The military budget: It is not a game, it’s our lives

A reserve battalion commander rose from his seat at an officers’ conference Wednesday and angrily addressed IDF Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, saying: “The level of training has been deteriorating for two years.”

Gantz’s response is not important. What is important is that he identified with the protester. The 20th chief of staff may have even entertained the notion that the second chief of staff, Yigal Yadin, set an example for his successors – he resigned from the job of his dreams because he didn’t want to be responsible for the security of a nation that refused to invest in its army. Indeed, it was during his time that the shrunken IDF suffered a resounding defeat at Tel Mutilla (near Almagor).

He is not the only one. Brig. Gen. Guy Zur, whose office at the IDF Planning Directorate approves every military expense of over NIS 6,000, would concur. I became acquainted with Zur in 2006, when I found myself in his entourage, together with Gantz and former IDF Chief of General Staff Dan Halutz. The battle of Wadi Saluki (in which 11 soldiers were killed) was underway in Lebanon and we were watching the fighting on a screen. Zur is unwilling to allow his young colleagues to encounter events such as that bloody Saturday in 2006. But it costs money.

But the treasury’s angry response is “they’re getting NIS 60 billion. Is that not enough? They should become more efficient.” It doesn’t really matter whether it is really NIS 60 billion or NIS 54.4 billion as the IDF maintains. The only thing that matters is that the missions have changed.

Before the Six-Day War, the defense establishment looked as far east as the Jordanian capital of Amman in search of intelligence. Nowadays, Military Intelligence Director Aviv Kochavi must look at Tehran and even further east. Back then there were no offensive or defensive missiles in the arena and there was no cyber warfare. Now there are. And all this before we even begin to talk about an attack on Iran.

There is an ongoing debate on whether the defense budget has increased or not, but there is not doubt that the defense duties have increased. During most of its years in existence, Israel has relied on its military’s offensive capabilities to steer the fighting into the enemy’s turf. But by 2012 Israel has invested billions in defensive capabilities. It is necessary. It is how it should be. But you can’t win a war with an Iron Dome (missile defense system) unless you invest just as much in offensive weapons and means of achieving victory in the battleground.

The mindset (legitimate in and of itself) that led to the ever increasing investment in the Iron Dome defense system is the same mindset that shaped the failed Second Lebanon War. The war’s stinging failure is evident in the number of commendations awarded not for achieving goals but for bravery in rescuing the wounded. Is rescuing the wounded important? Sure. Fateful? Definitely. Human? Of course. But it is part of a defensive effort – not a formula for victory.

An additional NIS 20 billion are required in order for the IDF to retain its military superiority and to train its troops in such a way that would prevent a reprise of the 2006 Second Lebanon War. The funds would be used toward the development of offensive systems, without which the IDF would enter the next war with a severe handicap. Until then, just like in David’s lament over the deaths of Jonathan and Saul – “How the mighty have fallen, and the weapons of war perished” – what will perish will be the brilliant minds of scientists and engineers who will abandon the frozen underfunded projects and retire from the defense industry in favor of the private sector at best, or move abroad at worst.

One could understand the urge to slash the defense budget if Israel had a different type of government – a government that still believed in the Oslo Accords and in former Prime Minister’s Ehud Olmert’s draft peace proposals, which opened a channel to the Right of Return and promised peace just around the corner. That government should also have exercised caution and increased the investment in defense for a few years, just to ensure that the diplomatic deal it had made stuck. Oh well – they could, but the current government can’t. The current government faces a different reality, one in which the Arab Spring has turned into a dark storm that threatens most neighboring countries. A government that considers attacking Iran, or even pretends to consider it in a brilliant hand of diplomatic poker, can’t afford to cut more than a symbolic shekel from its defense budget.

The Finance Ministry’s clerks have legions of supporters in the media. They lend credibility to claims that “they” – the out-of-touch IDF officers – are needlessly instilling fear and almost lying.

The opposite is true. Every Israeli should recall the times when the treasury disseminated made-up stories and made declarations it couldn’t prove. Even Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz – an honest and intelligent man – wouldn’t deny it. At most he would argue that these incidents were a rare exception.

Is Israel incapable of providing the extra NIS 3.6 billion required by the defense establishment in an era of continuously rising threats? (The military has yet to present the plan that would really set the treasury off: the defensive strategy in the event of severe deterioration in Egypt – but let’s cross that bridge when we get to it). Can Israel not banish its yeshiva students (religious students who don’t work and rely on government aid) to the job market and stop handing out stipends and charity? Can’t it charge income tax from the countless tax evaders in this country? If Israel can’t do any of these, it must resort to loathsome begging and wheedling. It must beseech our brothers in the Diaspora to donate money using the logo from the Abraham Goldfaden play “The Witch” which reads, “Oh, good Jews, have mercy.”

Victor and role model

In April, 2011, I met a determined doctor who was almost at the end of his rope. Dr. Yehuda David had lost a libel suit in France. He had testified that the father of Mohammed al-Dura, a child killed in the Second Intifada in 2000, was lying about the circumstances surrounding his own injury. Dr. David wrote that the father, Jamal, was wounded in an internal Palestinian battle in Gaza in 1992 (and not by Israeli fire in the same incident in which his son had been killed, as Jamal claimed). Unable to receive proper treatment in Gaza, Jamal was treated by Dr. David in 1994 at Sheba Medical Center near Tel Aviv. There were no intifada scars – just anti-Israel propaganda.

Jamal al-Dura sued David for defamation and a French judge ruled in favor of al-Dura’s deceptive testimony. David then lashed out at the state of Israel for abandoning him. Earlier this week, the tables turned: France’s Supreme Court cleared David of libel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised to reimburse him for his massive legal costs and he launched a Facebook page aimed at helping Israeli victims of Palestinian propaganda. A shining example of someone who cares.

True at the time

Full disclosure: Journalist Ilana Dayan is a friend and colleague. I was happy that the Supreme Court unequivocally cleared her in the libel suit (which alleged that her “Uvda” ("Fact") television program suggested that IDF Captain R., who accidentally killed a 12-year-old Palestinian girl, had acted maliciously. He was later acquitted of all charges in a military court). Some disappointed people slandered the justices who ruled in her favor, citing her personal relationships with some of them. (What does he who was the subject of aspersion have to say about that-)

Others claim that she was cleared on a defense called “true at the time” (if the claims are true at the time of their reporting, the report isn’t libelous even if circumstances change to make the report untrue). Not so. She won because her report was true, plain and simple. I read the 116-page transcript on Wednesday (including criticism of Dayan regarding matters that are not central to the story of this act) and I would recommend that this be required reading in civics classes. It is a source of pride for a lawful state.

This is certainly noteworthy during a week in which the court rejected libel suits brought by Secondary School Teachers Association Chairman Ran Erez and the Magen David Adom emergency services organization against my colleague, Mordechai (Motti) Gilat, and his friends. These are fine days for Israeli democracy.

I would have left it at that, had the ruling not given rise to a fundamental issue which diverged from the suit against Dayan: the Supreme Court ruled that it is sufficient for journalists to write what is “true at the time.” This ruling is not a license to defame. It is mandated by public interest in sustaining freedom of speech and criticism in a democracy.

For example, on the day that Dayan reported on Captain R., he was indicted on charges that were several times worse than the allegations aired on her show. If Dayan had interjected her report with the words “as it appears in the indictment” every few minutes, would that have been acceptable? After all, it is permissible to report on the content an indictment. Once Captain R. was acquitted, could Dayan be tried for quoting an indictment that had not resulted in a conviction? No. That is the wise and democratic thought behind the “true at the time” defense.

Every truth is essentially true at the time. A final un-appealable ruling is occasionally (rarely) handed down (as in the wrongful conviction of Amos Baranes for murder). The media reports the verdict, then new evidence emerges and the court overturns the conviction. Could Baranes have sued the media for reporting, after the initial verdict, that he had committed murder? No. It was true at the time. I hate to say it, but most of life is true at the time.

The difference between Israeli and Palestinian liberation

This week, 70 years ago, the British killed Avraham (Yair) Stern, founder of the Lehi (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel) underground. Channel 1 television will air his son’s journey in search of his father on Sunday. Stern had many love affairs in his 35 years: With his partner Roni, whom he loved but was reluctant to wed; with the Land of Israel, whom he loved most of all; with Western culture and particularly that of the ancient world, of which he displayed brilliant scholarship; and with death.

The foundation of his affair with death found expression in Stern’s “Anonymous Soldiers,” the anthem of the revolt against the foreign government and for liberation of the Land of Israel: “Only death from our duty can us sever.” But his inner romantic flirted with death, considered it, philosophized its meaning and accepted it – he even imagined it as separate from the Land of Israel.

I once asked a member of the trio that led Lehi after he passed, Dr. Israel Eldad, if Stern had aspired to die and thought of himself as a holy sacrifice in the name of the nation. He did not answer me directly, but told me that in Greek philosophy a man dies when his job on earth is complete, and that “Yair” did travel to Florence to write a doctoral dissertation on the Hellenist culture.

Lehi was the more extreme of the pre-state underground organizations. The English labeled it a “terrorist” organization. Many Jews agreed. To this day, there are those who claim that like the Palestinians, the Jews were terrorists. There is nothing to these stories. Certainly, not during the years in which David Ben-Gurion led the organized pre-state Jewish community and Menachem Begin led the Etzel (Irgun Tzvai Leumi) military organization.

Unlike the Haganah Jewish paramilitary organization and the Etzel, Lehi advocated personal hits on English officials. Its leaders ordered the assassination of Lord Moyne in Egypt, an action which was fundamentally damaging. But even this extremist organization never employed shahidim (suicide bombers); it never deployed one of its members to intentionally explode in the midst of a civilian population. The Jewish War of Independence claimed the lives of enemies, and accidentally killed innocent victims, but it never intentionally killed a random English woman in the street. The Jewish and Palestinian liberation movements are not identical twins. They would not admit that in Ramallah or Gaza. But it is the truth. The truth at the time and the truth forever.

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