Birth of a Zionist
Cohen, Arthur A.
THE WAR IN LEBANON IS NOT THE REAL WAR Birth of a Zionist ARTHUR A. COHEN FOR MANY YEARS I have been a non-Zionist. No longer. My fence-straddling was no good. Whether or not I personally delight...
...The psychological guess that the exuberant and excessive support that American Jews have given Begin derives from the fact that Begin speaks a diaspora rhetoric in Polish Jewish accents about a new-found militancy, might, moral independence that listens to no one...
...Begin is making payment on American Jewish guilt and receiving adulation for being able to rub the world's nose in its own historical cesspool...
...And so are the killed...
...Nor was there protest when President Assad leveled the Syrian city of Hama to destroy his enemies or now when the war between Iran and Iraq is admitted by both sides to have cost well over a hundred thousand casualties...
...Upon my return to America in early August I found no mood of doubt or moral uncertainty, only militancy at its most perverse and misguided...
...What they get from Begin is the opportunity to pay off the guilt for having survived the Holocaust unscathed and ineffectual...
...They are more numerous and one day will discover what numbers can supply if they ever acquire leadership along the way...
...Israel is not their state...
...At that time, that war of 1975-1976, tens of thousands of people were killed, wounded, and dispossessed, but I recall no international cri de coeur...
...The preemptive strike of the Israeli Defense Force in 1967 was wholly justified in my Zionist lights...
...But it has, it must be admitted, succeeded to this point: there is no American foreign policy formed to deal with Israel and the Palestinians...
...All this is known...
...Wars are always cruel, but they are not only cruel, but corrupt and evil as well, if they yield nothing to the imagination of peace...
...They attend to this northern war, ignoring the other violence going on in the same area of the world...
...It is immaterial that the Prime Minister and the Chief Rabbinate in Jerusalem make use of such idiotic language...
...when they would have to resume life in the shelters as the Katyusha shells landed...
...They are all Jewish civil servants, doing time for the Jews...
...The result has been that whatever moderation existed has been radicalized...
...IT IS HERE that my politicization begins...
...You can't satisfy your friends much less please your enemies...
...American Jews appear to stand four-square behind official Begin policy (with the exception of the distinguished band of intellectuals, artists, and writers who have signed protest advertisements...
...But everyone knows that an army does not grind to a halt...
...But they make up for their flaccidity of Zionist conviction with stridency of voice- hectoring, damning, opposing anyone who wishes to talk quietly or proposes an alternative...
...Moderate for what and for the sake of what...
...MANY PEOPLE think that the war being fought in Lebanon is the real war and the only war...
...The great Arab nations did absolutely nothing to absorb or assimilate their brethren...
...During the early days of the invasion, Ariel Sharon, Israel's Minister of Defense, indicated that he wished the IDF to establish a clean zone of not more than forty-five kilometers which would prevent PLO shelling of Israel's border settlements...
...By the fifth day of the war Israel had exceeded its artificial stopline...
...It is for these presumably that the Israeli doctrine of tahor haNeshek (purity of arms) was referred to by Prime Minister Begin before departing Jerusalem for the United States in June...
...The Israel operation is called Shalom leGalil (Peace for Galilee), a phrase and a raison d'etre worked out well before the train of events unfolded that provided Israel with an occasion for massive response...
...Israel retaliated for this provocation with a sustained bombing raid on Beirut...
...Why should it not be so...
...Given the militancy of the PLO Charter which calls for the destruction of Israel, Israel has refused and continues to refuse to enter into any direct negotiations with the PLO (whom it refers to in its official news broadcasts and press releases as "terrorists" pure and simple-no differently, it should be noted, than the PLO which refers to Israel as "the Zionist entity...
...It makes them feel good presumably to have an overseas spokesman who can express their helplessness and frustration in the American diaspora they never want to leave...
...Arabs are discriminated against within Israel, denied equal opportunity to compete for jobs, apartments, education, the benefits of the Israeli economy...
...The disadvantages of being a Palestinian in the occupied territories are even greater, as can be imagined...
...It is well conceded thai many Israeli industrial and agricultural enterprises continue to import day labor over the Green Line separating the territories from Israel at scandalously inferior wages, even employing many thousands of children for a daily pittance of soup and pocket change...
...But this would be only part of it...
...Obviously this was a foolish or deceptive announcement...
...So it goes...
...The real issue of Israel and the PLO in Lebanon is that they have no business being there in the first place...
...The refugees would certainly have continued to hanker for Jaffa or Acre or the Galilee, but at least they would have hankered without pain, disease, and hunger...
...Israeli unease has little or no analogue among American Jews...
...They helped finance the refugee camps as though to make certain that the sore would continue to fester...
...Whether General Sharon actually persuaded the Prime Minister and his Cabinet of the viability of such a program remains to be discovered...
...Israel won a lightning victory of incredible proportions, fighting and winning a tank war in the Sinai that was the largest in modern history...
...Indubitably...
...Undoubtedly the well-entrenched and supplied PLO had maintained steady pressure on northern Galilee...
...As we now know, the homeless are vastly fewer than were originally announced by the Lebanese Red Cross...
...A cease-fire, always fragile in the Middle East, had been in place for months, periodically broken by PLO gunfire or Israeli reprisals...
...Several days later the IDF moved into Lebanon in full-scale invasion...
...There is little doubt, however, that the long run is with the Arabs...
...They are endlessly hostile to the Palestinian Arabs, more so than Israelis...
...What goes on vis-avis Israel is selective indignation, undoubtedly promoted by a series of naive and prejudicial notions: that Israelis can be swayed by moral pressure whereas Arabs cannot...
...Such an image may displease some Jews, but there are many others whom it unreasonably delights: at last Jews can be as wicked as they are imagined, but this time in the open-without stealth, cabal, backroom dealing, or subversive shenanigans...
...There is no such thing as a benign conquest or a benign occupation...
...I have become a Zionist because never before have I felt Zionism so profoundly threatened-not by outsiders, not by enemies, nor hostile encampments beyond the borders of Israel (and there are surely these), but by the Jewish leadership of the State of Israel itself...
...As Michael Reisman, Professor of International Law at Yale University, has defined such occupation, the law views "the seizure of territory as a tactical but temporary necessity of war...
...But this is most certainly not the whole story...
...Many fled, to be sure, terrorized by their own leadership but many were harassed into leaving by the Israelis...
...The Israelis, for their part, do not seem to be interested in encouraging moderate leadership...
...the Jews are misbehaving...
...It was feared, the Israeli government makes clear, that the PLO might well have stepped up its attacks on the north, destroying much and killing more...
...Begins speaks a cheap rhetoric and American Jews love it...
...The American Jewish community has Israel-the raw political reality, stripped of clear moral and religious imperatives-like a bone in its throat...
...Israel is the state of my distant and far-flung family and a bone of resentment to be chewed by many of my non-Jewish neighbors...
...The world is either down on the Jews for killing when they shouldn't kill at all (while presumably it's unexceptionable for Shi'ites to murder Sunnites or the reverse since Westerners can't be expected to understand jihad) or else down on Jews for killing innocents whom they have forcibly expelled from Israel, robbed of their lands, and are now trouncing with gleeful excess in their Lebanese diaspora...
...until a peace treaty is signed and the territory is returned...
...It is, in short, a caricature of moral debate...
...Many communities regarded themselves as under a capricious siege, never knowing ARTHUR A. COHEN recently returned from Israel where he lectured at an international symposium on Judaism and Christianity under National Socialism: 1919-1945...
...For many years I was able (with considerable conviction) to describe the Palestinian flight from Israel during 1948 as a decision of panic, reinforced by the call of the Mufti of Jerusalem warning those who remained behind that they risked massacre...
...that Israel can be persuaded to leave off bombing Beirut, but Arafat will never release his innocent hostages in West Beirut...
...David Ben-Gurion was perhaps thinking of this massacre when he asserted that, given power, Begin would "bring unmitigated disaster over Israel...
...Down on Israelis...
...They are, it would seem, willing to have Israel fight against the Arabs to the last Israeli...
...Long live paranoia: nobody likes the Jews-not when they're weak, not when they're strong...
...They know it and have no intention of rectifying the situation...
...The installation of a civilian governor for the territories, although it creates the illusion of peaceful conduct, actually constitutes a further step in the direction of normalizing annexation...
...Events constrain...
...Although it is recognized that the occupying power has complete control of the land and its people, the law clearly limits the exercise of such legal power consistent with military and security requirements...
...And if there is malaise and bad faith among the so-called service organizations, there is no less egregious pusillanimity among the rabbinate who know perfectly well the Biblical imperative "Justice, justice, you shall pursue" but are too terrorized by their constituencies to assume moral leadership...
...Where once there was a Zionist leadership in this country (during the days when most Jews were non-Zionist or anti-Zionist), capable of spelling out the implications of the dream and the political obstacles that impeded its realization, today there are only spokesmen and rhetoricians...
...Can it be an amazement that Palestinians are endlessly angry with Israel...
...In many cases the land has been correctly purchased, but in a no less grievous number of cases the land has been expropriated (and under Israeli law, expropriation justified by reasons of security, is difficult to contest...
...The vocal sectors of American Jewry are, to my view, morally and emotionally deprived...
...I met many Israeli soldiers hitchhiking to and from the war, crowded with their machine guns into the back seat of the little car I drove throughout the nation...
...Those opposing the invasion of Lebanon as a political and moral mistake (and there were 100,000 Israelis in a "Peace Now" demonstration in Tel-Aviv on July 3) are considered traitors and enemies of the Jewish people...
...And with the conquered territories begins the problem of the Israel that invaded Lebanon...
...Whether or not I personally delight in my conversion is beside the point...
...It is suffering that makes for id'ees fixes, not political passion...
...Down on Jews...
...It is a document of my own political transformation from non-Zionist into Zionist...
...Even though their status is vastly improved over what it was, they are to the Jews of Israel what the Jews in Arab lands were to their ancestors-dhimmis, protected second-raters...
...Nonsense, but still nonsense with an origin and history...
...Either way-as political movement or as ideological soup meat-Zionism is unavoidable...
...And Prime Minister Begin can begin again his exhumations of Dresden, Berlin, and Auschwitz...
...Begin once again praised the IDF for the care and concern they showed in the handling of their weaponry that the innocent might be spared...
...Many were wounded...
...I speak Hebrew quite well and could talk to Israelis...
...I am a Zionist today...
...The revelation of this condition produced a full-scale inquiry in the Israeli Knesset, but the situation remains uncorrected and existing laws remain unenforced...
...Purity of arms is a moral persiflage...
...With such a treaty in view the occupation is mandated to balance military requirements of the occupying power with the human needs of the conquered population...
...They are anxious to have a crushing victory over the PLO, a smashing of its structure, indeed, a humiliation and destruction of the Palestinian will to self-determination and statehood...
...Unfortunately there are no innocents in war and bullets go without moral name-tags...
...The PLO answered with concerted shelling of the northern settlements...
...Mostly I listened...
...Of course, there was one terrible massacre of Palestinian Arabs undertaken by the underground force commanded by the present Prime Minister of Israel...
...Shortly thereafter it reached Beirut and encircled it...
...And so, having been clear about from where I come and having asserted the facts of my politicization, I must tell you something of my reasoning and my conclusions...
...Of course, what Begin realizes is that he rubs the nose of American Jewry as well and raises vast sums of money for the exercise...
...The Israeli Army (known conveniently as the IDF, the Israeli Defense Force) invaded Lebanon in early June...
...The warfare of right against right had begun in earnest...
...As has been documented time and again (most recently in Rafik Halabi's extremely balanced and temperate The West Bank Story) the Israelis have effectively smashed independent political activity in the occupied territories, claiming, naturally and inevitably, security reasons for their suppression or simply lese majeste...
...Had the Arab states invaded Israel they might well have destroyed her...
...Israel conquered more than it had ever hoped to conquer...
...During the two decades after the founding of the State of Israel, the refugee camps grew in Jordan, in Gaza, and elsewhere...
...Israel today occupies the West Bank and Gaza (having returned the Sinai in an unparalleled and still obscure gesture of generosity) as a "belligerent occupant," a legal concept spelled out in the Geneva and Hague Conventions...
...His new novel, An Admirable Woman, will be published by Godine in 1983...
...This stand-off of policy, language, and confrontation must be regarded as an impasse either to be broken by a softening of PLO intransigence towards Israel or by a more forthcoming and generous response on the part of Israel towards what is now a badly beaten adversary...
...In the present crisis, it is critical that the real issue not be overlooked in the mounting American sentimentality about cruel wars...
...Although the perpetrators were subsequently punished, the basic argument stood: Palestinians fled their lands and went into exile...
...It is acknowledged that much of the destruction visited on Sidon and Tyre was accomplished years before by the PLO in its war with the Lebanese for control of Lebanon...
...Unfortunately a splinter faction of Palestinian resistance-eminently terrorist-attempted to assassinate the Israeli Ambassador to London...
...By comparison with them the war in Lebanon is small...
...It is for the duplicitous image of the moral Jew compelled to wage immoral warfare and the immoral Jew doing his wont that the Prime Minister of Israel can solemnly intone his moral litanies about refusing to bow his knee to world censure...
...They talked...
...Alas, it was not as one-sided as I had imagined...
...The greater the moralistic outcry from Reagan, the more transparent Begin's self-righteousness...
...For the one, Jews are expected to fight moral, just, and defensive wars...
...The predicament is rendered even more extreme by the increasingly tolerated perception that the Begin government is moving towards annexation of the Occupied Territories (perhaps this is the reason for graciously returning Sinai, since someone-Egypt-wanted it back, but no one except Israel and the dismembered Palestinians want the West Bank...
...The jeopardy into which such a cohesive Arab majority in the Middle East could place the State of Israel is much more immense than the acts of terror and the rhetorical bombast of the PLO...
...It is the case that the opposition to the Begin government is profound in the State of Israel, probably not profound enough to bring his government down, although many Israelis observed to me that if the Lebanese crisis is not resolved with a clear-cut political or military victory for Israel, Begin could fall...
...The Begin government and his American supporters match them...
...I find it saddening, demoralizing, depressing that it is so, but I no longer find it amazing that there are no moderates on the West Bank...
...As for anti-Semites, the Jews have never been other than aggrandizing, aggressive, murderous...
...Given the initiative, it takes it...
...As a new Zionist, it is clear to me now that Israel is beleaguered, beleaguered by the Arabs and beleaguered by the Jews...
...The numerous settlements that have been established on nearly 30 percent of the occupied lands reflects no legitimate interest in security since it is generally conceded that most of the settlements do not occupy strategic positions, have no security advantages and, in time of war, would be speedily evacuated...
...And so are the wounded...
...In general, the truculence and unsophistication of the military government, the brutal measures used by the army to suppress hostile response from the conquered (the remains of a number of bulldozed Arab dwellings in East Jerusalem were pointed out to me as having been the consequence of rock-throwing incidents against Israeli soldiers), the bloody riots, the firing of elected officials, the censorship of books, the closing of Bir Zeit University and other institutions on the West Bank are not evidence of a benign and peaceful occupation...
...In public, one can find Palestinian intellectuals and political leaders who will tell Israelis in fluent Hebrew (or English) that they are quite prepared to recognize Israel as a fait accompli and that they are willing to negotiate autonomy on the West Bank as a way-station toward statehood...
...It will come as no surprise that following the Yom Kippur war of 1973, the Arab states, seeking to standardize a political response to Israel while at the same time continuing to hold themselves aloof from any moral obligation to the Palestinians, recognized that the West Bank and Gaza belonged to the Palestinian people (a recognition concurred in by Jordan which had annexed the territory in 1948) and urged that the PLO be regarded as the only legitimate political representative of the Palestinians...
...But I wonder as well about my fellow American Jews...
...There is no one with whom to negotiate, no manifest leadership, and no efficient political machinery for eliciting such leadership...
...Philo-Semites are embarrassed...
...Worse than brutal, it is a stupid occupation and one that makes many Israelis, sensitive to the historical foundations of their country, shudder with anxiety for themselves and the generations to follow...
...Presently it is an ideal match between Begin's moral solemnities and an American Jewish community that does not realize the extent to which it is working out to the last Israeli its generational guilt for helplessness before Hitler...
...Obviously every Palestinian Arab is today a supporter of the PLO...
...I have my suspicions about why this is so, but these entail judgments upon the competency of the present administration to define the relevance of morality or thinking to politics at all...
...Nor, in those days, were the Western powers interested in solving the refugee problem...
...There is no question in my mind that the Israeli invasion of Lebanon was manipulated by the Israeli government...
...I arrived in Israel on the fifth day of the war and remained for three weeks, long enough to see what was happening...
...The value of the settlements is to assert a presence, a presence linked to Begin's Biblical monomania, in many cases accompanied by a Biblical passage that cites the name of the settlement's location in Holy Writ...
...They revert to type among their own constituency...
...THE SITUATION, however, is rendered more complex and- to my lights-desperate by the fact that both parties to the fundamental conflict do not spell out their covert intentions...
...Zionism is a politics for the contemporary Jew and a polity for the State of Israel...
...They are passive participants in the real struggle...
...Its claims upon the Jewish pysche are too deep, too complex, too emotionally charged to yield anything but confusion when challenged...
...Most certainly cluster and phosphorus bombs are not dropped with "purity of arms...
...What I write now is not reportage...
...The greater reason for selective indignation is that Jews in the postwar world have succeeded in training both philo-Semites and anti-Semites how to respond to them...
...Many Israelis were killed...
...The Arabs remain intransigent...
...Can it be imagined what a Marshall Plan for the refugees would have accomplished during the 1950s had the modest funds been used to begin the industrialization and development of modern agronomy in Jordan...
...They should really be back home on the West Bank arguing over Palestinian self-determination and the formation of a Palestinian state...
...There are few first-rate minds of educated intellect and solid Jewish scholarship among the major figures conducting the representation of Jewish life and aspirations in this country...
...Am I being unfair in this assessment...
...given an enemy that continues to fight, it continues to attack...
...Unfortunately they are not willing to say the same thing in Arabic for home consumption...
...It is because of this mistake that they take unreasonable sides...
Vol. 109 • September 1982 • No. 15
