JERUSALEM.
FOR the first time in their war-ridden history, Israelis are being called upon by their government to celebrate a unilateral retreat, of their army from Lebanon.
Israelis are used to celebrating advances and victories – or retreats, such as in the Sinai and Arava deserts and West Bank, in exchange for peace agreements with Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinians.
But last week’s retreat was one-sided – and lauded on the other side of the fence border by Hezbollah as their triumph.
As a result, for the first time in 20 years, Israeli children near the border rode to school Friday in specially shielded buses to protect against mines or shooting.
Their parents remember how schoolchildren were killed by Palestinian terrorists from Lebanon beginning in the early 1970s.
And the Palestinians are being incorporated again in the threat from the north.
Prime Minister Ehud Barak is dispatching special emissaries to friendly countries with update intelligence data showing that Syria is already recruiting Palestinians from Tyre and Sidon in Lebanon and from Syria itself and training them as terrorists.
Training the Palestinians is Syrian President Hafez Assad’s way of pressuring Barak to give up the Golan Heights on his terms.
Bringing in the Palestinians also helps Hezbollah. Israeli intelligence officers believe that for Shiite guerrillas to legitimize their next assaults on Israelis – now that Lebanon is “liberated” – they need to either recruit Palestinians or pose as them.
So was this retreat just a Barak gamble?
He doesn’t like that term and prefers to call it a “calculated risk.”
He believes that Assad knows his military is inferior to Israel’s and will return to negotiations, having learned from Bill Clinton that Israel is prepared to give back all of the Golan Heights except for a strip along the Sea of Galilee.
Barak may be going to Washington next month to talk to Clinton both about the Syrian peace situation and the chances for a framework agreement, being secretly negotiated, with the Palestinians.
The retreat from Lebanon, hailed by the liberal Israeli media as “getting out of our Vietnam,” allows him to tell Arafat as well as Assad:
Look, I’m a man of my word. I said I was going to leave Lebanon and bring our boys home, and now I can retreat from the West Bank and the Golan.
Israeli soldiers were exuberant about coming home, even though some told Israeli TV it was a strategic mistake.
But the orchestrated celebration is a coverup for terrible mistakes of the emergency retreat, which took place well before organized withdrawal could have taken place in June.
The army ended up abandoning sensitive electronic devices, including computers, which allowed them to register unprecedented successes in attacking terrorists.
The newspaper Haaretz reported that thousands of dollars were burned up in a safe left in Lebanon so that it wouldn’t end up in Hezbollah’s hands.
The rumor was that it was half a million dollars that was to serve as the payroll for the Lebanese Christian militia, Israel’s allies. The safe had to be destroyed because the officer who had the key to open it was abroad, not knowing that the militia’s collapse would trigger the emergency retreat.
Nevertheless, Israelis are celebrating the end of this quagmire – but forgetting one thing:
When the GIs came home from Southeast Asia there was no U.S.-Vietnamese border, no fence with terrorists on the other side. And that’s why today Americans can travel to Ho Chi Minh City.