Uri Avnery
2.2.08
From
FOR SOME days, the country looked like the Place de
All eyes were fixed on the raised blade of the Winograd
commission. The judge sat down before the cameras and read out the report. But
the blade did not come down. No reserve soldier raised the bloody, severed
head. The head remained in its place. Ehud Olmert is
no marquis, and his head remains firmly on his shoulders.
From one end of the country to the other, a deep sigh of disappointment.
The reporters and commentators sprang from their seats, like the knitting hags
of the
The Winograd commission has failed, the
commentators exclaimed in outrage. To the many failures of the war, the failure
of the commission must now be added.
EVERY EXPERIENCED politician knows the axiom: He who chooses the members
of a commission determines its conclusions in advance.
That is almost self-evident. After all, the members of the commission are
only human. Human beings have attitudes and opinions. These are known in
advance to the person who appoints them. He can appoint the members at will. If
he appoints tycoons, he can reasonably expect that they will not decide to
raise the taxes on the rich. If he appoints leftists instead, the
recommendations will be quite different.
Therefore, when the proposed Law of Commissions of Inquiry was debated,
we decided that the members of an "official" commission of inquiry should
not be appointed by the government, but by the President of the Supreme Court.
I was a member of the Knesset at the time and took an active part in the
debate. I proposed that not only would the Chief Justice appoint the commission
members, but that he - and not the government - would decide on the setting up
of an inquiry in the first place. (This was rejected.)
That happened seven years before the young Ehud Olmert
was first elected to the Knesset. But he understands the law perfectly. When,
after Lebanon War II, the appointment of an "official" commission of
inquiry was proposed, he objected strenuously. He insisted on a government-appointed
inquiry commission. While the members of an official commission are appointed
by the Chief Justice, the members of a government commission are appointed by
the government itself.
Vive la petite difference.
The appointment of the Winograd commission was greeted
by many doubts. But these evaporated completely when the interim report was released
last April. It was harsh and uncompromising. It contained very negative remarks
about Olmert.
So the public relaxed. The difference between the two kinds of commission
was forgotten. The Winograd commission behaved
exactly like an "official" commission, took
decisions like one and spoke like one. It raised the guillotine blade, and
everybody waited for it to fall on Olmert's neck.
And then it became clear that le petite difference was a very substantial
difference indeed. The commission appointed by Olmert
has now issued a final report that is favorable to Olmert
all along the line, especially about the accusation that Olmert
had decided on the last-minute "ground operation" and sent soldiers
to their deaths to save his personal prestige.
The commission did not lay any personal blame on any politician or
general. Here it could base itself on a decision of the Supreme Court, which
had expressly forbidden the commission to condemn anyone personally.
How come? When the Knesset adopted the Commission of Inquiry Law, we paid
much attention to Article 15. It prohibits condemning anyone without giving
them a fair opportunity to defend themself. Such a
person must be warned in advance and invited to appoint a lawyer, to
cross-examine witnesses and to summon witnesses of their own.
That is a long process, and a commission of inquiry is generally in a hurry
to finish its report before the subject of its investigation is forgotten. For
example, the commission of inquiry that was set up after the Yom Kippur war,
under Judge Agranat, just disregarded the article altogether
and decided to dismiss the Chief of Staff, the Commander of the Southern Front
and other generals, without giving them any advance warning at all.
The Winograd commission took another path: when
the army authorities petitioned the Supreme Court and demanded that the
commission respect Article 15, the commission just promised that they would not
blame anybody personally.
The commission could, of course, have described Olmert's
part in the war in such scathing terms as to force him to resign. It did not do
so. On the contrary, it concluded that his decisions were reasonable.
The blade did not fall, Olmert
was bruised, but still standing.
AFTER THE 1982 Sabra and Shatila
massacre, the "official" commission of inquiry chaired by Judge Kahan published an exemplary report which exposed all the
facts. But these could have led it to much harsher conclusions than it did actually
reach. Instead of finding that Ariel Sharon and his minions were guilty of "indirect
responsibility" for the massacre, it could have decided that they bore
direct responsibility. The facts supported such a conclusion. Why did they not
do so, and only dismissed Sharon and some officers? I
assume that they shrunk back for fear of causing severe damage to the State of
Israel.
Now I could write much the same about the Winograd
commission. The facts exposed by it justify more extreme conclusions. What held
them back? One can guess: the five commission members, all pillars of the
establishment - 2 generals, 2 leading academics, 1
judge - did not want to topple Olmert, the No. 1
establishment person. Perhaps they feared that his place would be taken by
somebody much worse - a worry shared by many others in the country.
As prominent establishment figures, the commission members also shrunk
back from touching on two basic questions concerning Lebanon War II: (a) Why it
was started at all, and (b) What had caused the shocking deterioration of the
army.
IN ITS two reports, the commission asserted that the decision to start
the war was taken in a hasty and irresponsible manner. The stated war aims were
quite unattainable. But the commission did not say what had caused Olmert & Co. - the government of
We now know for sure that plans for the war had been prepared a long time
before. These were rehearsed only a month before the war and changes were made
according to the results. In the end, these plans were not implemented at all.
But it is clear that the government and the army had long been thinking about
attacking Hizbullah.
For six years, the Northern border had been completely quiet. Hizbullah did deploy rockets (as it is doing now) but
showed then (as now) no inclination to attack
The cross-border incursion in which two Israeli soldiers were captured
was an exception. The action was intended to provide negotiating chips for the
release of Hizbullah prisoners held in
As I said right at the beginning, this incident was a pretext for the
war, not the reason for it. If so, what was the real reason? The
desire of the civilian Olmert for military glory?
The dream of the Chief of Staff, Dan Halutz,
to prove that the Air Force could win a war alone, by a massive bombardment of
the civilian population? The illusion that Hizbullah could be eliminated by one big strike?
When Judge Winograd tried to explain why a part
of the report must be kept secret, the words he used attracted no attention:
"The security of the state and its foreign relations". Foreign relations? What foreign relations? Relations with whom? There is only one reasonable answer:
relations with the
That could be the crux of the matter: Olmert
fulfilled an American wish. President Bush wanted to install his protégé, Fouad Siniora, as ruler in
I believe that this is the missing link in Winograd's
chain. Olmert could have argued: "I was only obeying
orders". But that, of course, is unspeakable.
THE OTHER black hole in the report concerns the Israeli army. The report
criticizes it murderously. Never before has the army leadership been described
in such a way - as a bunch of people without character, talent or competence;
generals who are ready to send soldiers to their death in an operation they
believe to be condemned to failure, just because they do not dare to stand up to
their superiors; generals who do not demand a clear definition of the
objectives before going into battle; Generals who do not recognize the fateful
faults of their army, and who are themselves responsible - they and their
predecessors - for these very faults.
All this is being said now. What has not been said is: how did we get
such a leadership? What has caused these faults?
The answers can be summed up in two words: the occupation.
In the last few years I have written dozens of articles about the disastrous
effects of the occupation on the army. One cannot employ a whole army for
decades as a colonial police force for crushing the resistance of an occupied
population, without changing its character. Soldiers who run after
stone-throwing children in the alleys of the Qasbah,
who hammer at night on the doors of civilians, who use bulldozers to destroy people's
homes, and all this for year after year - such soldiers
are not competent to fight a modern war.
Worse: such a colonial army does not attract the best and the brightest.
These now go into high-tech and science. The brutal work of the army against
civilians and guerrilla fighters disgusts people of
conscience and sensitivity, the very ones who are the backbone of a good
officers' corps. It blunts the senses of those who remain, or sends them home
from the occupied territories traumatized.
In the 40 years of occupation, the Israeli army has lost the kind of
officers that led it in the 1948 and 1967 wars, people like Yitzhak Sadeh, Yigal Allon,
Yitzhak Rabin, Ezer Weitzman, Matti
Peled, Haim Bar-Lev and
David Elazar, to mention just a few. Their place has
been taken by a mediocre, faceless group, gray but arrogant technicians, people of shallow thinking, colonialist and extreme
right-wing attitudes, with an ever increasing percentage of knitted kippa-wearers.
That is the group the report speaks of - but without saying so. It is an
occupation army in which a negative natural selection process operates -
everyone who does not feel comfortable in this milieu just leaves. As in any
army, the atmosphere prevailing at the top - good or bad - trickles down the
ranks to the meanest soldier.
This is not an army of