The Six-Week War

...The individuals you did see worst, that the most dangerous days and abroad at night were bus and ambuespecially nights were history...

...Yet the memory of having sat by while they were hit was liable to sap the Israelis' own power to deter other Arabs—the Syrians, say—in the future...

...That's ly, the majority unapologetically...

...True, Israel had much to gain by letting the Americans systematically destroy the most powerful Arab army...

...The Palestinians, the poor, stupid Palestinians, would still be there after the war, a stone tied around Israel's neck...

...This was the lesson taught by Sadat, and by Menachem Begin and the Knesset when they gave the Egyptian back the entire Sinai...

...Think of a week old, it was clear it would take ment...

...Hence the possibility that the Israelis would do something before the war ended, maybe when the Marines tackled the Republican Guard...

...But where was the Arab king or dictator who was ready to travel Sadat's path...

...and if it was possible to put up with But in daylight, Tel Aviv was out and them, to live a more or less recognizable working...

...been rushed in, complete with their GI Most of the Tel Avivians who after the to hold its breath as it went about its The strangest part for the Israelis was crews, and spotted around Tel Aviv...

...Most of them, after three years of intifada, had arrived at the point where cohabitation with the PLO looked plausible...

...That was understandable...

...The Scuds were a throw-his was, however, a normality that tured by memories of Khe Sanh, hack of homes blown apart and families be- back to the V-2...

...to pop more Scuds over the horizon was Long before the end came into sight, after dark...

...siren without their blood collectively freezing...

...It was the rare Israeli who was bothered by the tonnage being dropped on troops in Kuwait and on Baghdad, sometimes on civilians...

...So the doves blessed the B-52s and prayed that, after winning the war, the all-powerful Yanks would put the arm on Israel, at long last...

...But now came the next sur- eggrolls by scooter than it was serving the happy ending, no one complained ers, and if the nights were nervous but prise...

...It was an unaccus- one reason why Saddam targeted it...

...Israelis blessed the Tomahawk missiles, Cobra gunships, and other terrible gadgets designed for use against the Soviets because these weapons might simplify an unavoidable push on the ground into Kuwait...

...Hoping, thanks chiefly to the USAF and RAF the Soviets and Germans, had sold to Peking restaurant was delivering more sensing that this was the beginning of pilots scouring H-2 and H-3 for launch- Saddam...

...Everyone was carrying a gas that they were prevented from, or spared In more ways than one, Israel boils Eilat, taking their kids and credit cards mask kit, and many had their Walk- the need of, fighting back...

...The war was useless and immoral, said the committee...

...it—if all those whose luck so far had the Allies a good deal longer to destroy pro basketball and soccer only in the Preoccupied, the country went to work held could concentrate on fighting for them and the other machines of terror afternoon, likewise only matinees of and school as if this were just another a parking space during the day, this was and destruction that they, along with Hamlet at the Cameri Theatre, and the day in the state of emergency...

...Therefore the Jews, the stronger party, must get out from under...

...Israelis of the hard-headed type said that American and Israeli interests had simply converged, and each country was playing its role, America doing the fighting and Israel, as Washington wished, staying out of it...

...Therefore also the bill being prepared for presentation to the Americans...

...Until all his launchers were by mid-February in fact, the Israelis had spiked, most Tel Avivians would subject improvised a routine...

...That was in 1956, when the Israelis, British, and French colluded to attack Nasser...

...Was it a war for the Jews...

...The national life, this was because there were fewer of economy, not to mention psyche, both the missiles than at the start of the war, of which were going to emerge from the war bruised, couldn't have taken another Edward Norden is a writer living in month like the first...

...Many of the doves were shocked, humiliated, furious...

...And if Bush and Baker insisted on a peace process, they should promise to go easy, eschewing all talk of an international conference where the Jewish state would effectively be in the dock, ignoring the PLO, and asking of Israel that it grant the Palestinians no more than autonomy, even if Hafez Assad or King Fand did a Sadat and came to Jerusalem...

...Arafat had taken his side, and Palestinians in the occupied territories had climbed onto their roofs to celebrate...

...They wouldn't migrate, and it was impolitic and immoral to kick them out...

...They felt that Saddam, his troops and, yes, his obedient people, deserved it—a middle-class Londoner sleeping in the subway half a century ago might have felt the same about Allied raids on Berlin...

...What was left of their pre-war analysis, their pre-Scud remedies...

...And what if Saddam, growing desperate, substituted chemicals for high explosives...

...They had never been free agents, of course, they couldn't always start wars preemptively or consummate them in decisive victory, yet when a war was on they fought it themselves, taking it quickly into enemy territory...

...Neither doves nor hawks here wanted to see him in charge in Baghdad at war's end, nor the Iraqi army uncrippled...

...The Israelis had made a habit of always fighting their own battles...

...Most Israelis, moved by their own emotions and making their own calculations, disagreed...

...A parade of body bags could bring on a ceasefire and save Saddam's skin...

...They had set out to convince the Israeli man-in-the-street...

...D -day, February 24, was the day a longer warning of their approach, and on the whole bearable, this was thanks Israelis in the heart of the country spring sprung in Israel, and also a good chance that they'd be inter- to the Patriot missile batteries that had showed that they could live with Scuds...

...What else could you expect from the Palestinians after all their peace balloons were shot down by Shamir & Co...

...He was reproached for his sentimentality by doves who thought of themselves as tough...

...Humans in such circumstances can't be expected to worry about the morality of carpet bombing or the accuracy of smart bombs...

...There was no telling whether such a bill would be paid...

...The war lance drivers, dedicated barflies, women correspondents were leaving, an en- in curlers walking the dog, gentlemen couraging sign...

...Therefore, as discreetly and urgently as possible, the Israeli government was preparing its bill for services rendered, for turning the other cheek to Saddam and consenting to let the country be protected, not by Israel's own pilots, but by Americans...

...Mystical Israelis announced that once again the enemy of the Jews had revealed himself as the enemy of mankind...

...The particulars weren't hard to guess...

...T he stick only caused the Israelis to 1 dig their heels in...

...They five weeks plus of the strangest war that weren't mobilized...

...With luck, many Arabs would ask the right question as they writhed with the pain—not why their hero had lost, but how it was that men of his type succeeded in ruling so many of them...

...Was it a war for oil...

...the day when the whole country seemed cepted...

...Mystical Israelis announced that once again the enemy of the Jews had revealed himself as the enemy of mankind...

...He, together with the Palestinians who cheered him on, had put them into an almost impossible bind...

...Now, however, Sad-dam had forced all Israelis to don gas masks...

...Stun with them, reappeared, a few sheepish-mans tuned to the non-stop news...

...By the time the war was I might go up in smoke at any moit...

...The Americans would be asked to pay for the beating Tel Aviv and the Israeli economy had suffered, as well as for the absorption of immigrants from the Soviet Union, a Zionist mission and humanitarian project that, it could be argued, fit into the scheme of a New Order...

...The disruption Jerusalem...

...The were bucking the traffic again, they Israelis had ever known, the Americans tomed, confusing position to be in, call- first surprise of the war was not only were back at work, and their kids—gaswere moving on the ground against ing for a different kind of grit, evoking that his rather crude toys could get mask kits in tow—were back at school...

...first barrages had fled to Jerusalem or business...

...Without exception, the doves still believed that Israel should get out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip for its own good, the sooner the better...

...As much as Americans, Israelis wanted American casualties kept low...

...It was also prudent, since a country that depended on others to kill and die for it could never know when they might get fed up...

...in-house...

...16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1991...

...It was a danger, not a certainty—it was also conceivable that the war would exhaust the Americans, and/or that the wiser heads in Washington, who understood that a steady flow of petroleum at affordable prices doesn't depend on reconciling Arabs and Israelis, would prevail...

...It got signatures from Communists, a scattering of doves, the octogenarian philosopher Yesheyahu Leibowitz...

...Could the Americans, tor- participants went its way and the tally the city down...

...The only thing that might be certain was what was already obvious to the wise before the war—that a breakthrough in the Arab-Israeli feud could only come when the boss of an Arab state credibly sued for peace...

...This was the manly thing to do...

...The hawks weren't fooled...

...It had to be...

...With Operation Desert Storm having moved into its final act, it was a good bet that it would take more than three years for the Arab street and campus to digest Saddam's defeat...

...The Scuds, for example, which had half-emptied Tel Aviv when they first landed, far from proving to Israelis that the occupied territories were irrelevant and added nothing to their safety, had rendered the ordinary Israeli more wary...

...Yossi Sarid, member of the Knesset from the Citizens' Rights Movement and an elder of the Peace Now lobby, in a series of speeches and articles, emotionally washed his hands of the Palestinians' national liberation movement...

...This time, however, the Israelis sat and did nothing, taking punishment on the home front while the Americans went about their work according to their own schedule...

...Having made it to the top of the local greasy pole by elevating distrust to a principle, they were worried...

...It was thanks to the round-the-clock attention that Allied pilots were paying to "Scudinavia," and the capabilities of the marvelous Patriots, that the hawkish government could practice dove-like restraint and Tel Avivians wake up to the occasional 2:00 a.m...

...After fathers, sons, brothers hadn't vanished, it, and you stun the Jewish state...

...Yet the doves didn't believe that they could ever bring their countrymen to see it their way...

...The ordinary Israeli figured that the more bombs, the more destruction and demoralization, and therefore the less trouble-making capacity the Iraqis would possess at war's end...

...James Baker had spoken of a New Order and a quickened peace process, however...

...The Tel Aviv stock market had no ing put up in hotels mounted...

...The news was that there were many doves now, Sarid foremost, who had come around to the hawkish line—talks with the PLO were a delusion, the only realistic idea was a deal with dismal Syria or benighted Saudi Arabia, as part of which, so hoped the doves at least, their country's grip on the occupied territories could be loosened...

...Therefore the crash program to perfect the Hetz (Arrow), an anti-missile missile likely to consign this generation of Patriots to the Smithsonian, and the Ofek (Horizon) spy satellite, which could spare Israel the need to beg for CIA pictures...

...The U.S...

...T he Jewish state had won glowing 1 reviews for its restraint under fire...

...This put the hawks, i.e., the government, on guard...

...A number of unappealing postwar scenarios crowded in upon the imagination as the war climaxed...

...Saddam, and the reports, wrapped in gratitude and also vexation as the war through, but that a couple of barrages disinformation, engendered queasiness in which the Israelis were and were not could inspire enough fear nearly to shut and elation...

...What the doves prayed for, the hawks,who also wanted Saddam wiped out, were already bracing against...

...The danger did loom that, energized by success, the Americans would try their hand as never before at solving the insoluble Arab-Israeli problem...

...Only once had this principle or doctrine been finessed...

...And Israelis didn't want this war, from which the Jewish state had something to gain, to be waged and won at the cost of many Americans killed and wounded and the budding of an anti-Semitic legend...

...They let them- themselves to a voluntary dusk-to-dawn selves hope that Saddam had done his curfew...

...Just two questions nagged as hawks and doves waited for the booms: What if a Patriot malfunctioned...

...Enough...

...For some doves, the PLO remained the prime enemy, therefore the only address, the only partner with whom peace could be made...

...Hardly...

...alone could throw the required lightning bolts...

...Jumping Tel Aviv was hobwhen Saddam sent over Scuds twice be- bling, because the best time for Saddam fore dawn on the twenty-fifth...

...Partly...

...It was still true: the Israelis could be shocked into withdrawing only by the juiciest of genuine carrots, wielded not by Americans but by Arabs...

...For example, an international conference to pacify the Middle East once and for all, or the resurrection by the Americans of a sanitized PLO...

...a committee demanding a ceasefire called itself...

...On the other hand, who had survived the war in Europe Scuds were still falling out of the sky, and considered this a deluxe one indeed...

...would have forced the government to 14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1991 forsake the low profile that had earned it worldwide praise and order the IAF to take out the launchers itself...

...The war was placing much in question but had left that bedrock of dovish faith untouched...

...Husbands, down to Tel Aviv and its suburbs...

...Among those demonizing Saddam were some of the doves...

...Sadat showed up in Jerusalem three years after winning what he could paint for his people as a famous victory over the Israeli Defense Forces at the Suez Canal...

...The Civil Defense was allowing doubts—its index jumped 2.16 percent...