The battle for the home front: Who will be responsible for Israel’s citizens in the next war? - Week’s End - Israel News | Haaretz Daily Newspaper
▻http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/week-s-end/the-battle-for-the-home-front-who-will-be-responsible-for-israel-s-citizens
GOC Home Front Command Maj. Gen. Eyal Eisenberg is very worried these days. In HFC, worry is a job requirement. While the other generals plan battle-winning maneuvers and surprise, in-depth attacks on the enemy, Eisenberg has to think about more prosaic matters, such as ensuring that the civilian population has food and a power supply when under fire.
These days, however, Eisenberg’s worries have a different cause. Behind the scenes, he is waging a rearguard action to prevent responsibility for the home front from being divided among a number of authority-hungry government ministries. If he fails, the implications for the quality of protection offered the Israeli public in wartime could be far-reaching.
The limitations of the Israeli home front were first exposed in the Gulf War of 1991. Again in 2006, in the Second Lebanon War − as depicted in the State Comptroller’s Report − Israel was caught with its pants down. For 34 days, rockets rained down on a third of the country, and the authorities were helpless.
A bureaucratic battle, one about which the public is unaware, is currently raging. Eisenberg isn’t talking about it in public, and the army, too, remains tight-lipped. If the issue is coming to the attention of the public, it is thanks to a number of people who have accumulated many years of experience in dealing with emergency situations.
“In principle, it makes a great deal of sense to rearrange the way the home front is dealt with, and even to remove some powers from the Israel Defense Forces,” one of these people tells Haaretz. “But what’s taking place now is a kind of coup, and the results in a war could be disastrous. Everyone who understands something about the home front understands that this is an insane move. My hair stands on end when I think about it.”
Since the unexpected summer of social protest in 2011, Israelis have become more aware of the tortuous and untenable way in which decisions are made in government ministries. Just this week, social activists took to the streets to demand that greater restrictions be placed on the export of the yield from Israel’s natural gas reserves. The question of who will manage the civilian rear in a war − a question with implications for hundreds of lives − is not getting similar attention, for the time being.
This week the IDF again ran an exercise simulating a total, multi-arena war, in which the air force and elements of the ground forces took part. As usual in recent years, much of the drill was devoted to ways of coping with the threat to Israel’s civilian population. Even if the slew of enemies − Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas − are no longer as coordinated among themselves as they used to be, because of the rift between Shi’ites and Sunnis generated by the ongoing Syrian civil war, they share a common understanding: that Israel’s great advantage in a war situation lies in the attack capability of its air force. Accordingly, the enemy will have to act quickly and powerfully to offset that advantage.