Kim Bullimore
"The responsibility for the military operation rests on my shoulders as prime minister. I have no intention and do not wish to share this responsibility with another", Israeli PM Ehud Olmert told the Knesset, Israel's parliament. An August 15 Jerusalem Post account of the speech reported that Olmert promised "that he would stand before an inquiry committee and not 'hide or sweep anything under the rug'".
Amid calls for his resignation, as well as those of Olmert and defence chief of staff Dan Halutz, Amir Peretz, Israel's "defence" minister, bowed to public pressure and established a committee to examine how the bungled Lebanon invasion was conducted.
But by August 17, Haaretz was reporting that Peretz was already receiving criticism for the committee's composition (its head was a Peretz adviser) and the scope of its investigations. One MP told the paper: "The public in general and the soldiers in particular demand a commission of inquiry which would also encompass the political echelon."
Most Israelis are in favour of a national "commission of inquiry" that will examine both the military and political aspects of the failed attempt to crush Hezbollah.
Despite the Israeli Air Force flying more than 15,500 sorties over Lebanon and bombing more than 7000 targets, naval vessels accruing more than 8000 combat hours and launching more than 2500 attacks, 30,000 reservists being called up for military duty, and the death of more than 1000 Lebanese civilians, Israel was unable to destroy Hezbollah's resistance or Lebanese support for the group.
Olmert's boasts of putting an end to Katyusha rocket attacks and disarming Hezbollah have amounted to little. Instead, Hezbollah succeeded in launching almost 3800 rockets against Israel, at times up to 200 a day. No explicit demand for the group to be disarmed was included in the UN-brokered ceasefire deal.
The war has cost Israel US$1.6 billion. More than 42 Israeli citizens and 80 soldiers were killed. Tens of thousands of Israeli citizens in the north were forced to spend four weeks living in bomb shelters. Reservists returning from the war criticised the military and political leadership, complaining that they were treated as "cannon fodder", citing the lack of body armour, ground force equipment being over 24 years old and shortages of food and water.
Olmert, along with Peretz and Halutz, is being particularly criticised for the handling of the last two days of the war. As a ceasefire drew closer, Israel stepped up its ground invasion in a last-ditch attempt to create the illusion of victory.
Haaretz writer Amos Harel noted in an August 15 article for the Israeli daily that a "number of reasons were given for the authorization of the ground offensive on Friday evening — despite the fact that the UN Security Council was about to vote on a cease-fire resolution: the need to hold forward positions near the Litani River so that during the cease-fire, searches of the villages could take place in a southward direction; the desire to influence the formulation of the UN resolution; and the need to be better positioned for renewed hostilities, should the cease-fire collapse."
However, Harel wrote, the Israeli military failed to achieve its stated aims and was "nowhere near the Litani. In most parts IDF forces are nearly 10 kilometers away, with dozens of Hezbollah positions still in the area."
With 32 soldiers killed in the invasion's last 48 hours, Halutz in particular has come under sustained criticism. He is also facing a scandal over his decision to sell off shares in the time between being notified of Hezbollah's capture of Israeli soldiers and making the formal decision to go to war.
Uri Avnery, a former soldier and founder of the peace group Gush Shalom, noted in an August 12 article that Israel had suffered a defeat and that "clearly Hizbullah has prepared well for this war, while the Israeli command has prepared for a quite different war".
Avnery argued that Hezbollah was the clear winner in the war simply by the fact it is "still standing and fighting". He wrote that this "is a stunning feat: a small guerilla organisation, with a few thousand fighters, is standing up to one of the strongest armies in the world and has not been broken after a month of 'pulverising'".
According to a poll carried out by Israel's leading mass daily, Yedioth Aharonoth, 66% of Israelis believed that the country had either lost the war or there was no clear winner (30% believed Hezbollah won, while 36% believed no-one had won). Only 30% believed that Israel had won.
The poll, published on August 16, found that 69% of Israelis supported the call for a "national committee of inquiry" to examine "the handling of the war amongst the political and military echelons" and to "assign accountability for the failures of the war".
A similar committee of inquiry was set up in the wake of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, which caught Israel by surprise and resulted in a number of devastating defeats in the first days of the war. Although Israel ultimately won a military victory, the early defeats had a huge psychological impact on Israeli and Arab consciousness. For the first time since the proclamation of the State of Israel in 1948, its military supremacy in the region was challenged.
The 1974 Agranat Commission into the Yom Kippur War recommended the dismissal of the Israel Defense Forces' chief of staff, and the chief of Intelligence and his deputy. The report cleared then prime minister Golda Meir and her defence minister, Moshe Dayan, of all responsibility. However, Meir and her cabinet were forced to resign nine days after the commission's findings were released due to public outrage.
While Olmert and Peretz may survive a commission of inquiry, they may not survive the internal ructions in their parties. According to an August 15 report in Haaretz, Shual Mofaz (defence minister under the previous PM, Ariel Sharon) abstained on the cabinet vote on the UN ceasefire. Haaretz reported that Mofaz, who is a member of Olmert's Kadima party, is likely to "play a central role in trying to take over the party leadership".
Similarly, Peretz, who until recently was the darling of the left-Zionist labour movement, is isolated within his own Labor Party faction.
Even if Olmert survives the backlash, it is unlikely that he and his party, which was elected primarily on a platform of "convergence" and unilateralism, will be unscathed.
"Convergence" is premised on the dismantling of some of the smaller illegal Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories in order to continue the illegal annexation of West Bank territory, by redrawing Israel's borders and isolating occupied East Jerusalem from the rest of the Occupied Territories.
However, since the beginning of Israel's assaults on the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, the voices opposing the dismantling of any of the illegal colonies, no matter what gains this might hold for Israel, have grown louder.
Binyamin Netanyahu, leader of the opposition Likud party and a former prime minister, remained quiet throughout the war. Now he is using Olmert's failure to clearly win the war in Lebanon as an opportunity to press his political credentials as an opponent of "unilateral withdrawal" from sections of the Occupied Territories. In his speech to the Knesset on August 16, Netanyahu slammed the "convergence" policy, saying that "the doctrine of unilateral withdrawals had proven to be a failure".
The Hezbollah victory has electrified much of the Arab world, including the Palestinians. The war against Lebanon, like Yom Kippur, has dealt a heavy blow to the image of Israel's military supremacy in the Middle East.
Sheikh Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's secretary-general, is now seen by many Palestinians as their new resistance hero. It is unlikely that the Palestinians will be able to repeat the achievements of Hezbollah due to the oppressive nature of the Israeli occupation and their lack of weaponry. However the war has shown Palestinians that Israel is not invincible. This will embolden the Palestinians to continue their own resistance, albeit in a different form, against the illegal and brutal Israeli occupation.