Israel Military Might Falling Short in Face of Guerrilla Warfare

Twenty-four hours before he and nine other Israelis were shot dead by a Palestinian sniper, Lt. David Damelin telephoned his mother. He described his feelings of vulnerability stationed at a remote West Bank roadblock, the enemy unseen in surrounding hills.

“We feel like sitting ducks,” he told her.

Damelin, whose story was recounted Monday in the Israeli newspaper Maariv, was one of seven soldiers and three Jewish settlers picked off Sunday morning by a sniper who fired 25 shots in 25 minutes using a World War II-era rifle. It was a devastating blow to the Israeli army, which suffered the most deaths in a single incident in years.

As fighting here escalates, the army, Israel’s most cherished institution, has suffered a string of humiliating failures that has alarmed a desperate public and amplified voices of dissent both within the military’s ranks and without.

Criticism of the military leadership is also the underpinning of a wider, anguished debate over how to conduct the war with the Palestinians--how to win it, how to end it. Reeling from some of the bloodiest violence in years, Israelis for the most part know that they want a clear-cut resolution but are at a loss on what that might be. Some say it is finally time to wage all-out war and destroy the Palestinian Authority once and for all. Others caution that military might alone will not bring peace and that there is still a role for diplomacy.

The debate reaches into the Cabinet of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. At a stormy session Sunday in which he ultimately ordered a massive military campaign against the Palestinians, Sharon listened to one of his ministers, Avigdor Lieberman, advocate airstrikes on Palestinian markets, banks and electricity grids.

Shimon Peres, the dovish foreign minister, responded in horror that such actions would send Israel to an international war crimes tribunal like former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

“I don’t care,” Lieberman answered.

But the shortcomings of Israel’s military might--especially when it is pitted against irregular guerrilla commandos--have been painfully on display in recent days.

The sniper shootings at the checkpoint Sunday that claimed the life of Damelin, a 29-year-old reservist and platoon commander, represented “a massive blunder and a disgrace for the Israeli Defense Forces,” said Zeev Schiff, veteran military affairs commentator for the Haaretz newspaper.

According to survivors, the sniper aimed for heads, avoiding the flak jackets most of the soldiers were wearing. When the soldiers began returning fire, they apparently were disoriented by the echo of the sniper’s bullets and initially shot in the wrong direction.

The checkpoint, near the Jewish settlement of Ofra, was especially vulnerable because it sat in a narrow valley that was hard to protect. The attack came 12 days after six soldiers were killed at a roadblock about 15 miles away. In both cases, the assailants escaped.

“The [army] has yet to learn its roadblock lesson,” Schiff noted. “The series of attacks, which are more in line with guerrilla warfare than terror tactics, will certainly raise Palestinian morale and damage the [army’s] prestige.”

All of the soldiers slain near Ofra were reservists; one was nearly 40 years old. (Most Israeli men are required to do regular reserve duty until about 45.) Newspapers, Web sites and radio shows Monday aired numerous complaints from reservists and their families who contended that reserve troops are not given adequate training, equipment or protection, yet are required to perform dangerous duty.

“We are suckers,” a reservist from the town of Nahariya said.

The shootings near Ofra were especially galling for many here because senior army commanders had just declared victory in a series of raids into two Palestinian refugee camps.

On Saturday afternoon, Col. Aviv Kochavi, commander of a paratroop brigade who led the charge into the Balata refugee camp in the West Bank city of Nablus, toured the conquered camp with reporters. Balata is a notorious center of armed Palestinian resistance, but Kochavi was pleased to announce that the Palestinian gunmen had fled and that his own men had suffered few casualties.

“The tiger known as Balata has turned out to be a pussycat,” Kochavi said.

Sunday’s checkpoint episode, commentators here said, was an example of the Israeli army trying to assert its invincibility only to have the attempt backfire. A militia affiliated with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement, the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, claimed responsibility for both the sniper attack and a devastating suicide bombing in the heart of Jerusalem the night before. It said the attacks were carried out to avenge Israel’s deadly incursions into the camps.

“Every time we try to send a ‘message’ to the Palestinians, we get it thrown right back in our faces,” political analyst Hemi Shalev wrote on Maariv’s front page. “Every solution merely aggravates the problem, every escalation makes itself worse many times over.”

The army command and Sharon’s government rejected the idea that there was a connection between the Palestinian attacks and the Israeli attacks. Israel seized the camps, they said, to capture militants and their weapons and take away their sanctuary.

But most of the gunmen in Balata slipped out ahead of the Israeli arrival, ready to fight another day.

Palestinian attackers have displayed more audacity and lethal efficiency in a number of recent operations. Marwan Barghouti, a West Bank leader of Fatah and key lieutenant to Arafat, praised the checkpoint shootings as “an excellent attack” that would be repeated.

“The expertise of our people will increase, and they will become more qualified day by day,” Barghouti said Monday at a rally by the Islamic militant movement Hamas after Israel killed the wife and children of a Hamas leader. The army said the Hamas leader, and not his family, was the target of tank shells fired into the West Bank city of Ramallah.

Danny Rothschild, a retired Israeli army general who headed Israel’s administrative authority over the West Bank and Gaza Strip, said Monday that mounting large-scale operations, such as the raids on the refugee camps, to combat guerrilla warfare was a mistake. And he and other critics said too many military decisions were being based on political considerations instead of sound strategy.

Rothschild is president of the Council for Peace and Security, a group of about 300 retired military and intelligence officers who recently advocated that Israel withdraw from most of the West Bank and Gaza to defensible borders.

Posting the checkpoint near Ofra was an illustration of the folly of heeding political rather than military concerns, Rothschild said. Although checkpoints along Israel’s border serve the purpose of preventing potential terrorists from entering the country, some roadblocks are posted in remote West Bank locations to protect Jewish settlers scattered over hilltop enclaves. Soldiers are put in harm’s way for the benefit of small groups of settlers, Rothschild said. Settlers constitute a powerful political lobby, however, and Sharon is determined to protect them.

“The government is willing to please voices of public opinion and maybe in the short term even succeed,” Rothschild said. “But in the long term, it doesn’t bring any comfort to anyone.”