On Wed, 18 Oct 2006, Doug Henwood wrote:
> I recorded a long (50-min) interview with Tariq Ali today (on the Middle
> East & Latin America), which I'll run in a few weeks. In it, Tariq said
> that an under-reported aspect of Israel's unhappy experience in Lebanon
> was that, in contrast with a stoked Hezbollah, the IDF is now full of
> members of the global slacker class who just didn't want to be there. Any
> thoughts on this?
Three thoughts. One, it's a perennial theme in Israeli public discourse that as the country gets rich, the young men get soft (and that the peace process accelerated both tendencies, and made a nation of warriors into a nation of consumers). A century ago this was a plaint you heard in every country Europe. And then a couple decades after WWII, the fear of infantry war became a thing of the past, and the idea of warrior virtue ceased to make sense. In Israel, this trope stayed alive, that market virtues and warrior virtues are opposed. So naturally it's being trotted out now. Like a stopped clock, it could be true, but you have note that it is stopped.
Second, insofar as Israelis find the troops at fault (and overwhelming they don't, and blame the military and political leadership for everything), the problem most people cite is that they weren't trained for an old fashioned war of tanks & armor against dug-in positions and missiles. They've spent their entire service busting down doors like SWAT teams. The tank maneuvers and classical exercises that were the heart of training long ago were shown to be very rusty this time out.
But as far as motivation was concerned, I think Tariq might be projecting. I think it may be hard for an outsider to really believe just how convinced the vast majority of Israelis were that this was a just war for survival. My impression was that there was more visceral support for this than there was for invading Lebanon in 1982.
Michael