Now it's all over

Nobody here really believes it's over at all, but the fact remains that the reservists are already home - as, of course, are the wounded. 18 year old boys with bullet wounds in their limbs whose eyes fill unexpectedly now and again, like when they're in a crowded bar and the crowd seems happy. It's called grief.

The older ones look after each wounded soldier as if he were their own kid brother; there's no roughness there, Israeli guys on the whole are very good when it comes to hugging at the right moment or knowing when it's a good time to walk someone away from an emotionally unbearable situation. And meanwhile the regular IDF (i.e. the non-wounded teenagers and the career soldiers that lead them) are still in Lebanon, waiting to be relieved by an increasingly recalcitrant Lebanese Army/UNIFIL coalition.

I'm told by friends who work in the Knesset that the atmosphere there is every bit as unpleasant as it looks in the press. Pretty much everyone is scheming against at least one other person, and (given that Israel has a highly efficient State Comptroller at present) there are also a bunch of accusations that would've arisen anyway against various members of the government. The Minister of Justice has already resigned; others may or may not find themselves forced to do the same. It depends on how much is spin and how much is for real. Olmert, Peretz and Halutz are coming in for spectacularly heavy (and - in my opinion - largely unfair) criticism. Unaccustomed as I am to living in a war zone, I only saw a handful of things that really went wrong:

1) the Israeli press had too much freedom, to the extent that they endangered soldiers' lives;
2) the weaker members of the 'home front' were forced to 'stand firm', or in some cases be wounded or even die, because nobody provided for them or evacuated them until the last minute - and even then it was a limited evacuation (from Kiryat Shmona, which bore the brunt of the direct missile hits);
3) the logistics were rubbish - the reservists complained of being under-trained, under-equipped and (in some cases) of not having enough food and water supplies to see them through the last-push ground attack;
4) the upper echelons underestimated Hezbollah's capabilities and worse, weren't prepared to listen to the soldiers on the ground who told them the full story.

Everyone that knows me will be wondering what on earth Israel has done to me that I don't care about the loss of civilian Lebanese lives all of a sudden. I do still care - but I believe Israel genuinely tried to minimize civilian deaths, and I've been very, very cynical about the way the Arab press report anything since the time of 'the Jenin massacre'. I've read a lot of conflicting reports coming out of Lebanon, and there's enough Israeliness in me that I find the sensationalist use of childrens' corpses - particularly during a war - almost as sickening as the fact that children died at all. They died here too; the difference is, Israel counted them all in a transparent way, and released each one's name rather than photographs of what was left of their bodies. (Direct hits from missiles don't leave whole corpses, sorry but.)

While all eyes were on Lebanon, the IDF were busy in Gaza. They took to phoning up homes known to be used for arms storage and giving the residents 15 minutes to get out before they flattened those buildings. I haven't even seen anyone comment on the success of this strategy, but the upshot has been that civilian deaths there have gone down dramatically; active terrorists have been targeted in a cleaner way, and something like 150 of them are idling with their virgins now as a result. Hamas and Fatah came very close to forming a unity government yesterday and _most_ of the militias have quit firing on Israel. It's been quite a success story to date; it could even lead to that peaceful Palestinian neighbour most of Israel wants. And this much was achieved already by the same team most Israelis seem to want to throw out of the Knesset. Go figure.