ONE COULD console oneself by saying that at least there is a commission for the Second Lebanon War. Three greater strategic failures that all devastated Israel's defensive posture have gone without any scrutiny whatsoever..
First, Barak's precipitous surrender of southern Lebanon to Hizbullah has avoided scrutiny not only by the Winograd Commission but by all other official bodies.
The second failure also played an important role in the Second Lebanon War, but has escaped examination. This is the Sharon government's decision to hand over the Gaza Strip in its entirety to Hamas and Fatah while expelling 10,000 Jews from their homes. This not only ensconced a Hamas-Fatah jihadist army within striking range of Israel's major population centers and cemented the belief that Palestinian terrorism would bring about Israel's national collapse through the gradual handover of all Israeli territory to terrorists; it also provided a safe base of operations for terrorists to conduct operations like the kidnapping of IDF Cpl. Gilad Schalit.
And, of course, the grandest of all Israeli failures was the Rabin-Peres government's decision to recognize the PLO and give it arms, land and legitimacy, ushering in the most deadly period of terrorism in Israel's history. This decision too, has never been scrutinized by a commission.
But, truly, the great pity is not that no commissions were formed to investigate these failures, as the Winograd Commission was formed to investigate the Second Lebanon War. The great pity is that Israeli society has yet to find the means to conduct a true public debate of our failures that could enable learning and corrective action.
If the Winograd report is to have any positive impact at all, it should be in beginning, not blocking the necessary public debate into the real sources of the failures last summer, and into the strategic failures of the Oslo process, and the withdrawals from Lebanon and Gaza. All of these call out for our attention and correction
And never let it be said that no one warned the Barak government that the pull-out from Lebanon would not one day lead to the events of last summer:
Over the weekend, Ma'ariv reported protocols of cabinet meetings in the weeks which preceded the 2000 withdrawal where then IDF chief of staff Shaul Mofaz and then IDF OC Northern Command Gabi Ashkenazi begged Barak not to go through with the withdrawal precisely because the Hizbullah buildup and aggression were so predictable.
The withdrawal from south Lebanon was fomented by the Left with the propaganda support of the Israeli media and the financial support of the EU. Together, they worked to destroy the public consensus regarding the need to protect the North from Hizbullah and Iran. They propagated the lies that unilateral withdrawal would create an "invisible wall of international legitimacy" that would protect Israel from Hizbullah better than the IDF could, and that if Israel withdrew to the international border Hizbullah would abandon jihad and become a regular Lebanese political party. But the Winograd report will not discuss such things, because it conveniently decided to begin its inquiry with the period after the IDF had already surrendered southern Lebanon to Hizbullah.
A long time ago I gave up thinking the “land for peace” formula was a foundation for peace. If it had been, the Palestinians would have accepted their state when it was originally offered in 1948, or again in 2000. The intrinsic problem with the two state solution, and consequently; the current Road Map for Peace is that it’s designed on a premise that is innately false, which is why the Road Map leads precisely nowhere fast and will continue to do so.
The conflict has never been about the Palestinians receiving a separate state of their own but their inability to accept the creation of an Israeli one. I’d even go one step further and argue it was a long-term strategic mistake for Menachem Begin and the state of Israel to exchange the Sinai for the appearance of a peace treaty with the Egypt but that is a blog post for another time.
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