Leon's News Comment (8)

Monday, August 21, 2006

Since the ceasefire last Monday 14^th Aug the general mood in Israel seems to be that we fought an unnecessary war and we didn't achieve our objectives. Many people point to Olmert's statement that the objective of the war was to disarm Hizbullah and to bring our captured soldiers home.

Neither of these things has happened and all we got was an agreement from the UN which we could have gotten without all the tragedy of war.

My opinion is different and when I tell it many people laugh at me. It's always like this when one has a different opinion to the general public. Most people feel so comfortable siding with the majority that they fall into the trap of not giving considered thought to an opinion which is different.

I hope that you won't fall into this trap.

Let's face it "the proof of the pudding is in the eating". Even though the results of the war are different to Olmert's promises they are so dramatic that we can say, without doubt that this war is one of the most successful ever fought by the IDF and the People of Israel.

Only one day before the cease fire 250 rockets fell on northern Israel, the next day, Monday 14^th the cease fire came into force and rockets stopped landing on Israeli towns.

I agree that, theoretically, rockets could start raining on us again, at any minute, because all Nasrallah's short range Katyusha's (estimated at 10000) are still intact. The fact is this is not happening. The fact that he has these rockets but doesn't fire them makes the fact even more dramatic.

It should be obvious to everybody that the fact that he has these rockets and could fire them if he wanted to shows simply that he doesn't want to fire them.

As far as I'm concerned getting Nasrallah to use his "kop", "sechel" instead of his fanatic feelings is a great achievement. I think that the fact that he has rockets and doesn't fire them is a much greater achievement than destroying all his rockets. After all, let's face it's easy for Iran to produce more rockets. To destroy the desire to fire the rockets is much more important than destroying the rockets themselves.

It remains to be seen how much his desire to fire rockets has been dampened, or how long it will be before his desire to destroy Israel will overtake his common sense.

The cease fire agreement of the UN is a very important factor in this in this calculation. In my opinion this agreement means that all the signatories to it will stand by Israel in any action she takes to prevent or retaliate against infringement. Such agreements aren't easy to achieve. Only the fiercest Israeli reaction to aggression could have achieved it.

This war showed the strength of UN agreement 1559 which was made after Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000. It was also very difficult to achieve that agreement but the freedom that Israel had in retaliating to its infringement shows its effectiveness.

Now we have agreement 1701 which comes in addition to agreement 1559 and so makes it even stronger. It gives Israel rights that it never had before in other war, namely the right to retaliate with all power to the slightest infringement.

The agreement already proved its effectiveness on Friday night when Israel attacked Baalbek to prevent weapons reaching Hizbullah from Syria.

This war has made it clear that agreements must be kept and the consequences of breaking them are disastrous for the guilty party.

This war will prove to be a success if Hizbullah has learned that agreements must be kept. So far we can conclude that there are indications that this is the case.

The fact that Hizbullah doesn't fire rockets means 1) He's abiding by the cease fire agreement and 2) he's doing this because he realizes that the price for firing rockets or attacking Israel in any way is more than he's prepared to pay at this time.

For the first time in Israel's history we are going to see strong Israeli action whenever there's a breach of any clause in the agreement backed by the UN.

Lebanon and Hizbullah's celebrations on winning the war look good on TV and allow the Arabs to enjoy their false dream of paradise.

The leaders of Hizbullah and the other Arab countries like Iran and Syria know exactly how much this little fiasco cost them but they are never going to admit this publicly. On the contrary they will continue to celebrate victory. This war has taught the Arabs to apply arithmetic before they attack Israel again.

We've done the arithmetic and the price has been very high but if we've managed to convince the Arabs that they too must think before they shoot then we can feel happy about the outcome of this war.

We have calculated the damage we caused to Lebanon. Next time the price will be higher. They know how they failed to achieve their objectives of sending rockets deep into Israel or damaging any strategic installation in Israel. They paid a high price for the failed attempt.

The price we paid was enormous, but thank God we didn't suffer the damage they really wanted to inflict on us. In spite of everything our population was well protected and all our strategic equipment and installations were untouched.

Only time will tell how successful this war has been. We shouldn't be hasty in branding it a defeat.

Like most other people in Israel I agree that the political and military leaders must undergo a thorough enquiry to uncover all the faults that were made. It's impossible that such a large scale operation was completely faultless. But all the faults in the world won't show that the individual Israeli soldier was not brave and ready to sacrifice his life for his country and fought skillfully and courageously.