CSM on Israel's internal struggle

JERUSALEM – Soon after Israel's war with Hizbullah came to a halt with a tenuous cease-fire, Israel's internal war began.

Now, amid widespread disappointment over how the war was waged, the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is under pressure to set up a state commission of inquiry on various aspects of a war in which Israelis see innumerable mishaps.

Sixty-four percent of Israelis, according to an Israeli Radio poll released Thursday, want an independent inquiry into the war - not unlike the 9/11 Commission in Washington. Such high figures serve an embarrassing blow to Mr. Olmert, who has tried to downsize the issue by appointing two lower-level committees Monday to investigate the handling of the war.

The possibility of a wider probe evinces the degree of disillusionment with the war, but also the extent to which Israelis are now willing to put the decisions of a sitting government and even the country's near-omnipotent military under a critical microscope.

Internal critique over the war appears to be making its impact on both sides of the border: Olmert has acknowledged that there were shortcomings, while Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah said in an interview this week that had he known how Israel would retaliate, he would not have ordered the kidnapping attack.

Commissions of inquiry have only been held at grave moments in Israeli history, such as the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War and after the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

"The public impact of a commission of inquiry is much greater than any other. The public confidence in officials who direct a commission of inquiry is huge," says Prof. Stuart Cohen, a political scientist at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar Ilan University, near Tel Aviv.

"They also have judicial powers which no internal committee possesses," he explains, meaning that the commission has the power to hold officials personally responsible for civil or criminal offenses, order them dismissed from their positions, and ban them from holding similar positions in the future.

The crux of the controversy focuses on how the war was conducted, and not whether it should have been waged at all. But even those questions have the potential to sway policy, and an inquiry could have a lasting impact on the military options Israel exercises in the future.

Israelis also want an investigation into the government shortcomings in protecting civilians during the war. Volunteer organizations and not government officials, critics say, did most of the aid work. A decision to evacuate bombarded northern towns did not come until a month into the war.

"The rights and wrongs are not the issue - nobody here disputes the justice of the use of force," says Dr. Cohen. Israel began bombing Lebanon soon after Hizbullah staged a cross-border attack on July 12, killing eight soldiers and kidnapping two. The men are still being held.

"People are upset but they're not saying, 'My son died for no reason.' He died because somebody made a mistake," he adds. "The mistake was not to have gone to war, but not to have conducted the war properly." [more here]