A Durable Peace (55 page)

This was very much my own experience. One of the young Israeli recruits whom I met in an elite military unit for which we
had both volunteered was Haim Ben-Yonah. Haim was a good half a head taller than the rest of us, and he stood out in other
ways as well. A self-effacing smile disguised an inner toughness, wedded to a basic integrity that made him the first of our
induction to be sent to officers’ school. If ever there were a person exemplifying so many of the things that we valued in
the Israeli character, Haim was that person. This was obvious to all of us from our first days in the army together. Our induction
into our unit entailed a twenty-four-hour, eighty-mile march, some of it over grueling terrain, and all of it during one of
the worst winter storms in years. Early in the march, when the officer leading Haim’s team twisted his ankle and had to be
evacuated, he asked Haim, then a raw recruit like the rest of us, to take command—which Haim did calmly, almost matter-of-factly.
And while the position of leadership Haim assumed naturally distanced him somewhat from the others in the unit, his habitual
reserve did not prevent him from opening up when it was needed. I remember in particular the friendship he struck up with
a young recruit whose family had come from Allepo in Syria. The youth found himself on perpetually unfamiliar ground in dealing
with the clannish kibbutzniks, but Haim was undeterred, spending hours speaking Arabic with him using what little of the language
he had managed to pick up on his kibbutz and sending both of them into paroxysms of laughter over the absurdities of his pronunciation.

One dark night in 1969, as the unit was carrying out a counter-strike across the Suez Canal after deadly Egyptian raids on
the Israeli side, Haim was killed in a burst of gunfire. His body fell into the waters of the canal and disappeared. We searched
for him
fruitlessly that night and the next, and his body was finally returned to us days later by the Egyptians. It was at the end
of a long row of cypress trees at Kibbutz Yehiam in the western Galilee, Haim’s home, that he was buried. It was there also
that I met Haim’s mother Shulamit and discovered that Haim had been born shortly after she and his father had been freed from
the death camps of Europe. Had he been born two years earlier, this daring young officer would have been tossed into the ovens,
one of the million nameless Jewish babies who met their end in this way. Haim’s mother told me that while she felt a great
deal of pain, she felt no bitterness. At least, she said, her son had died wearing the uniform of a Jewish soldier defending
his people.

I was nineteen years old then, and these words had a profound effect on me. I found myself thinking again and again about
the possibility that Haim might not have lived even the short life that he did live. Or, eerily, that he might have outlived
the war, but in a world in which Israel had not come into being. Would Haim have come out the same way in another land—a Hungarian-speaking
version of the same dauntless Israeli youth, sure of his place in the world, possessed of the same inner calm? For me this
was an unsettling question, and I was not at all sure of the answer. I had been born into the Jewish state and therefore believed
that the values and attitudes with which I and my generation had grown up were natural, long abiding, and even shared by all,
or most, Jews.

But this was not the case. A distinguishing feature of many Jews raised in Israel is the absence of the sense of personal
insecurity that accompanies many Jews in the Diaspora, even the most successful ones. While Israel itself may come under periodic
attack, the sense of
being
a Jew in Israel seldom does. There are occasional existential musings, limited to tiny fringe groups in the society, about
the purpose of it all and whether the Diaspora was not really preferable to all this, but these are sharp aberrations from
the norm: In the deepest personal sense, the overwhelming majority of Israelis feel completely and naturally at home in Israel,
notwithstanding its many problems. There are, of course, quite a
few Jews who feel at home in America as well, but a few sharp incidents of anti-Semitism may deprive them of this sense of
security. When non-Jews sense this vulnerability in Jews, some wrongly ascribe it to cowardice. I could not fully understand
until much later in life the view of the Jew as a pusillanimous creature because, although I had certainly met some noteworthy
cowards in my childhood and youth in Jerusalem, I had also seen the very opposite qualities in the young Israelis who grew
up with me. In any case, the issue here is not individual courage or lack of it, but the inner sense of belonging that produces
in turn a personal sense of security about one’s place in the world. This was the other great result of the Return. In addition
to the physical ingathering of the Jews, it stimulated a spiritual ingathering where feelings and attitudes that had been
lost in the dispersion were retrieved.

The speed with which a new generation raised in Israel had developed and absorbed this old-new ethos was one of the most remarkable
transformations in the history of any culture and of any people. No doubt it could take place so rapidly because the Jewish
people maintained the memories of its life in antiquity and preserved intact its desire not only to restore its independence
as a nation but its integrity as individuals. This is why what was happening in Israel radiated to the farthest corners of
the Diaspora and affected the self-perception of many Jews around the world. In particular, the victory after the Six Day
War stiffened Jewish pride and made many Jews speak out and declare their activism and commitment to the Jewish people and
the Jewish state. It was anything but coincidental that the great awakening of Soviet Jews, buried under half a century of
Communist amnesia, took place after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War in 1967, as Natan Sharansky and others have testified.
The reestablishment of the State of Israel and the rediscovery of the Jewish capacity to resist dramatically transformed the
objective and subjective condition of the Jewish people worldwide.

* * *

But this was not a complete transformation. Indeed, it could not have been complete. For the Jewish people, having lived outside
politics for so long, having not wielded power for so many centuries, could not adapt to an independent existence all at once.
If your fate has been entirely determined by others for centuries, it is difficult to internalize the idea that not only can
others bend you to
their
will, but that you can shape the actions of others to conform to
your
needs. A culture that is truly political assumes that the mustering of support and the periodic exercise of political power
is a natural and inevitable part of the ongoing struggle to survive.

But for the Jews, even reimplanting an understanding of the elementary need for
military
power entailed a bitter battle to overcome the entrenched view that Jews ought to have nothing to do with armies. The calls
by Theodor Herzl, Vladimir Jabotinsky, and others to challenge this state of helplessness by creating Jewish military and political
power met with derision even from many Jews and were dismissed as irrelevant absurdities or fascistic fetishes. Jewish critics
from all quarters warned that the establishment of Jewish military might would throw the Jews into the arms of militarism
and extreme nationalism, as though the act of wielding arms were in and of itself morally repugnant. If the Allies fighting
the Nazis had adopted such a view, it would have doomed humanity. Yet in rejecting the Zionist message to organize political
and military resistance, the Jews of Europe wasted a full four decades in which they could have obtained arms, allies, and
escape routes to save themselves. The result was Auschwitz.

The persistent refusal of most of the Jews to see the need for something as obvious as the capacity for self-defense seems
incredible today. It was indeed incredible, the result of over a thousand years of nearly complete detachment from political
and military realities. Of course, after the catastrophe of World War II, many Jews came to understand the need for military
power quickly enough; they understood the stark fact that the absence of a Jewish ability to physically resist the Nazis had
permitted a third
of their people to be slaughtered. This understanding they translated into the Jewish army of Israel, without which, they
knew, another Holocaust would have befallen them at the hands of the Arabs.

But even many Israeli Jews, who have come to accept the need for and the possibility of resistance, balk when it comes to
sustaining this resistance into the indefinite future. Perhaps because of the agonized odyssey of the Jewish people, the Jewish
mind seeks a way out of coping with this incessant political and occasional military struggle, stretching out into foreseeable
time. When will it all end? many Israeli and non-Israeli Jews ask. Will we go on struggling forever? Will the sword forever
devour its makers?

For Israel, such questions are never fully answerable. One cannot prophesy an endless succession of wars, nor predict the
scope of battles or their outcomes. Whether wars break out, whether they are defused by diplomacy or stopped by deterrence,
are questions no one can answer with certainty. But what is a safe assumption is that political conflict in the Middle East
is not about to disappear under any predictable circumstance—that is, unless one accepts the idea that history will soon come
to its end and we shall reach the millennium. Not coincidentally, this thought is of Jewish origin as well, although the visions
of Isaiah and the other Jewish prophets were principally intended to teach us what to strive for—and not necessarily what
to expect next week. But whereas many other peoples have been able to distinguish between the ideal vision of human existence
and the way the affairs of nations must be conducted in the present, the Jewish people has had a harder time accepting this
separation. The Jews have such an acute sense of what mankind
should
be that they often act as though it is virtually there already.

Nowhere is this penchant for seeing it all come to a speedy and satisfactory end more sharply felt than in Israel itself.
A country besieged time and again by armies calling for its destruction, whose eighteen-year-old sons and daughters give years
of their
youth to serving in the army, and whose adult men do reserve duty for another twenty-five years, naturally develops a powerful
longing for peace. As a result, broad swaths of Israel’s population have developed simplistic, sentimental, and even messianic
views of politics.

I recall, for instance, the attitudes of many people in Israel following the defeat of the Arabs in the Six Day War. A widespread
view was that the Arabs would sue for an immediate end to the conflict. I remember that even as an eighteen-year-old I found
inanely childish this notion that the Arab leaders would pick up the phone and call the whole thing off any moment now. Yet
it is remarkable how many in Israel actually believed this at the time, making no allowance for the possibility that the Arabs
would pursue the war against Israel by other means until they were ready for the next military round; nor did they make any
allowance for the time and experiences that would be needed for an evolution in the Arabs’ deeply held beliefs about Israel.

This approach was partly rooted in the tendency to ascribe to the Arabs the same sentiments that we felt in Israel, with a
total disregard for the differences in culture, history, and political values. Many Israelis believed that the Arabs loathed
war as much as they themselves did and that, given a proper explication of Israel’s peaceful intentions, the Arabs would embrace
and welcome us. This cloyingly sentimental approach was espoused in the 1920s by the Brit Shalom (Alliance for Peace) movement
led by the American rabbi Judah Magnes, who had settled in Jerusalem and became chancellor of the Hebrew University. Magnes
believed, in decidedly American terms, that the Arab campaign against the Jews was a product of a failure to communicate.
The Mufti, he believed, could be reasoned with, pacified, and appeased. Under no circumstances should the Jews take up arms
and retaliate, for this would merely heighten the Arabs’ hostility. It is difficult to believe how many of the leading intellectuals
of the Jewish community in Palestine continued to cling to this view, not only in the face of murderous anti-Jewish passions
incited by the Mufti but even in
the period when he was an active partisan of the Nazis. The successor-believers in this view are still very much with us today,
ignoring the realities of Arab political life, dismissing the intentions of those bent on destroying Israel, or inverting
logic by suggesting that they must be appeased rather than resisted.

Though the great majority in Israel shuns this simple-minded attitude toward the Arab world, it is nonetheless strongly influenced
by a current of thinking that encompasses surprisingly numerous segments of the population, left and right. This current derives
from the relentless Jewish desire to see an end to struggle. In its essence it is a nonpolitical, even antipolitical, approach
to the life of nations. Basically, it holds that history, or more precisely Middle Eastern history, will have a finite end.
We will arrive at a state called “peace” in which history will simply stop. Wars will end, external conflicts will subside,
internal conflicts will vanish, Israel will be accepted by the Arabs, and the Jews will be forever content. At this end of
days, Israel will become a kind of blissful castle in the clouds, a Jewish never-never land in which the Jews will be able
finally to find a respite from struggle and strife.

It is a view that I remember well from my childhood. The illustrated textbooks of Israel’s geography had drawings of rolling
hills and cultivated fields, in the center of which was a cluster of little white houses with red-tiled roofs and a water
tower in the background, presumably signifying some idyllic kibbutz or mo-shav. The idea was that we each were destined to
have our own version of this idyll, with our own little house, a stretch of grass next to it, and a leafy tree shading it—as
though we did not live in the middle of a sandstorm, as though the swirling dust of fanaticism and war were not enveloping
us, as though we were living in the Midwest and not in the Mideast. This fantasy view of Israel’s situation, including its
fairy-tale denouement, was broadly prevalent in the education of generations of youngsters both before and after the establishment
of the state.