Shame on us

By Evelyn Gordon, Jerusalem Post, 30.5.00

(May 30) - In one sentence, Prime Minister Ehud Barak epitomized all that was bad about last week's flight from Lebanon - the cynicism, the short-sightedness, the total disregard for our erstwhile allies. It takes a great deal of all three to declare grandiloquently that "the Lebanese tragedy has ended" on a day when 6,500 new Lebanese tragedies - largely Israeli created - washed up on the shores of the Kinneret.

For more than 20 years, the South Lebanon Army served as Israel's human buffer in Lebanon. For every casualty the IDF took, the SLA absorbed several times that number. Yet, when Israel decided to withdraw from Lebanon, the government refused to make even the most minimal efforts to assure our former allies' safety. To start with, Israel made it plain that it would not intervene should the pullout be followed by a Hizbullah massacre of SLA members. As of six weeks before the scheduled withdrawal date (July 7), Israel had not even obtained the dubious safeguard of a UN commitment to help shield the SLA. Even the simplest possible measure - a pledge of asylum in Israel for any SLA soldier who requested it - was not forthcoming: The government refused to make such a pledge in a High Court case five months ago.

The results of this policy were utterly predictable - yet the government was somehow taken by surprise when the inevitable happened last Sunday: A Shi'ite SLA battalion, having finally concluded that Israel would not protect it, decided to throw itself on Hizbullah's mercy. Hizbullah had promised not to kill those who deserted and surrendered their weapons, and Battalion 70 decided that its erstwhile enemies were more trustworthy than its erstwhile allies. It decamped, and the IDF-SLA front in Lebanon collapsed.

Had there been any chance of recovering from Battalion 70's defection, it was destroyed the next day when a Druse regiment came to the same conclusion - and also abandoned its arms in exchange for a Hizbullah guarantee of safety. At that point, the IDF had only two choices: to temporarily move into South Lebanon in force and cover the retreat of those SLA divisions that had remained loyal, or to flee with its tail between its legs.

The government chose the latter - and in so doing, it committed yet another betrayal. Some 6,500 SLA soldiers and family members were thereby forced to run for their lives into Israel, without even time to pack food and clothing for their children. As one SLA officer turned penniless refugee said bitterly: "They could at least have prepared us in advance. I have money in the bank. I could have lived here like a human being, instead of being discarded on the Tiberias coastline, not knowing what's happening to my children [who were in Beirut when the unplanned withdrawal occurred]."

Israel could not even be bothered to protect the property of those refugees who did manage to pack a few things. One of the most symbolic images of the past week was the hundreds of SLA cars lined up at the border crossing into Israel - where the refugees were not only forced to abandon them, but had to watch them be looted under the IDF's noses. Our soldiers had been given strict orders not to open fire.

That the abandonment of these allies was a moral outrage goes without saying. Yet this decision, and the consequent inevitable collapse of the SLA, also had disastrous practical consequences. The first was that it turned the IDF, formerly a respected military force, into a travesty - an army that not only fled without firing a shot from a militarily inferior terrorist organization, but which has completely abandoned any sense of mission.

Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Shaul Mofaz proclaimed the army's new credo with an astonishing lack of blushes last Wednesday: The retreat, he said, was a success, because "we preserved the safety and health of our soldiers." The IDF's goal, it seems, is no longer to protect civilians; it is merely to protect itself. And so the wives and children of our SLA allies were abandoned without a qualm - because the alternative, of moving the IDF forward to cover an orderly retreat, might have put our soldiers at risk.

Second, this behavior has ensured that Israel will never again be able to muster Arab allies. "For 25 years we worked together and we shed our blood together, and this is the respect we get in the end," summed up one former SLA soldier. The lesson will certainly not be lost on our neighbors. And it may also not be lost on the Druse and Beduin within Israel, who have been the state's loyal allies for over 50 years. With such a grim example before them, they would have to be fools not to be questioning the wisdom of that loyalty right now.