One Version of the War in Israel

One could live an entire lifetime in, say, Tel-Aviv or Haifa, and never be set upon by hostile Arabs, never hear a shot, not the least gunfire, and one's closest brush with death would in all likelihood be on the roads, where cars are driven with the same reckless excitability that seems to grace the entire population. It is indeed true that, as the Israelis never tire of saying, "You are a great deal safer anywhere in Israel than on the streets of New York." But this confidence in day-to-day security, this state of ostensible normalcy, does not quite obscure the fact that Israel is actually a nation under siege, a country whose life is entirely circumscribed by the contingencies of a war whose muted presence can only briefly be evaded.

Every hour on the hour, all pretenses at nonchalance are dropped, and Israelis turn on their radios to a menacing reality. It is perhaps the one most familiar sound in the country, and one quickly develops the conditioned reflex of silence upon hearing it: Three short beeps in quick succession: the silence: and then, "Today is Thursday, January 21, good morning, and this is the news from Menashe Harel. Today on the Suez Canal, five soldiers were killed when their jeep..." And so on: on and on. The hostilities are never distant or impersonal: the vulnerability of Israel and indeed its very lack of size is brought home hard in the realization that the names of all casualties are read over the radio, and in every crowd of listeners there is inevitably one to whom a casualty is known, perhaps an acquaintance, perhaps a relative or friend. But they listen primarily not for personal tragedies; rather it is as if they are awaiting the next war which perches precariously at the brink of some incident, behind one of the countless provocations, and retaliations which continue without end on three or tour fronts simultaneously.

This feeling of inevitability, that it is only a question of time before once more their future must be laid on the line, stems naturally from the situation in the Middle East. It is an overwhelming burden, a continuous grinding pressure to be confronted by the constant spectre of an ever-closing ring of well-armed enemies, to whom one's very existence constitutes an act of aggression, and who rededicate themselves over and over to the total eradication of "the aggressor" under the aegis of "a holy war...a war of national liberation. "This tension has only been aggravated by the inclusion of a new factor; international power politics, as the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. play their respective moves in scenario after scenario, in which the stakes are understandably seen in Israel as being extremely high. But the lesson of Munich, 1938 and the Allied sellout of Czechoslovakia has not been forgotten there, and the Israelis have learned to rely on no one but their own army, which if need be (they say) will fight and defeat even the Russians. In the final analysis, there is no alternative.

The country appears to be constantly in a state of semi-mobilization, at least to American eyes. Everywhere there are always soldiers: some obviously on duty, their Uzzi sub-machine guns in their hands, very cautious, very intent: but most simply milling in the streets, and always several "tramping" on any given road at any given time. This seeming paradox of soldiers who never seem to be on duty (it is, in fact, a misleading impression), is a fitting metaphor for the compromise which Israel attempts to make between life-styles of war and peace: to live like the city-state of Athens, culturally, economically, open and expanding, but to be prepared at all times to become a fortress-state, a Sparta, and to fight to the end. The ubiquity of soldiers is understandable in light of the fact that every Israeli male, eighteen years of age (almost without exception) must serve in the armed forces for three years, after which, until he is fifty-four, he will serve up to eight weeks a year in the reserves. There is no military state of mind, as such, as opposed to a civilian one, primarily because there is little status for career officers in this army which is so overwhelmingly composed of civilians, of shopkeepers and university professors and farmers: a reserve army which three times already, in 1948, 1956, and 1967, has mobilized on less than 24 hours notice and waged a victorious war.

It is standard procedure to initiate a conversation by asking an acquaintance when will he go to "miluim", to the reserves; the habit is a reflection of the common burden which gives a necessary unity to the country, and, at the same time, brings the face of war ever so much closer to a population which at any rate never manages to quite escape from it: the air-raid shelters on every street, in every apartment building: the signs, "NO PHOTOGRAPHS - MILITARY INSTALLATION" within the very downtown of major cities; the roadblocks on main arteries of traffic, to prevent the illegal entrance of Arabs from the Occupied Territories; the guards in the movie-houses, checking every pocketbook, every briefcase for explosives. Everywhere is the vision of the Enemy who will always perpetuate the state of war and prevent peace from being more than a mere quantitative decrease in hostilities.

It is difficult enough to withstand the pressures of constant conflict, amidst the daily worry, the threats, and the rumors, even when there is a faint glimmer of peace in distant sight. Israel has learned to adjust itself to the situation. Yet it is quite another matter and unbearable beyond quite another matter and unbearable beyond belief to face the prospect of war without end for this generation and for generations to come; to accept as a fact and state of nature that in order to survive, a country can never put down its guns, but rather must raise its children from birth "to learn the arts of war." Many would no doubt call into question the value of a life whose security can be ensured only be deaths upon deaths. There are moments when such seems to be the situation in Israel: moments when it seems that it must resign itself to being Sparta, a nation of warriors, and abandon the Athenian style. The dilemma is a particularly difficult one for the Israelis because their image and identity which is now evolving is, in a sense, both the fulfillment and contradiction of their historic traditions.

Auniquely controversial issue raised at a Rabbinical Convention in Jerusalem, June, 1971, illustrates particularly well the conflicting cross-currents in Israeli attitudes, and the strange temper given to questions of "a higher order": In problems of state morality, must Israel yet act in the role of the Chosen People, a nation whose God-given duty is to set an ethical example to the other nations: or should Israel allow itself, as a state involved in the "temporal" complexities of international politics, the luxury of compromising morality in matters of expedience, as any other state might do without hesitation? The notion of a Chosen People is no longer particularly valid for the majority of modern Israelis who, for the most part, have a tendency toward gentle skepticism in religious matters. Yet insofar as the ancient Jews did develop a higher conception of morality in their monotheistic beliefs, it seems for the Israelis to constitute a type of historic betrayal to abandon the unique role which the Jews once played. Indeed the Utopian vision of the Prophets which clearly saw the day "when nation shall not lift up sword against nation..." was an important corollary to the Messianic expectation of Return to the Promised Land, a return fulfilled only by the Zionists in this century. As Utopian socialists and Communists, they of course rejected all such religious concepts as nonsense, yet the traditional Jewish concern with a better life for mankind which they no doubt absorbed in their childhood homes, might well have been the unconscious stimulus to their susceptibility to Socialism and its kindred idea of a perfectible world. The Israel they set out to create was to have been primarily the Jewish State, but at the same time, a workers' paradise centered on concepts of freedom and justice, a force for civilization and enlightenment in the Middle East, which (with the naivete of true historial determinists) they assumed the backward oppressed Arabs would be only too glad to accept. It is a tragedy of history that the well-meaning forces of Jewish nationalism collided head-on with an Arab nationalism which none suspected existed--and that in the ensuing conflict, "the Chosen People" would become a nation of conquerors, a role for which they were little suited.

The history of the Jews in the Diaspora (in Exile) is a chronicle of suffering, a horror story which reached its climax in the holocaust of World War II. The slaughter of the six million deeply scarred Jewish sensibilities turned all Jews into "survivors", and to a great extent whatever guilt or bad feeling exists in Israel stems from the fact that they, a nation of victims and refugees, have caused suffering to another people, the Arabs, and out of their national hopes engendered hundreds of thousands of Arab refugees. In light of the familiar Nazi refrain, "We were only following orders," the Israeli public has become extremely sensitive to the preservation of individual humanity amid the exigencies of warfare: a furious controversy ensued when the Tank Corps established as its philosophy that there was to be no room for personal initiative, but rather in view of the technical knowledge demanded, one must follow the superior's order to the letter, without question. In curious contrast to the silence after the slaughter at My Lai, a full parliamentary commission was instituted in Israel to investigate the rudeness displayed by Israeli soldiers to Arab refugees in the Gaza Strip.

Yet the Holocaust is a double-edged sword in shaping Israeli attitudes and more than any other factor has brought out the toughness so characteristic of this country. It is an often repeated adage that Israel is the most anti-Semitic nation in the world, and the statement is actually quite accurate insofar as Israel was created consciously as a revolt against the traditional image of the Diaspora Jew, the Ghetto Jew, born with a burden of guilt into a hostile world which he was unable to challenge and from which he therefore retreated, into the stagnant world of the Eastern European Jew, a world of peddlers, of scholars, of "luftmenschen" (literally, "men-of-the-air" that is, parasites, do-nothings) where he would scrounge a life until the next Good Friday when the mob of Christians would burst in for revenge upon the "Christ-killers", who would be cringing in their houses, under their beds, praying for salvation from a very meek and very silent God.

Israel in contrast was to be the home of a new type of Jew who lived off the soil in a land of his own, the land of his ancestors, not afraid to fight for his existence. There is a revealing anecdote widespread in Israel about a young Israeli child who when told by his father about the horrors of the Holocaust, asked incredulously, "But why didn't the Jews kill the Nazis with their Uzzis? (submachine guns)" If at times the Israelis seem abrupt, almost rude to the do-gooders who would advise them on how to wage their peace or their war, it is because they are not at all the same Jews who walked off to slaughter acquiescently, as the now-selfrighteous world stood silent and did nothing; rather these are Jews with guns who will themselves kill any enemy that threatens. They have been exposed to annihilation attempts too often to be able to interpret Arab threats of "a Jewish bloodbath" as mere rhetoric. The new generation in Israel has passed beyond ideology, beyond any concept of moral mission: Israel is quite simply their home and they must defend it. In such a spirit, Israeli schools tend to bypass the history of the Jews in the Diaspora and its "shame" completely and instead teach the youth to venerate their ancient ancestors who lived by the sword: the generation that originally conquered Canaan; the Maccabees who defeated the world-power Greece; most of all, the Zealots at Massada, who withstood Roman assault for two years and when the end was near committed mass suicide rather than live as slaves. It is a significant fact that Israeli soldiers are sworn in on the heights of Massada, overlooking the Dead Sea.

We in America are very weary of the cycle of wars that seems to infinitely go on, for causes no one believes in, causes not worth the deaths; and war has come to be seen as the pure expression of aggression or blindness or pride. Peace is there to be won, one must only want it and it will be within reach. Yet such an attitude, for all its moral validity, is naive in that it ignores the complex traps set by History for unsuspecting nations, out of which develop a tragedy of circumstance, of unavoidable war, whose victory is unobtainable and whose loss is too high a price to pay. Ultimately all considerations about the war in Israel are academic, the cause, the motivation, the minute detail: it is above all a war for survival, for preservation both national and individual. The outcome, if there is ever to be one, is lost in future haze, while the war itself, slowly, sadly, inevitably, is becoming identical in Israel to life itself.