William Mehlman

“Confused? So are we,” read the headline of an article by Ha’aretz reporters Amos Harel and Avi Isaacharov a day after the release of the Winograd Committee’s 600-page final assessment of the Olmert government’s handling of the Second Lebanese War.

So are we all. For deep within the innards of an exhaustive discovery brief simmering with condemnation of the failure of strategic purpose, preparation, organization and execution--military and political–that marked Israel’s conduct of the 34-day conflict in 2006 was a statement that seemed to defy all rational explanation. It clearly, however, wasn’t one that was going to escape public scrutiny, because it rubbed up against the most controversial aspect of the war–its final 60 hours. It was in those closing hours, in the face of an imminent UN cease fire, that the IDF, allegedly on orders from the government, launched a ground offensive against deeply rooted Hezbollah forces in south Lebanon that resulted in the death of 33 soldiers. The storm raised by the families of the 33, their charge that their sons and husbands were sacrificed to a vain effort by the Olmert government to enhance its bargaining position and repair its shattered military image in advance of the cease fire, has been the emotional fulcrum of the case against the government’s conduct of the war.

Winograd’s verdict on this issue was a stunner. Conceding that the offensive “did not achieve any military objective” and further conceding that “the manner in which the ground operation was conducted raises the most difficult of questions,” the Committee nevertheless concluded that “the desire to improve Israel’s military position constituted reasonable political justification for the ground invasion.” These considerations, it additionally averred, not only “required, or at least justified, the continuation of the planned military step, if there was a reasonable operational expectation that it would achieve the goals in the period of time remaining,” they actually dictated “a practically essential decision.”

But how, Harel and Isaacharov argued in their analysis of this exercise in double-talk, could a time-frame circumscribed by an onrushing UN cease fire have rendered the launching of a major ground operation a “practically essential decision?” To a query by Public Security Minister Avi Dichter at an August 9, 2006 cabinet meeting as to whether there was the remotest chance of degrading Hezbollah’s Katyusha capacity in the time left to the army, IDF Chief of General Staff Dan Halutz was reported to have replied: “We can conduct a four-day campaign, but it doesn’t serve any purpose.”

Why is this the case? Winograd, in a contradiction it has yet to resolve, supplied the answer in its April 2007 interim report. The execution of the IDF’s military plan, the Committee wrote, would have required four days simply to take over Hezbollah’s fortifications south of the Litani River. It would have taken another 4-6 weeks to “cleanse” the area. The Committee concluded in its interim report that “a reduction of the timetable to 60 hours made the move unrealistic in terms of the necessary achievement.”

So how, in the nine months between the interim and final reports of the Winograd Committee, did the “unrealistic” become “a practically essential decision?”

The answer lies deep within the tangled roots of the Israeli judicial system and the Olmert government’s efforts to obfuscate it.

To begin with, it needs to be understood that the Winograd Committee has no juirisdictional powers under Israeli law. It was selected and appointed by the prime minister in place of the independent State Commission of Inquiry that should have been enjoined to examine the prosecution of Lebanon II. A state commission would have had the authority to use its findings to institute court proceedings. That’s what the IDF reservists and most of the country wanted. That’s what the Olmert government was determined not to let happen.

What the government failed to anticipate was that its five Winograd Committee members, under the compulsion of evidential discovery, might begin to behave like something other than benevolent allies. Indeed, with the Committee’s witnesses unfettered by judicial restraints and guaranteed the right to speak their minds without fear of their names appearing in the next day’s newspapers, Winograd’s April 2007 verdict on the conduct of the war was so clear, frank and pointedly personal that Defense Minister Amir Peretz and Chief of General Staff Dan Halutz saw no alternative but to resign. Suddenly the government’s anticipated slap on the wrist from a quintet of aging good-ole-boys had turned into a shot to the solar plexus. Olmert managed to hold off his own exit, but the heat on him had the 911 bells ringing.

The prime minister’s fire brigade responded with a legal maneuver sprung out of a modern Machiavellian playbook. Cutting the legs out from under his own committee, Olmert got Israel’s deputy attorney general and IDF Solicitor General Col. Orna David to file petitions to the Israeli Supreme Court for a ruling that would prohibit Winograd from issuing any further conclusions or recommendations pertaining to the personal responsibility of any member of the government for the conduct of the war. In compliance with the petitions, the High Court dutifully ruled that the publication of such conclusions and recommendations would, under article 15 of the Israel State Commission’s Inquiry Law, require Winograd to dispatch “letters of caution” to any and all individuals named, informing them that they could be damaged by the Committee’s findings and granting them and their lawyers the right to respond and cross-examine the witnesses against them. Such a procedure might have tied Winograd in knots for years, which is exactly what the Olmert team wanted. As anticipated, the Committee backed off.

With one bold stroke, Olmert had managed to load onto the back of his handpicked Winogradians all the legal baggage of the State Commission of Inquiry he had refused to appoint, but only after having first denuded Winograd of the authority a state commission would have had to initiate court action based on the evidence it produced.

The considerations that prompted this frantic legal ploy could not have been more transparent. There is no prima facie evidence of political or diplomatic motivation behind the government’s ordering of ground forces into south Lebanon in the waning hours of the war. That would have amounted to a criminal act. But even an investigation of the charges leveled by the IDF reservists and the bereaved families might have been enough to send the Kadima coalition packing. It had to be stopped, even at the cost of explaining how a military operation without the slightest rhyme or reason evolved into “a practically essential decision.” The April 2007 interim Winograd report provided the exit cues for Amir Peretz and Dan Halutz. The defanged January 2008 final report left Ehud Olmert at center stage.

Predictably, the Olmert camp wasted no time wrapping itself in the perceived absolution of the hamstrung Winograd findings. Having already informed the nation that “I have no intention of letting go, no matter the political costs,” the prime minister’s crediting the Committee with “lifting the moral stigma from me” was as fine a blend of sanctimony and sophistry as Israeli politics has ever witnessed. His aides could barely restrain their glee. “The report exonerates Olmert,”. a smirking Vice Premier Haim Ramon shouted at reporters. Another demanded that the prime minister’s critics “apologize” to him.

Ramon could have saved his breath in calling on Defense Minister Ehud Barak to “show national responsibility” and continue to grace the Kadima coalition with his 19 Labor Party seats. Barak had already given every indication he was going to renege on two separate promises he’d made last summer to quit the government and force new elections unless the final Winograd Report resulted in Olmert’s resignation. It took him five days to confirm what everybody suspected. Ducking a press conference, Barak casually let drop to a handful of reporters grouped outside the government’s weekly cabinet meeting that he had decided to remain defense minister. “Because I know what challenges Israel faces: Gaza, Hizbollah, Syria, Iran, Lebanon, rehabilitating the army and the diplomatic process,” he said, “I have decided to do what’s right for the nation and this is right for the nation.”

Barak’s clumsy effort to save face the following day with a vow to “find the right time in the not too distant future to topple the government” went over like a lead balloon. None were more distressed than veteran members of his own party. Labor secretary Elie Cabel gave up his cabinet seat in protest. MK Danny Yatom said he would either quit politics altogether or spend the rest of the Knesset term voting against the coalition. MK Yoram Marciano excoriated Barak for avoiding a direct confrontation with the press and Ophir Pines-Pines accused him of abandoning his pledge to quit the coalition out of fear of an election that might return Likud head Benjamin Netanyahu to power. “Whoever is afraid of Netanyahu and serving in the opposition,” he thundered, “will never get to power.” Declaring herself “sickened by the relentless celebrations” over Winograd in the Olmert camp, MK Shelly Yachimovich, the fire-eating former TV news commentator, convened a meeting of the Labor Party dissidents in her Tel Aviv apartment to coordinate strategy for a battle against the coalition.

While Barak continued to avoid the Knesset and recriminations over his reneging on a pledge that would have rid Israel of the most unpopular government in its history, the prime minister, ignoring repeated interruptions from the bereaved families and heckling from opposition MKs, left and right, told a plenum packed with spectators (the IDF reservists were barred) that he took “full responsibility for the failures” [exposed by Winograd] and would “use this responsibility to fix the faults, implement the recommendations and jump-start the changes.” In respect to which, Netanyahu had earlier remarked, “Who would want to offer the captain of the Titanic a second command?”

The prime minister’s associates were effusive in their praise of Ehud Barak for his gift of “nine months of political quiet” in backing off on his threat to torpedo the coalition. “There is no problem in the coalition anymore,” one of them remarked. “If there’s a diplomatic deal that includes Jerusalem in November, there will be problems, but until then there will be only minor setbacks ...This government will last longer than all the prophets predicted.”

The Olmert government’s “nine months of political quiet” lasted about 72 hours. It ended with a thunderclap of incredulity produced by interviews in Ma’ariv and The Jerusalem Post with Yehezkel Dror, one of the five members of the Winograd Committee.

The 80 year-old founder and president of the Jerusalem’s Jewish People Policy Planning Institute threw the political scene into turmoil and the integrity of the Winograd Report into question by indicating that its failure to hold the prime minister’s feet closer to the fire may have been influenced by a desire to shield the “peace process” from a governmental collapse. Dror’s subsequent strenuous denial that Winograd’s judgments were skewed by political considerations wilted before the statements he served up to the press.

"We must think of the consequences,” he remarked in the Ma’ariv interview. “Who would you prefer, a government led by Olmert and Barak or new elections that will give rise to a government led by Netanyahu?”

While Netanyahu declined comment on the remark, a senior Likud official considered it sufficiently grave to warrant a full new investigation of the conduct of Lebanon II. “It’s not just Dror’s comments in the papers,” he asserted, “it’s the statements made in the report itself which are concerning.” Pointing to Winograd’s Article 64, stipulating that Israel must establish peace with its neighbors, the Likud official exclaimed: “Who authorized the Committee to make political statements?”

At another point in The Jerusalem Post interview Dror averred that “Israelis considering Ehud Olmert’s resignation” over the handling of Lebanon II, should “balance assessments of his performance against the fate of the peace process and whether new elections would disrupt it. This is a matter for subjective judgment.” He underscored this by telling the interviewer, “Let me state in the interest of full disclosure: I am personally for the peace process. You should know I’m for it…”

Dror was just as frank about his feelings toward public opinion and his view of who should be calling the shots for Israel. “Should a head of government resign because public opinion polls show he is distrusted?” he asked “The answer is no. Because it is a populistic business and I don’t have such a high opinion of public opinion. I am an elitist. Eighty percent of the critical decisions affecting Israel are shaped by 100 or 200 people, 300. These are my clients. These are the people I want to read the report and discuss it.”

The shock waves generated by Dror’s remarks and their impact on the credibility of the Winograd report have reverberated across the political spectrum, “If a member of the [Winograd] Committee claims that the considerations that guided him pertained to who could bring peace and who would be prime minister,” Likud MK Silvan Shalom declared, “this calls for a state commission of inquiry.” On the other side of the divide Meretz Chairman Yossi Beilin let it be known that his support of the peace process was not to be translated into condoning the use of the issue by any Winograd member to color his judgment. “The question regarding the prime minister’s ability to promote peace should not have been considered by members of a public committee of inquiry appointed to investigate the war’s failings,” Beilin averred. “This is an issue that the political parties and the public should decide. If this was indeed taken into consideration by the Committee, then it has lost its legitimacy.”

Whether the Knesset State Control Committee exercises its power to order a full state commission investigation into the conduct of Lebanon II will ultimately depend on how much weight it assigns to the influence concerns for the peace process and the prime minister’s future might have exerted on Winograd’s findings. “We need to examine the [Winograd] Report and question its judges before any further steps are taken,” said National Union-National Religious Party MK Zevulun Orlev, the Knesset committtee’s chairman. Orlev made it clear that the first person he’ll be summoning for interrogation is Yehezkel Dror. “We will hear what he has to say and ask our own questions to determine if his decision was influenced,” the chairman remarked. “If he says anything similar to what was stated in Ma’ariv, we will have no choice but to ask for a State Commission of Inquiry that will investigate the personal recommendations issued against the political echelon.”

At this writing, an uncharacteristic silence has settled on the Olmert camp. If it’s a change of subject they’re banking on, the only one on the horizon is the growing likelihood of a ground operation into Gaza, one whose long delayed implementation is certain to be measured in increased IDF casualties. With an eight year-old boy lying in hospital with one and possibly both of his legs sacrificed to a Hamas rocket, the cries from Sderot can no longer be ignored. Winograd and its implications will not go gently into the night but it may in the end stand only as marker on the road to a shattering political upheaval.

William Mehlman represents AFSI in Israel and is co-editor of the internet magazine ZionNet.net.

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