Israel is in for some real surprises in the coming War,
The IDF, Like The Old Gray Mare, Ain’t What IT USED TO BE!
Unfortunately, the Following Two Quoted Paragraphs are Reality!
Two Paragraph Quote From MEMRI Special Dispatch NO.
2499 Follows:
BEGIN QUOTE
“[Safwat Al-Zayyat, military expert and formerly a high-ranking officer in the Egyptian army, spoke of Israel’s ‘strategic defeat’ in the Gaza war and its implications for Israel’s future. He stated: “The present Zionist generation is a generation that likes comfort and ease. It lacks the toughness of the first generation of the kibbutzim and the settlements. It cannot withstand [the hardships] of battle.
‘With the Palestinians, the situation is completely different. In the past, during killings and massacres,
the Palestinians would pack their belongings and leave their villages.
The present generation, [on the other hand], clings to the land and prefers to die on the soil of the homeland rather than leave it in the hands of the occupying enemy.’]”
END QUOTE
August 22, 2009
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
Although the IDF has undergone considerable toughening up since its 2006 conflict with Hizbullah, what Safwat Al-Zayyat said in the above quote is something I have said since 1992. The last time I warned about it was in September 2008.
Begin 2008 Blog
IDF needs greater Training & Funds
Under Funded Rusty IDF not an Option
A long chain of victories can be Dangerous
Something New England Patriots Discovered
48, 56, 67, 73 victories sow IDF Overconfidence
Overconfidence IS A contributor TO Incompetence
This is Not the generation Israel Fought 1948-1973
Muslims who fought in the 73 War are now PAST Fifty
September 7, 2008
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
Begin Excerpt from Haaretz
Senior reserve general: IDF desperately needs more training, funds
By Amos Harel, Haaretz Correspondent
September 5, 2008
Major General (res.) Moshe Ivri-Sukenik, who resigned as commander of the Israel Defense Forces’ Nor thern Corps earlier this year, has sharply criticized
the way the army is training. In his first public comments on the matter, Sukenik says the army’s training program is flawed and troops are not being prepared for future challenges.
“We are not training enough,” Sukenik, who led an IDF in-house probe after the Second Lebanon War, said yesterday.
Sukenik served as commander of the IDF’s ground forces several years ago. After the Lebanon war he led the investigation into battles by Division 162. Sukenik was asked to return to the ranks and command the Northern Corps, but he resigned in January, in part to protest what he calls the insufficient allocation of funds for training the land forces.
Sukenik spoke yesterday in Ramat Efal at a conference on the land war in Lebanon.
“After a year at the Corps, I told a forum of the most senior ranks in the army [the General Staff] that it is not taking things seriously.
We are not training sufficiently. We are not giving people the minimum means to succeed,” Sukenik said.
Although since the war a major effort has been taken to restore the ground forces’ readiness, this is not enough, he said.
” I did what
I could to restore knowledge. It will take time for the IDF to recover from the wounds of the war …. Now they are once more talking about cuts in the defense budget.
The easiest thing to do is to cut training budgets, because that is where there is big money. The result is that next year, after the cut, the readiness level will once more be low,” Sukenik said.
Describing the army before the war as having “rusted,” he said about one division: “Would you believe they did not have maps of the Golan Heights? They had no operational plans on a critical front.
Their plans were for an entirely different front. This is the sort of vertigo the IDF found itself in.”
Sukenik blames the war’s failures on the conduct of the senior officers, and the confusion in the orders given. “The soldiers in the field heard in the media and in the Knesset that there would not be a ground offensive. ‘We can end this with the air force,’ they said. In the end it trickles down and has an effect. I say with authority: 70 to 80 percent of responsibility for the results [of the war] lie with the command and the General Staff. The gaps in readiness are not a pleasant thing, but in the end these led to only 10 to 15 percent of the final results.”
Sukenik described the results of the war as “embarrassing” and said he accepted the invitation to lead an in-house probe of the performance of a division because he wanted to understand “what had happened to the most skilled group. Why did they behave this way? These are the best people we have.”
He also criticized the decline in the ground forces’ preparedness in the years before the war, and he himself accepted blame because he was a member of the General Staff.
“People did not understand what a mountainous passage means. An armored battalion goes into a mountainous passage [during the war] without an engineers APC [armored personnel carrier], without bulldozers – and they think that’s okay. Things that used to be maxims evaporated. In the air force there is a someone leading a flight of aircraft. If he does not practice twice a month, he is not ready,” Sukenik said.
“Everything is written in orders. In the ground forces the company commander is always ready, even if he has not trained all his life. This is not something you learn on the Web …. A battalion goes on a three-week training session in a year – and they trained for deployment in the Gaza Strip or Nablus, not for a major war. Unfortunately this is still not sufficiently understood. A battalion commander needs to know how to defend and attack on the Golan heights.”
Sukenik said one of the biggest lessons of the war is that the IDF must deal with short-range rockets. “Since the war we made this part of our orders: The mission of every force is to end the indirect fire from its area of operations. This is a problem the commander must deal with, no one else.”
Begin Excerpt from MEMRI
Middle East Media Review Institute (MEMRI)
Special Dispatch – No. 2499
August 21, 2009
Hamas ‘Victory Festival’ in Damascus
In March 2009, Hamas held a festival at the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus, Syria to mark “the victory of the ‘Izz Al-Din Al-Qassam Brigades,” its military wing, in the “Al-Furqan War,” [1] i.e., the 2008-9 war with Israel in Gaza. The festival included a photo exhibit and the screening of films showing the Al-Qassam Brigades at their training camps; distribution of videos about the Brigades’ operations during the war; and an evening poetry program featuring poets and children’s choirs from across the Arab world. There were also speeches by military and political activists from the resistance movements, who praised the resistance and martyrdom operations while condemning the Palestinian Authority and various Arab countries.
Following are excerpts from statements made at the festival, as published in the Al-Qassam Brigades newsletter in April 2009.
Al-Qassam Brigades: We Will Continue Jihad as Long as We Live
The “surprise of the festival,” as the newsletter described it, was a video address by Al-Qassam Brigades spokesman Abu ‘Obaida, in which he declared, “We say to the Zionists and to all those who conspired with them that we have triumphed and thwarted their despicable goals… We launched our resistance and jihad not in order to open a [border] crossing or beg for a piece of bread… [but in order to] liberate the land, purge the holy places, and restore the refugees [to their homes]. Therefore, we will continue the jihad as long
as we live. [Our slogan is] victory or martyrdom…”
Addressing the Palestinian diaspora, Abu ‘Obaida said, “This is your struggle as much as it is ours… a struggle to remain in this land…”
Popular Resistance Committees Activist: Our Missiles Were Fueled By Martyrs’ Blood
One of the speakers at the festival was Abu ‘Abir, spokesman of the Salah Al-Din Brigades, the military wing of the Popular Resistance Committees. He said: “…True, thousands of Palestinians, [including Hamas] government employees, were martyred [in the war]. But what the enemy did not know is that their blood [fueled] the missiles we fired at the Zionist settlements and military bases throughout the war…
“The Zionist enemy wanted to eliminate the [Hamas] government, which draws its legitimacy from the resistance. [It wanted] to break [this government] and force it to submit, because it knows it represents the resistance.
But what the enemy did not know is that the resistance has never given up and will never give up this government.”
Former Egyptian Army Officer: The Zionists Can No Longer Withstand the Hardships of Battle
Safwat Al-Zayyat, military expert and formerly a high-ranking officer in the Egyptian army, spoke of Israel’s “strategic defeat” in the Gaza war and its implications for Israel’s future. He stated: “The present Zionist generation is a generation that likes comfort and ease. It lacks the toughness of the first generation of the kibbutzim and the settlements. It cannot withstand [the hardships] of battle.
“With the Palestinians, the situation is completely different. In the past, during killings and massacres, the Palestinians would pack their belongings and leave their villages. The present generation, [on the other hand], clings to the land and prefers to die on the soil of the homeland rather than leave it in the hands of the occupying enemy.”
Al-Zayyat added that Hamas’ constant rocket attacks on Israel throughout the war were proof of its victory.
Hamas Executive Bureau member Muhammad Nazzal said: “I want to expose a fact that may evoke puzzlement, condemnation, and resentment. Senior Palestinian and Arab leaders once asked the ‘Israeli’ officials not to free Fatah fighter Marwan Barghouti [from prison in Israel] because this would weaken [PA President] Mahmoud ‘Abbas. On another occasion, [they asked that he be kept imprisoned] because his liberation would strengthen Hamas politically and increase its popularity…”
Addressing the Palestinian prisoners incarcerated in Israel, Nazzal declared: “We promise you that we will never forget you as others have done, and never deceive you as others have done. Our abduction of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit three years ago was part of our efforts to free you…”
Abu ‘Abir said, in a similar vein: “The hypocrites [i.e. the PA] stood on the borders of the homeland and prepared themselves, thinking that they could reenter [Gaza riding] on the Zionist tanks. But Allah be praised, their hopes were dashed. We destroyed the tanks and delivered the pieces to the [Zionists’] doorstep.”
[1] Al-Furqan, meaning “salvation,” is one of the names of the Koran, and is also the name given by Hamas to the Gaza war.
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