Israelis Still Debating on Withdrawal AnniversaryA year after Israel pulled back troops from the so-called security zone in south Lebanon, Israeli politicians from the left and right wings are still debating the wisdom of such a move.Considering the time lapse, it may be weird that they are arguing over whether the pullout was a smart maneuver to save lives or a short-sighted and belly-up miscalculation ruining the Mideast peace process. On May 24, 2000, then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak ordered a unilateral pullout from the buffer zone, which was established in 1985 with the claimed aim of protecting Israel's northern borders from Syria-backed guerrilla attacks. Barak's move brought to an end Israel's 22-year occupation of south Lebanon. However, Barak, instead of being hailed as a hero who made a brave decision in order to end century-old Israeli-Arab conflicts, was voted out of the premiership nine months after the withdrawal and succeeded by Ariel Sharon, who masterminded Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982. For those who backed Barak's move, Israel's pullback from the Lebanese quagmire was long overdue given the painful loss of Israeli soldiers' lives during a 22-year occupation. For others, however, the event was badly timed and Barak's strategy was at least questionable, if not catastrophic, although most of them admitted that a majority of Israelis, by a nearly four-to-one margin, endorsed the withdrawal in principle. The pullout apparently resulted in calm to northern Israel as promised, saving the communities there from repeated rocket attacks by Lebanese resistance guerrilla group Hezbollah, or Party of God. But those against the withdrawal argued that the situation along the border between Israel and Lebanon, or the Blue Line marked by the United Nations after the withdrawal, was never completely tranquil in the past year. Three Israeli soldiers were abducted and two others killed along the line in clashes between the Israeli army and Hezbollah, who claims that they will continue fighting as long as Israel occupies the Shebaa farms, which it calls "a Lebanese sovereignty area." Israel stressed that it captured the farms from Syria in the 1967 Mideast war, whose fate will be decided during Israeli-Syrian peace talks. In Barak's initial calculation, the withdrawal would deprive Syria a trump card in bargaining with Israel over the occupied Golan Heights and force late Syrian President Hafez al-Assad back to the negotiating table. Syria had been using Lebanese resistance movement as a leverage as Israel was bogged down in a war of attrition in south Lebanon. But to Barak's disappointment, Assad died just a month after the pullout. His son and successor, Bashar al-Assad, was concentrating on solidifying his rule at home and had no immediate strength to carry on the negotiations. Therefore, the anti-withdrawal group argued that such a move failed to entice the Syrians back to the peace talks as Barak had expected. Moreover, they also linked the pullout, somehow awkwardly under the pressure of Hezbollah guerrillas, to the ongoing Palestinian intifada, or uprising, which broke out some four months after the withdrawal. They claimed that the withdrawal damaged Israel's deterrent capability and encouraged the Palestinians to use the Hezbollah way --fighting rather than talking. They saw the Palestinians as trying to exact maximum compromises from Israel on final-status issues, namely, the fate of Jerusalem, the return of Palestinian refugees, Jewish settlements, borders, security and water. "The army had to leave under pressure from the enemy which forced it to evacuate the area without an agreement. This left a huge hole in our deterrent ability. The immediate result is what we see today in Judea, Samaria and Gaza (the West Bank and Gaza Strip)," former Israeli army general Effi Eitam, who is a famous right-winger, said in an interview with the Ha'aretz daily earlier this week. The withdrawal may save Israeli soldiers' lives in Lebanon, but "bring Lebanon into Israel" and caused more Israelis dead in the Israeli-Palestinian violence, they added. But pro-withdrawal Israelis rebutted the allegation, saying that the Palestinian intifada was irrelevant to the pullout. "Even when we were deep inside Lebanon, there was an intifada," said Bruria Sharon, who belongs to the Four Mothers organization calling on the Israeli government to retreat long before the withdrawal. Some pro-withdrawal Israelis stressed that the uprising was rather caused by a visit by Sharon, then opposition leader, to a disputed shrine in the Old City of Jerusalem late last September. They said that the root cause of the riots was Israel's continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and Palestinians' growing frustration caused by their slow gains in the talks. Some of them called on Israelis to learn the Lebanon lesson in a right way and resolve the disputes with the Palestinians through negotiations as soon as possible. Israel's columnist Riuth Sinai pointed out that as long as the violence between Israel and the Palestinians goes on, the pro- and anti-withdrawal groups will continue their row on the historical event and relevant soul-searching according to their political ideology. "Only by studying history will future generations learn that staying there was superfluous and stemmed from only one thing -- fear of leaving," former Israeli Justice Minister Yossi Beilin said, adding that history will judge the pullout in a correct light. |
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