|
|
 |
“We Are Ready for the Next War”
// Another clash with Syria and Hezbollah is seen as inevitable in Israel
Syrian Information Minister Mohsen Bilal stated yesterday that Damascus is ready to take the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights back by force. In the Israeli general staff, they say that a war with Syria and Hezbollah may take place next year. In the time remaining, the Israeli military should correct the mistakes that were seen in the recent war in Lebanon. Kommersant Israeli correspondent Grigory Asmolov visited the Lebanese border to find out how the army is preparing for renewed warfare.
Chief of Staff of the Israeli Army 91st Division Lieut. Col. Guy Hazut stood on the concrete reinforcement that surrounds the Nurit border post answering questions for the Qatari television station Al Jazeera. The plaintive voice of a muezzin could be heard in the distance. It was coming from a kilometer and a half to the north, where residents of the Lebanese village of Aita a-Shaeb were gathering for evening prayers. That village was the site of one of the fiercest battles of the last war. Farther to the right, the outskirts of Bint Jbail, until recently the stronghold of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, can be seen.
It was getting dark, and the Al Jazeera cameraman turned a light on the Israeli officer's face. Now all of southern Lebanon could see him. He was an ideal target for a sniper. “Why do you think you won?” an Arab journalist asks him. “I couldn't have stood here before,” Hazut answered. “Do you see the tower over the post? Snipers shot two of our soldiers on it a year ago, because Hezbollah fighters were only a few meters away from it. They aren't there any more.”
The 91st Division and its commander, Brig. Gen. Gal Hirsch, have been barrage of criticism in Israel for the last two months. Hirsch, along with Udi Adam, commander of the Northern Military District until his recent resignation, is being assigned much of the blame for the failure of the last campaign. Army sources say that the negative opinion was formed because of the extreme dissatisfaction of Chief of Staff Lieut. Gen Dan Halutz with the performance of his division.
Last week, for the first time since the end of military actions, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert visited the division, which was the first to see battle. He observed that the division not only bore losses, it had had important victories. A few days later, journalists were invited to visit the division, which had previously been strictly off limits for them. Apparently the prime minister thought that other should hear what he had found out. They had not even changed the name of the computer-generated presentation shown journalists from “The Visit of the Prime Minister of Defense Minister.”
“We have completely changed our tactics and strategy,” Hirsch says. “Before we only reacted. Hezbollah took the initiative. We were even jokingly called the division for the prevention of soldier kidnappings. Now everything is different.”
At the spot where tow soldiers were kidnapped on July 12, Hazut explains why the division was unable to prevent tat incident, which became the beginning of the military actions. “It was a carefully planned operation,” he said. “Any officer in the special forces will tell you that at least three or four months were necessary to organize it. The Hezbollah fighters who took part in it were specially trained in Iran.” He reconstructed the events. “Two antitank rockets hit a second Hummer from that hill. All the soldiers in it were killed. They shot one rocket the first one from there and only wounded the soldiers. Twenty meters away is the gate through which the fighters entered Israeli territory after the ambush of the Israeli patrol and seized the two soldiers who were apparently alive.
There were surprises for the Israeli soldiers on Lebanese territory. “We were the first to enter the forest reserve, which turned out to be packed with weapons and bunkers up to 150 meters underground. A defensive line like that is the dream of every general,” Hazut relates. Reserve Col. Miri Eisen, the prime minister's advisor on the foreign press, interjects at this point. “Reserve' is a military term for a forested area, not a defended zone,” she explains, and asks the journalists to think up a new term by the end of the day. The prime minister's office is concerned that the not very well-chosen Israeli Army terminology has caused it to be accused of destroying the Lebanese ecology on top of everything else. According to Eisen, the prime minister was especially impressed by photographs of twenty-barrel launchers for Katyusha rockets hidden under concrete slabs in the forest. For Olmert, that was the clear answer to the question of why the army was unable to stop the rocket fire on the north of Israel quickly.
The Israelis do not intend to allow that to happen again. “We are preparing for the next war. We are optimistic, but we have to be ready for the worst. We hope that the Lebanese Army and the reinforced UNIFIL contingent will perform their role, but from now on, our goal is not to allow Hezbollah to form heavily armed groups on our borders again,” Hazut said. “If an armed fighter appears at our border, the soldiers will shoot him,” the prime minister's advisor adds. Hazut is somewhat more pacifistic. He says that an armed fighter will be fired on only if he presents a danger. Until then, the army will demand that the peacekeepers remove the extremist. There have been no incidents like that yet, only several cases of Lebanese civilians throwing stones over the border fence. “Are you satisfied with the way UNIFIL has settled that problem?” I ask. Hazut shrugs. “Yes, it's fine in general,” he says. And relations are friendly with Lebanese soldiers, he adds. Patrols exchange greetings when they meet on their opposite sides of the border.
Preparations for war are underway in full force in the 91st Division. First of all, it is necessary to restore the destroyed barriers on the border. Second, new tactics and strategy have to be worked out, including those for military actions against fighters with underground strongholds and for antitank weaponry. “We are assuming that Hezbollah still has modern Russian antitank rockets,” Hazut explained to the Kommersant correspondent. The army also intends to speed up the modernization of its Merkava 4 tanks. But the most important thing, the military says, is training. Within the next year, Israeli reservists should feel the army's plans to retrain them.
Another tension point is the village of Rajar, which is curt in half by the border. In spite of the fact that northern Rajar is considered Lebanese territory, the Israelis plan to stay there until the village's status is decided on by the UN. Hezbollah tried to use the village to gain access to Israeli territory. “There is no European answer to the problem of Rajar,” Hazut said. “It's not Geneva, where you can have one foot in France and the other in Switzerland. This is the Middle East.” That's hard to deny.
The muezzin could still be heard from Aita a-Shaeb.
Grigory Asmolov
All the Article in Russian as of Nov. 09, 2006
|
|
|
