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CIAO DATE: 12/03
Israel on the Edge
On The Issues
May 2002
Israel may appear to be guilty of using disproportionate force against the Palestinians, but that is because it is fighting a war that lacks symmetry. If Israel falters in this war, there can be no doubt that its enemy, which has few inhibitions about killing either opponents or its own people, will exterminate the entire Jewish-Israeli nation.
In the current Arab-Israeli crisis, the Israelis appear to have forfeited the sympathy of much of the civilized world. Why is this? And what can Israel, and its allies, do about it?
Part of the explanation lies in the failure of Israel's once brilliantly efficient instrument of state to deliver. After half a century of embattlement with the Arab world, Israel has a tired and combat-weary look and seems to be asking, despairingly: "Where will it all end?"
Israel's case for its offensive against its neighboring terrorist enclaves is, in essence, excellent and unassailable. It is now clear that the Oslo accords were a mistake and have been used by Yasser Arafat—and his foreign backers—merely as a platform from which to launch indiscriminate suicide bombing against Israel's cities. But this case has been poorly presented by officials who seem to have lost heart. At any rate, it has not gotten through. When Colin Powell was in Israel, most of the horrifying facts presented to him by Ariel Sharon appeared to be news to him. And if Powell does not grasp the strength of Israel's case, how can millions of ordinary television viewers across the world, who nightly see Israeli tanks trundling through Arab villages, be expected to understand why the Israeli army has had to conduct its campaign?
Second, there has been a manifest decline in the quality and energy of Israeli diplomacy, formerly one of the world's wonders. Israel's ambassadors in key capitals were handpicked for outstanding ability and high profiles, with a superb grasp of English forensic skills. They seized with relish on the smallest chance to provide "bites" for television audiences. Now they tend to be second-raters with limited fluency in English.
Third, and more serious, is the decline in the morale and effectiveness of the Israeli army, the overwhelming victor in four trials of strength with the Arab world over the past fifty years. This decline has been noted both by well-disposed military experts from the West and by critical Israelis themselves. Operations are less well planned, troops often inadequately trained, and individual soldiers, most of them conscripts, poorly motivated. These factors lead to excessive use of heavy firepower, needless killing of innocent civilians, and painful delays, all of which the television cameras magnify.
These weaknesses on the Israeli side could be removed if the will were there. But is it? Israel has some of the characteristics of a gerontocracy, a state run by old men who have forgotten nothing and learned little in recent decades. It is a genuine democracy—none better—but its multiple-party system makes for a deadly paralysis at the top, where old men never seem to die, or fade away either. The man who tried to break this impasse, Benjamin Netanyahu, was eventually rejected by voters (who are highly conservative too), but they now seem to be having second thoughts, and it may be that a return of Netanyahu to power would be the first decisive step in putting Israel to rights.
Asymmetric Conflict
There are some factors in Israel's present predicament that are outside her control. Here are the most important. First, there is no symmetry in the Arab-Israeli conflict. If the Israelis score a military victory, or a diplomatic one for that matter, the Arabs live to fight another day. Israel, by contrast, cannot afford one serious mistake. If Israel lost control of the air, and her army were overrun, there can be absolutely no doubt that the entire Jewish-Israeli nation would be exterminated. It would be Hitler's holocaust all over again, conducted not in secrecy and shame but in the open, in a spirit of triumphant exultation as the successful climax of a jihad. This is the nightmare—not distant but proximate—that every Israeli prime minister must face and for which he will be held posthumously responsible if he guesses wrongly and fails to use the necessary force in time. By one wrong decision, an Israeli leader cannot only lose the war in one afternoon, he can lose half the Jewish people too. This helps to explain why the Israeli elite is hagridden with anxiety, obstinate, and often closed to argument.
The lack of symmetry between the risks taken by Arabs and by Israelis is one result of a different view of the sanctity of human life. The Jewish faith was the first religion to preach this sanctity and to magnify the value of each individual human being in the eyes of his Creator—hence, equally, in other human beings. This is the main reason that Mosaic law differs so markedly in humanity and reason from all the other fiercely retributive codes of the ancient Near East. The value placed on human life by Jews has steadily increased over the centuries, as a response to persecution and, above all, to the Nazi attempt at extermination of the entire people. Israel itself was created as a refuge and fortress in which Jewish lives would be safe from annihilation. It is thus the physical embodiment of the principle that individual life is sacred.
By contrast, the Islamic-Arab concept of "the war of the martyrs" places no value on human life except as a sacrifice in the holy war. A warrior gains infinitely more by losing his life than by preserving it, for then he gains eternal life, and his status as a martyr is enhanced by the number of dead Israelis—"sons and daughters of Satan"—whom he takes with him.
It is very difficult for the Israelis to know how to straddle this complete lack of symmetry in warfare and to combat an enemy that has so few inhibitions about killing either opponents or its own people. There is, indeed, something Hitlerian about the implacable hatred Israel faces on its own borders. It should come as no surprise that Arabic translations both of Mein Kampf and of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that diabolic forgery, are bestsellers in the Arab world. We in the West would be well advised to appreciate the strength of the hatred the Israelis face, for it may soon be turned against us too. (We received a foretaste on September 11.)
However, for the moment, the world is unconscious of these deep underlying forces, and tends in its ignorance to see the Arab-Israel conflict as a war like any other, with the faults fifty-fifty. From this perspective it is therefore the Israelis who appear to be guilty of a disproportionate use of force, an impression the nightly television images seem to confirm.
Thus the Jews, not for the first time in their long and tragic history, are blamed for the persecution they suffer. Like the Israelis themselves, the world is tired of the endless antagonism of the Arabs and wishes that somehow or other the Jews and their state would simply fade away and allow everyone to have some rest. Thus, similarly, in wartime Germany, ordinary Germans, vaguely aware that countless thousands of Jews were being "sent east"—that euphemism employed for Destination Auschwitz—were furious at the rattling of vast trains of cattle trucks packed with doomed Jews, which disturbed their rest throughout the night, and cursed "those damned Jews, never letting us get a decent night's sleep."
British historian Paul Johnson is an adjunct fellow at AEI.
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