What About Disengagement Now? - Linking Lebanon II To the Disengagement Is A Really Bad Tactic
We came across this article while doing yesterday's afternoon roundup. At the time, we figured that it was inevitably going to become the right's article of the week, but we were kind of hoping it would take them a day to find it. Our life being our life, of course, meant that IRIS got it within a couple of hours. We're quite sure that IsraPundit, Israel Matsav, Soccer Dad, etc are at most just a couple of hours behind. Here is the relevant passage, courtesy of soon-to-be-fired-for-political-opportunism firmly-fired-for-political-opportunism OC Ground Forces Major-General Yiftah Ron-Tal:
Ron-Tal... claimed that there was a clear connection between the IDF's failure in the recent Lebanon war and its participation in the disengagement from Gaza last summer. "The IDF, from a readiness standpoint, was well-prepared for this war," he said. "That wasn't the problem with this war... Our army last June and July was in a sufficient state of fitness to subdue Hizbullah, but the army dedicated most of its time to training for the disengagement, and therefore the training suffered... It was not on such a level that it was impossible to fight, but there was a need to remove the rust in the first days of fighting. Did the army have to participate in the disengagement? It wasn't its job to evacuate Jews, which was non-consensual, and it, as the army of the people, was not supposed to do that," Ron-Tal said
This argument is nonsensical on a number of levels, but that's not why the right shouldn't be making it. More importantly, they should avoid linking Israel's presence in Gaza and the West Bank to Lebanon II because it hurts their argument much more than it helps them.
First, the nonsense. Give us a break. The Gaza withdrawal was conducted mostly by the Givati Brigade, while Lebanon II was mostly Golani and Nahal. Of course there was overlap, and we haven't really gone through tracing which reserve brigades were called up for support in which battles - but the idea that there was massive overlap among the regular army is just not defensible. Besides, it's been a year and a half since the disengagement - if the IDF hadn't recovered its logistical bearings from the onerous task of picking up settlers and moving them, that's a massive failure of a different sort. But there's an even more fundamental problem with the idea that the IDF's force readiness was damaged by disengagement: assuming that there was an overlap in brigades, those soldiers wouldn't even have been available if Israel still had twenty-one settlements in the Gaza Strip. They would have been guarding the settlements instead of being "rusty" up in Lebanon. This is just a bad argument - Lebanon II was a failure of political will, not IDF readiness. We understand that Netanyahu is gearing up to make the disengagement the Original Sin of the Kadima party, but that doesn't make the argument any better.
Even if there was a tenable argument to be made that soldiers on the ground were less ready to confront Hezbollah because they had trained for the disengagement, merging debates about Gaza/West Bank and Lebanon II is a really bad idea for the Israeli right. Sure, training to evacuate settlers may have hurt the IDF's readiness - but not as much as dealing with the Palestinians:
Most units, in their training and operations, followed fighting doctrines of police forces and not of standing armies. Hezbollah trains, fights and is equiped (sic) as an army, utilizing some of the most advanced anti-tank missiles and other weapons. The character of the IDF - known for its blitzkrieg methods, encircling movements deep inside enemy territory, and the ability to bring about a quick and decisive conclusion to the fighting - has been spoiled by years of involvement in operations that tied it down, emotionally and politically
This is coming from Ze'ev Schiff, who is certainly "one of Israel's best, if not the best, military correspondent" (and that's from David Gerstman's post answering this exact article). We still think that David misread Schiff on this question. He thought that Schiff was arguing against the Occupation on moral grounds. It seems much more tenable that the parts of Schiff's article that sounds like that were just window dressing for Schiff's real argument: the Palestinians suck at fighting, and dealing with them for almost half a century made the IDF soft and weak. It's like playing down to a bad opponent, a phenomenon known to everyone from chess players to athletes. The Palestinians are weak, disorganized, and haphazard - even mobilizing overwhelmingly effective operations against them did nothing to genuinely tax the IDF's capabilities. In contrast, Hezbollah is the best armed and most disciplined Arab army ever fielded against Israel. The difference between Hezbollah and the Palestinians is that Hezbollah's snipers actually hit things (and that's before we get into actual material differences - like, say, cutting edge Iranian-supplied anti-tank weapons).
Now David's original point was that rhetoric criticizing the Israeli presence in the West Bank gets away from even careful advocates like Schiff and becomes the basis for broad-based criticism, which is a point we see no reason to dispute. But the Israeli right needs to keep that dynamic in mind just as much as careful leftists do: beware looking too closely at the relationship between the IDF's force readiness and the Israeli presence in the West Bank. The argument that the Palestinians harden the IDF for any genuine challenge is not particular credible, while the argument that their incompetence lulls Israel into a false sense of military superiority does not seem easily dismissible.
Ron-Tal... claimed that there was a clear connection between the IDF's failure in the recent Lebanon war and its participation in the disengagement from Gaza last summer. "The IDF, from a readiness standpoint, was well-prepared for this war," he said. "That wasn't the problem with this war... Our army last June and July was in a sufficient state of fitness to subdue Hizbullah, but the army dedicated most of its time to training for the disengagement, and therefore the training suffered... It was not on such a level that it was impossible to fight, but there was a need to remove the rust in the first days of fighting. Did the army have to participate in the disengagement? It wasn't its job to evacuate Jews, which was non-consensual, and it, as the army of the people, was not supposed to do that," Ron-Tal said
This argument is nonsensical on a number of levels, but that's not why the right shouldn't be making it. More importantly, they should avoid linking Israel's presence in Gaza and the West Bank to Lebanon II because it hurts their argument much more than it helps them.
First, the nonsense. Give us a break. The Gaza withdrawal was conducted mostly by the Givati Brigade, while Lebanon II was mostly Golani and Nahal. Of course there was overlap, and we haven't really gone through tracing which reserve brigades were called up for support in which battles - but the idea that there was massive overlap among the regular army is just not defensible. Besides, it's been a year and a half since the disengagement - if the IDF hadn't recovered its logistical bearings from the onerous task of picking up settlers and moving them, that's a massive failure of a different sort. But there's an even more fundamental problem with the idea that the IDF's force readiness was damaged by disengagement: assuming that there was an overlap in brigades, those soldiers wouldn't even have been available if Israel still had twenty-one settlements in the Gaza Strip. They would have been guarding the settlements instead of being "rusty" up in Lebanon. This is just a bad argument - Lebanon II was a failure of political will, not IDF readiness. We understand that Netanyahu is gearing up to make the disengagement the Original Sin of the Kadima party, but that doesn't make the argument any better.
Even if there was a tenable argument to be made that soldiers on the ground were less ready to confront Hezbollah because they had trained for the disengagement, merging debates about Gaza/West Bank and Lebanon II is a really bad idea for the Israeli right. Sure, training to evacuate settlers may have hurt the IDF's readiness - but not as much as dealing with the Palestinians:
Most units, in their training and operations, followed fighting doctrines of police forces and not of standing armies. Hezbollah trains, fights and is equiped (sic) as an army, utilizing some of the most advanced anti-tank missiles and other weapons. The character of the IDF - known for its blitzkrieg methods, encircling movements deep inside enemy territory, and the ability to bring about a quick and decisive conclusion to the fighting - has been spoiled by years of involvement in operations that tied it down, emotionally and politically
This is coming from Ze'ev Schiff, who is certainly "one of Israel's best, if not the best, military correspondent" (and that's from David Gerstman's post answering this exact article). We still think that David misread Schiff on this question. He thought that Schiff was arguing against the Occupation on moral grounds. It seems much more tenable that the parts of Schiff's article that sounds like that were just window dressing for Schiff's real argument: the Palestinians suck at fighting, and dealing with them for almost half a century made the IDF soft and weak. It's like playing down to a bad opponent, a phenomenon known to everyone from chess players to athletes. The Palestinians are weak, disorganized, and haphazard - even mobilizing overwhelmingly effective operations against them did nothing to genuinely tax the IDF's capabilities. In contrast, Hezbollah is the best armed and most disciplined Arab army ever fielded against Israel. The difference between Hezbollah and the Palestinians is that Hezbollah's snipers actually hit things (and that's before we get into actual material differences - like, say, cutting edge Iranian-supplied anti-tank weapons).
Now David's original point was that rhetoric criticizing the Israeli presence in the West Bank gets away from even careful advocates like Schiff and becomes the basis for broad-based criticism, which is a point we see no reason to dispute. But the Israeli right needs to keep that dynamic in mind just as much as careful leftists do: beware looking too closely at the relationship between the IDF's force readiness and the Israeli presence in the West Bank. The argument that the Palestinians harden the IDF for any genuine challenge is not particular credible, while the argument that their incompetence lulls Israel into a false sense of military superiority does not seem easily dismissible.
