The road to Masada
Powers, Thomas
Of several minds: Thomas Powers THE ROAD TO MASADA BEGIN INCREASES ISRAELI ISOLATION MY FATHER and I share an office in Vermont during the summer. He usually arrives about 9:30, carrying the...
...We can never live together...
...It was as if Israel had determined that Palestinians would not be allowed to live in communities, or even to gather together...
...Perhaps most important, there is no prospect of a change in the situation...
...Israel was not trying solely to halt sporadic rocket attacks but to destroy the PLO as an autonomous political force, to force it into dependence on neighboring Arab governments...
...The occupation is a harsh one, not so much militarily as legally...
...They all look to the PLO...
...As a military force the PLO has always been negligible...
...At the end, when the Jews were starving and the Romans were finally about to breach the western wall, the survivors- about a thousand in number- decided to commit suicide...
...Jerusalem has been annexed and turned into a Jewish city, and the process is being repeated in the rest of the West Bank, with one difference...
...Perhaps the Arabs on the West Bank will lose hope and drift away...
...Begin is taking a large gamble, but he has got Israel with him...
...Arab schools are frequently closed, Arab lands are seized under various pretexts, Arab economic development is stunted and Israeli economic development promoted...
...Israeli men sometimes joked that they had traveled widely through Arab countries- in the Army...
...A young Israeli and his wife visited me in Vermont this summer...
...He killed himself...
...This offensive posture- a quickness on the trigger unprecedented in modern times- is in direct contrast to the notions of war revealed at Masada...
...The ancient drama of Masada is still vividly apparent on the site...
...It was the scale of the retaliation which suggested Israel had something larger in mind...
...The Jordanian army sent Bedouin patrols into the wilderness to find them, and a Jordanian told me the Bedouin could smell the Israelis...
...Josephus tells the story in great detail in The Jewish War...
...But the nearest place Israelis could go was Athens...
...When I was in Israel a number of years ago I was struck by the country's extraordinary isolation...
...Officers in the Israeli armored corps, I have been told, receive their commissions at night in a torch-lit ceremony among the ruins of Masada, where they pledge never again...
...Things have gone too far...
...It is likely that more Palestinians were killed by Israelis since the beginning of June, than Israelis have been killed by Palestinians since 1967...
...Herod had built a frontier fortress on the site, a high plateau overlooking the Dead Sea...
...Then they would go home and have a family...
...More troubling was the determined destruction of Palestinian communities- first by air attack and artillery, finally by bulldozer...
...The top was all but deserted...
...Israel's neighbors can choose peace or war, but it has got to be one or the other, and whichever it is will be on Israeli terms...
...They expected to be gone for a year or so...
...The PLO has indeed attacked Israeli villages in Northern Israel, and it has got small right to complain of Israeli retaliation...
...Other sites nearby where Jews lived in ancient times were on the West Bank, annexed by Jordan...
...A friend and I did it late in the day in 1975 and there were moments when I wondered if I were really going to make it...
...Begin's invasion of Lebanon, and the siege of the PLO in West Beirut, is entirely in keeping with the spirit of Israeli military policy- a clear attempt to hunt out the enemy and destroy his capacity to fight...
...For the ancient Jews, the retreat to Masada was a strategic mistake of the sort it was impossible to correct...
...Almost every day there was something on the front page about the invasion of Lebanon...
...They chose lots to see who would act as executioner...
...Parts of the fortress have been restored, but that is not what creates the effect...
...THOMAS POWERS...
...The climb up from the Dead Sea takes a couple of hours...
...I look at the headlines and we talk for a few minutes...
...We should give it back," he said...
...He usually arrives about 9:30, carrying the newspaper...
...The scale of Israeli settlement of the West Bank dwarfs anything established in Sinai...
...One afternoon we split and stacked a cord of firewood...
...When the first Arab-Israel war ended in 1948, Masada chanced to be inside the green lines- that is, on the Israeli side of the ceasefire lines...
...As soon as he was released he and his wife set out on a journey to see the world...
...What they did do was to guarantee a quasi-sovereign status in Lebanon, and thus put weight behind the Palestinian political agenda...
...across the Suez Canal by air when Nasser followed a policy of no peace and no war until his death...
...Begin recog-nizes this fact by his insistence on referring to the West Bank as Judea and Samaria, and it is increasingly clear that neither Begin nor Israel itself intends to surrender the captured territories, now or ever...
...It is hard to imagine an opposition government willing to dismantle the settlements and go back to the green lines...
...into the West Bank, the Golan Heights and the Sinai again in 1967...
...But the truth was they felt confined...
...It is precisely this, of course, that Menachem Begin is determined to avoid...
...When it is threatened it strikes out...
...Modern Israel has refused to accept the constriction of a siege...
...For more than twenty years Israel has followed a policy of carrying war to the enemy, so long as the enemy chooses war...
...The Israeli invasion of Lebanon was an attempt to destroy the PLO pure and simple, not in order to protect the Israeli villages of Galilee, but to hinder the growth of an effective local political opposition to Israeli absorption of the West Bank...
...The siege which followed lasted a year or more...
...Israel has engaged in a clandestine war of assassination with PLO terrorists in Europe, conducted a lightning raid into Uganda, destroyed a nuclear reactor near Baghdad by air, and repeatedly crossed the border into Southern Lebanon to attack Palestinian guerrillas...
...Arab nations cannot force Israel to surrender the West Bank, and the United States will not...
...The Arab population is hemmed in by Israeli law, blocked from buying land or building outside of narrowly prescribed areas...
...After the fall of Jerusalem a small army of Jews retreated to Masada and waited for the Romans...
...There faith was put in walls...
...Young Arabs traveled all over the Arab world, from North Africa to the Persian Gulf and beyond to Baghdad...
...He told me he had never seen a cord of firewood at one time before...
...It wasn't strategy my father was thinking of when he said Begin was determined to have a new Masada, but his unbendingftess...
...Looking down, it is not hard to imagine the awful despair of the Jews who sat there month after month and knew the Romans would never go away...
...But I can't help thinking of the view from Masada, with the wall of circumvallation below and the outlines of the camps where the Roman soldiers waited patiently for time and starvation to do their work...
...There was much talk of bringing peace to Galilee, but this seemed a thin pretext for a campaign on such a large scale...
...A few weeks earlier he had been called up by his reserve unit and sent to fight in the Bekaa Valley...
...This does not appear to be the plan on the West Bank...
...The advance to Beirut was only part of it...
...As Begin relentlessly forced the Palestinians into yet a third dispersal since 1948 my father said- at least eight or ten times in two months, always in the same words- "Begin is determined to have a new Masada...
...We should have encouraged local political leaders but now it's too late...
...Masada was the last or one of the last Jewish strongholds to succumb to the Romans following the Jewish revolt in 70 A.D...
...For a couple of dollars you could take a taxi from Beirut to Damascus, or from Damascus to Amman in Jordan...
...Perhaps in twenty or thirty years the world's map-makers will decide to forget the lines of occupation since 1967, and color it all Israel...
...For the pure adventure of it Israeli high school students sometimes crossed secretly into Jordan to visit the ancient city of Petra near the southern end of the Dead Sea...
...It is one of the ironies of modern Israeli history that it established itself on the coast of the Mediterranean, not in the central highlands which were the historic heart of ancient Israel for all but two brief periods of its early history...
...Masada is easily defended, but impossible to escape...
...I asked him about the West Bank...
...When the Romans entered the fort they found the garrison dead...
...When Jerusalem was annexed the Arab inhabitants were offered Israeli citizenship...
...For one thing the fort commands a vast expanse of the surrounding Dead Sea wilderness...
...The control of water and other resources is entirely in Israeli hands...
...When it has felt threatened it has struck out- into the Sinai in 1956...
...Perhaps Begin will succeed, the PLO will spend the next few years fighting for its political life, the Arab countries will do nothing, and the United" States will murmur protest but go on supporting Israel with military and economic aid...
...Modern Israel has no walls...
...across the canal again in the October War of 1973...
...Two thousand years later the Israeli general and archaeologist Yigael Yadin excavated Masada and found some of the broken shards of pottery used to draw lots...
...Once the siege walls were up, the end was certain...
...Very often, last June and July, the subject was Israel...
...We wandered for an hour or two...
...into Jordan to retaliate for PLO raids until the PLO was driven out in 1970...
...Its 15,000 "fighters" may have been heavily armed with Soviet weaponry but they did not seriously threaten Israel...
...These facts are already beginning to have the predictable effect: the Arab population has begun to move away...
...The losers each killed nine of their fellows, and then chose lots again until only one man remained...
...From the walls you can look down and see the outline of the ancient Roman siege camps and the Roman wall of cir-cumvallation, completely surrounding the base of the plateau to keep supplies for the besieged from getting in, or messages from getting out...
...My father saw things differently...
...The published remarks of Menachem Begin sounded very much like those of a man who at last has got his enemy where he wants him...
...They hate us there...
...Not all of them came back...
Vol. 109 • October 1982 • No. 17
