Israel’s Army May Be War’s Worst Casualty

In the long run, the principal Israeli casualty of the war in Lebanon may be the image and self-confidence of the army.

The Israel Defense Forces, now in the process of withdrawing, undertook on June 6, 1982, what was to have been a lightning strike against the Palestine Liberation Organization in southern Lebanon.

The Israeli army was regarded as the most formidable fighting force in the Middle East. It was seen as tough and aggressive--with the best equipment, highly motivated men, bold and imaginative commanders and an unbroken string of military victories stretching back over 34 years. Its reputation had been further enhanced by the daring 1976 raid on Entebbe airport in Uganda, rescuing the passengers of a hijacked airliner.

A Citizen Army

As effective as it was, the army prided itself on being humane, as well. It was a true citizen army, in which virtually every able-bodied man and woman in the country served, and it was steeped in the doctrine of tohar haneshek , Hebrew for the “purity of arms.”

The Israelis had fought all their wars secure in the conviction they were essentially defensive, that they were engaged in battles with a just cause. They took extraordinary precautions to avoid unnecessary killing, in the belief that every human life, even the enemy’s, has unique value.

Now, Lebanon has cast a shadow over those old concepts and raised questions about the Israeli army among friends and enemies alike, and within the force itself.

Rightly or wrongly, Lebanon is perceived by many, both here and abroad, as a war that Israel ultimately lost. A U.N. officer wrote a book about it entitled “The First Defeat.” The defeat may have been largely political rather than military, but it has tarnished the Israeli military’s reputation of invincibility.

The army, known for its speed and daring, has spent most of the last three years bogged down in defensive positions. Its only goal seemed to be to protect itself against determined guerrilla attacks.

The war in Lebanon became the most divisive conflict in modern Israel’s history--with at least a substantial minority, in and out of the army, questioning whether it was either defensive or just. And the purity-of-arms concept suffered as Cabinet ministers and generals talked of an “iron fist” and of “scorched earth.”

If Entebbe brought glory to the Israel Defense Forces, the siege of Beirut balanced it out. The growing concern over the impact of the war on what has long been Israel’s proudest institution is captured in a popular saying here: “After the IDF gets out of Lebanon, we’ll have to get Lebanon out of the IDF.”

Lt. Aryeh (not his name; Israeli soldiers on active duty may not be identified), who recently returned from Lebanon, commented: “Many of us have done things we would have never believed ourselves capable of doing. The IDF of before the war is not the same (force) I know now.”

The question of the Israeli army’s image is much more than a public relations concern. Some people fear that a post-Lebanon perception of Israeli military weakness might embolden its enemies.

Rabin Rebuts Idea

Reflecting that concern, Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin said in an interview: “Any assumption that the deterrence of the IDF suffered a setback vis-a-vis the main threat to Israel--the military threat that is presented by the armed forces of the Arab countries and whoever might back them--is completely incorrect. . . . I believe that any one of our neighbors or our enemies that will reach the slightest conclusion that the IDF lost, and will base on this doing something, will find very, very quickly that he totally miscalculated.”

Perhaps a more immediate danger than conventional armed attack is that the success of guerrilla resistance in southern Lebanon will find echoes on the Israeli-occupied West Bank and in the Gaza Strip.

A few days ago, a remote-controlled roadside bomb exploded near an Israeli bus on the outskirts of the West Bank town of Qalqiliya in an attack apparently inspired by tactics used against the Israeli army in southern Lebanon.

In predominantly Arab East Jerusalem, there are posters extolling Sana Mheidleh, a 16-year-old Beirut girl who killed herself and three soldiers driving a bomb-laden suicide car into an Israeli checkpoint in southern Lebanon last month.

And the Israeli newspaper Maariv reported not long ago that leaflets have been distributed in working-class neighborhoods of Cairo calling on Egypt to emulate the Lebanese resistance and “liberate” Taba, a disputed strip of land on the Israeli border.

Effect on Draftees

More difficult to assess, but no less important, is the impact of the war on the attitudes of a generation of draftees. Most of the reservists, who make up the largest part of Israel’s fighting forces, were in Lebanon for at least one of their regular call-ups to active duty in the last three years. Some reserve units returned to Lebanon five and six times.

Even Defense Minister Rabin conceded that Israeli army morale suffered in the war. He told a group of reporters, “There is no doubt that many commanders and soldiers come home with inner scars from the war in Lebanon.”

Still, Rabin and others argue that any damage will be quickly repaired once the army completes the final phase of its withdrawal from Lebanon, probably early next month.

Some analysts are not convinced. Returning earlier this year from an 18-month sabbatical abroad, Zev Schiff, the military affairs commentator for the independent newspaper Haaretz, said he was shocked at what he found in Lebanon. He wrote:

“It is not merely a different Lebanon; it is first of all a different IDF. It’s astonishing and painful. What the people who initiated the war have done to the IDF is unforgivable.”

Schiff said he found an army questioning itself and its purpose. He described it as an army that knew a different kind of fear, a kind that comes when one is not quite sure who the enemy is, and so assumes that the enemy is anyone who looks or talks differently.

There are many signs that the Israeli army is having morale problems in Lebanon, though interpretations of their significance vary.

Emotional Problems

Richard A. Gabriel, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer and military analyst, in his book “Operation Peace For Galilee: The Israeli-PLO War in Lebanon,” quotes the head of an army mental health unit as saying that in the first months of the war an unusually high 10% of Israeli troops suffered some type of incapacitating battle fatigue.

And early this month, it was disclosed that 21 Israeli soldiers had committed suicide in Lebanon over the last three years.

“I can’t say for certain” whether this is a deviation from the norm, Rabin said, “but we are studying the matter.”

Israeli military writers such as Schiff have referred repeatedly to the problem the army had in mobilizing reserve units for duty in Lebanon. Information about mobilization rates is, naturally, highly sensitive; however, Rabin said that whatever the situation was before the government approved a staged withdrawal plan in January, it has improved since then.

“Since the soldiers realized that we are really telling them the truth, that we are going out, there is a complete change of attitude,” he added.

More than 150 regular army soldiers have gone to jail for refusing to serve in Lebanon. The number is small by comparison to the number who fought, but as Aharon Yariv, a reserve major general who heads Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, said, it was “absolutely the first time in Israel’s history that anything like that has happened at all.”

The authors of “Middle East Military Balance,” an annual publication of the Jaffee Center, concluded that the Israeli army “has sustained damage in an area in which it enjoyed the clearest advantage over neighboring armies: the readiness to fight even when the nature and objectives of the conflict are not universally accepted.”

Implications for Future

“This,” they went on, “may mean that in future,reservists in particular will not perform to full capacity unless they sense that war has been forced upon them and that it must be fought in order to remove a clear and unambiguous danger to themselves and to the state.”

Ironically, it was in part because of morale problems that the army earlier this year undertook its “iron fist” policy of raiding southern Lebanese villages believed to be serving as staging areas for guerrilla attacks against it.

“The IDF is much, much better in offense than in defense,” a senior Israeli defense source said at the time. “There is higher morale with the troops when they know they are going to hit instead of waiting like sitting ducks.”

The bloodiest of the pre-emptive iron fist raids left 37 Lebanese dead in the village of Zrariye on March 11, a day after a suicide truck bomber killed 12 Israeli soldiers and wounded 14. The first Western reporters to reach Zrariye after the raid found a spray-paint sign bearing the words, “The Revenge of the Israel Defense Forces.”

At about the same time, an officer was shown on Israeli television instructing his men, who were about to go out on patrol: “I want to make it perfectly clear: You shoot at anything that moves.”

Operation Iron Fist was the culmination of a process that military correspondent Eitan Haber, writing in the newspaper Yediot Aharonot, described as having left young Israeli soldiers with “a total lack of consideration for human life, human feelings and property.”

‘What’s the Difference?’

Visiting troops in the Lebanese village of Doueir early in April, Rabin was barraged with questions, including one from a paratrooper who asked, “What’s the difference between them and us?”

Some here contend that the “purity of arms” concept has been overemphasized in Lebanon. A Western military source, who asked not to be identified by name, scoffed, “Those comments are being made by people who haven’t been shot at lately.”

Moshe Arens, a former ambassador to the United States and a minister of defense in the previous Likud government, had this to say: “I think that in the entire recorded history of warfare, there has not been an army that has behaved in as humane a fashion as the IDF in Lebanon; there has not been an army that has taken the kind of risks to its own soldiers in an attempt to avoid risks to the civilian population. . . .”

The military analyst Gabriel, however, said in his book on the Lebanese war: “The IDF, perhaps more than any other army, stresses in all aspects of its training and officer selection that the use of force within the Jewish historical and moral tradition has an ethical base. It is an integral aspect of IDF training of combat soldiers that soldiers fight best when they are not asked to do things which reasonable men would judge to be immoral. From this proceeds a concern to reduce the human and material (damage) of war.”

Some people fear that troops who have learned in Lebanon to shoot first and ask questions later may be more likely to overreact when next faced with stone-throwing Arab youths on the occupied West Bank.

“The attitudes of my soldiers toward Arabs in general have become more extreme,” Lt. Aryeh said. “You find many soldiers who speak like Rabbi Kahane”--a reference to Meir Kahane, the extreme right-wing member of Parliament who wants to expel all Arabs from Israel.

Lt. Boaz, another officer recently returned from Lebanon, said that “even now, every time we see an Arab at the roadside, many of us instinctively cock our weapons.”

Reorientation Needed

An influential Israeli military source commented, “We should, once we finish this, undertake an education effort both for the professional army and the reservists to make sure that the dictum ‘shoot first and ask questions afterward’ does not become the norm.”

While military planners ponder the lessons of Lebanon for the future, the soldiers returning just want to forget about it.

“We’re all tired from the Lebanese adventure and don’t want to think about tomorrow,” Boaz said.

The problem is that Lebanon remains on Israel’s northern border, and even after the last pullout is completed, Israeli army patrols will be returning regularly to a “security zone” north of the border.

Arens, now a minister without portfolio in the coalition Cabinet currently led by Labor Party Prime Minister Shimon Peres, said in a recent interview:

“The United States could walk out of Vietnam and forget Vietnam, and it was not going to affect the lives of people living in California or even Hawaii. Israel is not in a position to ring down the curtain on Lebanon, or even forget it, because we have people who are living right near the Lebanese border.”