Reporter says war struck fatal blow to unilateralism

by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

An Israeli journalist speaking in Roseland said the war in Lebanon has dispelled the notion that Israel can act unilaterally in its dealings with its neighbors.

The missile threat from Hizbullah, said Tovah Lazaroff, a reporter for The Jerusalem Post, has left Israel’s ruling Kadima Party with two options.

“You can totally obliterate the threat — which is what Israel tried to do this summer, and it didn’t work so well — or you’re going to have to come to an agreement. But a unilateral move, the way Kadima had been talking about before, is kind of off the table,” she said.

Lazaroff spoke at a luncheon meeting of the Community Relations Committee of United Jewish Communities of MetroWest New Jersey at the law offices of Grotta, Glassman & Hoffman.

She also said that peacemaking with the Palestinians has been set back by the recent war. “The argument for having a Palestinian state is now much harder to make,” she said, based on fears that Palestinians in the West Bank could eventually gain the capability of hurling powerful missiles into Israel.

Lazaroff said the European Union’s decision to back the new Palestinian unity government further complicates the Israeli position. “The pressure is going to be on Israel to move forward even as politically within Israel it is going to be much, much harder to do that.”

The Massachusetts-born Lazaroff mixed political analysis with anecdotes from the war zone — an assignment she described as a large leap for a reporter who once reported on environmental affairs at a chain of Massachusetts newspapers and, after making aliya, covered education and Diaspora affairs for The Jerusalem Post.

When the summer of 2006 began, Lazaroff had expected her mission would be to cover the lives of Gaza settlers relocated after last year’s withdrawal.

She was also keeping track of Israel’s intention to withdraw from some areas of the West Bank and the potential crackdown on the 12 “outpost settlements” the government had deemed illegal.

On June 25, however, she covered the story of an attack on an Israeli tank, in which two soldiers were killed, a third survived with injuries, and a fourth, Gilad Shalit, was taken prisoner by Hamas.

“The Shalit thing was huge, until it was totally overshadowed by something even larger” in July, when Hizbullah shelled the North and seized two other soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev.

“Most people in the North are much savvier than I was about ‘the winds of war.’ The moment they heard about the attack, many people simply grabbed their belongings and said, ‘Okay, this means war.’ They went to Jerusalem, they went to the West Bank, they went to the center of the country, and I moved in the opposite direction.”

The attacks produced near unity among Israelis until “only at the very end, when you started to hear voices of dissent. The Left was very quiet until the last week or two. The level of the casualties and the destruction of the buildings gave the Left something to say.”

With the advent of the cease-fire, Lazaroff predicted “economic fallout. You can’t shut down half of a country for six weeks” without major financial repercussions.

She also predicted that in the aftermath of the war, there will be “a lot of fighting in the cabinet and the Knesset….”

The resulting “diplomatic and political fallout” represents a shift of attention from suicide bombers to what she called “the age of the missile.”

“I’m not saying there won’t be more suicide bombers,” she explained. “But the suicide bombers never paralyzed the country in a way that the Katyusha rockets did.”

She said she remains unsure as to whether the Kadima government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert can survive Israel’s next election.

“Can Olmert pull a rabbit out of a hat the way Ariel Sharon used to? I’m not writing him off,” said Lazaroff. “I’m leaving room for him to pull that rabbit out of a hat.”

“Tovah’s rich experiences at several of the flashpoints in Israel’s recent past gave her a broad perspective on this summer’s events,” said CRC director Lori Price Abrams. “Her anecdotes illustrated how small a country Israel is and how Israelis got through the crisis by supporting one another.”