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Edited on Sun Jan-18-09 02:43 PM by shira
Those most hostile to Israel were claiming that the battle of Jenin 2002 (Defensive Shield) was also disproportionate. Israel didn't allow the press in for that operation either. Rumors grew about hundreds massacred. All rumors were proven as BS. In fact, Israel's tactics in Jenin were hailed as a blueprint for future close-quarter fighting. See below.
Israel's most hostile critics weren't even the slightest bit embarassed by their conceit and arrogance, their slander and libel, or misplaced righteous indignation then. I hardly expect them to be now when their hostile accusations are again proven wrong.
====================
U.S. Military Studied Israel's Experience in Close-Quarter Fighting
in Refugee Camps
By JAMES BENNET
The New York Times
1 April 2003
JERUSALEM, March 31-- As they prepared for war in Iraq, American
military officers studied Israel's use of helicopters, tanks and
armored bulldozers to fight in the claustrophobic quarters of
Palestinian refugee camps.
But Israeli veterans and other experts said the Americans might also
learn from the political dimensions of Israel's war in Lebanon and
its occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip: how hard it can
be to sift civilians for potential threats without enraging a
society and alienating world opinion; how inspiring it can seem to
face up to an enemy and to try to improve the lives of its victims
-- and how agonizing it can be to sustain, or to end, an occupation.
"We also think that we are very, very moral," Martin van Creveld,
professor of military history and strategy at Hebrew University,
said of Israelis. "And we wonder why they hate us so much."
Professor van Creveld briefed officers of the Marine Corps in North
Carolina in September.
Israeli officials who are usually quick to draw parallels between
the American and Israeli experiences have been reticent to do so
recently -- even after a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself
apart and wounded dozens of people outside a cafe in an Israeli city
on Sunday, the day after an Iraqi bomber killed four American
soldiers at a checkpoint.
But to any Israeli -- and any Palestinian -- the parallels are
inescapable. "I have a deja vu feeling," said Yoni Fighel, a colonel
in the Israeli reserves who served as an intelligence officer in the
Lebanon war and later as a military governor in the West Bank.
He said the Iraqis also appeared to have studied the Israeli
experience. "I do believe that some conclusions from Lebanon, and
from the West Bank and Gaza, were adopted by the Iraqi regime," said
Mr. Fighel, now a researcher at the International Policy Institute
for Counterterrorism. He called suicide bombing and guerrilla
warfare "an excellent tool to build a fence" between the American
and British soldiers and the Iraqi civilians they hope to win over.
The military tactics on both sides in Iraq, and their political
effects, may change quickly, as they already have. But the soldiers
who are setting up checkpoints in Iraq, demanding identification,
frisking men and examining even the most innocent-seeming bundles,
are doing what Israeli soldiers do daily in the West Bank.
Like the Israelis, the Americans and British are now relying on
intelligence gleaned from collaborators and prisoners to storm homes
in pursuit of wanted men, weapons and more intelligence. Like the
Israelis, they are bulldozing trees and houses to improve their
lines of fire. They are opening fire on people who move into
off-limits areas.
Like the Israelis, they say they have no choice. They say their
enemy is deliberately drawing fire toward civilians to darken the
outsiders' image.
"Similar?!" was the headline in the newspaper Maariv recently, with
a picture of Iraqis standing in the concrete rubble left by a bomb
in Baghdad and a picture of Palestinians doing the same thing in
Gaza.
The newspaper ran a series of compare-and-contrast pictures: of
soldiers guarding prisoners with their hands on their heads, of
soldiers in battle gear standing by children, of soldiers napping in
newly occupied buildings.
To expert Israeli eyes, the British troops, with their experience in
Northern Ireland, appear more adept at this form of conflict than
the Americans.
American consultations with Israeli experts appear to have been part
of a broad review of army strategy for fighting in cities that
preceded the war on Iraq.
Marines trained on mock cities in Guam and in Southern California as
the armed forces tried to extract and instill lessons from many
sources, including American combat in Mogadishu, Somalia, and
Russian fighting in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya.
United States Army officials have said they were particularly
interested in how the Israeli Army used specially loaded tank rounds
to blast holes through walls, without collapsing buildings, during
fighting last year in the Jenin refugee camp. In Jenin, Israel also
used bulldozers and wire-guided missiles fired from helicopters to
overwhelm about 200 gunmen holed up inside the camp.
Professor van Creveld said that when he visited Camp Lejeune, N.C.,
last fall, the American marines were "interested in what it would be
like fighting a guerrilla war, especially urban warfare of the kind
we were conducting in Jenin."
He said he had focused on three areas: the use of bulldozers, the
use of helicopters and "the moral and ethical problems that were
sure to come" from fighting among noncombatants. He warned that
Israel could use helicopters in Jenin only because the Palestinians
were so poorly armed. "You can't do that if you are facing fire from
the ground," he said, "because the helicopters are very vulnerable."
He said he had particularly emphasized the moral concerns of urban
warfare and the critical importance of avoiding "a prolonged
campaign of the strong against the weak."
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was the defense minister when Israel
invaded Lebanon in 1982, in what was presented to the Israeli public
as a bid to drive the Palestine Liberation Organization back from
the border. Mr. Sharon went on to drive the P.L.O. out of Lebanon,
and to try to install a more friendly government there.
Ephraim Sneh, who commanded Israeli forces in the southern zone of
Lebanon, rejected as superficial any comparison to the American war
on Iraq, noting that Lebanon shares a border with Israel and had no
effective government when Israel invaded. He pointed out that it
took Israel only days to reach and besiege Beirut.
Further, unlike the Americans in Iraq, the Israelis were instantly
welcomed as liberators, even by the Shiites of the south, Mr. Sneh
said. "It was genuine, because we liberated them from the
Palestinian occupation," he said.
Mr. Sneh, who is a member of Parliament, said he had been received
warmly into Shiite homes. But, he said, in the kind of warning other
Israeli soldiers recall receiving at the time, one Shiite leader
told him, "Thank you for coming, but please, leave quickly."
The Israelis stayed, and their effort to install a new government
ended in disaster. Charles Enderlin, the bureau chief here for
France 2 television, recalled covering the war initially from a
passenger car with Israeli license plates. Within months, he said,
he was wearing a flak jacket and moving safely only in a military
convoy.
"You started to have attacks against Israelis, and the Israelis
reacted the usual ways, and that was curfews on villages, searches
in houses, sometimes in mosques, with dogs to look for explosives,"
Mr. Enderlin recalled. "The result was, after a few months, the
whole Shiite community was anti-Israeli." The militant group
Hezbollah had been born.
Israel withdrew to a "security zone" in Lebanon's south, but did not
leave altogether for 18 years.
Eventually it was the withdrawal that illustrated for Israelis how
dangerous a trap the invasion had become: they did not want the army
to stay in Lebanon, but they concluded that by leaving under fire,
Israel emboldened the Palestinians to pursue their own cause
violently in the belief that Israel would capitulate to force.
"I don't think the idea of the Americans staying in Iraq after the
war is a good one," said Asher Susser, director of the Moshe Dayan
Center for Middle Eastern Studies. "It's a tortuous road to begin."
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