JERUSALEM — Nadia Klein, a teacher and mother of three, says she is relieved that her soldier son is patrolling the border between Israel and Lebanon.
That’s because the once volatile border has witnessed relatively little action since Israel withdrew its troops from Lebanon one year ago.
“My son is in a combat unit and he never tells me exactly what he’s doing,” says Klein, a resident of the Jerusalem suburb of Mevasseret. “Of course I worry, but I would be more worried if he were serving inside Lebanon. My friends whose sons served in Lebanon didn’t sleep. Every phone call, every knock on the door made them crazy with fear.”
While the euphoria over the May 24, 2000 pullout from Lebanon has long since been overshadowed by the Palestinian uprising, one year after the withdrawal the vast majority of Israelis say they are happy to be out of the Lebanese quagmire.
“Our stay in Lebanon wasn’t good for Israel,” Klein asserts. “It wasn’t good for the morale of Israel, for the image of Israel. It wasn’t good for anyone. I think the last 10 years of our presence was an assault against another country.”
Though many Israelis, particularly on the political right, would argue that Israel had every right to maintain a south Lebanese security zone to prevent attacks on its northern communities, few if any citizens regret the decision to leave.
It was, in fact, the will of the people that prompted the government to act.
The movement to withdraw from Lebanon, which sprang up alongside Israel’s incursion in 1982, gained tremendous momentum in 1997, after 76 soldiers were killed en route to Lebanon in the Sha’ar Yishuv helicopter accident.
In response to that tragedy and the deaths of other soldiers, four women in the north launched a grassroots organization called the Four Mothers.
The group’s demand that Israel quit Lebanon caught the imagination of tens of thousands of citizens from across the political and religious spectrum. They flocked to the organization’s protest rallies and lobbying sessions, demanding that Israel quit Lebanon with or without a regional peace treaty with Lebanon and Syria.
Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s vow to withdraw from the security zone is what helped him get elected. Barak delivered on his promise on May 24, 2000, when Israeli troops made a lightning retreat six weeks ahead of schedule.
Klein, who was active in the Four Mothers until it disbanded after the withdrawal, believes that the Lebanon issue “was above politics. It wasn’t an issue of making land concessions. No one, right-wing or left-wing, religious or secular, wanted to be there. Just about everyone agreed we had to leave.”
Galia Golan, a professor of political science at Hebrew University and a spokeswoman for Peace Now, calls the withdrawal “an absolutely good thing. We lost so many lives over the years from something that wasn’t giving us any security. It was definitely public opinion that brought about the unilateral withdrawal. There were many who wanted to have an agreement with Syria before withdrawing, but in the end people felt they couldn’t wait any longer.”
In the eyes of Barry Rubin, deputy director of the BESA Center for Strategic Studies, the Lebanon withdrawal has been a success, though not an unmitigated one.
“There have been some problems,” he concedes, noting that three Israeli soldiers and a businessman have been kidnapped since the pullout, and that Hezbollah is still active in the area.
The Lebanese border is not as stable as it could be, Rubin says, because Lebanon has failed to deploy its own troops to fill the void left by Israel’s army and its ally, the South Lebanese Army. When the Israel Defense Force left the security zone, many SLA troops fled Lebanon out of the well-founded fear that the Lebanese forces would view them as traitors.
And despite the demand by some Lebanese leaders, particularly Christian clergymen, that Syria’s 30,000 soldiers leave the country, Syrian President Bashar Assad shows no willingness to recall his troops. If anything, say analysts, Syria will try to strengthen its stranglehold over Lebanon and increase support to Hezbollah guerrillas in an attempt to force Israel to relinquish the Golan Heights.
While some political observers initially believed that Hezbollah’s terror campaign and the subsequent Israeli withdrawal directly inspired the Palestinians to launch their own armed intifada four months later, that opinion does not prevail today.
“I’m not persuaded that the Lebanese situation was of such importance to the intifada,” says Rubin. “I think the [Palestinian Authority] started it because they weren’t able to come to an agreement.”