Also in late June 2006, Hamas militants in Gaza kidnapped an Israeli soldier, Corporal Gilad Shalit. Israel promptly launched a massive offensive against targets in the territory. Ostensibly it was to recover Shalit. In reality it was the precursor of the war in Lebanon that started in July 2006. That was confirmed by Ehud Olmert on July 12 when Hezbollah guerrillas killed eight Israeli soldiers and kidnapped two more on the border of south Lebanon. Ehud Olmert called it “an act of war.” Two days later, with strong support from Israel, the U.S. and British missions at the United Nations opposed a motion on a ceasefire. By then, the first Hezbollah rockets rained down on Haifa and other towns in northern Israel. Israel’s powerful air force had made its first strikes on south Lebanon and Beirut. The dead were left where they lay, soon numbering a hundred a day. Meir Dagan found himself at the cutting edge of the conflict, deploying his agents into hostile territory.
Every morning before the sun rose over the Judean hills, Israeli Prime Minister Olmert, who was barely three months into office, routinely slipped out of the bed he shared with his wife, Aliza. In no time he had shaved, showered, and dressed in another of his lightweight suits, which nevertheless would leave him slightly perspiring in the fierce midday heat. A consolation, he told an aide, was that it was nowhere near as unbearable as the temperature inside the tanks he had sent across the border to fight in south Lebanon. By 5 A.M. each day Olmert was reading the overnight intelligence summary left for him on a table. No more than two foolscap pages long, the document had been prepared by Meir Dagan and faxed to Olmert. It consisted of little more than bullet points listing the latest number of overnight rocket attacks on Israel’s northern cities, the current body count, the number of injured, the number of missions flown by Israeli air force jets, the assessment from Mossad stations around the world of the criticism of Israel, and the mounting demand for a ceasefire.
In those first weeks of July after the war had started, the summary could only have brought little comfort to the man whom Efraim Halevy had dismissed as “just happening to be in the right place when he could make or break his career.” Already his domestic critics were asking if Olmert’s limited experience of military tactics meant he was the wrong man to lead the war to a successful conclusion for Israel. As July drew to a close and the first body bags with IDF soldiers were brought back for burial, the war showed all the signs of becoming a widespread conflagration. It had all seemed a long way from only two weeks before when President George W. Bush had pronounced at the G-8 summit in Saint Petersburg on July 16, four days into the conflict, that “this is a moment of clarification. It is now clear why we don’t have peace in the Middle East and that Iran and Syria are the root causes of instability in the region.” Two days later calls came from several governments for the United States to lead the negotiations to end the fighting. But Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice insisted that any ceasefire was not possible “until the conditions are conducive.” She never explained what “conducive” meant, brushing aside media requests to do so.
Ehud Olmert had been told by Meir Dagan that Mossad’s intelligence from Washington was that the Bush administration believed that a swift war against Hezbollah would serve as a prelude to the eagerly anticipated preemptive attack that the president and his vice president, Dick Cheney, were still convinced was their solution to “why we don’t have peace in the Middle East.” In the meantime, Mossad agents had uncovered another reason. Al-Qaeda had asked an estimated million-plus jihadists to fight alongside Hezbollah. By mid-July the agents were reporting that from the snow-capped mountains of Afghanistan to the scorching deserts of Saudi Arabia, the call to join the “Holy War” was being answered.
