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Soldier injured in Second Lebanon War. Turning failures into successes
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Eitan Haber

Fake myths won’t help IDF at the moment of truth

Op-ed: The Second Lebanon War and Operation Protective Edge have expanded the gap between myths and reality: Despite the calm borders, the situation in the north and south is becoming very dangerous again.

Ten out of 10 members of my generation were born, raised and have lived with the knowledge that the IDF is the greatest army in the greatest state. It will save us from any trouble. The Arabs around us, who want us to be exterminated, aren't half as good when it comes to courage and determination, science and technology, and of course our army's strength. They still live in the stone age, while we – allegedly – have the doomsday weapon.

  

 

The members of my generation were raised, for example, on the legends of the Battle of the Mitla Pass between IDF paratroopers and Egyptian army forces during the Sinai war (Operation Kadesh) in 1956. We knew by heart the details of that extremely critical battle at the time, we spoke with a quiver of sanctity about the soldier who threw a rolling hand grenade at himself in order to save his soldiers, about the one who volunteered to drive a jeep in front of heavy fire in order to uncover the Egyptian army posts in the cervices of the Mitla, we mentioned the names of the casualties with a sense of gratitude. We journalists wrote about it and passed on the stories to an entire nation that wanted to admire the heroes.

 

But deviltry led me to live for decades alongside the living legends. During Saturday afternoon conversations, over a cup of coffee, they spoke bitterly and even loathingly about that unnecessary battle at the Mitla Pass, about the legends that were spread, about the senior command which managed the battle far away from the scene.

 

Slowly, a huge gap opened between the myths and reality. Since then, the majority of the public still believes those myths and is willing to kill anyone who ruins the story. The paratroopers' commanders at the time – Yitzhak (Haka) Hofi, Mordechai (Motta) Gur, Rafael (Raful) Eitan, aharon Davidi and others – are fortunate enough to have already reached the gates of Heaven, and there is almost no one left to kill among the bearers of the news about that unnecessary courageous battle.

 

The Second Lebanon War. A horrifying chapter of relations between the military echelon and the political echelon (Photo: Gil Nechushtan)
The Second Lebanon War. A horrifying chapter of relations between the military echelon and the political echelon (Photo: Gil Nechushtan)

 

What am I talking about? Two chapters of recent history which have been broadcast on Channel 10 in the past two weeks, the fruit of journalist Raviv Drucker's work. They discussed the entanglements of the Second Lebanon War, summarized the plot and its heroes and exposed a horrifying chapter of relations between the military echelon and the political echelon – the private relations, the discretion, the assumptions and the estimates, the decision making, the misunderstanding and the ego which raged on the roads leading to and from the Northern Command, which is responsible for the area where the war took place.

 

From the picture sketched by the war's leaders – then-prime minister Ehud Olmert, then-defense minister Amir Peretz and then-IDF chief of staff Dan Halutz – we learned that the IDF is not what it used to be. And since an insurance company which issues a policy for victories has yet to be established, it appears that the Goddess of Good Fortune enlisted for reserve service in the IDF in the Second Lebanon War. The 156 bereaved families from that war (including 117 families of soldiers) were not as fortunate and have been left forever with the pain of their loss.

 

We should have panicked following the exposure and gone to the barricades, but the people at the top know that other wars and operations waged by the IDF and State of Israel were managed similarly or in a different manner – better, not as good or much worse. And so, with this unsuccessfulness, we have come so far. A good place in the middle.

 

Historians say that such things have happened before. If, for example, the public had been interested in the intrigues of the War of Independence, they would have weakened us. The same happened in many other wars and operations. It is we who turned failures into successes.

 

The Second Lebanon War, like Operation Protective Edge in Gaza, expand the gap between the myth and reality: Despite the calm borders, the military situation both in the north and in the south is becoming or has already become very dangerous again. The myths entire generations have been raised on will not help us on the crucial day. Unfortunately, a large part of the people of Israel are caught in these myths.

 

It's true that there isn't a single nation which doesn’t need myths, but not fake myths.

 


פרסום ראשון: 05.17.15, 23:21
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