Two years after the Second Lebanon War, Israel is suddenly waking up and pressing for implementation of the U.N. resolution that ended the fighting between Hezbollah and Israel, 1701.
On Wednesday, Israel’s Security Cabinet convened a hastily arranged discussion about the lack of implementation of the resolution, which called for stemming the flow of arms to Hezbollah. Now the Israelis are trying to press UNIFIL, the U.N. force in southern Lebanon, to make sure Hezbollah falls into line.
Too little too late?
The war’s most urgent lessons, the adoption of which might prevent another round of fighting, remain regrettably unlearned.
First, due to its stubbornly misplaced faith in the UN, Israel has continued to turn a blind eye to the rearming of Hizbullah.
The Post reserves its harshest critique for Israel’s political leadership:
The broadest unlearned lesson from the war concerns Israel’s political culture itself. From the days of the Muslim conquest of Andalusia to today, it is impossible to recall Arab expressions of guilt or remorse over military victory. In contrast, Israel’s political echelons have typically been prompted to hand-wringing self-examination less by defeat than by victory. Yet healthy self-examination – of the kind so lacking in the wake of the latest war – requires precisely the opposite.
Could it be that both an underlying cause, and an effect, of the failures of the Second Lebanon War is that those steering this country no longer believe in the justice of its cause as utterly as used to be the case?
Ha’aretz’s Israel Harel also lays the blame for the failure of 1701 with Israel’s leadership:
The cabinet yesterday discussed “Hezbollah’s missile arsenal.” But what is such a discussion worth when there is no leadership in Israel today capable of making security decisions – even if the dangers and means of dealing with them are defined correctly? What is it worth when there is no leadership capable of insisting on decisions being implemented in full, even in the face of a public opinion with little patience and low endurance for suffering? The kind of public opinion that represses the central threats to the state’s existence and is not prepared to pay the necessary price for Jewish sovereignty.
After all, the main reason we do not escape the cycle of endless war is that every time we are on the edge of victory we stop the battle one step too soon – two years ago in Lebanon, and now with Hamas. This allows the enemy to recover and claim victory, continuing the struggle, justifiably from his point of view, until the Zionist Jewish entity comes to an end.
