Nicholas Blanford
Daily Star staff

There is a sense of dawning realization in Israel that ­ after all the fuss, fears, hopes and doubts ­ the Israeli Army got it completely wrong in its assessments that a unilateral troop withdrawal from Lebanon would bring the conflict to the border settlements of Galilee.
Three weeks have passed since the last Israeli troops hurried out of Lebanon with Hizbullah fighters and thousands of former residents of the occupation zone hard on their heels.
The worst fears of the residents of Galilee seemed to be confirmed when all they had to do was look out of their front windows the morning after the withdrawal to see victorious Hizbullah fighters waving guns and flags at the border fence. The majority of residents in Kiryat Shmona simply fled south. Three weeks later, many have still not returned.
Yet Barak’s repeated threats of a “painful response” to any cross-border attacks from Lebanon sound increasingly hollow as the days pass. The only missiles crossing the border at present are the stones hurled at Israeli soldiers on the other side of the Fatima Gate in Kfar Kila.
So what happened to all those dire predictions from Israeli Army intelligence?
Why is Hizbullah not already sending fighters across the border to attack Israeli civilians?
Where are Hizbullah’s long-range Katyushas and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles that the Israeli Army has been warning of since at least 1996?
Where are those Palestinian fighters whom Hizbullah recruited from the refugee camps and who were being trained by 150 Iranian Revolutionary Guards in the Bekaa? (Indeed, where are the Guards?)
What happened to the 70 kilometer-range Iranian Fajar rockets the Revolutionary Guards have stored in the Bekaa?
What happened to the Iranian-inspired “terror” campaign that an alliance of Hizbullah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad was due to unleash?
Whenever troop casualties in Lebanon led to renewed calls from the Israeli public for a withdrawal from the South, the Pavlovian response of the Israeli Army would be to churn out yet more dubious “intelligence data” to justify its continued presence here.
The Israeli media were spoon-fed ­ and faithfully lapped up ­ the colorful intelligence data from the military and rarely questioned its veracity.
It is well known that the Israeli Army never approved of a unilateral withdrawal. What is perhaps not so widely appreciated is that there were those among the Israeli general staff who were reluctant to leave Lebanon even if a peace deal were on offer. The Israeli defense establishment had much to lose by abandoning the occupation zone.
New weapons could be tested in south Lebanon and then marketed around the world as “combat proven.” An example is the NT-Dandy or “Long Spike” anti-tank missile that killed one Lebanese civilian and wounded four others before the Israelis admitted its existence and placed it on the international arms market.
Elite units ­ such as the Egoz commandos created in 1995 for counter-guerrilla operations against Hizbullah ­ could gain invaluable combat experience in the hills and wadis of south Lebanon.
The South was a free-fire range for the Israelis, especially for the aircrews of warplanes, who were able to practice their bombing skills virtually risk-free. Indeed, the vast bulk of these almost daily raids achieved nothing more than to disturb the wildlife in otherwise empty wadis ­ “crushing rocks” as Timur Goksel, UNIFIL’s veteran spokesman, used to say. But the Israeli Army would still release statements after each raid describing how its warplanes had “attacked terrorist targets north of the security zone.”
The Israeli Army even had its own private militia, the SLA, to do most of the fighting, while its own soldiers remained safely hidden inside almost impregnable hilltop bunkers.
South Lebanon provided plenty of room for the Israeli Army to play soldier and came with the bonus of an inflated annual defense budget, too ­ which it now stands to lose along with the occupation.
Is it any wonder that some of Israel’s top brass believed that the price of about 20 troop fatalities a year was, frankly, a small price to pay for the considerable benefits enjoyed by the Israeli military and the defense industries in maintaining their private fiefdom in Lebanon?
This aspect of Israel’s occupation was never reported by the Israeli media. Not due to misplaced loyalty to the Israeli Army, but because they were unable to witness at first hand the reality of Israel’s occupation and contrast it with the military’s fact-twisting propaganda.
While Lebanon-based journalists could go south and watch bombs fall harmlessly into the same empty wadis each day, Israel’s media was forced to take the military’s statements at face value and report the destruction of “terrorist targets.”
Finally, however, the Israeli media is beginning to cotton on.
Zvi Barel, a more insightful Israeli commentator on the South, criticized the Israeli Army’s inaccurate predictions.
“It appears that, more than anything else, Lebanon was an IDF (Israel Defense Force) training school for the formulation of tactical, strategic and political conceptions,” he wrote in Monday’s Haaretz newspaper.
The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday gave prominence to an opinion by Magnus Ranstorp, a leading expert on Hizbullah, that the party was “unlikely to initiate an unprovoked attack on Israel in the near future.”
This assessment has been voiced by analysts for months. Only now, however, when Israel’s northern border is quiet, are Israelis beginning to reassess the accuracy of the spurious military intelligence they so faithfully reported for so many years.

DS 14/06/00