“Israel” preparing for war with Syria, confirms general
Source: Israeltoday, 17-7-2007
A senior “Israeli” general on Monday confirmed that the army is preparing for a full-scale war with Syria in the very near future.
Speaking at “Israel’s” Institute for National Security Studies, Maj.-Gen. Eyal Ben-Reuven, who served as deputy commander of “Israel’s” northern forces during last summer`s war in Lebanon, said that the army is “preparing itself for an all-out war, and this is a major change in the military`s working premise” following the 34-day conflict with Hizbullah that many “Israelis” feel their nation failed to win.
The general said that when war breaks out, Syria will be prepared to suffer mass military and civilian casualties, while at the same time playing on “Israel’s” sensitivity to civilian losses by striking “Israel’s” home front with as many missiles as possible.
Syria “will try to hit `Israel`s` home front in order to win diplomatic gains in peace talks that will follow, and also cause another split in `Israeli` society,” “Israel” National News quoted Ben-Reuven as saying.
In order to deny Syria this victory, Ben-Reuven said the “Israeli” army is training for a swift and overwhelming invasion of Syria “to knock out the areas from where missiles are launched against `Israel` as quickly as possible.”
He lamented that if “Israel” had responded to Hizbullah`s rocket attacks in such a manner, the Second Lebanon War would have ended much differently.
One in four “Israeli” men dodges the draft
Source: telegraph.co.uk, 18-7-2007
Jerusalem (al-Quds) – One in four “Israeli” men eligible for national service last year dodged the draft, the highest proportion in the history of the Jewish (Zionist) state.
Figures released yesterday by the “Israeli” Army showed that in the 2006 intake, just 75 per cent of eligible men joined up. The figures date from before last year`s Lebanon war, widely viewed in “Israel” as a failure, and there are worries that this year`s numbers could show an even greater rate of non-participation.
The declining participation rate in a country that since its foundation in 1948 has repeatedly had to use its army to fight for its existence led to strong criticism from officers inside the “Israeli” army.
“`Israeli` society has to condemn draft dodgers,” an unnamed officer said. “This is not just a military matter, but a social issue as well. Those who do not shoulder their share of the burden have to be made to feel ashamed.”
“Israeli” men can avoid service in several ways. The growing number of Ultra-Orthodox Jews have special dispensation to continue religious studies, while convicted criminals are barred from serving, as are the ill and infirm.
But some young “Israelis” travel overseas beyond the reach of the army authorities and there is some evidence of people pretending to have mental illness to avoid service.
There have been calls to reverse the decline either by limiting exemptions, or by allowing those with a criminal record to enlist.
The reduced levels of participation reveal a change in attitudes among young “Israelis” as the memory of the country`s early days, surrounded by hostile, aggressive Arab neighbours, becomes more distant.
With peace treaties signed with Egypt and Jordan, the imminent sense of threat is not as strong for today`s young “Israelis” as it used to be.
(note: the quotatian marks around the words “Israel” or “Israeli” are not mine, but are from the original articles. VS)
My Israeli-American friend told me about this last year during the Lebanon war. She said that children from her social class (Ashkenazi elite, although her father was from Baghdad – he was in the Irgun and became an Ashkenazi by default) no longer do military service, or if they do, they get the cushy jobs: tank training or other education unit jobs. She said many of them get deferments or waivers for psychiatric reasons.
Her late brother was a senior military guy, veteran of Lebanon ’82, and she said he would be “rolling in his grave” about his children, who have all effectively dodged the draft by such legal methods. She told me last summer that the Israeli army is very weak and had no more than 29,000 troops ready to fight.
As much as I love and trust my friend, my Middle Eastern suspicion wonders how real those statements are (play wounded to fool your opponent). But that is what she said, and she’s a woman who tells the truth as she knows it. Her father the retired diplomat reported all this to her.
Israelis with any heart and soul know that their military is doing terrible things; they quite naturally want to get out of having to participate. So the rich ones are all in Europe or the States, getting fancy graduate degrees and making new lives stateside, while their less privileged siblings/cousins use the system to hide out and practice Yoga or Haitian drumming.
It’s the poor/working class Sephardim/Mizrahim/Russians who serve.
Thanks for the very interesting comment. While I have not been to the Holy Land for a while now, I have maintained contacts with Israeli/Jewish friends but that topic has never come up (yet) so I really appreciate your insights. What I do know is that the wilingness of Israelis to fight is vastly exagerated. I have it from a very, very good source that for example, during the 1973 Kippur War several Israeli Air Force fighter pilots had to be shot by their commanders right on the tarmac before the rest of them agreed to fly again (at the time many Israeli aircraft had been shot down by Soviet-made AA missiles). Considering that the air force pilots are the “elite of the elite” this tells you something about how unwilling the Israelis can be to actually die in combat.
Likewise, a good friend of mine was sent with the IDF into Beirut in 1982 and he was telling me how horrified the Soviet Jews were. They had imagined Israel to be some Mediterranean resort with plam trees and white beaches only to be given a crash course in Hebrew, stuck into an M-113 with a (crappy) M-16 to defend themselves and off to Beirut they were sent! Having spent all their lives in Odessa or Gomel hardly prepared them to the idea of fighting the Palestinians (and later Hezbollah) or being blown up by sucide bombers.
And then, of course, there is the intifada-effect. No army, no matter how well trained, can survive as a disciplined unit when it starts regularly engaging in atrocities. From comrades in arms, the soldiers become *accomplices* and morale and combat discipline goes down the tubes.
This is one reason why while elite commando/recon forces can kill in cold blood, even civilians, they will do that *only* to achieve the goal of their mission and never *ever* to vent their frustration or hatred at somebody. Those who are inclined towards such behavior are always rejected from elite units for that very reason.
It is quite clear that the Israeli recruits are regularly engaging in totally unsuervized but fully tolerated actions of random violence, murder and other atrocities agains the Palestinians and that kind of behavior literally infects the minds and combat capability of otherwise ‘normal’ soliders. I am thus not at all surprized that the Israelis performed so poorly in Lebanon last summer.
Simply put – you can have real combat units, or you can have terror squads, and you can even have both, but they need to be separated. The fact that the much glorified Golani Brigade got its ass whipped in Beit Jbeil shows better than any statistic that the IDF is in real trouble.
I don’t think that 6-12 months of training are going to do much to fix that either. We now have an entire generation of Israeli soliders and officers who think of military service as “beating the Arabs” rather then “protecting my country” and that kind of trend is very hard to reverse.
So what can the Israelis do now?
They can get some new equipment, revise their communications (take away cellphones from their soliders for one), practice some more combat drills, and, last but not least, set far more limited goals than the utter nonesense which Olmert declared last summer. That will hardly work.
The Syrians, on the other hand, might give a careful consideration to what happened last summer and think about which parts of Hezbollah tactics could be usefully incorporated into their own plans. This being said, the Syrian armed forces are still the armor heavy and centralized force which they have been for years and they are going to have huge difficulties to transpose the “democratic” and decentralized culture of the Hezbollah movement into their authoritarian Baathist culture. So all in all, I do not expect the Syrians to do nearly as well as Hezbollah did last summer. Likewise, the Israelis will do much better against the Syrians than against Hezbollah.
The real question for the Israelis is not whether they can beat the Syrians, but what ‘beating’ them would mean exactly and what that would accomplish (besides putting some blam on the bruised egos of Israeli politicians).
Saker wrote “We now have an entire generation of Israeli soliders and officers who think of military service as “beating the Arabs” rather then “protecting my country” and that kind of trend is very hard to reverse.”
Are we now training a whole new generation of American soldiers to think the same thing? This is my fear.
my last close contact with American officers was in 1990-1991 when I studied with them. I found most of them highly competant and committed to serving their country. None of them had ever participated or committed in the kind of random atrocities as the Israelis do. More importantly, *none* of them were racist in any sense at all. However, when I hear that US soliders in Iraq speak of “Hadjis”, “AYe-rab”, “ragheads” or “sand-niggers” I start worrying that you might be correct. However, this might also have to do with the fact that most soliders today come from very poor white and black families and their level of education might be truly dismal. I have to admit that I never had any close contact with US privates, most US officers I deal with were in the captian/major range, with a few colonels and at least one admiral. All in all, these were very good guys and competant professionals. Certainly an impressive group of real gentlemen.
I have really no way to assess what the mess in Iraq did to the US soliders.
Does anyone here?
If yes, please let us know.