A hint of that had surfaced when Shabtai Shavit, a former Mossad director and, in 2006, a national security adviser to the Knesset said, “we do what we think is best for us, and it happens to meet America’s requirements. That’s just part of a relationship between two friends.” This would explain why a small team of U.S. Air Force strategists had been in Israel for weeks and had held several meetings with Lieutenant General Dan Halutz, the chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces, who during his time in the Israeli Air Force had helped to prepare the attack plan for an aerial assault on Iran. It was that plan which had been used to launch the air assault on south Lebanon. The effect would once more form the core of the morning meeting in Israel’s war room.
The size of a Hezbollah rocket crater—forty by twenty feet—the war room was deep inside the Kirya, the Tel Aviv headquarters of the Israeli Defense Forces. It was accessed by swipe cards whose codes were as closely guarded as the life-or-death decisions made within the featureless concrete building. Tacked to the olive-green walls were maps and charts showing the progress in the war: the number of IDF air strikes and their targets, bombardment by Israeli warships of the towns and villages around the port city of Tyre, ground advances by the crack Galilee, and Nahal divisions into south Lebanon. On a separate chart were the latest figures of rockets launched against northern Israel and the precise location where each Katyusha BM-24 and Fajr-3 rocket had landed. Another chart listed the armaments Hezbollah still possessed, but had not yet fully used. The Fajr-5 rocket with its range of 55 miles and the deadliest of them all: the Zelzal-2 Iranian missile with a range of 150 miles. It brought Tel Aviv and the Kirya within its range.
Against one wall were a bank of screens. They brought into the war room unedited footage from IDF cameramen on the frontline: advancing with troops into Arab villages, perched on mine-sweeping bulldozers clearing the way for tanks, or on the hull of the tanks as they ground their way forward, firing as they advanced.
In the center of the room was a conference table made from cedar wood from Galilee. There were twenty chairs around the table. With the sun already high over the Judean hills, they were all occupied by 6:25 A.M. each morning by the men who would direct the war against Hezbollah. The fanaticism and ruthlessness of their opponents had surprised them. Their faces showed the strain of long days and shortened hours of often disturbed sleep. They knew before they left the room each morning they would make more life-or-death decisions which, when they were implemented, would draw further harsh criticism from not only around the world, but from within Israel.
A great deal of criticism had been directed against Ehud Olmert from an increasingly bewildered public who had begun to ask what was being gained from a war where the number of Israeli dead rose by the day and tens of thousands cowered in bomb shelters and protected rooms in the north of the country. Hezbollah, far from being crippled, appeared to have a limitless supply of rockets and anti-tank missiles that had destroyed the pride of the IDF army—its latest American-built tanks.
Every morning Israeli Army Radio carried the anguished words to the people that the prime minister had promised to teach Hezbollah a lesson it would never forget—and from which it would never again threaten Israel. And it was not only Hezbollah who would be dealt with. Hamas had continued to attack the Jewish state, creating an effective war on two fronts. Olmert in one of his regular broadcasts had promised the day of reckoning would also soon be upon Hamas. But there were a growing number of Israelis who felt the prime minister not only looked increasingly tired, but sounded ever more uncertain. That would have been noted by his waiting generals in the war room.
Pinned to one wall was a blow-up of an Israeli newspaper editorial: “If Israel fails in this war, it will be impossible to continue to live in the Middle East. What is it about us, the Jews, the few and persecuted? We are not hesitating, apologizing, or relenting. The Jewish state will no longer be trampled underfoot.”
