THE MI DDL E E AS T

Israel at Middle Age

Benny Morris

ALONGwith the rest of the world, Israelis have grown tired of their conflict with the Arabs –now, in effect, in its 126th year (it can be said to have begun the moment the first Zionist settlers stepped off the boat in Ottoman Palestine in 1882). Of course, there exists a difference in outlook: the world would like the conflict simply to go away, but Israel’s 5.5 million Jews have nowhere to go away to. And they are plain tired of it all, and, unlike in the past, see no light at the end of their tunnel. The last six months of 2000, which saw the rejection of a two-state solution by Yasser Arafat and his Fatah aides, and the start of the Second Intifada, will no doubt be viewed by future historians as the moment that Israelis lost hope – hope that “the Arabs” would ever agree to a compromise with the Jews and abandon their long-term aim of uprooting the Jewish state. The Palestinians’ election of Hamas in 2006 only underlined the trend and reinforced this despair. Where and when would it all end? For how long can a people ‘live on its sword’, as in the Biblical phrase? These signs of exhaustion were legion during last summer’s bout of hostilities with the Lebanese Islamist Hezbollah, which ended in a type of draw but which most Israelis viewed as a depressing failure. Since the state’s creation, Israelis have been pampered by their wars, moving from one crushing victory to the next: in 1948, over four Arab states; in 1956, over Egypt; in 1967, over three Arab states (and in six days!); in 1973, over Egypt and Syria –despite the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) being initially caught unawares; and in 1982, over the ragtag PLO and Syria’s army, air force and anti-aircraft defenses in Lebanon (the Israeli Air Force downed some 90 Syrian jets, to no losses of its own). But between July and August 2006, the mighty IDF – with the world’s fourth or fifth strongest air force, and with a roster, though only fractionally tapped, of some 3,500 tanks and 400,000 (professional, conscript and reserve) soldiers – failed to crush Hezbullah’s 2-3,000 fighters over 33 days. Instead of mobilizing five or six divisions of reserves and methodically churning up southern Lebanon, perhaps as far as Beirut, inch by thorny inch eliminating the guerrillas and their arms caches and emplacements, the IDF instead sent in the air force (it flew some 7,000 missions), which, while taking out the Hezbollah’s long and medium-range rockets, proved unable to silence the short range Katyushas that rained down on the Galilee and Haifa at the rate of 200-250 a day – effectively terrorizing the population and bringing life to a halt in northern Israel for over a month. For all practical purposes, there was no ground war.

There were three reasons for this failure. The first was the obvious incompetence and/or unsuitability for leading the nation in such a crisis of all three key players: the sharp lawyercum-party hack Prime Minister Ehud Olmert; the small-town Moroccan-born trade union leader, Defense Minister Amir Peretz; and an ex-air force commander whose career and eye were focused on Tehran and Natanz, IDF Chief-of-Staff Dan Halutz (who subsequently, somewhat belatedly, resigned). All three sensed the public’s mood –nay, its essential will –and were averse to taking casualties (the IDF lost some 116 men, with 43 Israeli civilians dead). They understood, or at least believed, that the public was not ready to pay a large price in blood, certainly not in a war seen as existential, and that it would vote out those who made free with soldiers’ – theirs and their sons – lives. This appreciation tricked down the chains of command, and divisional and brigade commanders likewise conducted themselves –whatever their private inclinations – as if they understood that, above all, they were expected to preserve their men’s lives. The surest way of doing this was to fight as little as possible. But wars, of course, are not won on the cheap. These leaders, of course, were right: Israeli society had vitally changed over the four decades following Israel’s creation. During the 1980s and 1990s, a large part of this society –the more progressive, creative elements, the urban middle and upper-classes, the kibbutzimand the wealthier moshavim (co-operative settlements) – had discarded the collectivist ethos and ‘gone Western’; meaning that they now put a premium on individualism and the pursuit of private interests and pleasures, and were riddled with self-criticality (encompassing, among other things, Zionism’s ideals and history). Who would have imagined, thirty years ago, the privatization that has recently swept the kibbutzim? Or kibbutz children declining to volunteer for elite IDF units? Indeed, an increasing number of 18 year-olds now avoid military service altogether (some say over 50%), and very few 21-45 year-olds actually do reserve duty (which, of course, is the reason why months before the conflict Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah described Israeli society as frail: fragile as a “spider’s web”). The most recent example of this privatization, and its accompanying unwillingness to pay the price in pursuit of a collective end, was afforded by the inhabitants of the border town of Sderot, which during May virtually emptied of its inhabitants, as Palestinian guerrillas rained down primitive Qassam rockets on their homes. Forget the London Blitz, in which 60,000 died, and compare it to the 1960s, when

30 | The Liberal | Autumn 2007