‘We Are Tired; We Are Worn Down’ : Israelis Debate Question: Was War Worth the Price?

“No one in his senses should start a war without being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by the war and how he intends to conduct it,” said Karl von Clausewitz, the 19th-Century Prussian military philosopher whose classic “On War” is studied at Israel’s National Defense College.

With the end of Israel’s longest and most divisive war seemingly within reach, any assessment of that war by Israelis is still colored by differences over what it has achieved.

As the Israeli Cabinet voted last week, 16 to 6, to approve a phased withdrawal of Israeli troops from Lebanon, the only thing about the war on which everyone seemed to agree was that it has been terribly costly in lives, money and damage to the national spirit.

According to official figures, 610 Israelis have been killed and 3,645 wounded in the 31 months since Israeli forces invaded Lebanon on June 6, 1982. That makes the war in Lebanon the fourth-bloodiest war in Israel’s history. More than 6,000 Israelis were killed in the 1948-49 War of Independence, 2,500 in the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and 800 in the Six-Day War of 1967.

In economic terms, the war in Lebanon has cost Israel $3 billion so far. The psychological cost is impossible to quantify.

“We are tired; we’ve been worn down,” the independent newspaper Yediot Aharonot said in an editorial after last week’s Cabinet decision. “What didn’t happen to us in the 1936-1939 riots, in the long and lethal War of Independence, in the war of attrition along the (Suez) canal, has happened to us now. Our resistance has been sapped.”

Also, the war in Lebanon led to what in the past had been unthinkable in Israel. War had been virtually the only thing that Israelis did not argue about. But this time, Israelis took to the streets in the tens of thousands to protest.

About 150 Israelis have refused to serve in Lebanon, a small number compared to the thousands who have fought there. But this is an unprecedented and deeply disturbing development in a country where a universal and unquestioning readiness to take up arms has long been seen as a matter of national survival.

Opinion polls have traced the deepening divisiveness of the war. According to the newspaper Haaretz, the segment of the population that supported the government’s conduct of the war plummeted from 70% at the time of the invasion to less than 20% by last fall.

It might have been different if the government had stuck to its stated goal, which was also the code name for the invasion: “Peace for Galilee.”

Israeli forces went into Lebanon with the announced intention of wiping out the Palestine Liberation Organization threat to Israel’s northern settlements, to ensure, as Prime Minister Menachem Begin said at the time, that no more Katyusha rockets would be launched across the frontier from Lebanon.

But it is now clear that at least some Israeli leaders had much more ambitious plans--to destroy the PLO not only as a military threat but also as a political threat, and not only in Lebanon but also on the occupied West Bank of the Jordan River; to see a friendly government installed in Beirut; to expel the Syrians from Lebanon; to conclude a peace treaty with a second Arab government to go with the 1979 agreement with Egypt.

Even Israelis who are most stridently opposed to the war concede that it succeeded in wiping out a heavily armed PLO “state within a state” on Israel’s northern border.

When the Israeli forces moved north, they found hundreds of hidden weapons caches and fortified PLO positions. The list of arms seized in southern Lebanon included more than 400 heavy weapons, 25,000 rifles and submachine guns, 1,500 truckloads of ammunition.

But on the course the war took after those early hours, there is no consensus. The dream of using the Israeli army to reshape the political destiny of Lebanon has been shattered, but there are still those who believe that it was worth the try. And there are even more who count the military and political blow to the PLO as a great achievement of the war in Lebanon, despite the admittedly heavy price.

“Our ‘Operation Peace for Galilee’ succeeded in breaking the back of the PLO by depriving them of their territorial base and by scat tering them to the four corners of the Arab world,” Yitzhak Shamir, Israel’s foreign minister and alternate prime minister, told a group of American and Canadian fund-raisers late last week.

One military source said, “It will be much more difficult today for any terrorist organization to build the kind of infrastructure (in southern Lebanon) the PLO had prior to June of 1982.”

And Dan Meridor, a member of the Knesset (Parliament) representing the Likud bloc, which was in power at the start of the war, said, “You should ask (PLO leader Yasser) Arafat if he prefers what he had in April, 1982, or what he has now.”

Also, as Meridor and others are quick to point out, there has been peace in northern Israel’s Galilee region for 2 1/2 years.

But residents of the northern settlements are clearly worried that an Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon will put them in jeopardy again. About 250 residents of Kiryat Shemona, a border town, demonstrated last week against the announced pullout.

And there are some who raise questions about what the war accomplished. They say the military victory over the PLO is illusory and that even if the Palestinians are unlikely to return in force to southern Lebanon, this is more than offset by a newly hostile local population of Shia Muslims, antagonized by the Israeli occupation.

These people say that the PLO is far from finished politically and that divisions in it will only make it more difficult to come to terms with the Palestinian problem. On the West Bank, many Arab residents still claim the PLO as their only legitimate representative.

According to Gideon Rafael, a former director general of the Foreign Ministry, whatever damage has been done to the PLO is at least as much the result of its own internal weaknesses and inter-Arab rivalries as it is of Israel’s invasion of the PLO stronghold in Lebanon.

As for peace in the Galilee, the critics note that under a U.S.-mediated cease-fire, there had been no Katyushas fired into northern Israel for a year before the 1982 invasion. If it is not possible to protect Jerusalem and Tel Aviv from terrorist attack, they ask, how can the residents of the northern settlements expect more?

Galia Golan, the leader of the Peace Now movement, says that the war in Lebanon “was doomed to be a failure when it started.”

Israel’s most immediate worry is probably the Shia Muslim population in Lebanon, which in 1982 welcomed the invading Israelis. Now, after 31 months of occupation, the Shias are harassing the Israelis with guerrilla attacks.

About 80% of the attacks on occupying Israeli troops in Lebanon are now carried out by local residents, most of whom are Shias, according to Israel’s director of military intelligence, Maj. Gen. Ehud Barak.

“We are creating new enemies,” another senior military source said, adding: “We don’t need any more enemies. We have enough.”

A columnist observed the other day in the Jerusalem Post that the Shias can “boast of waging the first effective guerrilla war ever” against Israeli forces. And there is fear that the Shias will carry their campaign southward, following the withdrawing Israeli troops, and thus pose a new threat to Israel’s northern settlements.

Israel’s image abroad was badly damaged in the early months of the war in Lebanon, especially in the siege of Beirut and after the massacre of Palestinian civilians by Christian Falangist militiamen at the Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps. But time and a change of government in Israel seem to have healed those wounds. Most impor tant, from Israel’s point of view, Israeli relations with the United States have rebounded from the low point in the summer of 1982.

In terms of domestic politics, the war’s greatest impact was on Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who resigned in mid-term in fall, 1983. “I think those people who say the war broke his spirit are not wrong,” said Zeev Chafets, former spokesman for Begin’s government.

The Likud bloc that Begin put together is still in disarray as a result of his retirement. This is reflected in the Lebanon withdrawal vote in the Cabinet; two Likud ministers broke ranks and voted for the pullout. The scramble to take over Likud’s leadership is widely seen as the principal destabilizing factor in the four-month-old national-unity government of Prime Minister Shimon Peres.

Senior military sources say the war in Lebanon has had a negative and little-understood effect on the army, and therefore on Israel’s defensive capability.

One characterized the Israeli military as a “reserve army” whose “main job . . . is to prepare for the next war. This can’t be done if you spend your reserve duty on security trivia in Lebanon.”

Instead of becoming better tank gunners, reservists are becoming better policemen, this source maintained. “This harms our strength, harms the training,” he said.

The balance sheet on Israel’s war in Lebanon will not be complete and clear until long after the last Israeli soldier leaves Lebanon, if ever. But it seems certain that this is the first war in which Israel will not achieve a clear-cut victory.

The Jerusalem Post’s respected writer on military affairs, Hirsh Goodman, referred recently to Israel’s “retreat” from Lebanon after a war “that went too far, lasted too long, cost too much and achieved too little.”

Like the United States with its experience in Vietnam, Israel will undoubtedly be profoundly influenced by its war in Lebanon.

If nothing else, according to Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Lebanon has proved that “the theory that we can impose a peace initiative on an Arab country by means of war is an illusion.”