Israeli 'Doves' Say Response Is Legitimate

In Haifa, an Israeli woman and a policeman react after a rocket exploded nearby. "This is probably the most justified war in our history," said Ari Shavit, a dovish Israeli newspaper columnist. (By Baz Ratner -- Associated Press)

"I'm sorry to say it, but Hezbollah is maybe a better army than the IDF," said Keren Kavim, a makeup artist and stylist from Jerusalem, referring to the Israel Defense Forces. "We have our best-trained soldiers up there, and Hezbollah is making a laughingstock out of them."

Beilin, an architect of the 1993 Oslo accords between Israel and the Palestinians and a negotiator at the failed Camp David peace summit in the summer of 2000, said he doubted that current military operations would disarm Hezbollah or push it from the Israel-Lebanon border, an outcome that will turn the Israeli public's current support into disillusionment. Instead of attacking Hezbollah and Lebanon, he said, Israel should have hit neighboring Syria, which supplies the group with arms and other support.

Shavit, the columnist, said Israeli strikes were killing too many civilians and needed to be more focused on Hezbollah targets. "We must make sure not to hurt or destabilize Lebanon, and to keep this war decent in its means, not just in its ends," he said.

"In every war in this country or any country, there is always a huge amount of public support in the early days, which will last precisely until people start dying, until we can't count the victims on our hands," said Dalia Rappaport, 59, whose youngest son is a soldier in the Israeli army but is not currently serving in the north. "The support of the government and the army will decline at the same rate as people are being killed."

That is precisely what happened in Israel's 1982-2000 occupation of southern Lebanon, recalled Nahum Barnea, a columnist with Yedioth Aharonoth, Israel's largest daily newspaper. The occupation muddled along without great domestic opposition until February 1997, when two Israeli transport helicopters collided in midair, killing all 73 soldiers and air crewmen aboard. "This made the Lebanon price too high to swallow," he said.

Today, with so many people in Israel displaced, so many reservists mobilized and so many families having children in uniform, "you can't behave as if this is someone else's war," he said. And having a broad-based government, led by Olmert's centrist Kadima party and including Labor Party leader Amir Peretz as defense minister, "makes it much easier to launch a military strike against someone," Barnea added.

But the lessons of Lebanon have been learned, he said. "It's clear that sending ground forces into Lebanon on a grand scale would not only be a problem, it would be a catastrophe politically," Barnea said. At the same time, "one of the main reasons Israel bombed parts of Beirut so hard was not tactical or strategic or military, it was to draw the attention of the world," he said.

"That's how this campaign is different in a major way from the last one," Barnea said. "From the beginning, Israel didn't want to conquer Lebanon or force Hezbollah to surrender, because it knew it couldn't get that. But it wanted the world to understand that the problem is so hard that they need to intervene, and you can't get the attention of the world unless you start to bomb civilians."

Researcher Hillary Claussen contributed to this report.