Getting Lebanon Wrong

By Michael J. Totten

Right after the end of the Hezbollah war I interviewed two members of Israel's Peace Now who stayed on a kibbutz just a few kilometers south of the border under Katyusha fire attack. Not wanting to give space only to the Israeli left, I sought out someone who could give me a different point of view, someone who was not an officer or spokesman for the Israeli Defense Forces, someone who could speak his or her own mind freely without having to answer to the government or the army.

Yaacov Lozowick seemed perfect. He's the archivist at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, and he wrote a book called Right to Exist: A Moral Defense of Israel's Wars. His Introduction is titled Why I Voted for Sharon.

If anyone would be able to provide a clear and thoughtful defense of Israel's most recent war in Lebanon, it should be him. But he did not say what I thought he would say. The Hezbollah War, or whatever it ought to be called, is one of the least popular wars in Israel's history.

We met at Yad Vashem and he gave me the best insider's tour of the museum I could ever have hoped for. Afterward we sat down in the restaurant to talk about his book and the recently concluded hostilities.

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