The probationary period starts
Ha’aretz, 24.5.00

In the coming days, the chapter that began as Operation Peace for Galilee and turned into Israel's longest war will come to an end. After 18 years of fighting, the government of Ehud Barak is meeting its commitment to withdraw from Lebanon and keeping Barak's campaign promises of last year. The pictures reaching us from Lebanon, the rapid dissolution of the South Lebanon Army and the Hezbollah flags flying over villages just across the border, should not surprise anyone, and should certainly not engender humiliation. The IDF did not retreat from territory that belonged to the state of Israel, and is not giving holy places back to the Lebanese.

Capturing and holding the security zone as a way to defend the northern border was based on the theory that defining a specific territory as a limited battlefield, with its own special rules of warfare, would create a barrier that would keep the battle from reaching Israeli territory. From the start, the theory didn't prove itself. Lebanon saw the security zone as Israeli-occupied territory and, due to the weakness of the central government in Lebanon, Beirut allowed the Hezbollah to develop into a national resistance movement that was well exploited by the Syrians for their own political goals.

The security zone did not fulfill its prime function - it did not prevent Katyusha rocket fire into Israel's northern settlements and at the same time it took a high price in lives, a price the Israeli public had difficulty accepting. The Israeli government, after much deliberation, gave in to public opinion and decided to change the defense concept for the North and protect the border from within Israeli territory.

This change in policy assumes that the IDF withdrawal and the final breakup of the SLA will get rid of the excuse for daily combat in the security zone - fighting the Israeli occupation - and will prevent the escalation in violence built into that daily friction, which inevitably turned into Katyusha attacks on the northern settlements. The assumption is that the IDF can rely on its well-known power as a deterrence and won't have to prove it daily in demonstrations of power. Therefore, the statement by Likud leader MK Ariel Sharon that Israel must drive home the "consciousness of deterrence" with a massive show of force in Lebanon is odd at best. The public has not forgotten the bloody Lebanese chapter in Sharon's biography.

The assumption that the new form of defense will be more efficient has yet to be proved, and it would be good to remember that the IDF withdrawal does not end the state of war between the two countries. Meanwhile, this is only a strategic change in defensive posture and not a peace agreement. Such an agreement will become possible only after a renewal of the negotiations with Syria, and that ambition does not fade with the completion of the withdrawal.

The coming days will be a probationary period not only for the safety of the northern border but also to find out Lebanon and Syria's readiness to maintain a cease-fire along an internationally recognized border, as a confidence-building measure in advance of the possibility of renewed peace talks with Syria.