Israel was fighting on two fronts this week as one military disaster piled on another. Lebanese militia killed and captured troops on Israel’s northern border while the army launched a fresh ground assault into the Gaza Strip in pursuit of a third abducted soldier.
Hizbullah’s capture of the two soldiers on Wednesday, and the deaths of seven others, is deeply embarrassing to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who will be left explaining to Israelis why their forces are again fighting in two pieces of territory from which they withdrew after long and bloody occupations.
He faces the prospect of a drawn-out confrontation that could cost many more lives or of making a humiliating climbdown by ransoming the missing soldiers for Arab security prisoners in Israeli jails.
Four months ago, Olmert won a general election with a campaign focused on the single issue of drawing Israel’s final borders through a partial pull-out from the West Bank and the annexation of the major Jewish settlement blocks behind a frontier defined by the vast steel and concrete ”security” barrier. But the burgeoning crisis since the capture of a teenage soldier, Corporal Gilad Shalit, by Palestinian militias in Gaza last month, and the return of tanks and troops to the territory, has raised questions even within Olmert’s party about the viability of a further withdrawal from the West Bank. Those doubts will have been strengthened by the fresh crisis on the Lebanese border.
Confidence in the military operation in Gaza has also been dented by the Israeli air force’s killing of a family of nine people on Wednesday, including seven children aged from four years, when it dropped a half-tonne bomb on their home.
”Olmert’s situation has become radically more complicated,” said Yossi Alpher, former military intelligence officer and ex-director of the Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies. ”The government’s situation is complicated, the army’s situation too. The public will ask why the army can’t take care of its soldiers.”
Hizbullah’s capture of the two soldiers would appear to strengthen the demands of Hamas for the release of Palestinian security prisoners in Israel jails in return for freeing Shalit. Hizbullah is demanding that Israel release all Arab prisoners.
Alpher said Olmert would probably be forced to agree to release some prisoners. ”I don’t see how we’ll be able to avoid ransoming these soldiers by releasing prisoners. If Olmert thought he could stand firm on one front, it will be very difficult to do so on two,” he said.
”Everything we know from previous instances indicates the public will stomach negotiations with Hamas and Hizbullah. Every prime minister who has released hundreds of prisoners has been criticised in the newspaper columns, but it hasn’t affected his standing with the public, it hasn’t cost him elections.”
In 2004, the then Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, swapped 420 Palestinian and Lebanese security prisoners for the release of an abducted Israeli businessman, who was also a reserve army colonel, and the bodies of three soldiers killed four years earlier.
Many Israelis will ask themselves how Sharon would have handled the situation and some are likely to find his successor wanting. That in turn may undermine Olmert’s long-term plans for removing some smaller Jewish settlements in the West Bank and pulling back behind the barrier to consolidate control over the major settlement blocks. He is already facing criticism from the right and questions within his own party about the wisdom of withdrawing settlers and ground forces from the Gaza Strip last year only for rocket attacks to continue.
Some politicians in Olmert’s Kadima party, set up by Sharon to oversee the ”realignment” and ”convergence” plan for a partial pull-out from the West Bank, oppose it. ”The chances now of implementing re-alignment are very small,” says Meir Sheetrit, the construction minister.
Olmert says he will not be deterred from his ”basic commitment” to his West Bank plan by either Shalit’s capture or the election of Hamas to lead the Palestinian government. But Alpher said that it would be politically impossible to push it forward at this time. ”This will be the test of whether … he will be able to proceed with his political plans. I don’t see how he can proceed while this crisis continues. All of Olmert’s convergence plans were put on the back burner the moment Shalit was kidnapped,” he said. — Â