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What made Israel burn Lebanon again?
The decision to go to war hurled Israel's economy into a wall,
smashed the deterrent' power of the country's army, plunged its
northern population into misery, and magnified the hatred felt
towards it in the region - all without achieving Tel Aviv's stated
goals.
Mishandled, the July 12th Hezbollah
raid that seized two Israeli soldiers could certainly have brought
down the government. But the incident was no unprecedented failure
of Israeli deterrence. Hezbollah had been trying to capture Israeli
soldiers in cross-border raids all year. Israel's government
had a choice in how they responded this time.
Why the choice for war?
Some say it was responding
to a message from its sponsor. Charles Krauthammer, the doyen
of U.S. neo-cons wrote in the Washington Post of Israel's rare
opportunity to demonstrate what it can do for its great American
patron'. Washington's green light for Israel was no favour, he
said. America wants, America needs, a decisive Hezbollah defeat'.
But why pursue this objective
by force of arms, at the cost of hundreds of lives, before even
considering the diplomatic option that was available from day
one?
Partly because Israeli society
holds a longstanding inclination towards overwhelming force preferably
involving collective punishment whenever an Arab force militarily
defies it. But where does this prejudice come from, and why has
it proved so pernicious?
A hint of the answer came on
June 26th, a day after the Shin Bet brutally squashed a religious
peace initiative aimed at resolving Israel's other 'existential'
crisis in Gaza (see
Then, Amir Peretz, Israel's
Defense Minister, explained why a military response to the seizure
of Corporal Gilad Shalit in Kerem Shalom was needed. 'I will
not permit the blood of our citizens to be shed,' he growled.
'Our hand is open for peace, but closed into a fist in the face
of terror.'
Peretz' use of the 'clenched
fist' metaphor was telling. In Jewish lore, it traces back to
a song the Jewish Partisans sang as they marched through the
forests towards Warsaw:
'We strike like the wolf strikes,
We come like the wind and are gone,
And the fascist feels our clenched fist,
Our clenched fist, our clenched fist...'
The clenched fist allegory
evokes two defining characteristics of Israeli Jewish identity,
eternal victimhood and its Zionist riposte, the 'new Jew'. Early
Zionist leaders such as David Ben Gurion, Ze'ev Jabotinsky and
Arthur Ruppin were anxious to construct Israeli national identity
around this unyielding and aggressive prototype. Nordau called
it 'muscular Judaism'.
Revulsion at the victimhood
of the 'trembling ghetto Jew', weak, stooped and debased by two
millennia in exile, fed its modish alter-ego: a robust and virile
Israeli, implacable, resolute, and tied to the soil by blood.
Zionist groups had not been
distinguished in their physical resistance to anti-Semites in
Europe but they were gladiatorial in their assaults on Palestinian
communities. Moshe Dayan was frank about it: 'We are a generation
of settlers and without the steel helmet and gun barrel, we shall
not be able to plant a tree or build a house."
The settlers' houses and allotments
mushroomed - at the expense of a people without a land who, forced
from their homes and denied civic rights, were to be holed up
behind ghetto walls or else exiled into an Arab Diaspora, there,
perhaps, to live as rootless cosmopolitans.
Those who resisted learned
how Moshe Dayan's steel helmets and gun barrels provided their
housing insurance. 'If we try to search for the Arab it has no
value, but if we harass the nearby village,' Dayan said, 'then
the population there comes out against the [infiltrators]. The
method of collective punishment so far has proved effective.'
Today, it is a common sense
notion for most of the world that collectively punishing civilians
is more of a provocation than a deterrent. But historically,
the practice was effective in bowing the heads of one ethnic
group: the Jews of old.
During the 1648 Chmielnitzki
pogroms, which claimed around 250,000 Jewish lives, for instance,
the Jews of Tulczyn refused to even attack the Polish nobles
who had betrayed them to the Cossacks. Their community elders
had told them: 'We are in exile among the nations. If you lay
hands upon the nobles, then all kings of Christianity will hear
of it and take revenge on all our brethren in the exile.'
Eventually, the Zionist movement
placed the blame for such catastrophes on the lack of any European
territory from which to organise self-defence. But no Arab can
get with their liberation programme in Palestine because the
only roles it offers them are stand-in victims in someone else's
psychodrama. The programme's mitigating plea, the narrative of
a Phoenix state rising from six million ashes, came at a heavy
price - for Jews too.
As successive waves of migrants
arrived in the holy land, the "new Jew trope required them
to prove their worth as Israelis. Holocaust survivors became
the most merciless warriors of 1948; Arab Jews, the most fearful
anti-Arab racists. The meek Orthodox establishment won their
spurs as gun-toting hilltop bigots, while Russians today flock
to Avigdor Liebermann's Yisrael Beitenu party of ethnic cleansing.
They marched there all with fingernails piercing their palms.
Soon, the memory of anti-Semitic
persecutions will dim. In Israel they have already merged with
1948, 1967 and the country's subsequent wars as battles for the
survival of the Jewish people. Together they now form a powerful
assumed collective memory, with its own tabloid shorthand that
can be invoked at will.
On July 12th, for example,
the mass-circulation Israeli newspaper Maariv compared Sheikh
Hassan Nasrallah to Hitler, saying that it left Israel with 'one
choice: To respond with might, in one fell swoop, unless it does
not wish to live!' The resonance with Menachem Begin's justification
for carpet bombing Beirut in 1982 was unavoidable. Then, Begin
had compared Yasser Arafat to Hitler, hiding in a bunker surrounded
by civilians.
For most of the 34 days of
war, Israel's political leadership was sophisticated enough to
speak the lingo of US soundbites. As torn bodies were pulled
from the Lebanese wreckage, Ehud Olmert talked of a national
moment 'of transcendence, of purification' while the chief of
the Northern Command, Major General Udi Adam, suggested not counting
the dead.
But on the bus stops of Tel
Aviv, the posters bellowed a simpler message: 'Together we will
win'. The catch is that even victory would not staunch the pain
of the new Jew, whose raison d'etre is a misplaced fight against
terrifying ghosts that remind him from whence he has come.
Safer to say the phoenix will
prevail, and each time more barbaric. For the poisoned bird of
prey feeds on the hatred it creates as it hovers above the ruins,
unable to fly, its talons clenched and bloody, its screech of
'a nation's right to self-defence' an agonised cry for help that
might better translate as 'Stop me before I kill again'.
Washington listens, and sends
more bombs.
Arthur Neslen is a journalist working in Tel Aviv.
The first Jewish employee of Aljazeera.net and a four-year veteran
of the BBC, Neslen has contributed to numerous periodicals over
the years, including The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent
and Red Pepper. His first book, Occupied
Minds: A journey through the Israeli psyche, was recently
published by Pluto Press.
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