Israeli Catch-22

The heavy price of human life extracted has become intolerable in this Napoleonic war against windmills in Lebanon. As the Israeli solider and civilian body count mounts the internal support for this war against an enemy that is proving itself impossible to eradicate, is gradually waning. The Israeli government is brokering a cease fire with one hand while approving an expansion of grounds operation with the other. The question remaining is how many more Israeli lives the government is willing to sacrifice, how much longer will they drag us through the Lebanese mud for the sake of a war that Israel cannot win?

The realization that we have met a political dead-end in this war is amplifying as what the Israeli public was told to believe to be a swift operation to crush Hezbollah is dragging on. All the while, Hezbollah only seems to be gaining strength as rocket launches creep deeper and deeper into Israel and expanding ground operations require the enlistment of more and more of its citizens.

It seems that Ehud Olmert by hastily determining to lead us into a war the military was unprepared for he has actually led us into a gambit that we cannot escape. If the government decides to continue the war effort, as the recent government approvals of operations expansion and national budget modification indicate, then the mutual bloodbath will continue. Hezbollah has shown no indications of weakening and prolonging the war will only intensify the economic and humanitarian disaster on both sides. If Israel does indeed continue the war effort the death toll of Lebanese civilians will only rise and Hezbollah continuing resistance will internally enhance their status from terrorists to freedom fighters. When the bombs are dropping you would look for anyone who claims to protect you and why the bombs starting dropping becomes meaningless. This accomplishes Hezbollah's intent of humiliating Israel and consolidating power within Lebanon.
On the other hand, if Israel decides to pull out immediately, taking whatever truce the UN might draw up, Israel still remains humiliated and Hezbollah will still remain unvanquished and will restore their arsenal within a few years with the help of Iran. They will draw strength by portraying themselves as liberators who stood up to "Zionist hostility".

A basic obstacle in concluding winners and losers in this conflict is that the large gaps between the cultures of the two sides will not allow for such a simplistic analysis. In Israel we mourn the loss of human life as a tragedy; the death of an Islamic fundamentalist is immortalized as martyrdom. In this violent clash of cultures, Israel's value of human life has impeded victory before the first bullet was even fired.
Israeli society will continue to rationalize and weep for its dead while the Islamic mechanism of Hezbollah will be ready to manipulate on this weakness as the Israeli public will reach a point when they realize that enough is enough and they just want their son/husband/father/friend back home.

In June PM Olmert was quoted as saying "We are tired of fighting, we are tired of being courageous, we are tired of winning, we are tired of defeating our enemies…."
The first two sentences are unquestionably right and must be heeded, but regardless of whether we are right in this war; Israel will not walk away with a decisive victory or a defeated enemy. So the least we can demand, after all the cannons have been fired and all our dead are in the ground, is that the rest walk away alive.

Werner