Amidror: ’Israel’s Gov’t Allowed Hizbullah to Build Up’
Excerpts;
Maj.-Gen. Yaakov Amidror formerly served as Deputy Chief of IDF Intelligence and the head of its Research and Assessment Department.
“The Hizbullah attack was no surprise for the IDF,” Amidror told IsraelNationalRadio’s Alex Traiman and Baruch Gordon. “It was always understood that Hizbullah is preparing something against us; the only question was exactly what and when.”
“Then why didn’t the IDF stop it?” Gordon asked. Amidror replied,
“This is an important question. Ever since our retreat from Lebanon [in May 2000], Israel’s political decision-makers decided that Israel would not take the initiative anywhere on the Lebanese border. We were able to see, hear, and detect what Hizbullah was preparing, but we would not take the initiative against them. Because of the political arrangements with the international community, it was decided to let them shoot first – and the consequences are now very clear. If you don’t take the initiative, and you allow the enemy to shoot whenever and wherever he wants, then even if he fails 20 times, at the end he succeeds.”
Kidnappings Deal Strategic Blow
Excerpts;
The IDF says it is not working on the basis of false premises. Senior officers in the Northern Command said they knew that the military operation against Lebanon alone would not bring the kidnapped soldiers home. In 2000, when three soldiers were kidnapped, Israel paid a heavy price to get their bodies back, releasing more than 400 Palestinian prisoners. As Carl von Clausewitz, the 19th-century Prussian military theorist, said, the military’s job is to create the right conditions for the political echelon, and that is what the IDF says it is doing.
“A military operation will not solve the Hizbullah problem,” a high-ranking source in the Northern Command said. “The international community needs to get involved and place pressure on the Lebanese government to disarm Hizbullah. That is the only way.”
Commentary;
The second of these articles is here only for the reasons of the excerpt quoted and connection which this author sees between it and the comments of General Amidror.
The type of mindset which waits and watches as an enemy sworn to annihilate us arms and prepares and then when confronted with the results, claims that it cannot solve the problem, that only Israel’s political leaders who are the root of the problem, and a futile Israeli dependence upon world leaders to solve it’s problems seems classically indicative on the current battlefield of the handcuffed mentality of the IDF.
And in the political spector, Israel’s leaders dare not take the initiative against Hizbullah’s preparations for fear that doing so would be an admission of gross misjudgement exercised in leaving South Lebanon in the first place. And so the mistakes go on; South Lebanon begot the abandonment of Gaza and the expulsion of Jews.
Add to the above that the IDF which, after abandoning South Lebanon to terrorists, after its role as the regime’s enforcement vehicle for removing Jews from Gush Katif, one can easily understand what Moshe Feiglin wrote earlier this year concerning the apparent change in the IDF’s mission: they defend the regime, not the Jewish People.
To paraphrase: Military action alone won’t bring captured soldiers home; this implies the futile exercise of begging for world pressure against Hizbullah; appeasement, prisoner swap — the acts of the weak-willed which convey the perception of real weakness to Israel’s adversaries … MB