Israeli Army Defends Occupation of Lebanon

Perched on a wind-swept ridge overlooking a picturesque Lebanese valley, Lt. Gilad Engel shrugged off the dangers of serving at this remote Israeli base on the edge of southern Lebanon.

An M-16 slung casually across his back, the 20-year-old Engel also all but dismissed the emotional public debate swirling anew in Israel over a military withdrawal from Lebanon.

Those urging Israel to end its long occupation of a strip of southern Lebanon simply do not understand the problem, he said.

“We have to be there, or the Hezbollah will be here,” the young soldier said this week as he gazed at Lebanese villages across rows of concertina wire and bright red signs warning of a nearby minefield. “Why can’t they see that?”

Since mid-November, seven Israeli soldiers have been killed in southern Lebanon in attacks by Iranian-backed Hezbollah guerrillas. Amid growing public anger over the wave of deaths and intensified demands for a unilateral withdrawal, the Israeli government is reexamining its Lebanon policy.

But to the army leadership, and to the young soldiers of the Nahal infantry brigade on this exposed hilltop, a unilateral pullout is not an option.

They argue that the departure of Israeli troops from the self-declared 9-mile-deep “security zone” would allow Hezbollah to launch deadly attacks on Israelis living in communities just south of the “purple line,” the international border.

Stung by the growing calls for withdrawal, the army launched a public relations offensive this week, inviting Israeli Cabinet ministers and reporters to the country’s north for briefings aimed at depicting its operations as a success--and the latest deaths as the painful but necessary cost of protecting Israeli civilians.

“When you are dealing with an enemy that is coming to shoot and kill people, you do not take chances,” Brig. Gen. Shuki Shichrur, deputy commander of the army’s northern sector, told reporters at an army base in the region.

“It’s a very, very high price,” he said. “For a family that lost a son, it’s not worth it. But as a country, as a state, as armed forces trying to prevent casualties to the civilian side of the house . . . sometimes we have to pay the price.”

Despite the casualties, Shichrur asserted, the army has been extraordinarily successful in its goal of keeping the north tranquil for Israeli civilians.

For the last three years, he said, Hezbollah and other groups operating in southern Lebanon have not even tried to cross the border to carry out raids on Israeli communities.

Instead, Hezbollah has stepped up its attacks against Israeli soldiers in the buffer zone, with 1,100 attacks this year, nearly double the number in 1997.

Yet even with the latest killings, the toll of 21 dead this year is about the annual average and well below last year’s figure of 39, Shichrur noted.

“It’s like a strong lion fighting a bee,” he said of Israel’s battle against guerrilla forces. “It’s very easy for the bee to hide. It’s very hard for the lion to hide.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai this week reiterated the government’s position: Without a peace accord with Lebanon--and with Syria, the real power in Lebanon--there is no alternative to Israel’s continued occupation.

However, public support is growing for the troops to leave Lebanon, with or without a peace agreement. In a recent newspaper poll, 40% of Israelis surveyed said they support a unilateral withdrawal, nearly double the number who said so last year.

On Friday, Israel’s Yediot Aharonot newspaper reported that two top security officials--the head of the Shin Bet internal security service and the deputy chief of the Mossad intelligence service--have joined the chorus of voices advocating a pullback. Another well-known proponent is Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon, who led Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and now favors a gradual withdrawal, but combined with a threat to bomb Lebanon if Israel comes under renewed attack.

Protests by the bereaved parents of soldiers and other withdrawal proponents are also attracting public attention and support.

This week, handfuls of demonstrators kept daily vigils outside the homes of President Ezer Weizman and other government leaders. Among their hand-lettered placards was one bearing a stark message: “Lebanon Is Killing Us.”

Here in the north, where young Israelis don black face paint for nighttime raids into Lebanon to fight a shadowy enemy, a few of the soldiers acknowledged that the debate bothers them a bit and their parents even more.

Some said they carry mobile phones--although not in Lebanon--just so they can call their worried mothers. One said he did not tell his mother where he was for several weeks.

Capt. Zvi Mincovitch, 26, said the debate over Israel’s presence here makes him feel a little uncomfortable at times.

“The public doesn’t know what’s going on,” he said. “But you know what you’re doing here, and you feel right with it.”

At the same time, he and the others said it is a strangely anonymous war they’re fighting.

For the most part, they never see their enemy, which battles Israel these days mainly with rocket and mortar attacks or roadside bombs. The soldiers carry out missions in Lebanon and return here, to the tiny base that lies within easy reach of Hezbollah fire but has never been hit.

“We don’t meet them in firefights,” said Sgt. Gilad Rosenzweig, 24, a Canadian immigrant. “We land on their mines. I think they realize they can fight us better that way.”