mothers for war
Wall Street Journal - August 1, 2006
In Israel, ‘Mothers’ Have Change of Heart On Hezbollah Fight
Ex-Leader’s Bellicose Stand Signals Shift in Nation; Ms. Anteby Skips March
By GUY CHAZAN
KAKHAL, Israel — In 1997, Zahara Anteby became so sick of Israel’s
lengthy occupation of Lebanon that she started campaigning full-time
to end it. The 18-year military presence finally ended, in 2000, in a
wrenching moment for Israel and a major victory for the popular
movement Ms. Anteby helped lead.
Seven years later, Ms. Anteby finds herself living through a new
Lebanon war. But she backs this one to the hilt. “This time we’re
fighting for our survival,” she says in her home here, a village
overlooking the Sea of Galilee. Any Israeli who opposes the military
campaign is just a “bleeding heart,” she says.
Ms. Anteby’s transformation from peacenik to hawk shows how Israeli
attitudes are hardening as the country’s war on Hezbollah enters its
third week, with no sign of the decisive victory its army promised.
Diplomatic pressure to end the fighting is mounting, especially after
an Israeli airstrike killed dozens of civilians on Sunday. (See
related article.) But inside Israel, the national mood is
increasingly belligerent. Frustration is building at the government’s
failure to stop Hezbollah’s missile barrage against Israeli cities.
That has led to calls for a full-scale ground offensive — even as
Israel announced a 48-hour halt of the bombing campaign in the south
of Lebanon.
A poll in the daily Yediot Aharonot Saturday found 71% of Israelis
wanted the army to use more force in Lebanon, while 48% said
Hezbollah should be destroyed, not just pushed back from the border.
Polls have yet to emerge after Sunday’s disastrous airstrike, but
there are few signs the Israeli public has wavered.
Indeed, public opinion seems to be running ahead of Israel’s leaders,
who have scaled back their war aims as the fighting has dragged on.
Observers say Prime Minister Ehud Olmert could face a backlash if the
war ends without a knockout blow against Hezbollah.
“Olmert will emerge weakened from this unless there’s a clear-cut
victory,” says Gadi Wolfsfeld, a professor of political science at
Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “He’ll be seen as having capitulated
to the U.S. and the Arabs.”
The mood is captured in Carmiel, a hillside town of 50,000 a short
drive from Ms. Anteby’s village. A frequent target of Hezbollah’s
Katyusha missiles, Carmiel was deserted on a recent visit: 60% of its
population had sought sanctuary in the south. Apartment blocks with
gaping holes from rocket fire stood amid manicured lawns, palms and
eucalyptus trees. Bunting for a canceled dance festival fluttered in
the breeze.
In a mostly shuttered shopping mall, three men sat at a café
answering nonstop calls on their cellphones from anxious relatives.
They said their biggest fear is not that the war will drag on but
that it will be brought to a premature end.
“I’m prepared to suffer anything, but only if they finish off
Hezbollah,” said Yossi Ettedgi, a 56-year-old driving instructor.
“But I’m worried they’ll just do a deal with them. Then this whole
thing will start up again in a few years.”
The gung-ho mood is a far cry from that of Israel’s last major war in
Lebanon, which began in 1982 and triggered the biggest peace rallies
in the country’s history. Some 400,000 people demonstrated in Tel
Aviv in September that year after Israeli-backed Christian militiamen
slaughtered 1,500 Palestinians in Beirut’s Sabra and Shatila refugee
camps.
Last month, only a few hundred protesters turned up for an antiwar
protest in downtown Tel Aviv. Even Peace Now, a prominent advocacy
group that campaigns for peace with the Palestinians, backs this war.
One person who wasn’t at the rally was Ms. Anteby. A soft-spoken 54-
year-old high-school principal, she considers herself a dyed-in-the-
wool leftist. “I got varicose veins from all the peace demonstrations
I attended,” she says. But she finds she can’t oppose this war. “We
were provoked,” she says, “and we have no choice but to protect
ourselves.”
In 1997, she was living on a left-leaning Kibbutz, an Israeli
commune, and working as a school teacher when she became one of the
early members of the Four Mothers. The group was founded that year in
informal meetings in a kitchen by women with sons in the army. The
women demanded an end to Israel’s occupation of Lebanon.
They were inspired to act by one of Israel’s worst military
disasters: Seventy-three soldiers died in 1997 when two helicopters
flying them into south Lebanon collided in midair and crashed. Her
son was 24 at the time and serving as an officer in the army. “I
realized our role as mothers is to protect our sons,” she says, “and
that only mothers can stop wars.”
Four Mothers turned into one of Israel’s most influential grass-roots
movements. Ms. Anteby’s job was to arrange meetings between the
group’s members and Israeli prime ministers, lawmakers and generals,
including polarizing figures like Ariel Sharon, who as defense
minister in 1982 had engineered Israel’s attack on Lebanon.
The group ultimately played a pivotal role in swinging public opinion
behind a unilateral withdrawal, which finally went ahead in May 2000.
“It was above all a victory for civil society,” she says. Before the
group started, it had been taboo for “a wife and mother to criticize
the army.”
Initially, she says, the withdrawal seemed to have worked. Like many
Israelis, she had little fear of Hezbollah. She saw its leader,
Hassan Nasrallah, as a freedom fighter struggling to liberate his
people from foreign occupation. “For six years there was peace in
Galilee,” she says.
But that tenuous peace was shattered July 12 when Hezbollah militants
staged a brazen cross-border raid, kidnapping two Israeli soldiers.
On the same day, the militia fired rockets at northern Israel: Some
of them landed near Ms. Anteby’s house in Kakhal, a tranquil village
in the upper Galilee, sending deer from a nearby nature reserve
galloping in panic across the hillside. “I suddenly realized that
Nasrallah isn’t a political leader at all, but a jihadi,” she says.
“He was never fighting for freedom — it was and is a war of religion.”
Like many in Israel, Ms. Anteby sees the latest conflict as a
legitimate response to Hezbollah’s aggression. “It’s like someone’s
come into my house and stolen my child,” she says. “All war is
cursed. But this one is for our very existence.”
Even the errant airstrike on Qana, which killed more than 50 Lebanese
civilians, didn’t diminish her support for the war. “It’s
indescribable what happened there,” she says. “But the blood of
innocents is on Nasrallah’s hands, not ours. He’s prepared to
sacrifice innocent lives to freely operate in southern Lebanon.”
Other key members of the Four Mothers agree with her. In interviews
in the Israeli press they’ve strongly defended the current war. One
exception is Rachel Ben-Dor, a founding member who has been living in
the U.S. for the past five years and says she fears that by re-
entering Lebanon, Israel may be about to repeat the fatal mistakes of
its past. “I understand the anger, the fear and frustration this
time, but I don’t understand how come we always fall into the trap of
terror groups in Lebanon,” she wrote in an email exchange with a
reporter.
Ms. Anteby doesn’t regret her work in Four Mothers. But she admits
badly misjudging Sheik Nasrallah. “I thought he would lay down his
arms and try to bring prosperity to southern Lebanon, not take it
back to the Stone Age,” she says. “I made a mistake.”