Stepping Up to the Job
HAIFA, ISRAEL--He may be Israel's unlikeliest warrior, a socialist trade union leader who participated in Peace Now demonstrations. Today as defense minister, Amir Peretz is giving orders to conduct Israel's biggest military offensive in years. The pacifist Labor Party leader, who barely a month ago urged restraint against Palestinian militants (and saw his poll rating drop) and then stammered at the start of the current crisis, is now talking tough. "There is no stopwatch on the military operation" in Lebanon, he declares--and the latest polls show he has gained Israelis' confidence.
Peretz, 53, claimed the Defense Ministry post in Labor's alliance with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's new centrist party, Kadima (Forward). With ambitions to become the next prime minister, he recognized that he would need to show voters real security experience--certainly something more than having served as an Army captain three decades ago. Most Israelis thought he was in over his head, and Labor colleagues scorned him for forsaking the party's social welfare mandate. Peretz, somewhat mockingly, said that under his command the generals would "create a new dictionary" of military acronyms for social work "like SOK for Soup Kitchen or UFUMW, the Unit for Upholding Minimum Wage." A colleague and former general warned him not to take his post lightly. "Be careful," Matan Vilnai told him. "Don't dismiss the military jargon or the military men. You will need them."
Rocky start. Sure enough. On the morning of June 25, when an Israeli soldier was captured by Palestinian militants from Gaza, Peretz faced the first of a sequence of fateful trials. It didn't go well. At a press conference with the Army chief of staff two days later, he stammered and stuttered, unable to get out a word. The local media broadcast it, repeatedly. Until then, Peretz had restrained the generals, who for months had been pushing for a ground invasion of Gaza to stop the Kassam rockets launched against his southern Israeli hometown of Sderot.
Finally, when Egypt's diplomatic efforts failed to gain the soldier's release and a Kassam fell for the first time on the city of Ashkelon, the famously stubborn leader caved in to pressure for action from the public, the military, and Olmert. Israeli tanks and troops entered northern Gaza, though Peretz restricted them to short incursions and urged restraint toward the civilian population.
But when Hezbollah fighters similarly captured two soldiers on the northern border, Peretz turned into the decisive man the public wanted. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, he declared, "will never forget the name Amir Peretz." No longer stammering, he spoke with force and conviction as he signed orders to attack civilian infrastructure and Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon and Beirut's southern suburbs, attacks that have killed more than 300 people, many of them civilians. It's not easy on him, says a confidant, who asked not to be named. "He is very sad, but he takes the necessary decisions."
Unlike the fight against Palestinians, this is a battle that Peretz believes in--a response to an unprovoked attack across an internationally recognized border by people not under Israeli occupation. Speaking to pilots during a visit to a military base, he convincingly declared, "This is a military operation that will determine the future of the state, and we will win." Nothing dovish sounding in that.
This story appears in the July 31, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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