was now chief of staff, to ensure we had a plan to get our troops out as quickly and

/ BARAK / 52 was now chief of staff, to ensure we had a plan to get our troops out as quickly and safely as possible once the order was given. But complex though the operational issues were, that was not the most difficult part. The withdrawal had not just a military aim, but a critical political one: to denude Hizbollah, with full international support, of its “occupation” fig-leaf for targeting and terrorizing the towns and villages of northern Israel. Shaul and a number of other generals in the kirya tried to make the security argument for keeping several small hilltop outposts just north of the border. But I insisted not a single Israeli soldier or emplacement remain on Lebanese soil. Throughout the spring, we had been coordinating every detail of the planned pullout with UN cartographers on the ground, to ensure that they, too, recognized it would be a fu// withdrawal to the border, fulfilling the terms of the Security Council resolution adopted after the 1982 Lebanon War. Ordinarily, an operation on this scale would have been carried out over a period of weeks. But when we handed over a pair of military strongholds to the South Lebanon Army, and Hizbollah promptly moved in to take them over, it was clear that even several days might risk chaos, and casualties, as we left. The head of the northern command now supported an immediate withdrawal, and I agreed. Frustratingly, we did have to hold off for a further 36 hours, in order to ensure the UN staff on the ground could complete their verification process. But on the afternoon of May 23, alongside Shaul Mofaz at a command post on the border, I ordered the pullout of all Israeli troops, vehicles and other equipment within the space of 24 hours. I then flew back to Jerusalem for an urgent meeting to secure formal cabinet approval. The field commanders ended up getting it done in /ess than 24 hours, mostly overnight, without a single Israeli casualty. For nearly two decades, our troops had been serving and dying on a strip of land on which we had no claim, no settlements, and for which there was no rational security need. Finally, we were out. As I should have anticipated, there were accusations from Hizbollah and its allies that our UN-verified withdrawal was incomplete. At issue was a cluster of villages where Lebanon meets Syria, known as the Sheba’a Farms. But as I knew first-hand, they were not part of Lebanon. I’d met their Syrian inhabitants when I helped “capture” the villages at the very end of the 1973 war on the Golan. When Syria now publicly supported Hizbollah’s efforts to get the UN to say the area was in fact part of Lebanon, I decided to call their bluff. Through the Americans, I 338 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011809