The End of Invincibility

Ehud Olmert has some new neighbors. In a rose garden across from the Israeli Prime Minister's Jerusalem office, a squad of angry army reservists and their families have pitched a cluster of igloo tents, and it looks as if they will be staying for a while. They've connected a refrigerator and a TV set to the electricity main, and, says an infantry reservist, they will camp out in Olmert's rose garden until "this loser, the Prime Minister, goes home."

In Israel nobody likes a loser. And however much Olmert's media advisers try to spin it, Israel's war in Lebanon was bungled: the Israelis failed to destroy Hizballah's leadership or even halt its barrage of rockets, and 159 Israelis died in the conflict. As a result, the presence of the reservists on Olmert's doorstep is more than an eyesore. Protests by army reservists--practically every Israeli home has one--tend to gather momentum. And this movement is being joined by families of soldiers killed in the brawl with Hizballah. All that has sent Olmert's political stock plummeting. At the start of the Lebanon campaign, he was seen as tough and decisive, a lanky Churchill puffing a cigar. Today 63% of Israelis want Olmert to resign, according to a poll reported last week in the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper.

Israel is hardly the only country whose citizens blame their leaders for military failure. But this isn't just politics as usual. The war in Lebanon has induced a new sense of national vulnerability, heightening Israelis' anxiety about the dangerous neighborhood they live in. In the past, Israelis believed that their military was mighty enough to scare away Arab attackers. No longer. During the war, as many as a million Israelis were forced to flee the north or hide in bomb shelters from Hizballah's rockets. Not since Israel's war of independence in 1947 had so many civilians been put at risk. Says Galia Golan, a political science professor at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya: "There's a loss of confidence in the ability of the Israel Defense Forces to deal a knockout punch to the enemy."

What's perhaps surprising is that so few of Olmert's detractors have criticized his decision to launch the war after Hizballah kidnapped two Israeli soldiers on July 12. Nor has the bloody draw with Hizballah occasioned any doubt over the long-standing doctrine that Israel must meet force from its enemies with an overwhelming force of its own. What riles Israelis is that Olmert and his generals didn't hit harder and with more deadly effect. Says Golan: "There's a sense that if the army had been allowed to pulverize Hizballah, we could've won."