What Was He Thinking?

Just days after launching Israel’s violent offensive in Lebanon, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert took time off to share a leisurely weekend lunch with a few old friends. With helicopters buzzing overhead on their way to and from the front, the group sat on the patio of an elegant private home, eating tomato soup, egg noodles and steak. What struck one participant was Olmert’s inner calm, the confidence he has exuded as he leads Israel through its biggest crisis in years. “You could see the intensity in his body language,” says the friend. “But he was not nervous. You could see that he feels he’s the right guy to deal with the situation–that he has found his way.”

But the way is not at all clear. Israel’s untested Prime Minister was dealt a formidable challenge two weeks ago when fighters for Hizballah, the Lebanese Islamist group, crossed the border and kidnapped two Israeli soldiers. Olmert responded ferociously, authorizing air attacks and limited ground incursions aimed not just at punishing Hizballah but also at reshaping Israel’s neighborhood. It’s an enormous gamble and one that could well determine Olmert’s political fate and the peace prospects of the area. If he succeeds, by neutralizing Hizballah and convincing Israel’s enemies, at least for a while, that it’s not worth picking a fight, Israel could win a greater sense of security, while its patron, the U.S., could point to Israel’s experience as proof that standing up to militant Islamists pays off. But as the fighting escalates beyond what Olmert’s government once imagined, the odds against him have grown. If the battle ends with less than a demonstrable victory for Israel–an outcome he has insisted is unsatisfactory–then Hizballah and its backers Syria and Iran would declare a moral victory just as the U.S. is trying to curtail the influence of both radical states and as American power is being tested in Iraq.

Elected Prime Minister in March in the wake of his predecessor Ariel Sharon’s debilitating stroke, Olmert, 60, did not expect to define himself in this way–through the most dramatic outbreak of cross-border Arab-Israeli violence since the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Voters brought him to power not as the man best equipped to fight Israel’s enemies but as one explicitly committed to disengaging from Israel’s foes, to walling them off by establishing borders demarcated by an imposing fence. Hizballah’s incursion into Israel two weeks ago, in which eight soldiers were killed in addition to the two taken hostage, on the heels of the kidnapping of an Israeli corporal by the Palestinian militant group Hamas, reset Olmert’s agenda. “If the Bush presidency was defined by 9/11, for Olmert it came a little quicker,” says Daniel Seaman, director of Israel’s government press office. “His political stature is being defined now.” And so far, he is gaining. In a poll published at the end of last week in the newspaper Ma’ariv, 95% of those surveyed supported the government’s actions in Lebanon; 78% said they were satisfied with Olmert’s performance, compared with 43% before the Lebanon flare-up.

As the conflict continues, however, that support will be tested. Having found air raids insufficient, the military has begun sending ground troops on limited incursions into southern Lebanon. Israel has called up three battalions of reservists in addition to three that had been called to duty earlier. As tanks and armored personnel carriers massed on the border, the Israelis insisted they had no intention of reoccupying Lebanon, but many feared they could wind up there again. “This is how it starts,” said a former government official, referring to the in-and-out raids authorized so far.

Throughout the crisis, Olmert has displayed a characteristic decisiveness. “In his meetings, everyone has a limited time to talk,” says a senior aide to an Israeli government minister. “Then he makes decisions quickly. He’s a fast thinker and not hesitant–for better and worse.” When Hizballah took the soldiers hostage, Olmert faced a challenge. He could have opted for a limited response: in 2000, after all, five months after Israel pulled its troops out of southern Lebanon following an 18-year occupation, Hizballah kidnapped three Israeli soldiers, and Israel declined to retaliate, choosing calm over escalation and, eventually, opting for negotiations that resulted in an exchange of the three soldiers’ bodies for prisoners held by Israel. Yet this time Olmert reacted by declaring the hostage taking an “act of war,” and Israel responded in kind. Within 24 hours, Israel conducted some 1,000 air missions over Lebanon–a number on par with the first day of the full-fledged war of 1982, when Israel moved to oust Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, which had been using Lebanon as a staging ground for attacks on Israel.

For Israel the latest hostage taking also represented an opportunity. For almost six years since Israel had quit southern Lebanon, the Israelis watched Hizballah build fortifications along the border and stockpile rockets and missiles. Of late, Hizballah’s charismatic leader, Hasan Nasrallah, had explicitly threatened to kidnap Israeli soldiers, and Jerusalem believes it thwarted at least two attempts by his fighters to do just that. Army brass had urged the political leadership to respond with precisely the kind of campaign Olmert has initiated, and Israeli forces practiced just such an operation in a tabletop exercise as recently as two months ago. After the soldiers’ kidnapping, Olmert, according to one of his ministers, presented his Cabinet with the military’s plans and after a discussion said he was approving the action. The Cabinet unanimously backed him: it was time to hit back, hard. The goal was not just to roll back Hizballah but to show that Israel is willing to fight. It was a message meant to dissuade adversaries from harassment and was aimed at Hizballah; at Hamas, which, in addition to kidnapping the corporal, has launched homemade rockets from Gaza into Israel; and at Iran, which sponsors Hizballah and supports Hamas and whose President has called for Israel’s destruction.

That Israel no longer occupied any part of Lebanon gave Olmert’s government credibility with much of the world as it responded to Hizballah’s incursion, at least in the beginning. Israel’s withdrawal of the last of its settlers and soldiers from the Gaza Strip a year ago added to the store of global goodwill that Israel started out with. Plus Olmert calculated that he could count on the support, if not the applause, of President Bush, who since 9/11 has strongly backed Israel. Some Arab countries–Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan–even took the unusual step of criticizing Hizballah; their regimes also face Islamist threats and would prefer to see forces like Hamas and Hizballah (and Iran) suppressed.

Olmert’s actions have followed a certain logic of Israeli politics. A weak response to the kidnappings could have given his political opponents a handy cudgel with which to pound him. Olmert was particularly vulnerable because of his lack of security credentials–in a country that often entrusts high political office to its war heroes. During his compulsory military service, Private Olmert found glory as a mere reporter for the army’s radio and journal. (At age 35, seven years into his career as a member of the Knesset, he enrolled in an officer-training course, emerging as a second lieutenant and polishing his political résumé.) Not that Olmert seems fazed by his past: he is outwardly macho and even arrogant. “He is not afraid to confront anyone, to make his place in history,” says an aide to a Cabinet minister.

The current struggle could well determine how kindly history treats Olmert. He has taken Israel into an unplanned war, and there is always the risk his venture could fail. “For Olmert to sustain the trust the Israeli public has in him, he is going to have to produce,” says Aaron David Miller, a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington who has advised six U.S. Secretaries of State. “It reminds me of the guy jumping out of a 15th-floor window, and at the 8th floor someone asks, ‘How are you doing?,’ and the guy says, ‘So far, so good.'”

Olmert’s fall is certainly steeper than he anticipated when he took the dive. The Israelis calculated that their campaign, which has included strikes on not just Hizballah targets but also Lebanese roads, bridges and runways as well as a naval blockade–plus the explicit threat of worse to come–would cow Hizballah. In addition to maintaining a militia, the group functions as a political party and has a representative in the Lebanese Cabinet. Hizballah represents the traditionally downtrodden Shi’ites of Lebanon, who live mostly in the south and the Dahiya suburb of Beirut, areas Israel has hit hard. The bombardment has driven an estimated half a million Lebanese from their homes; many will have only rubble to return to. The strikes on infrastructure are meant not only to prevent Syria and Iran from resupplying Hizballah with rockets and launchers but also to warn Lebanon that Jerusalem can set back the country’s restoration even further if it chooses. Of the estimated 300 who have died so far in Lebanon, most have been civilians. For its part, Hizballah was taken aback by Israel’s ferocity. In a TV interview last week, Nasrallah lamented, “Tell me about a war that was waged against a state because of two soldiers. This has never happened in history. Nor has Israel done it anytime before.”

But to Israel’s surprise, instead of looking for a way out, Hizballah launched an escalation of its own, shooting longer-range missiles than it had ever used, forcing the 1 million Israelis in the north of the country–a sixth of the nation’s population–into bomb shelters and paralyzing that region’s economy. Jerusalem believes Hizballah is serving Iran’s interests, perhaps to detract attention from Tehran’s controversial nuclear program. Says Avi Dichter, Israel’s Minister of Public Security: “We thought Hizballah would not sacrifice Lebanon on the Iranian altar. They did it very clearly, and it was contrary to Israel’s assessments.”

In other words, the escalating war is a result of two sets of miscalculations. Each side underestimated the other’s fierceness and willingness to fight. So now the Israelis are stuck with a war on a scale they didn’t plan for, and without an exit strategy. Hizballah is in a similar bind. At first, the Israelis spoke vaguely about the need to degrade Hizballah before ending their campaign. But as the battle escalated, so did Israel’s expressed goals. Officials last week were demanding implementation of U.N. Resolution 1559, passed after Israel’s 2000 pullout, which calls for disarming Hizballah and deploying the Lebanese army in the south, where Hizballah now rules unimpeded. The Lebanese government and army, however, are too weak to take on Hizballah and its patrons, including Syria, a country that long dominated and still influences Lebanon. Israel hopes third parties–the U.S., European powers, Turkey, perhaps Egypt–will help Lebanon defang Hizballah by sending peacekeeping troops to the southern part of the country.

Meanwhile, the war continues. The Israelis announced early on that they hoped to assassinate Nasrallah, whom they credit as a clever and potent adversary. Israeli forces last week dropped 23 tons of bombs on a bunker in Beirut where they believed he was hiding. Nasrallah appeared later in the taped TV interview, disappointing Israeli officials, who said they were still after him. Nasrallah’s death would bring Jerusalem a huge symbolic victory. But Israel may eventually regret raising expectations that it will get him. (Ask George Bush about the wisdom of calling for Osama bin Laden’s head.) “If Nasrallah is alive at the end of this and gives one of his speeches, it cannot look like an Israeli victory,” says Eti Livni, a former Knesset member and close friend of Olmert’s.

The Israelis have begun enforcing a rule that anyone in Lebanon within a kilometer of the border will be considered an enemy. They have sent bulldozers across the border to clear away trees, boulders, bunkers and other structures that impede their view into this swath of territory. Maintaining such a buffer zone will theoretically prevent Hizballah from returning to its positions along the frontier, shooting small arms across it, kidnapping more soldiers and easily gathering intelligence on Israeli army movements. But it won’t stop the militia from firing rockets from deeper inside Lebanon. Israeli forces have concentrated on tracking and eliminating Hizballah’s rocket launchers, but with limited results. Many are hidden in bunkers that Israeli pilots can’t find, which is largely why the infantry was sent in. While ground troops searched for launchers last week, Israeli intelligence pored over all the aerial photos of Lebanon taken by Israeli drones over the past six years, looking for evidence of bunker building so that pilots or ground troops could take out the rocket launchers likely held within. The idea is to weaken Hizballah as much as possible before a cease-fire takes hold and, more urgently, to stop Hizballah’s rocketing of Israeli towns, which by the end of last week had taken 15 lives, on top of the 19 soldiers who have died in the conflict. Olmert knows that the longer Israel’s north is crippled by rocket fire, the more the public is likely to question whether his onslaught was well calculated.

Such questioning could, in turn, prompt Olmert to conclude he needs to sustain the fight until he can end it in a way that clearly rewards his gamble. “Israel must emerge from this war as a winner, or else the war will continue,” says Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres. That’s an equation that could make for a conflict even longer and nastier than the one that has already surpassed either party’s bellicose ambitions.