What lessons?

By Gideon Levy

"The publication of the interim report of the Winograd Committee tomorrow is a marginal event. Except for the fate of several individuals, who at most will be replaced by similar ones, nothing will be different the day after. The generals and politicians who cheered for the war from its outset, in a frighteningly unified chorus, will again fill the television screens, this time in the role of admonishers, as pitiful Monday-morning quarterbacks. And we will forgive them their gleeful support for the war. Even if those who conducted the war are forced to step down in the wake of the report, none of their replacements will be someone who opposed the war from the start. Therefore, what was, shall be, even after the report, even in the next war.......

Major General Gadi Eisenkot, the head of the Operations Directorate during the war, now admits that "after two hours, it was already clear that it was impossible to return the abducted soldiers in a military operation." Why didn't he tell us this then, after the two hours had passed? And now Eisenkot says, "The IDF operation was designed to be a four- to six-day operation, but the plan was disrupted and the campaign developed into a war that lasted over a month." The plan was "disrupted?" Was there really any chance of it not being disrupted? Weren't we in precisely this same horror film, with the very same script, 14 years earlier? Will the committee have something to say about this?

The committee will also not say a word about another subject, which interests almost no one in Israel: the awful killing and destruction we sowed in vain in Lebanon, alongside the heavy price that Israel paid. One thousand Lebanese killed, thousands injured and crippled, and billions of dollars in damage are not on the agenda of the Winograd Committee.

The headlines will declare tomorrow: Israel learned the lessons of the war. Baloney. Proof? There is already growing talk about the next war, this summer."