Ari Shavit did an interview with former Chief of Staff Moshe “Boogey” Yaalon which appeared in this past Friday’s (15 September, 2006) Haaretz Magazine.
Aaron Lerner, in posting the interview on IMRA observed “Those in the national camp hoping to see Ya’alon teaming with Netanyahu should take note… when asked about the Golan [Yaalon responds]: “If a territorial concession will bring about true peace and full recognition of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, I am not against that.”
But notice the sentence immediately preceding the above; “I never sanctified any piece of ground.”
The meaning of this should be obvious — it seems that to Moshe Yaalon, the “savior,” the “great hope” there is no underlining biblical, historical meaning to any of the land. It’s all about strategy, tactics and politics. “I never sanctified any piece of ground.”
One should take careful note of this point in the course of this post.
MY: “I drew up a military plan intended to address a scenario of a Hezbollah offensive that would oblige us to deal with the organization militarily.”
AS: What were the plan’s basic assumptions?
MY: “That the IDF must act in a way that would set in motion a political process that would lead to the disarming of Hezbollah, the removal of the Iranians from Lebanon and perhaps also the imposition of sanctions on Syria and Iran. In a scenario of the abduction of soldiers, exactly as occurred on July 12, the IDF was supposed to respond with an aerial attack and the mobilization of reserve divisions, which would act as a threat to the Syrians and to Hezbollah and would encourage Lebanon and the international community to take action to achieve the desired goal. If the threat itself did not achieve the goal, a ground move would have begun within a few days aimed primarily at seizing dominant terrain as far as the Litani River and the Nabatiya plateau.”
“The ground entry was supposed to be carried out speedily, for an allotted time, without the use of tanks and without entering houses or built-up areas. Because of our awareness of the anti-tank missile problem and our awareness of the bunkers and of the fact that the routes are mined, the intention was to activate the IDF in guerrilla modalities. That was the operational idea, that was the plan and that is how the forces were trained.”
AS: If so, why was that plan not implemented?
MY: “I don’t know. That is one of the questions that the state commission of inquiry will have to investigate. In my opinion, the aerial offensive was correct. The air force delivered the goods. In a few areas it even provided favorable surprises. But the activation of the ground forces was a catastrophe. There was no defined goal. There was no required achievement. They jumped from one idea to the next and introduced new missions all the time without any logic.”
AS: So you argue that the IDF was prepared for the war but that its management was a failure.
MY: “Exactly so. In the debriefings that are now under way in the IDF the tendency is to… talk about a crisis at the tactical level. To cast the responsibility on the battalion and brigade commanders. But I maintain that the problem is not there. Our pilots are excellent. The company commanders are excellent. They fought excellently in Operation Defensive Shield [in the West Bank, in spring 2002].”
“So the allegation that the army is basically flawed is not right. Nor do I accept the claim that the IDF did not prepare for this campaign but for the last war. That is simply not true. What we had here was a management failure at a very senior level by those who are responsible for activating force in Israel. The failure in this campaign was one of management.”
AS: When did you understand that there had been a failure, that something had gone wrong?
MY: “At the end of the first week. Until then things were conducted reasonably well. I was critical of the fact that the reserves were not mobilized. Instead of plucking the political fruits of the aerial offensive, they continued to use force. They over-used force. And instead of coordinating with the Americans for them to stop us when the operation was at its height, and setting in motion a political process to disarm Hezbollah, we asked the Americans for more time. We let the Americans think that we have some sort of gimmick that will vanquish Hezbollah militarily. I knew there was no such gimmick. I knew the whole logic of the operation was that it be limited in time and not be extended.”
“We let the Americans think that we have some sort of gimmick that will vanquish Hezbollah militarily. I knew there was no such gimmick. I knew the whole logic of the operation was that it be limited in time and not be extended.”
On Bint Jbail, Yaalon tried to urge the government and the military commanders to “Seize the dominating terrain. Use infantry according to the original plan. Don’t enter killing areas in which Hezbollah is waiting for you. Listen to the command levels that are telling you that this is a mistake.”
In other words, it seems that according to Yaalon, this was NOT a war to be fought to a winning conclusion and that Yaalon’s indefinite conclusion apparently didn’t differ much from the result at hand aside from timing; that the war went too long and that ground troops should [according to Yaalon] have been inserted much earlier.
Yaalon referred to the final actions of rushing to the Litani River with a cease-fire deadline hanging over our heads;
“That was a spin move. It had no substantive security-political goal, only a spin goal. It was meant to supply the missing victory picture. You don’t do that. You don’t send soldiers to carry out a futile mission after the political outcome has already been set. I consider that corrupt.”
It seems apparent from the Yaalon interview that the entire campaign, as he had envisioned it and as he apparently would have run it had he remained chief of staff, would have been a victory of spin. Perhaps he, like Halutz might have used terminology like “won on points.”
And yet, Moshe Yaalon is being spun as the coming defense minister in the “next big bang” [this author’s terminology] with Bibi Netanyahu.
Evidence of this Yaalon spin is seen in this excerpt of a letter to the editor by a Jerusalem Post reader, in response to a recent Uri Dan Piece. The letter was published under the title of “Chosen Guide”:
We are not now looking for the Messiah to be our next political leader. We have a lot to achieve ourselves first. We are looking for honest, capable and shrewd leaders with a true vision of our future as a Jewish nation and people in our land. That vision involves education, respect and, of course, security for the generations to come.
Ya’alon belongs to a small group of leaders in Israel who have demonstrated responsibility, action, vision, dedication and honesty. He should be a very senior leader in building our “new” Israel. We deserve it.
But Nadav Shragai wrote in Haaretz in July;
Former chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon, former Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter, Major General Giora Eiland, and others, who during Sharon’s time… have dodged doing what they should do: putting their ranks on the desk, resigning and revealing their views to the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators and dozens of MKs who tried to stop the evil…, who warned “don’t give them land and rifles again”; who raised the alert about a Hamastan state; who anticipated the flight of the rockets and missiles toward Ashkelon; who understood that disengagement was a free gift, a further disintegration of Israel’s deterrence strength and a shot of adrenalin for terror, and despite all that they continued to serve the government that was so wrong and so misleading.
There would be no point in pouring salt on the wounds, … if not for the fact that the current leadership of the General Staff and Shin Bet is tainted with the same disease when it comes to “convergence”: against it and squirming on the inside; quiet and swallowing their tongues in public.
Under cover of this false quiet, and nearly total media and legal enlistment in favor of disengagement, Sharon granted terror a paradise and turned Gush Katif into a pile of rubble.
And Batya of Shilomusings wrote recently of Yaalon;
“Olmert’s guilty of agreeing, especially requesting, that dangerous “cease-fire agreement,” but the people responsible, guilty of our lack of preparedness are those who were running the Defense Establishment these last six years, ever since Barak ordered the soldiers to flee. And foremost among those generals was Moshe Ya’alon.
He was silent during his years as Chief of Staff? From 2002 to 2005, he was the one responsible for everything going on in the army. He is more responsible for the state of the IDF than Amir Peretz and Ehud Olmert. Ya’alon succeeded Shaul Mofaz…
Ya’alon is no innocent, when it comes to the question of who was the was supposed to be making sure that the IDF was ready for war! And as Chief of Staff from 2002 to 2005, he had to have known what Hizbollah was doing in Southern Lebanon. Ya’alon should be investigated, not considered as a savior.
Commentary;
There is no question of the corruption on the political level. Olmert and cronies are. There is no question that the current chief of staff was more concerned with himself and his stock portfolio than with the state of the IDF at the crucial opening stage of the war — he was. There is no question that the war was mismanaged at both the political and command levels — it was. There’s no question that they had insufficient or no strategy, no game plan or goal behind the war. Seemingly they didn’t and there is no question that the war was a “spin move” — it was, although one cannot figure why, except as a possible rationale for convergence: “See, we can beat the enemy at whatever borders!” And there is no question that they fought the war on the cheap and for the wrong reasons — they did. But for Yaalon to have spent the whole war writing about what they should be doing or should have done in the war and then, afterwards to say that it should not have been fought, that “it was scandalous,” is for the “bird to have had it’s head buried in the sand” as the war exposed for all to see and for panels to investigate and assign blame for the extent of the consequences of 6 years of Israeli neglect of the growing Hezbollah threat, some of this neglect time is on Yaalon’s clock.
So this author really can’t see why General Moshe Yaalon is now hailed as an upright hero. When he had the chance to expose the Hezbollah threat on his clock and do something about it, he didn’t. When he objected to disengagement, he did so but only for strategic reasons. He saw nothing in expulsion of his fellow Jews that inherently immoral. And in objecting to disengagement, he didn’t throw his general’s insignias on the table and resign out of principle. Instead he waited to be sacked.
Moshe Yaalon, in this author’s opinion, is no great hero, no savior and no “great hope”, but rather a “great nope.” MB
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