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<img src="cid:6.2.5.6.2.20060816082012.029fab68@freedomarchives.org.6" width=264 height=20 alt="London Review of Books">
<a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/index.php"> <br><br>
</a>L<a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/index.php">RB</a> |
<a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n16/contents.html">Vol. 28 No. 16 dated
17 August 2006 </a>|
<a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/contribhome.php?get=laor01">Yitzhak
Laor</a> <br><br>
<br><br>
</font><h1><b>You are terrorists, we are virtuous<br><br>
<br>
</b></h1><h2><b>Yitzhak Laor on the
IDF</b></h2><font face="arial" size=3>As soon as the facts of the Bint
Jbeil ambush, which ended with relatively high Israeli casualties (eight
soldiers died there), became public, the press and television in Israel
began marginalising any opinion that was critical of the war. The media
also fell back on the kitsch to which Israelis grow accustomed from
childhood: the most menacing army in the region is described here as if
it is David against an Arab Goliath. Yet the Jewish Goliath has sent
Lebanon back 20 years, and Israelis themselves even further: we now
appear to be a lynch-mob culture, glued to our televisions, incited by a
premier whose 'leadership' is being launched and legitimised with rivers
of fire and destruction on both sides of the border. Mass psychology
works best when you can pinpoint an institution or a phenomenon with
which large numbers of people identify. Israelis identify with the IDF,
and even after the deaths of many Lebanese children in Qana, they think
that stopping the war without scoring a definitive victory would amount
to defeat. This logic reveals our national psychosis, and it derives from
our over-identification with Israeli military thinking. <br><br>
In the melodramatic barrage fired off by the press, the army is assigned
the dual role of hero and victim. And the enemy? In Hebrew broadcasts the
formulations are always the same: on the one hand 'we', 'ours', 'us'; on
the other, Nasrallah and Hizbullah. There aren't, it seems, any Lebanese
in this war. </font><font face="arial" size=3 color="#FF0000">So who is
dying under</font><font face="arial" size=3>
</font><font face="arial" size=3 color="#FF0000">Israeli fire? Hizbullah.
And if we ask about the Lebanese? The answer is always that Israel has no
quarrel with Lebanon. It's yet another illustration of our unilateralism,
the thundering Israeli battle-cry for years: no matter what happens
around us, we have the power and therefore we can enforce the
logic.</font><font face="arial" size=3> If only Israelis could see the
damage that's been done by all these years of unilateral thinking. But we
cannot, because the army – which has always been the core of the state –
determines the shape of our lives and the nature of our memories, and
wars like this one erase everything we thought we knew, creating a new
version of history with which we can only concur. If the army wins, its
success becomes part of 'our heritage'. Israelis have assimilated the
logic and the language of the IDF – and in the process, they have lost
their memories. Is there a better way to understand why we have never
learned from history? We have never been a match for the army, whose
memory – the official Israeli memory – is hammered into place at the
centre of our culture by an intelligentsia in the service of the IDF and
the state. <br><br>
The IDF is the most powerful institution in Israeli society, and one
which we are discouraged from criticising. Few have studied the dominant
role it plays in the Israeli economy. Even while they are still serving,
our generals become friendly with the US companies that sell arms to
Israel; they then retire, loaded with money, and become corporate
executives. The IDF is the biggest customer for everything and anything
in Israel. In addition, our high-tech industries are staffed by a mixture
of military and ex-military who work closely with the Western military
complex. The current war is the first to become a branding opportunity
for one of our largest mobile phone companies, which is using it to run a
huge promotional campaign. Israel's second biggest bank, Bank Leumi, used
inserts in the three largest newspapers to distribute bumper stickers
saying: 'Israel is powerful.' The military and the universities are
intimately linked too, with joint research projects and an array of army
scholarships. <br><br>
There is no institution in Israel that can approach the army's ability to
disseminate images and news or to shape a national political class and an
academic elite or to produce memory, history, value, wealth, desire. This
is the way identification becomes entrenched: not through dictatorship or
draconian legislation, but by virtue of the fact that the country's most
powerful institution gets its hands on every citizen at the age of 18.
The majority of Israelis identify with the army and the army reciprocates
by consolidating our identity, especially when it is – or we are – waging
war. <br><br>
The IDF didn't play any role in either of the Gulf wars and may not play
a part in Bush's pending war in Iran, but it is on permanent alert for
the real war that is always just round the corner. Meanwhile, it harasses
Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, to very destructive effect. (In
July it killed 176 Palestinians, most of them from the same area in Gaza,
in a 'policing' operation that included the destruction of houses and
infrastructure.) They shoot. They abduct. They use F-16s against refugee
camps, tanks against shacks and huts. For years they have operated in
this way against gangs and groups of armed youths and children, and they
call it a war, a 'just war', vital for our existence. The power of the
army to produce meanings, values, desire is perfectly illustrated by its
handling of the Palestinians, but it would not be possible without the
support of the left in Israel. <br><br>
The mainstream left has never seriously tried to oppose the military. The
notion that we had no alternative but to attack Lebanon and that we
cannot stop until we have finished the job: these are army-sponsored
truths, decided by the military and articulated by state intellectuals
and commentators. So are most other descriptions of the war, such as the
Tel Aviv academic Yossef Gorni's statement in <i>Haaretz</i>, that 'this
is our second war of independence.' The same sort of nonsense was written
by the same kind of people when the 2000 intifada began. That was also a
war about our right to exist, our 'second 1948'. These descriptions would
not have stood a chance if Zionist left intellectuals – solemn purveyors
of the 'morality of war' – hadn't endorsed them. <br><br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3 color="#FF0000">Military thinking has
become our only thinking. The wish for superiority has become the need to
have the upper hand in every aspect of relations with our neighbours. The
Arabs must be crippled, socially and economically, and smashed
militarily, and of course they must then appear to us in the degraded
state to which we've reduced them.</font><font face="arial" size=3> Our
usual way of looking at them is borrowed from our intelligence corps, who
'translate' them and interpret them, but cannot recognise them as human
beings. </font><font face="arial" size=3 color="#FF0000">Israelis long
ago ceased to be distressed by images of sobbing women in white scarves,
searching for the remains of their homes in the rubble left by our
soldiers. We think of them much as we think of chickens or
cats</font><font face="arial" size=3> . We turn away without much trouble
and consider the real issue: the enemy. The Katyusha missiles that have
been hitting the north of the country are launched without
'discrimination', and in this sense Hizbullah is guilty of a war crime,
but the recent volleys of Katyushas were a response to the frenzied
assault on Lebanon. To the large majority of Israelis, however, all the
Katyushas prove is what a good and necessary thing we have done by
destroying our neighbours again: the enemy is indeed dangerous, it's just
as well we went to war. The thinking becomes circular and the prophecies
self-fulfilling. Israelis are fond of saying: 'The Middle East is a
jungle, where only might speaks.' See Qana, and Gaza, or Beirut.
<br><br>
Defenders of Israel and its leaders can always argue that the US and
Britain behave similarly in Iraq. (It is true that Olmert and his
colleagues would not have acted so shamelessly if the US had not been
behind them. Had Bush told them to hold their fire, they wouldn't have
dared to move a single tank.) But there is a major difference. The US and
Britain went to war in Iraq without public opinion behind them. Israel
went to war in Lebanon, after a border incident which it exploited in
order to destroy a country, with the overwhelming support of Israelis,
including the members of what the European press calls the 'peace camp'.
<br><br>
Amos Oz, on 20 July, when the destruction of Lebanon was already well
underway, wrote in the <i>Evening Standard</i>: 'This time, Israel is not
invading Lebanon. It is defending itself from a daily harassment and
bombardment of dozens of our towns and villages by attempting to smash
Hizbullah wherever it lurks.' Nothing here is distinguishable from
Israeli state pronouncements. David Grossman wrote in the
<i>Guardian</i>, again on 20 July, as if he were unaware of any
bombardment in Lebanon: 'There is no justification for the large-scale
violence that Hizbullah unleashed this week, from Lebanese territory, on
dozens of peaceful Israeli villages, towns and cities. No country in the
world could remain silent and abandon its citizens when its neighbour
strikes without any provocation.' We can bomb, but if they respond they
are responsible for both their suffering and ours. And it's important to
remember that 'our suffering' is that of poor people in the north who
cannot leave their homes easily or quickly. 'Our suffering' is not that
of the decision-makers or their friends in the media. Oz also wrote that
'there can be no moral equation between Hizbullah and Israel. Hizbullah
is targeting Israeli civilians wherever they are, while Israel is
targeting mostly Hizbullah.' At that time more than 300 Lebanese had been
killed and 600 had been injured. Oz went on: 'The Israeli peace movement
should support Israel's attempt at self-defence, pure and simple, as long
as this operation targets mostly Hizbullah and spares, as much as
possible, the lives of Lebanese civilians (this is not always an easy
task, as Hizbullah missile-launchers often use Lebanese civilians as
human sandbags).' <br><br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3 color="#FF0000">The truth behind this is
that Israel must always be allowed to do as it likes even if this
involves scorching its supremacy into Arab bodies. This supremacy is
beyond discussion and it is simple to the point of madness. We have the
right to abduct. You don't. We have the right to arrest. You don't. You
are terrorists. We are virtuous. We have sovereignty. You don't. We can
ruin you. You cannot ruin us, even when you retaliate, because we are
tied to the most powerful nation on earth.
</font><font face="arial" size=3 color="#808000">We are angels of
death.<br><br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>The Lebanese will not remember
everything about this war. How many atrocities can a person keep in mind,
how much helplessness can he or she admit, how many massacres can people
tell their children about, how many terrorised escapes from burning
houses, without becoming a slave to memory? Should a child keep a leaflet
written by the IDF in Arabic, in which he is told to leave his home
before it's bombed? I cannot urge my Lebanese friends to remember the
crimes my state and its army have committed in Lebanon. <br><br>
Israelis, however, have no right to forget. Too many people here
supported the war. It wasn't just the nationalist religious settlers.
It's always easy to blame the usual suspects for our misdemeanours: the
scapegoating of religious fanatics has allowed us to ignore the role of
the army and its advocates within the Zionist left. This time we have
seen just how strongly the 'moderates' are wedded to immoderation, even
though they knew, before it even started, that this would be a war
against suburbs and crowded areas of cities, small towns and defenceless
villages. The model was our army's recent actions in Gaza: Israeli
moderates found these perfectly acceptable. <br><br>
It was a mistake for those of us who are unhappy with our country's
policies to breathe a sigh of relief after the army withdrew from Lebanon
in 2000. We thought that the names of Sabra and Shatila would do all the
memorial work that needed to be done and that they would stand,
metonymically, for the crimes committed in Lebanon by Israel. But, with
the withdrawal from Gaza, many Israelis who should be opposing this war
started to think of Ariel Sharon, the genius of Sabra and Shatila, as a
champion of peace. The logic of unilateralism – of which Sharon was the
embodiment – had at last prevailed: Israelis are the only people who
count in the Middle East; we are the only ones who deserve to live here.
<br><br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3 color="#FF0000">This time we must try
harder to remember. We must remember the crimes of Olmert, and of our
minister of justice, Haim Ramon, who championed the destruction of
Lebanese villages after the ambush at Bint Jbeil, and of the army chief
of staff, Dan Halutz. Their names should be submitted to The Hague so
they can be held accountable. <br><br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>Elections are a wholly inadequate form
of accountability in Israel: the people we kill and maim and ruin cannot
vote here. If we let our memories slacken now, the machine-memory will
reassert control and write history for us. It will glide into the vacuum
created by our negligence, with the civilised voice of Amos Oz easing its
path, and insert its own version. And suddenly we will not be able to
explain what we know, even to our own children. <br><br>
In Israel there is still no proper history of our acts in Lebanon.
Israelis in the peace camp used to carry posters with the figure '680' on
them – the number of Israelis who died during the 1982 invasion. Six
hundred and eighty Israeli soldiers. How many members of that once
sizeable peace camp protested about the tens of thousands of Lebanese,
Palestinian and Syrian casualties? Isn't the failure of the peace camp a
result of its inability to speak about the cheapness of Arab blood?
General Udi Adam, one of the architects of the current war, has told
Israelis that we shouldn't count the dead. He meant this very seriously
and Israelis should take him seriously. We should make it our business to
count the dead in Lebanon and in Israel and, to the best of our
abilities, to find out their names, all of them. <br><br>
<i>3 August<br><br>
</i><b><a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/contribhome.php?get=laor01">Yitzhak
Laor</a></b> lives in Tel Aviv.<br>
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