Israeli Public Calls for Lebanon Pullout

This week’s upsurge of violence in southern Lebanon is prompting an urgent new chorus of voices calling for Israel to pull its troops out of the region, even without an agreement with Syria, Lebanon’s main power broker.

The heightened demands for a unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon, once taboo in Israel, came Wednesday from politicians, commentators and even a handful of soldiers in Lebanon who asked radio reporters on the battlefront to broadcast anonymous appeals that Israel pull its troops back without delay.

“We don’t want to be the last soldiers to die in Lebanon,” one soldier said. “There’s no chance in the world that we’ll win this war.”

Prime Minister Ehud Barak has pledged to extricate the army from Lebanon by July, ending Israel’s long and costly occupation of its 9-mile-deep “security zone” just inside the Lebanese border. Syrian-backed Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas are fighting to oust Israeli troops from the territory, which Israel has occupied for two decades.

But after spiraling violence--which has left six Israeli soldiers dead in the last two weeks and prompted Israel’s fiercest airstrikes against Lebanon in many months--the Haaretz newspaper seemed to reflect the view of more and more Israelis with an editorial Wednesday that asked, “Why wait for July?”

The swirling debate over withdrawal came as the conflict continued Wednesday, with new bombing raids by Israeli jets. Battles raged on between Israeli troops and Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanon, but the guerrillas did not act on threats to retaliate for the air raids with Katyusha rocket attacks on border towns in northern Israel.

Those communities remained under a state of emergency nonetheless, and thousands of people spent another night in bomb shelters or away from the border. Israel Radio said as much as 80% of the residents of Kiryat Shemona, the largest Israeli town along the border, had fled south.

In the past two years, since politicians and a few military officials began to broach the subject, the push for a Lebanon pullout has grown stronger. Influential political figures, from Justice Minister Yossi Beilin on the left to Likud Party leader Ariel Sharon on the right, have called on the government to reexamine the policy of keeping troops in Lebanon.

Barak campaigned on the issue, promising Israelis that he would bring the troops home by this summer, although he has always said the withdrawal should occur, if possible, within the context of an agreement with Syria.

But now, with casualties mounting once again and peace talks broken off, Barak is under increasing public pressure to cut Israel’s losses and withdraw quickly from Lebanon, despite the risk that such a pullout would expose northern Israeli towns to cross-border attacks by Hezbollah or other groups.

Wednesday’s appeal by Israeli soldiers serving in Lebanon appears to have been the first of its kind. Israel Radio said a small group of soldiers sought out its reporters and asked to make the unauthorized statements, which army officials later criticized.

“What’s the good of staying in Lebanon and putting our lives in danger when the army has its hands tied for political reasons and cannot act as it should?” one soldier asked. Another said Israel’s tactics in Lebanon are ineffective against a guerrilla force. “We are too big and cumbersome, while [Hezbollah] is small and can sting us.”

But several commentators, while arguing for a unilateral withdrawal, acknowledged that it would mark a bitter end to Israel’s fruitless occupation.

“Evacuate the outposts, bring the soldiers home and redeploy at the border,” David Grossman, an Israeli novelist, wrote this week in the Yediot Aharonot newspaper. “Go. Learn to live with the insult, swallow the empty pride, stop feeding the fire of our lingering, pitiful arrogance still left in us with more and more of our young soldiers dying.

“We have lost,” Grossman wrote. “It’s OK to say it aloud. No one dies from saying it. That’s not what people die from.”