In Israel, 'Mothers' Have Change of Heart On Hezbollah Fight
Ex-Leader's Bellicose Stand Signals Shift in Nation; Ms. Anteby Skips March
By GUY CHAZAN
KAKHAL, Israel -- In 1997, Zahara Anteby became so sick of Israel's lengthy occupation of Lebanon that she started campaigning full-time to end it. The 18-year military presence finally ended, in 2000, in a wrenching moment for Israel and a major victory for the popular movement Ms. Anteby helped lead.
Seven years later, Ms. Anteby finds herself living through a new Lebanon war. But she backs this one to the hilt. "This time we're fighting for our survival," she says in her home here, a village overlooking the Sea of Galilee. Any Israeli who opposes the military campaign is just a "bleeding heart," she says.
Ms. Anteby's transformation from peacenik to hawk shows how Israeli attitudes are hardening as the country's war on Hezbollah enters its third week, with no sign of the decisive victory its army promised.
Diplomatic pressure to end the fighting is mounting, especially after an Israeli airstrike killed dozens of civilians on Sunday. (See related article.) But inside Israel, the national mood is increasingly belligerent. Frustration is building at the government's failure to stop Hezbollah's missile barrage against Israeli cities. That has led to calls for a full-scale ground offensive -- even as Israel announced a 48-hour halt of the bombing campaign in the south of Lebanon.
A poll in the daily Yediot Aharonot Saturday found 71% of Israelis wanted the army to use more force in Lebanon, while 48% said Hezbollah should be destroyed, not just pushed back from the border. Polls have yet to emerge after Sunday's disastrous airstrike, but there are few signs the Israeli public has wavered.
Indeed, public opinion seems to be running ahead of Israel's leaders, who have scaled back their war aims as the fighting has dragged on. Observers say Prime Minister Ehud Olmert could face a backlash if the war ends without a knockout blow against Hezbollah.
"Olmert will emerge weakened from this unless there's a clear-cut victory," says Gadi Wolfsfeld, a professor of political science at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. "He'll be seen as having capitulated to the U.S. and the Arabs."
The mood is captured in Carmiel, a hillside town of 50,000 a short drive from Ms. Anteby's village. A frequent target of Hezbollah's Katyusha missiles, Carmiel was deserted on a recent visit: 60% of its population had sought sanctuary in the south. Apartment blocks with gaping holes from rocket fire stood amid manicured lawns, palms and eucalyptus trees. Bunting for a canceled dance festival fluttered in the breeze.
In a mostly shuttered shopping mall, three men sat at a café answering nonstop calls on their cellphones from anxious relatives. They said their biggest fear is not that the war will drag on but that it will be brought to a premature end.
"I'm prepared to suffer anything, but only if they finish off Hezbollah," said Yossi Ettedgi, a 56-year-old driving instructor. "But I'm worried they'll just do a deal with them. Then this whole thing will start up again in a few years."
The gung-ho mood is a far cry from that of Israel's last major war in Lebanon, which began in 1982 and triggered the biggest peace rallies in the country's history. Some 400,000 people demonstrated in Tel Aviv in September that year after Israeli-backed Christian militiamen slaughtered 1,500 Palestinians in Beirut's Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.
Last month, only a few hundred protesters turned up for an antiwar protest in downtown Tel Aviv. Even Peace Now, a prominent advocacy group that campaigns for peace with the Palestinians, backs this war.
One person who wasn't at the rally was Ms. Anteby. A soft-spoken 54- year-old high-school principal, she considers herself a dyed-in-the- wool leftist. "I got varicose veins from all the peace demonstrations I attended," she says. But she finds she can't oppose this war. "We were provoked," she says, "and we have no choice but to protect ourselves."
In 1997, she was living on a left-leaning Kibbutz, an Israeli commune, and working as a school teacher when she became one of the early members of the Four Mothers. The group was founded that year in informal meetings in a kitchen by women with sons in the army. The women demanded an end to Israel's occupation of Lebanon.
They were inspired to act by one of Israel's worst military disasters: Seventy-three soldiers died in 1997 when two helicopters flying them into south Lebanon collided in midair and crashed. Her son was 24 at the time and serving as an officer in the army. "I realized our role as mothers is to protect our sons," she says, "and that only mothers can stop wars."
Four Mothers turned into one of Israel's most influential grass-roots movements. Ms. Anteby's job was to arrange meetings between the group's members and Israeli prime ministers, lawmakers and generals, including polarizing figures like Ariel Sharon, who as defense minister in 1982 had engineered Israel's attack on Lebanon.
The group ultimately played a pivotal role in swinging public opinion behind a unilateral withdrawal, which finally went ahead in May 2000. "It was above all a victory for civil society," she says. Before the group started, it had been taboo for "a wife and mother to criticize the army."
Initially, she says, the withdrawal seemed to have worked. Like many Israelis, she had little fear of Hezbollah. She saw its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, as a freedom fighter struggling to liberate his people from foreign occupation. "For six years there was peace in Galilee," she says.
But that tenuous peace was shattered July 12 when Hezbollah militants staged a brazen cross-border raid, kidnapping two Israeli soldiers. On the same day, the militia fired rockets at northern Israel: Some of them landed near Ms. Anteby's house in Kakhal, a tranquil village in the upper Galilee, sending deer from a nearby nature reserve galloping in panic across the hillside. "I suddenly realized that Nasrallah isn't a political leader at all, but a jihadi," she says. "He was never fighting for freedom -- it was and is a war of religion."
Like many in Israel, Ms. Anteby sees the latest conflict as a legitimate response to Hezbollah's aggression. "It's like someone's come into my house and stolen my child," she says. "All war is cursed. But this one is for our very existence."
Even the errant airstrike on Qana, which killed more than 50 Lebanese civilians, didn't diminish her support for the war. "It's indescribable what happened there," she says. "But the blood of innocents is on Nasrallah's hands, not ours. He's prepared to sacrifice innocent lives to freely operate in southern Lebanon."
Other key members of the Four Mothers agree with her. In interviews in the Israeli press they've strongly defended the current war. One exception is Rachel Ben-Dor, a founding member who has been living in the U.S. for the past five years and says she fears that by re- entering Lebanon, Israel may be about to repeat the fatal mistakes of its past. "I understand the anger, the fear and frustration this time, but I don't understand how come we always fall into the trap of terror groups in Lebanon," she wrote in an email exchange with a reporter.
Ms. Anteby doesn't regret her work in Four Mothers. But she admits badly misjudging Sheik Nasrallah. "I thought he would lay down his arms and try to bring prosperity to southern Lebanon, not take it back to the Stone Age," she says. "I made a mistake."