The Longest War: Israel in Lebanon
Timerman, Jacobo
.............................................................................................................................................................. B O O K R E V I E W S J acobo...
...Perhaps Israel will atone THE LONGEST WAR: ISRAEL IN LEBANON Jacobo Timerman / Alfred A. Knopf / $11.95 Werner J. Dannhauser 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1983...
...he thought of his arrival as the completion of a voyage, a kind of return...
...From there, he exacted his revenge on his torturers by telling his story, which he understood as a survivor's testimony...
...If Timerman had not been Werner J. Dannhauser is a Fellow at the National Humanities Center...
...That becomes for Timerman either a sure sign of the majority's manipulation by its leaders or else a sure sign of the perils of democracy itself...
...arrested because he was a Jewthough being Jewish surely harmed him once he was in prison-perhaps he had exaggerated the intensity of Argentinean anti-Semitism...
...They are fair questions, though they may sound harsh, for Timerman always writes as a witness and in a witness credibility is all...
...Fortunately, Jacobo Timerman had a place to go, a country that had worked all along for his release, that not only welcomed him but granted him citizenship at once: Israel...
...Israel quite literally nauseates Jacobo Timerman: "I can only relieve myself by vomiting for this Israel . . . " The Begin government is "establishing the basis" for "a totalitarian coun t,, , Yet hope mingles with Timerman's gloom, a hope derived from all those Israelis who protest against the war...
...The book amounted to more than a personal tale of suffering and endurance, though it was certainly that...
...Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number-all the above information is taken from it-brought much acclaim to Jacobo Timerman, some of it deserved...
...As the war goes on Timerman frets about Israel's expenditure of the blood of its young people, but above all about the moral costs of a war in which Israel commits so many crimes and thus incurs so much guilt...
...Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number raised a number of troubling questions...
...Israel has forfeited all claim to be a light unto the nations...
...Timerman's business partner had been involved in the financing of subversive activities, and Timerman's arrest might well have been triggered by his connection with David Graiver...
...Timerman writes in the present tense, in a form reminiscent of a journal, so that he is able to illustrate his growing despair and rage as week of war follows week of war...
...The war shakes "the foundations of the moral structure on which Israel was built...
...Finally, what was one to make of Timerman's venomous comments about the Argentinean Jewish community...
...The basic question of credibility could not be resolved simply on the basis of Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number...
...Why had Timerman been arrested...
...Acting against the wishes of the country's supreme court and even its president, the generals did not let Timerman go until the end of 1977, when they annulled his citizenship and expelled him...
...instead it has, become "the South Africa of the Middle East," or its Prussia, or its Chile, or its Argentina under Peron...
...it illuminated the lot of the political prisoner in many times and places...
...Nothing could be done about assessing his reliability until the appearance of another volume in the same mode...
...However, the book also entangled Timerman in acrimonious controversy...
...What the Israelis, whom the war has turned into "efficient criminals," are doing cannot be called genocide, yet the author fears that the collective subconscious "may not be wholly repelled by the possibility of a Palestinian genocide...
...Israel begins to lose a genuine sense of continuity and identity by ceasing to be true to itself...
...The new book provides new evidence, and with that evidence Jacobo Timerman has gone a long way toward indicting himself...
...A life-long Zionist, Timerman considered Israel his home rather than a mere refuge...
...Timerman makes all these comparisons but criticizes those who would compare the Israelis with the Nazis...
...it even cast some light on the perplexities of Argentinean politics...
...Argentina's military authorities arrested the prominent journalist and publisher, subjecting him to cruel interrogations and hideous torture...
...All these questions concern Jacobo Timerman's credibility...
...He had likened Jewish leaders to those Jews who had collaborated with the Nazis...
...The Longest War concerns Israel's invasion of Lebanon in June 1982 as well as Timerman's reactions to subsequent events of what he calls "Sharon's War," a war he views as completely unnecessary and hence completely unjust...
...The war commands the support of the majority of Israelis...
...It was not enough to refute Timerman on the basis of facts: a mistaken witness differs from a deceitful one...
...Perhaps they, who now constitute no more than a substantial minority, will be able to recall the whole country to its senses...
...Perhaps Israel will come to see that no military solution to its problems exists but that a political solution is quite simple: the establishment of a Palestinian state...
...AntiSemitism is always to be deplored, but was the Argentinean regime so perfidious that it exposed as knaves or fools all those who tried to distinguish its authoritarianism from totalitarianism...
...He suggests that his being a Jew as well as a champion of human rights proved too much for the authorities, but was that the whole or the real story...
...The Jews are no better, though perhaps no worse, than the Palestinians...
...Begin, who is inept -and "unbalanced," is no better than Arafat...
...Timerman's vituperative responses to his critics, many of whom knew the situation in Argentina as well as he, only served to broaden the questions raised...
...Israel was not even provoked for there "were no difficulties along the northern border" and the general situation in the Middle East these days is such that the Israeli "doesn't fear for his security...
...He writes well, and at his best he used the heat of hatred to forge his style into a weapon against injustice...
...The situation of Argentine Jewry was surely quite difficult and might not be enviable, but were most of the Jews there either blind or cowardly, as Timerman suggested, when they kept building synagogues and community centers instead of fleeing or fighting...
...B O O K R E V I E W S J acobo Timerman's ordeal began in April 1977...
...That would not in the least justify those who jailed Timerman, but why had Timerman failed to mention Graiver in his account...
Vol. 16 • April 1983 • No. 4
