At war, Israeli reservists wield new weapon: opinion polls

To those on a family vacation and hard at work, the call came: Tzav 8, code name for the emergency mobilization order from the Israeli military.

Soon, reservists found themselves on a Lebanese battlefield, at a disadvantage to Hizbullah guerrillas fighting on home turf. And in the midst of combat, they did what anyone wanting to influence decisionmakers here would do: get on their cellphones and commission an opinion poll.

And so, from somewhere south of the Litani River in Lebanon to the Tel Aviv headquarters of one of Israel's most prominent polling groups, a hyperdemocratic dynamic was put into play: Soldiers wielding the weapon of public opinion to try to influence how the war is being waged.

"We realize that we have to do something because it's a life-or-death situation, and so many soldiers were getting killed. We got upset, but we didn't know what to do," says Intelligence Corps Officer Shmuel Yannay, who has emerged as a kind of spokesman for the reservists – some of whom asked to have their identities withheld – who contacted the Dahaf Institute a week ago and commissioned the poll on the direction of the war.

"It's the first time ever it's been done, and I think it's a new tool," he says. "It's not refusal of orders or officers. If you do that, you abandon your friends in the field," explains Mr. Yannay, talking in a phone interview days before his next military assignment. Although he didn't get sent to Lebanon, he'd done perilous duty in Gaza, and recently got his call-up for service that will take him away from his day job – a lawyer for an investment club. "We tried to find an alternative way to put pressure on the political process," he says, and "to pressure the prime minister" to reconsider the course of the war.

Not, that is, the war itself. Israel went to war hours after Hizbullah's July 12 attack on Israeli soldiers, killing eight of them and kidnapping two others. Public opinion sat squarely behind that decision. But as the casualty count climbed, support for the war – and more specifically, its handling – declined. A poll released on Tuesday by a different group, Globes-Smith, found that 52 percent of the public believes the IDF did not succeed in the war, while 44 percent think it did.

The question the reservists posed was of a more tactical nature. The soldiers felt they were being sent into Lebanese villages like so much cannon fodder, and wondered why the Israeli military wasn't first calling in airstrikes on houses that were confirmed Hizbullah hide-outs.

"It's not supposed to be a moral dispute. There weren't any villagers left there at that point, just Hizbullah men," says Yannay. The soldiers began to question the wisdom of their orders.

"The answers they got didn't satisfy them. They were told that world public opinion wouldn't tolerate it," he says. "We got into this war, they told us, to prove to Hamas and Hizbullah that the blood of our soldiers doesn't come for free. But we proved in the war the very opposite thing: The blood of the soldiers seems less important than public opinion."

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