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Nov. 30, 2007
Beaufort stirs thoughts
Winnipeg screening includes Israeli generals.
RHONDA SPIVACK
Ret. Lt.-Col. Jonathan Halevi and Ret. Col. Yoram Hamizrachi-East both gave bleak assessments of the situation in the Middle East following a recent screening of the moving Israeli film Beaufort in Winnipeg.
The film, which is considered to be Israel's first great war movie, takes place at the Beaufort Castle, built by the Crusaders in the Middle Ages on top of a mountain in South Lebanon. The fortified plateau has been held by numerous armies over hundreds of years due to its commanding view of the area.
The film depicts the struggles of Liraz Liberti, a young Israeli commander and one of his soldiers, who are the last stationed at the stronghold and who must retreat from it when a decision is made by the Israeli government under then-prime minister Ehud Barak to withdraw from Lebanon in 2000.
Hamizrachi-East, who, in the late 1970s, became the first Israel Defence Forces officer to command the now-defunct South Lebanon Security Belt and lived with his young family in Metulla, remembers Beaufort well. "My son was shelled from this place when he was six years old," he said. "I was shot at hundreds of times from Beaufort and I fired at this place a million times. During the civil war in Lebanon, Beaufort was a stronghold held by the PLO. It is a bloody place that cost the lives of so many people."
Hamizrachi-East is the first commander of the IDF South Lebanese Liason Unit. He continued, "I don't think that these guys in the movie, or the Israeli soldiers who fought in Lebanon in 2006, will be the last Israelis who have to fight in Lebanon. We are fighting a war for our existence.... It's a fact of life."
Halevi, who is a former career intelligence officer in the IDF, specializing in Palestinian affairs, said, "Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon gave Yasser Arafat the impression that Israel could not defend itself against Hezbollah resistance. After the withdrawal, Arafat decided that he wanted to emulate Hezbollah's resistance in the West Bank. The idea was that the Palestinians could get Israel to withdraw from the West Bank by continuing terror, which led to the second intifada."
Halevi, a senior researcher of the Middle East and radical Islam at the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs, believes that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict pits the determination of Jews against that of Arabs. "The side that stops being willing to sacrifice, will lose the game," he said. "The conflict cannot be resolved through peaceful means, not because of Israel. Israel is ready to go back to the '67 borders but the other side is not willing to make concessions.
"In a war of attrition, the only side that will win is the side that has the stronger nerves and the stronger backbone.... There is no real solution to the conflict. We will have to defend ourselves and we will have to be willing to pay the price for doing so.... Every Israeli knows, at the end of the day, that there will be another war and another war and another war," said Halevi, who is also the director of research and policy planning for the Orient Research Group Ltd.
According to Halevi, "one of the solutions to the conflict is Zionism – real Zionism and not individualism.... What we need is a real desire to defend our country."
Halevi is of the view that Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas is not strong enough to be a credible negotiating partner. He said, "It's possible that, within a year, Hamas will take over the West Bank. The problem is that Islam, in general, is getting stronger."
A former senior advisor for policy planning in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Halevi said, "If Israel were to withdraw from the West Bank, the heart of the country – Tel-Aviv, Ra'anana, etc. – would be under threat. We have to keep Ben-Gurion Airport and the Tel-Aviv area safe."
In his view, if Israel were pressured to concede the Jordan Valley, it would likely expose itself to a steep increase in infiltration to the West Bank of terrorists and weapons. At the same time, the vacuum created by an Israeli withdrawal would likely attract global jihadi groups to Jordan, he said, thereby undermining the stability of the Hashemite kingdom.
Halevi has been conducting research into claims being made against the IDF by the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem. He has just completed investigating a case recently published by B'Tselem regarding the death of a very sick Palestinian man at an Israeli checkpoint in the West Bank. B'Tselem has claimed that the delay the man experienced getting through the checkpoint to a Jerusalem hospital caused his death, but Halevi's research indicates that the terminally ill cancer patient would have died anyway, even if there had not been a checkpoint. Additionally, Halevi's report questions why the man was taken through the checkpoint rather than to a closer hospital in Tulkarem or Nablus.
Halevi, who speaks Arabic, said, "When a Palestinian dies at an Israeli checkpoint, he automatically is recognized as a martyr and his family is entitled to receive monthly payments from the Palestinian Ministry of Social Affairs and from Palestinian charitable societies." Halevi believes that this could explain why the man's brother took the otherwise "inexplicable decision to drive his dying brother to Jerusalem."
Both Halevi and Hamizrachi-East do not believe that the U.S.-sponsored summit at Annapolis will yield any real progress.
"Right now, it appears that Israel has given up all of its assets," said Halevi, referring to Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem and control over borders, "before the beginning phase of the [Annapolis] negotiations and the Palestinians haven't made any concessions whatsoever - they are still making demands over Jerusalem and still talking about the right of return."
Hamizrachi-East, who was born and raised in Jerusalem and served as a reserve officer in the battle to capture East Jerusalem and the Old City in 1967, added, "Some Israeli politicians are saying Jerusalem is negotiable. Now suddenly Jerusalem is on the market.... Jerusalem is the heart of everything."
The film night and panel discussion was sponsored by Canadian Friends of Hebrew University, Tel-Aviv University, the Rady Jewish Community Centre and a host of other Israel-based and youth organizations.
Rhonda Spivak is a Winnipeg freelance writer.
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