Text size:

Israeli assault failed to defeat Hezbollah

BY MICHAEL ROTHFELD | Newsday Staff Correspondent

August 12, 2006

SHEAR YESHUV, Israel - The peace deal for Lebanon endorsed by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert Friday is likely to have serious ramifications for his leadership.

Only four months after his election in the shadow of Ariel Sharon, the often beloved, often reviled giant of Israeli politics, Olmert took his country to a war in a land that it had hoped to leave behind after ending an 18-year occupation of Lebanon in 2000.

But his early promises to dismantle and disarm Hezbollah did not materialize. The Lebanese militia that set off the conflict by kidnapping two Israeli soldiers succeeded in launching hundreds of rockets a week over the border and killing more than 35 Israeli civilians and 80 members of the vaunted Israel Defense Forces, which has prided itself on a string of victories over Arab neighbors going back 30 years.

The acceptance of a United Nations cease-fire resolution without a defeat of Hezbollah, a group Israelis see as committed to the destruction of their state, is sure to leave many here feeling weakened in a hostile region where the perception of military might is what has always kept them feeling safe. If, as has been widely predicted, Hezbollah guerrillas do a victory dance on the streets of Beirut, that will only reinforce the sense of loss. Nor does the agreement guarantee the release of the soldiers, whose abductions Israel cited as its reason for going to war.

Olmert, a career politician with little military experience, will sell the deal as one that effectively neutralizes Hezbollah with a strengthened version of UNIFIL, the UN peacekeeping force - long derided by Israel as too weak - to halt the violence and establish an arms-free zone in southern Lebanon.

The question is whether he can convince Israelis that Hezbollah can no longer threaten them, or if they will see the war as put off for another day.

Olmert will not be blamed for allowing Hezbollah to grow strong over the past six years; Sharon, who invaded the country as defense minister in 1982, will be described in Israeli history books as the leader who could not confront his past in Lebanon. But Olmert and his generals will have to answer for why they did not go in with overpowering force on the ground, and why they chose to stop without winning.