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October, 2006
Opinions
Leonard Fein | Suzanne F. Singer | Marshall Breger | Naomi Ragen | Matthew Yglesias
Leonard Fein
Standing With Israel, but...
Our love of Zion must not render us mute
??“We Stand With Israel.” These words are unavoidable, inscribed on front lawn signs of synagogues all across America. And we do stand with Israel, without ambivalence.
Which made this past summer somewhat problematic, since the war we saw on television wasn’t conducive to keeping an easy balance. To be sure, we were appropriately anxious for Israel’s safety, appropriately angry at Hezbollah’s behavior. Still, the destruction of life and property in Lebanon was on a scale that led us to wonder just what “standing for Israel” implied.
We had our comforting answers: “Aha!” It was terrorist Hezbollah that started all this, by kidnapping soldiers inside Israel. “Aha!” Rockets were being indiscriminately fired at northern Israel. A million Israelis were driven from their homes. We could be anxious for our kinfolk and still feel a twinge of sympathy for the displaced Lebanese, but not responsibility. For was it not the case that the Lebanese civilians who were killed or wounded were killed or wounded because Hezbollah used them as human shields? While some of us may have been indifferent to the Lebanese suffering, only the most hard-hearted refused to acknowledge it. But how could such an acknowledgement fail to challenge our moral categories? A quick and decisive victory might have spared us such a challenge, but this war was neither quick nor decisive.
Now, in the aftermath, the war has come to be seen by many Israelis as nothing short of a fiasco. Critics insist that had Israel not relied so heavily on air power, it might have had a less ambiguous outcome. (Didn’t Vietnam expose the limitations of using air power against an indigenous guerrilla movement?) Some are saying that the errors were not only tactical but strategic and that the whole idea of “destroying Hezbollah” on the battlefield was ill-conceived, ill-prepared and ill-conducted. Accordingly, an investigative committee is looking into how Israel managed the war, and the Olmert government may be on its last legs. Indeed, Israel may, even by that nation’s typically contentious standards, be entering the most fractious political season it’s known since 1948.
War is a time for consensus, not for division and debate. Yet what if we think Israel picked the wrong job to do, and did it badly?
In August of 1973, I was in Israel. I’d spoken out against Israel’s then-incipient settling of the West Bank, so the Foreign Office took an interest in my visit and arranged a series of meetings to persuade me of the error of my ways. The final such meeting was the headiest: It was with the chief of Israeli Military Intelligence, General Eli Zeira.
The general spent some 40 minutes with me. Summing up his position, he said, “Don’t be so impatient. We have time. Neither Syria nor Egypt can touch us, not for the next 10 years at least. If they are so foolish as to try, I guarantee you—we will be in Cairo and Damascus within a week.”
I left his office thinking that this Israeli general, obviously no less concerned for Israel’s safety than I and privy to so much more information, must have known whereof he spoke.
Yet, less than two months after that conversation, Syria and Egypt attacked Israel; the Yom Kippur War had begun.
The moral obligation of individuals ready to stand behind Israel is to scrutinize any information they are given and to thoughtfully reach their own conclusions; they ought never simply accept the judgment of the generals or politicians. History is simply too riddled with their blunders to warrant such trust.
I do not mean to oversimplify this position. There’s pressure on the community to close ranks, as well as an inclination to defer to those closest to the battlefield, with all the relevant information. And those of us who are so physically distant and whose children are not (with a handful of exceptions) suddenly sent to kill and be killed hesitate to pass judgment.
Yet it cannot be that our love of Zion must render us mute. During the course of this summer’s violence, there were people in Israel and here in the United States who spoke out in criticism of the war. Here, organizations such as Brith Tzedek V’Shalom and Americans for Peace Now raised tough questions and pressed for non-violent solutions. Today, with the benefit of hindsight, their judgment seems more sober and their solutions potentially more productive than the judgments and decisions of Israel’s political and military leaders.
It’s not off the wall to argue that Israel had no choice but to respond as it did when Hezbollah crossed the border to kill and to kidnap. But the question that can no longer be avoided is tied to the years before that. What opportunities for a different way of dealing with Lebanon and with Hezbollah—or, for that matter, with the Palestinian Authority and Hamas—went unrecognized or were rejected? It is a question that becomes relevant not only as a matter of historical curiosity. As new opportunities and new challenges arise, it is an urgent question. Otherwise, we’ll meet again after the next and still bloodier fiasco.
Leonard Fein was Moment editor from 1975 to 1987.
Suzanne F. Singer
The Price of Contentment
How many times must we learn the same lessons?
?My mother-in-law, Jeanne Singer, died in Jerusalem this summer, just four days after her 98th birthday. I’ve been going through everything she left behind, especially the drawings and paintings of her later years. Among the canvases, I was startled to find a hand-drawn map—about five feet long—stapled on two pieces of plywood hinged with a rough strip of fabric. The map, bearing landmarks in southern Lebanon, was our son Alex’s improvised briefing tool for instructing his soldiers while he served in the Israel Defense Forces in 1987. It was two years after a small IDF force, along with its Christian allies, the South Lebanese Army, had established control over a 12-mile swath of Lebanon north of Israel’s border. This occurred in the aftermath of the war Israel waged in Lebanon to remove the PLO terror base and to chase Arafat to Tunis. From 1985 until 2000 it was the responsibility of Israeli soldiers on both sides of the border to prevent terrorist incursions into Israel’s villages and to stop Hezbollah’s firing of Katyushas into Israel. During those 15 years, the human cost to Israel was seven civilians killed by Katyushas and two or three soldiers killed each month.
One of those soldiers was Alex. On September 15, 1987, he was killed in an ambush on the boulder-strewn Christofani ridge by Palestinian terrorists, trained in Syria. The terrorists never reached their target—Jewish villages inside Israel.
The quiet in Israel’s north was imperfect. Over the years some Israelis wearied of the cost in soldiers’ lives. In 1997, after 70 soldiers died in a helicopter collision on their way in to Lebanon, a grassroots organization, that became known as the Four Mothers Movement, demanded that the Israeli government withdraw from the security zone. They succeeded when Ehud Barak took office in 2000 promising to “ensure the safety of the northern towns and villages,” by withdrawing and redeploying inside Israel’s northern border. Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, had already proclaimed on CNN, “We’re close to victory; we’ll drive [the IDF] from our land.” In May, Barak fulfilled his pledge in a sudden nighttime pullout.
For the next six years, northern Galilee enjoyed greater normality, a burgeoning of restaurants and family-run inns that became favorite destinations. Hezbollah used this time, under the nose of the IDF now deployed inside Israel’s border, to build a honeycomb of deep bunkers among southern Lebanese villages, to bring in more than 13,000 short and long range rockets supplied by Iran through Syria, to train youth in Iranian terror camps, and to continue indoctrination against Israel the aggressor, Israel the nation that must be excised from its home.
This summer we learned the price of our contentment. For 34 days, 4,000 rockets flew from Nasrallah’s arsenal into Israel, as far south as Hadera, 30 miles north of Tel Aviv. This was a war that missed our family. Our sons were not called to their reserve units; our grandsons were still too young. But if the next war comes in four years, we will have our own on the line.
For all its imperfections, the decade and a half occupation of southern Lebanon prevented Hezbollah’s massive arming and becoming a terror state within a weak nation. A month after the IDF left Lebanon in 2000 I wrote in Moment: “For Israel to appear defeated by Hezbollah and for Syria to be courted as a peace partner may be messages of weakness that will encourage Arabs to dream again and plan for Israel’s defeat and expulsion.” In the same column I quoted Amos Oz, whose justification for withdrawal was that “Lebanon will have to decide between war and peace. And if it chooses war it will be a textbook war between Lebanon and Israel, army against army, without quarter.”
We know now that the texts have yet to be written for the war Israel fought this summer. It was not Oz’s nation against nation. It was terrorists embedded within villages sending rockets to kill whoever happened to be at the other end, against an army often protecting innocent life at the expense of its own soldiers. It was a war Israel entered confident in its aerial power and advanced weaponry, weak in training and equipping its ground forces, inadequately supported by intelligence. It was a war in which civilian resilience and support for the IDF never faltered and, equally, a war where reservists called from home were ready to pay the price of destroying Hezbollah.
The lessons known by Alex and his commanders must be relearned today: Israel must be prepared for ground offensives to secure its borders; antiseptic war is a delusion; patient persistence must be as much an emblem of Israeli armed forces as it is for those who plan the destruction of the Jewish state. Courage of the young must be matched by the skill and determination of leadership. And the citizens of Israel must once again understand that we are a nation that will survive only if we understand our purpose and accept that we are still “a people that dwells apart, not reckoned among the nations” (Numbers 23:9). Only then may we one day cease finding war maps that can be used again and again.
Suzanne F. Singer contributes to Moment from Jerusalem.
Marshall Breger
The Perils and Limits of Force
Beware the Law of Unanticipated Consequence
?Generally, I tend to avoid books by ex-government officials about their time in office, since they are invariably thick, turgid and riddled with a sense of self-justification. But Shlomo Ben-Ami’s book, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, is refreshingly different. Ben-Ami, a historian who served as Israel’s Minister of Foreign Affairs under Ehud Barak and participated in both the Camp David and Taba negotiations, offers a painfully honest assessment of Israel’s choices and a balanced history that seeks neither personal nor political glory.
Ben-Ami takes us through the history of the Zionist enterprise, sparing us the traditional mantra of a “people without a land for a land without people.” While clearly supporting the establishment of the Jewish state, he is not blind to the reality that there also was, and still is, an Arab population on the land. Time and time again, he says, Israeli politicians faced with the painful choices that recognition of Palestinian national claims would require have retreated to a kind of political immobilism that leads inexorably to endless cycles of violence.
Israel’s “almost inbred incapacity to resist the temptation of the use of force” is self-defeating, according to Ben-Ami. The conviction that the Arabs, like Churchill’s Hun, are “either at one’s throat or at one’s feet” animates much of Israeli strategic thought. It is premised on one of two views: either early Zionist visionary Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s notion of the “Iron Wall,” in which peace is possible only when the Arabs recognize and accept their inability to eliminate Israel, or the even more pessimistic view held by both David Ben-Gurion and—yes—Shimon Peres throughout the 1950s and 1960s that the Jewish state “was doomed to live in a state of permanent war with the Arab world.” Such notions compel “Israel to live eternally on its sword and under the protection of a balance of fear and nuclear deterrence.”
In contrast, Ben-Ami demonstrates that, while Israel requires military superiority to survive, the ultimate challenges it faces are fundamentally political. It has been difficult for the Israeli public to understand that Israel can win every war it fights but that only a political solution can bring peace. Even Ariel Sharon, the quintessential man of action, “finally realized the limits of force,” according to Ben-Ami. “I have learned from my own experience that the sword itself offers no solutions,” Sharon told the settler community in promoting unilateral withdrawal from Gaza.
Scars of War is replete with historical premonitions of this summer’s conflict with Hezbollah. In both 1978 and 1982, Israel resorted to military force under circumstances that triggered and, in many respects, justified it. But, Ben-Ami notes, it took advantage of those circumstances to enlarge its war aims in an effort to remake its political and geostrategic environment. Shia Lebanese cheered in 1982 when Israel pushed the Palestine Liberation Organization out of southern Lebanon. But when Israel later decided to remake the Lebanese political system, those same Shia flocked to Hezbollah.
Ben-Ami’s narrative focuses on the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. There is, however, a more cosmic question—the so-called “conflict of civilizations” thesis advanced first by Samuel Huntington. In its more extreme version, Islam and Western values are inextricably at odds and a showdown will come, sooner or later.
To my mind, talk of such a cosmic conflict cannot be proven. What I do know is that we should be seeking to diffuse, bring nuance to and soften any such conflict dynamic, and not suggest or imply that the United States and Israel want to “bring it on!”, as so many of Israel’s supporters do. America, I am certain, will survive such a war of civilizations, but the notion of Israel emerging unscathed in a holy war with 1.3 billion Muslims is, at best, problematic.
I sat in my Jerusalem hotel room this Tisha B’av studying the Talmudic story of Kamza and Bar Kamza. In revenge for being severely humiliated by the Rabbis, Bar Kamza urged the Romans to test Jewish loyalties by sending an animal to the Temple for sacrifice. Then he secretly created a defect in the cow, making it unfit for such a sacrifice under Jewish law. Although most were inclined to accept the sacrifice to preserve peace with the Romans, the authorities deferred to Zachariah ben Avkolos, who urged stringent adherence to Jewish law. Zachariah carried the day; the Rabbis refused the sacrifice, and the Temple was soon destroyed.
Some Talmudic commentators blame Zachariah for the ensuing exile; he did not think about unanticipated consequences, they say. Ben-Ami’s book, as well as the then-ongoing war in Lebanon, brought that lesson home to me: Always be prepared for unintended consequences. Yes, some problems can be solved—indeed, some can only be solved—by force and violence. But Israeli leaders must always be thinking about the unanticipated consequences that shape the limits of force for the Jewish state.
?Marshall Breger is a professor of law at the Catholic University of America.
Naomi Ragen
Between Hope and a Hard Place
?A mother’s fear, a people’s need
?My first son was born in August, 1973, two years after we climbed aboard an El Al plane and left New York, my birthplace, to make our home in Jerusalem. He was a tiny baby who spent his first night in an incubator, released only when his young mother swore she would feed him every two hours.
Even then I knew that one day I would have to let him put on a uniform and learn how to shoot a gun. Like every Israeli mother, I had complex feelings about this. People move to Israel because they believe that the tragedy of the Jewish people has been their inability to protect themselves. My child, I thought proudly, would never be at the mercy of violent anti-Semites, or a capricious government that would take away his rights and leave him helpless. He was the new beginning of the Jewish people, who could live in proud independence and self-determination.
He was only two months old when the Yom Kippur War broke out. We bundled him up in his baby carrier and took him to a bomb shelter. I was so confused, horrified and panic-stricken that I forgot to take a bottle with me. And I kept thinking: What if he wakes up? I have nothing to feed him and I won’t be able to go back to my apartment to get anything. How could I be such a terrible mother, putting my child into such a dangerous situation? A two-month-old in a bomb shelter in a country being attacked on all sides? I was supposed to protect him, wasn’t I? And yet, I had made these choices and here we both were, helpless in our own ways.
It is not easy to be a mother in Zion, especially these days. Your head tells you one thing, and your heart tells you another. What is your first responsibility? Is it to your personal life, your children and husband and extended family, or is it to your country, your idealistic vision, your religion, your God? And do you have the right to make heroic, patriotic decisions that are not in the best interests of your children in order to satisfy your own emotional and psychological needs?
Again and again these questions are being asked in Israel, almost on a daily basis. Again and again, mothers and fathers are making decisions for their children that are not necessarily based on pure practicality.
Or are they? Are the ideological choices and the practical choices really so incompatible?
My youngest son put on an army uniform in March 2005. Though he wanted very much to serve his country, he was not gung-ho about soldiering by any means. Quiet, reflective, a writer, he’s the kind of person to whom people reveal their life stories within the first 15 minutes of meeting him. Rambo was not his role model. He loathed the army’s secular ethos, its macho male-bonding denigration of women. A yeshiva boy, he was uncomfortable having to carry his commanding officer (a petite blonde girl his age) on his back during field maneuvers. He was most comfortable doing things by himself, even if it was guarding terrorists on their way to jail and making sure they got water and visits to the bathroom.
He sat across from me at the Shabbat table one Friday night long after dessert had been served and poured his heart out: all his frustrations, his thwarted youthful desires, his life, put on hold until released from the compulsory dictatorship that is the army. I looked at him with love and sympathy, and suddenly saw the picture of his grandfather hanging on the wall behind him.
Manny Ragen, born in Czechoslovakia, had been forcibly drafted into the army and used as slave labor for the Nazis. His small tailor shop and home were confiscated, his wife and two children arrested and shipped to Auschwitz, where they were gassed and burned. I thought of Hamas, with their covenant, that is not any way different from that of Mein Kampf. I thought of Hezbollah, which has announced its plans to wipe Jews off the face of the earth.
“Honey,” I told my son. “You know what happened to your Zaydie? Well, the times we are living in are not that different. The only thing that’s different is you: You and your friends who are standing between us and our enemies.”
He looked at me and I looked at him, our eyes meeting in perfect understanding.
And when he returned from Israel’s latest war, weary, unwashed, his youthful face hardening into a man’s determined one, I took him in and fed him and washed his clothes. He spent the day praying, eating, sleeping and entertaining his young nieces and nephews with floor games until the Shabbat was over and it was time for him to pack up and go back to his unit up north.
“You’ll call me when you get there?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll call.”
And he did.
We both wait for the wars to be over, and for a new time to come when Jews won’t need to protect themselves from irrational, hate-filled enemies. But right now, we do. I’m glad my sons know how, for all our sakes. Perhaps that was the most practical decision for a mother to make after all.
?Naomi Ragen is a novelist and playwright. She lives in Jerusalem.
Matthew Yglesias
Know Thine Enemies
Lumping Islamic fundamentalists together is appealing but counterproductive
Shortly before his death in June, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, condemned a certain organization as “a shield protecting the Zionist enemy against the strikes of the mujahideen in Lebanon.” Was he referring to the United States? The United Nations? Neither. According to Zarqawi, Israel’s shield was none other than Hezbollah.
In the minds of many Westerners, Jews especially, Hezbollah and Al Qaeda are two sides of the same coin. Both are violent, committed to the destruction of Israel and frequent traffickers in vicious anti-Semitism—seemingly natural partners and allies. But Hezbollah and Al Qaeda are distinct organizations with different interpretations of Islam and bases of support. Hezbollah is deeply rooted in Lebanon’s Shia community, which has long struggled against the domination of that country by Christian and Sunni elites. Al Qaeda members, on the other hand, are Sunni fundamentalist; some of them don’t even recognize Shia as Muslims because of what they consider their un-Islamic beliefs and practices, such as reverence of saints. Indeed, Zarqawi’s efforts in Iraq were directed as much against its Shia majority as they were against the United States.
Hezbollah was born during the 1980s in the chaos brought about by Lebanon’s long civil war and in reaction to Israel’s occupation of the south. From the start, it was supported by the new Shia fundamentalist government in Iran as part of its efforts to strengthen Shia power and its own influence throughout the region. Sunni Arab rulers, in control of most other Middle Eastern countries, felt threatened by Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution and support of Hezbollah. That’s one of the reasons why Saudi Arabia and Egypt, not to mention the United States, supported Saddam Hussein when the Iraq-Iran War broke out in 1980.
Hezbollah’s other patron was the secular regime in Syria, which is ruled by the Assad family, members of a Shia sect known as the Allawites. Ever fearful of losing its grip on the country’s majority Sunni population, the Syrian government busied itself with violent suppression of local Sunni fundamentalists—part of the Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded in Egypt in 1928 and has been persecuted by secularist regimes ever since. In 1982, an estimated 20,000 people were killed in a government clampdown on the Brotherhood in the Syrian city of Hama.
In its infancy, during the early 1990s, Al Qaeda sought and received training from Hezbollah, but by the time its leader, Osama bin Laden, moved the group to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan in 1996, the relationship was rocky. The Taliban are Sunni and Hezbollah was disturbed by their harsh treatment of Shia during their conquest of Afghanistan, including the killings of Iranian diplomats that nearly led to an Iran-Taliban war late in 1998.
Sunni jihadists thought they could emulate Hezbollah and take advantage of Lebanon’s weak central government to establish themselves in that country. The result, as journalist and Middle East analyst Anders Strindberg noted in The American Conservative magazine, was that “in response to an uprising linked to Al Qaeda affiliates in the northern coastal town of Tripoli in late 2001, Hezbollah provided intelligence support for a successful joint Syrian and Lebanese army counterterrorist operation.” This incident is most likely what Zarqawi was referring to when he described Hezbollah as “shielding” Israel from Al Qaeda’s holy warriors. Obviously, a desire to protect the Jewish state didn’t factor into Hezbollah’s thinking. It was, however, more important to Hezbollah to prevent a rival from gaining a foothold in its backyard.
But by late summer of this year, with Zarqawi killed by U.S. forces and Hezbollah in battle with Israel, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s second-in-command, attempted to send an olive branch to Hezbollah. In a videotape, Zawahiri asserted that “we cannot just stand idly by while we see all these shells fall on our brothers in Gaza and Lebanon” and suggested that Al Qaeda fighters were prepared to join in the fray.
Hezbollah, however, wasn’t interested. It remains hostile to letting rival forces operate on its turf. It is also part of the Lebanese government and seeks domestic and international recognition in a way that Al Qaeda does not. Hezbollah is well aware that Zawahiri’s overture was prompted by his concern about the admiration Hezbollah won from the Sunni Arab masses by taking on the Israel Defense Forces. Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, isn’t about to let Zawahiri steal a piece of the action. In the end, Al Qaeda’s offer to cooperate with Hezbollah is just one more example of the competition between two distinct Islamist groups, neither of which has any love for Israel—or each other.
While lumping Al Qaeda and Hezbollah together has an appealing moral clarity, it risks encouraging our enemies to unite in a common front against us, when we should be seeking to divide them against each other.
Matthew Yglesias is editor at The American Prospect.