Sometimes you need the eyes of a stranger, looking in from the outside, to come to an understanding of subjects you have thought about so much and so often that they have become blurred and lost focus from your extreme closeness to them.
On my trip to the US I had the pleasure of talking with Shirley – a pleasant, polite woman – about the situation in Israel. She asked about the central role of the military in Israel, about why there was such hostility to any criticism of it. This came up after describing my experiences (including death threats) following a column I had written and the pieces I published in the course of the 2006 Lebanon war.
I told her that one cannot talk about the military and its focal role without taking into account the central place of the Holocaust in Israeli life. Since the days of Ben Gurion’s prime ministership, the Holocaust has become a unifying code of what it means to be Israeli. It is almost a religion. And the military has been endowed with being its polar opposite: Holocaust is contrasted with Revival, and the revival is an explicitly military one. The army is the organization whose role, under the organizing myth, is stated (by general Eliezer Stern, in another of his buffoonish statements) as “in every generation, every person must seem himself as if he himself came out of Auschwitz,” – echoing the liturgical statement about slavery in Pharaonic Egypt and the escape of the Israelites, which is celebrated by Jewish families annually in a great feast, with extensive liturgical content. In every generation, so whispers the myth, the Israeli army fights back Hitler’s armies, which invade Eastern Europe; the Israeli Air Force flight over Auschwitz, the Chief Of Staff declaring that “we have arrived too late” – all these are elements of the army playing its role in the organizing myth.
And of course, with such an organizing myth, the best defense is always a good offense, with extra points for a surprise offense, such as the ones Israel enacted in the Sinai in 1956, the 1967 war, and in the invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Obeying the customary laws of international diplomacy would play into the hands of the enemy, which is always monstrous and forever planning complete annihilation. Facing an enemy like that, the usual laws against war crimes can be dismissed. As former Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon said, “we granted ourselves permission to kill the wife,” – this being Selah Sahara’s wife, who was killed – oops! – along with 14 children, after the Israeli air force dropped a one-ton bomb on the apartment building where she had lived.
(It should be parenthetically notes that Palestinians play their role in this myth effectively, starting with Mufti Haj Amin Al Husseini and through to the tragically foolish tactic of promoting Holocaust denial in service of resisting Zionism.)
Shirley gave the matter a few seconds of thought and then said, “so you’re telling me that anyone who criticizes the army is, effectively, denying the Holocaust.” Exactly. And better than I could have put it myself. Sometimes, you need a stranger.
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A survey published last weekend in the popular Yediot Acharonot daily tells us that an astonishing number of citizens, 82% of them, stated that they have faith in the Israeli army. This was in a year when the Israeli army attacked Lebanon and barely managed to move ten kilometers beyond the border – even though the Lebanese army was not even deployed against it; in the year when it transpired that the Air Force could not disable bunkers, in a war that was intended as a sort of teaser, preceding an attack on Iran – not even the bunkers shockingly discovered within Israel itself; in the year when it became evident that the Israeli army could not put together five kilometer supply lines in hostile territory; in a year when it again became evident that the Israeli army had no response for any threat facing Israel, that Israel’s enemies can force it to evacuate whole towns, and that its army can do nothing to prevent this.
Now you might say that a housefly has a better long-term memory than the Israeli public. Well, yes, but damn and blast, the Winograd Report detailing military failures in the 2006 Lebanon War is less than one month old. It tells a devastating story about the role played by the army and by former Air Force Chief Dan Halutz in the decision-making process. Since this report only dealt with the first week of the war, even harsher judgments are expected in future.
And after all that, after that long chain of failures and disasters, 82% of the population says they have faith in the army. How does that happen? How can it be that the person who sent the Prime Minister and Minister of Defense down this disastrous path to a pointless war, where he was responsible for a near-infinite series of failures – how does it come out of the failure smelling like roses?
The answer seems to come from the field of psychology. If the average Israeli acknowledges the fact that the Israeli Army is not the American military in Normandy but rather, more the British military in Dunkirk, he would be seized by an existential fear. Nothing stands between him and the new Hitler – be he currently called Ahmadinajad, Nasrallah, or Haniyeh; and there are politicians who base their entire career on such comparisons. To resolve the cognitive dissonance that arises from the clash between the claims that Israel’s army is the only thing that prevents an ever-possible second Holocaust and the fact that the Israeli army is not actually functional, the average Israeli takes two courses of actions.
First, he engages in denial. Denial is the first line of defense. There are no problems whatsoever, everything is all right. Lebanon was a just a specific, limited failure, which has nothing at all to do with 1973 and 1982 and 1987 and the first and second Intifadas. The sequence of events exists only in the imagination of professional self-haters. And anyhow, who are you to say such things about the Israeli army?
The second, quieter action, is the acquisition of a second passport. This has become a most acceptable step in recent years, or so I am told. People seek out ways to get a Romanian or a Polish passport. To have around. Just in case. In case Panzers reach the outskirts of Ramat Hasharon. In case the consul bangs on his table and says “you’re officially dead./But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.”
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Ironically, both reactions – both the denial and the preparation for fleeing – guarantee their own perpetuation. Denial prevents any rehabilitation of the Israeli army. As long as the public attacks not its failing generals but rather, the people who point out the failures; as long as it prefers to blame the media for the failures of the war, rather than blaming those who are truly responsible, the army will not repair itself. And why should it? After all, it has already reversed the normal order of things: the life of a soldier is considered far more valuable than that of a civilian. Just between myself and my readers, after every failure the army is flooded with even more money, granted even more influence. It becomes more powerful with every defeat.
The fact that very many Israelis have already given up on Israel – and I can’t blame them for that, I would also like a seat on the last flight, and I do assume that the last flight will indeed take place – demonstrates that Israel is indeed becoming a gossamer society, spun of cobwebs. There may be a recognition of the terrible failure of Zionism, of its conception of “shelter for a night”; perhaps people are fed up with living in a grumpy land, which devours its own residents; perhaps it is the feeling of having been abandoned by the establishment, which perceives you as indebted to it for everything and entitled to nothing; and perhaps there is that most Jewish of actions: packing and wandering in times of trouble. These all make Israel into a ship whose own rats sense its impending sinking and scurry about getting their documents in order.
But this is a subject not frequently discussed in public. It is too upsetting to one’s peace of mind. It is much more comfortable to whistle in the dark and tell the nice young man on the phone that you indeed have full faith in the green-clad beast. Especially if you’ve just received your very own Transylvanian passport. That somewhat alleviates the guilt feeling, the abandonment which you are considering.
Ignore failures or deeply acknowledge them – in either case, Israel’s army wins. And Israel – as usual, when its army wins – loses.
Originally published in Hebrew in May 2007, on Friends of George. Translated into English by Dena Shunra.