kibbutzniks in the Jordan Valley were pounded by the Syrians for days on end with heavy artillery, and held their ground (albeit underground). Flight would have been seen as shameful and cowardly. The third reason for this failure was an unwillingness to kill Lebanese civilians in large numbers. An effectivelyexecuted war against a guerrilla/terrorist organization like Hezbollah would by necessity have led to the death of thousands of Shi’ite civilians, along with the gunmen who hid among and behind them. In large part, this stemmed from moral considerations. Israeli society has certainly ‘progressed’ in this sense since 1948 and the 1950s, when such attitudes only marginally affected the country’s war-making. A few years ago, a batch of Israel Air Force pilots ‘rebelled’ and declared that they would not carry out borders to bomb Palestinian terrorists if it resulted in the deaths of civilians. This, too, is a feature of the ‘Westernization’ that Israel has undergone during the past decades. (Would American or British public opinion today countenance the indiscriminate carpet-bombing of civilians, in their millions, as from 1941-1945?). The nation’s fatigue with conflict appears also to be, at least in part, a result of this ‘Westernization’, much as World War II exhausted Europe of conflict, and led to prolonged inaction when confronted with a bloodbath in Bosnia, on its doorstep. Indeed, what Western society today is built to endure and fight a protracted conflict, videVietnam, Iraq? And the weariness, born of such prolonged, indecisive conflict has been aggravated, in Israel’s case, by the 40 yearlong occupation of the Palestinian territories that began with the ‘success’ of 1967. Israelis, for moral and material reasons, have grown tired of ruling recalcitrant Palestinians and, as every opinion poll confirms, definitely do not want to rule over rebellious Arabs; they not want to oppress and torture and kill (and die) in order to sustain this dominance. This was the reason why in 2005 that ultimate Israeli warrior (and expansionist) Ariel Sharon pulled the IDF and settlers out of the Gaza Strip (which, in light of what the Hamas has done in and from Gaza since then, may have been a mistake). For Westerners, hundred-year wars are definitely out of the question; going in and taking out Saddam Hussein and his allies, and then heading for home, was probably the right way to have done Iraq in 2003 –as, certainly in hindsight, Israel should have done with the West Bank and Gaza Strip/Sinai Peninsula in 1967. The problem, of course, is that while Israel as a society may have entered middle age, the situation (Jewish) Israelis live in, and, even more so, most likely face, is antediluvian, revolutionary and possibly apocalyptic. And Israel won’t successfully weather these challenges with Olmerts and Peretzes at the helm.

Benny Morris is a professor at Ben-Gurion University in Be’erSheva, and the unofficial figurehead of Israel’s New Historians.

“The importance of Postel’s book reaches far beyond a mere exercise in intellectual history. The temptation is either to castigate Iran as a state run by dangerous fundamentalist fanatics, or to celebrate it as a beacon of anti-imperialist resistance. Both approaches miss the complexity of intellectual and political life in Iran where, in a unique short-circuit, political battles reverberate in the terms of modern Western philosophy: some traditionalist clerics refer to Heidegger, liberals to Habermas, feminists to Arendt, some young ‘nihilists’ to deconstruction. . . . The specter of an exotic country is thus dispelled, and we can recognize in Iran our own battles, fought more passionately than in our own countries. This is Postel’s great lesson: Iran’s story is our own.”—Slavoj ŽŽižžek Distributed for Prickly Paradigm Press

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Autumn 2007 | The Liberal | 31