ISRAEL: BAR KOCHBA AND ALL THAT

...In detail, Eldad's argument is often highly vulnerable...

...as a matter of national life or death...

...A third oath obliged the nations of the world not to oppress the Jews...

...Ultimately, however, it is not the past but the present and the future that are at stake in this controversy...

...Harkabi had used the tools of historiography to pinpoint the symptoms of disease that he perceived in the Israeli body politic...

...For a moment the audience seemed struck dumb...

...Broadly speaking, the one camp sees itself as working in the tradition of Ben Gurion, Chaim Weizmann, and the Haganah—the other in that of Jabotinsky, the Revisionists, the IZL (the "Irgun") and the Lehi ("the Stern Gang...

...His style is simple and blunt, his arguments are based on common sense and, as he is the first to admit, almost banal...

...Fifty of their most important outposts and nine hundred and eighty-five of their most famous villages were razed to the ground...

...Yadin recalls how the Prime Minister responded on finding out that not all the newly discovered Bar Kochba letters were in the language of the Bible: " 'Why did they write in Aramaic and not in Hebrew?' was his immediate angry reaction, as if the scribes had been members of his staff...

...Eldad's book contains a short essay that is highly critical of Harkabi by David Rokeah, who teaches Jewish history at the Hebrew University...

...Harkabi may be right that it "is arrogance to think that historical processes affect all peoples except the Jews...

...And yet, they were finally victorious, hence justified...

...Given this ethos, it follows that figures in Jewish history who enjoy heroic status among the Israeli population at large belong (with the possible exception of Herzl) exclusively to those ancient days when the Jews still had the opportunity and daring to fight wars...

...the countries that had been accepting immigrants were beginning to close their gates...

...Despite popular perceptions, the Israeli academic world is by no means uniformly opposed to the Greater Israel camp...

...The essential vulnerability of Harkabi's argument, as Eldad interprets it, lies in the distinction Harkabi makes between realism and fantasy...

...The antiannexationist camp has, to a striking extent, drawn its support from groups and individuals who have either grown up outside Israel altogether (Abba Eban, Ben Aharon) or who have drawn inspiration from sources beyond mainstream patriotism...

...of the Common Era...

...In sum, Harkabi is arguing that the Zionist enterprise, having rejected one form of spiritual excess, is in imminent danger of falling victim to another...

...The first paramilitary underground group, founded in 1907 in Palestine by members of the Marxist-Zionist youth groups (among them Isaac Ben-Zvi), was called Bar Giora...

...Roman rule [as Harkabi puts it] did not maintain a totalitarian, bureaucratic control like that of twentieth-century regimes...

...Let Harkabi have the last word on the issue of the Second Revolt: The Jewish tradition requires Jews to see anything significant that has happened to our people as though we share it directly...

...Eldad employed those skills to attack the Camp David agreements and the Israeli withdrawal from Sinai...

...The assumption (not necessarily accurate) was that these were the remains of Jews who had fled the Romans and that they should be given a ceremonial and religious reburial...

...Each side believes that it represents the Zionist revolution, and its opponents the counterrevolution...

...In a profoundly religious age, the ban on circumcision alone must have appeared as a "red line," a point of no return, when death became a better choice than surrender...

...The Dead Sea finds made it possible to flesh out this skeletal sketch somewhat when it came to the social and administrative life of the time, but they threw no new light on either the cause or the course of the rebellion...

...Bar Kochba is to be held up to the Israeli public as a dread example to be shunned at all cost, as an object of terror, as the embodiment of a collective 194 death wish, as a prime case of the false messianism usually dormant but always immanent within the Jewish collective consciousness—a kind of Jim Jones acting out his fantasies at the expense not of a cult but of an entire nation...

...He wants every Israeli to see that the Likud government is gambling with the highest stakes against insuperable odds, to understand that throughout history, when the leaders have made their last throw and lost, the people are left to pay the price in suffering and blood...

...How could the statesmen at Versailles lay the groundwork of "peace in our time," to which they had dedicated themselves, when Germany also had to be treated as a satanic realm...

...Therein lay Zionism's revolutionary innovation within the scheme of Jewish thought...

...On the contrary, Sharon's appointment as minister of defense in 1981 and his rush to transform the Middle East by war provided Harkabi's analysis with immediate and shocking confirmation...

...As he sees it, the Lebanese War confirmed his diagnosis...

...In the preface to his subsequent book, Bar Kokhba (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1961), Yadin described the meeting in the house of Israel's President Isaac Ben-Zvi, attended by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, the cabinet ministers, and other dignitaries: A screen had been erected at Mr...

...Harkabi concludes that the revolt was profoundly irrational, caused in the last resort not by Roman decrees per se but by the belief that Bar Kochba was the Messiah...

...And turning to our Head of State, I said, "Your Excellency, I am honored to be able to tell you that we have discovered fifteen despatches written or dictated by the last president of ancient Israel 1800 years ago...

...The Twenty-Second Legion, rushed in from Egypt, was probably utterly destroyed...

...A return to the primitive was part of the ur-myth of the new society—a phenomenon that finds expression in the fact that Joshua and King David are more meaningful symbols to most of the Israeliborn population than not only John Stuart Mill or de Tocqueville, not only Zionism's Ahad Ha-Am or A. D. Gordon, but even Chaim Weizmann and, with the passing years, even David Ben Gurion...

...Why then—and this is, perhaps, the crucial question—did the revolt take place at all...

...In toto, his statement does have a kind of monolithic grandeur, a Sturm and Drang quality, which gives it aesthetic appeal...

...There is an extraordinary amount of time given over to the Bible, which is taught to the children a few days a week throughout 11 years of their schooling...

...Or, again: "For seven years the gentiles fertilized their vineyards with the blood of Israel without using manure...

...Like some Golem it turns on those who used it, threatening to destroy what it had initially helped to build...

...For all his political genius, there was an unmistakable strand of primitive ativism in Ben Gurion...

...If it had not been for Rabbi Joshua Ben Hananiah and other overcautious leaders, the Jews of Judea might have joined the revolt of the Diaspora in 115-117 C.E., the combined forces ensuring victory at a moment when "the fate of the Roman Empire hung in the balance...

...It was even suggested at the time by disciples that Bar Kochba's soul had been reincarnated in Sabbatai Zvi...

...It is high time to weaken the hold of mysticism and myth...

...Bar Kochba—even more than the leaders of the First Revolt—was transformed by the Sages of later periods into something of a "nonperson...

...A heated public debate in Israel, lasting from May 1980 until the outbreak of the Lebanese War in June 1982, followed Yehoshafat Harkabi's attack on Shimon Bar Kochba, the second-century leader of the anti-Roman revolt in Judea, 132-35 C.E...

...With little hard fact to go on, both Harkabi and his critics have to work largely in the area of speculation and extrapolation...

...The subtitle of Yadin's book Bar Kokhba, which is as fascinating as his work on Masada, is The Rediscovery of the Legendary Hero of the Last Jewish Revolt Against Imperial Rome...

...Only a general uprising throughout the Empire or the massive intervention by Parthia (consisting of Persia and Mesopotamia) could have staved off disaster...

...Until the discovery of these letters in 1960, hard information about the Bar Kochba revolt had been minimal...

...He persisted in the idea that Zionism meant the ingathering of all the exiles, not in some messianic future but as a real possibility...

...An extraordinary logistical infrastructure, developed over a period of centuries, backed the army in the field and permitted the systematic transfer of forces from one end of the Empire to the other...

...Having contributed to the attainment of victory, myth tends to make its consolidation impossible...

...It is touch and go whether Zionism can survive the effects of its own triumph...

...196 It is an axiom of the Jewish religion that martyrdom is considered obligatory only in order to avoid being coerced into idolatry, into sexual offenses, or into the commitment of murder...

...In this context, it is interesting to note that Yigael Yadin rejected Harkabi's critique of Bar Kochba out of hand (and with various ad hominem jibes) on the grounds that too little is known about Bar Kochba...

...For many years Harkabi was an adviser to the government on the Arab world...

...He is a noted Arabist and has published extensively on the Arab-Israeli conflict...

...Harkabi consequently uses the Bar Kochba epic in order to sharpen and clarify this ideological divide...

...At the practical level, Ben Gurion brilliantly combined daring with caution, acceptable risk with underlying realism...

...The subsequent ceremony, which took place in early May 1982, was attended by both President Yitzhak Navon and Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and it cost the country hundreds of thousands of dollars...

...Given what Harkabi is attempting to do and who he is, his campaign shows with shocking clarity just how polarized Israel has become...

...The "primitivization" of political thinking, against which Harkabi warns, is not the product of the Begin years, even though the Likud has built on it, fosters it, and may well perpetuate it...

...And he insists that the moderate politicians in both political alignments (the Likud and, still more, Labor) must stop pretending that they can eat their cake and have it too...

...It is only with victory, the end of the war, the seizure of power, the establishment of the national state, that the dialectical nature of myth reveals itself in all its force...

...There, in effect, he and his colleagues set out to demonstrate that the Jewish people could survive indefinitely without the Temple, the priesthood and animal sacrifice, and build instead on the study of the Torah, the codification and explication of the Oral Law, the synagogue, the family, individual piety, and belief in the eventual messianic coming...

...What turned unavoidable defeat into a tragedy of colossal proportions were the rebels' military tactics...

...Or Polish nationalism without Gniezno, Jagiello, and Grunwald...

...Ultimately, he argues, the creation of the State of Israel cannot be grasped in mundane terms according to the familiar "lessons" of history...

...they were to a great extent its product...

...and Bar Kochba, not to mention Joshua and King David, are seen as kindred spirits—while Maimonides, Ibn Ezra, and 192 the many other great poets and scholars and communal leaders of medieval Jewry remain shadowy figures...

...Did the two Jewish revolts (of 66 and 132) serve, however incidentally, to frustrate the permanent Roman subjection of Parthia (thus in the long run permitting the rise of Babylonian Jewry to preeminent importance...

...Yet, as an operative doctrine it seems a sure prescription for disaster...

...not another Northern Ireland or Lebanon...

...Zionism proclaimed the return of the Jewish people, as Harkabi puts it, to the stage of history...

...Against "the common Israeli reaction that these Jews were insufficiently 'nationalistic,' " Harkabi argues that "the survival of the Jewish people is due to the moderation of the Jews in Galilee...

...Together with Yitzhak Shamir (now Israel's prime minister), he was one of the leaders of Lehi (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, the so-called Stern Gang...

...In general terms, his work on Bar Kochba simply opens up one more front in the great debate that has divided Israel since the June War of 1967...

...To the uninitiated observer in the West, the ancient history of Judea must seem an improbable subject for fierce contemporary political debate...

...Their scattered guerrilla warfare, skirmishes and raids, conducted from within the midst of the village population, made it well-nigh impossible for the enemy to distinguish between combatants and noncombatants...

...There is no concerted effort to depict modern Israel for what it is (but may not be much longer): the product of Jewish history in both ancient Palestine and in the Diaspora, of both national tradition and Western modernity, of both the rebellion against Greece and Rome and of the Graeco-Roman civilization...

...But neither he nor anyone else among the founders seems to have given much thought to the problem of how their values could be incorporated into what is being taught...

...But, Harkabi insists, neither of these two decisions, however terrible and humiliating from the Jewish point of view, could have justified full-scale revolt...

...Coming from such a man, the assault on the Bar Kochba myth could hardly be brushed off with the contempt usually displayed by the extreme nationalists for their opponents...

...The potential dangers of nationalistic mythology (which Yadin himself fosters, however unintentionally, through his books on archeology) have apparently never occurred to him...

...To discount this entire phenomenon, as Harkabi does at one point, as belonging primarily to "the literary realm" in the preindependence period is to miss a fundamental truth: the central role played by myth in the radical movements of the modern age...

...The failure to rise up then was "one of the great tragedies in this struggle between Rome and Jerusalem...

...He was rarely mentioned, and whatever references to him survived tended to be negative...

...First, Eldad insists that for any given movement to repudiate its own heroes is an act of spiritual self-mutilation...

...Herut and Gush Emunim share with Sabbatai Zvi, Bar Kochba, and the Zealots of the First Revolt (this is Harkabi's case) the same refusal to recognize that some hurdles are too high to clear, some obstacles too stubborn to be brushed aside or wished away, that the external world indeed is real...

...The power of Rome was based in part on the superbly thorough training given to all officers and men, above all to the middleranking centurions who commanded the cohorts of about 600 men...

...Among them was the distinguished Rabbi Joshua Ben Hananiah who, arguing against the idea of revolt, used the parable of a rooster who puts its beak into the mouth of a lion, and he concluded that "It is enough for us that we have come into contact with this [Roman] people in peace and were able to leave in peace...

...That the Bible per se, when not measured against some external yardstick, can be mined to justify every religious or political doctrine (including almost any form of fanaticism) is obvious enough and has long been demonstrated by the never-ending history of Protestant schism and sectarianism...

...The sources are contradictory here, but there seem to have been one or two immediate causes (or perhaps both, together): the first, Hadrian's decision to build a Roman city, Aelia Capitolina, upon the ruins of Jerusalem, which had been destroyed in 70 C.E...

...When the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy met Prime Minister Begin in 1981, he was astonished, as Amos Elon has reported, to hear him talk about "nothing else" but the leader of the last revolt in ancient Judea...

...And, of course, they share the same language, Hebrew (although Aramaic was also spoken in the Second Temple period...

...Five hundred and eighty thousand men were slain . and the number of those that perished by famine, disease and fire was past finding out...

...There are no grounds for describing the Zionist movement from 1881 until 1948 as a wildly utopian enterprise...

...If [writes Eldad] one compares that reality [facing Bar Kochba] with the reality that faced us [the Zionists], then it turns out that the chances of success were far greater then than in our time, whether at the stage of pioneer Zionism . . . or of the uprising against the British Empire . . . or of the war between the small Yishuv [Jewish community in the Land of Israel] and the seven Arab states...

...Harkabi estimates the total number of deaths among the Jewish population at about a million...

...Roman losses were, it seems, unusually heavy...

...It is, rather, that he appears to underestimate the true dimensions of the problem, assuming that a few doses of sharp ideological shock treatment can restore the collective psyche to a state of equilibrium, thereby reversing what he rightly discerns as "the primitivization of political thinking among a large section of the Jewish population [in Israel...

...As for those national movements that had to struggle hard for statehood, they not only required myth...

...The establishment of the state in 1948 and the subsequent six-fold increase in its Jewish population have, in this view, to be seen as mere stepping stones toward ultimate redemption...

...That evening the national radio interrupted its scheduled program to broadcast news of the discovery...

...This made the Romans respond with a policy of ruthless attrition, mass extermination...

...For he has not invested all this time and effort in an academic exercise of demythologization...

...From the Dead Sea letters, it is known today that his actual name was Bar Koziba...

...Dayan was a man of quick intelligence and bold imagination, but he lacked entirely what Ben Gurion had in such abundance— a steady and large vision of the state and society, which still had to be built...

...The same syndrome seems to have been at work when it came to laying down the guidelines for the educational system of the emer201 gent state...

...For a period he was in command of military intelligence in the Israeli army and he left the regular service with the rank of major general...

...Beyond a certain point, it has to be taken on trust that those who raised the flag of revolt had no choice...

...Dayan's book on the archeology and geography of Israel was called, characteristically, Living With the Bible...

...Ben Gurion himself, every inch the statesman, let myth blind him when it came to planning the succession...

...But its success, so vastly impressive and rapid, achieved in the span of a few decades, has in turn produced a wave of irrationality so powerful that it threatens to sweep aside all realism, all caution, all sober thought...

...It is said that Bar Kochba, along with Jabotinsky and Garibaldi, is one of Begin's three personal heroes...

...To avoid military confrontation with Rome was considered of essential importance by Rabbi Yohanan Ben Zakkai and by at least some of his colleagues and disciples...

...Add to these factors vast military experience and cold-blooded ruthlessness, and you have an all but unbeatable formula...

...Under his leadership, Israel was a democratic state with a decisive Jewish majority, and the area assigned for new settlement was, above all, the unpopulated South (Lachish and the Negev...

...He attended to building an adequate military force both before and after 1948...

...during the First Revolt (as well as a temple for Jupiter on the Temple Mount...

...The goal was "back to the Bible," back to the period of Jewish sovereignty, and the creation of a new nation freed of the passivity, dependency, and powerlessness of the Diaspora...

...It's still a very young country, born in the aftermath of the Holocaust, always fighting wars or threatened by them and so, naturally, its people cherish heroism and seek out heroes...

...One is reminded of Ben Gurion's first law of coalition-building, designed to draw clear lines: "Without Herut [Begin] and without the Communists...

...Much of the argument comes down to the question of whose guesswork is the more plausible...

...And yet, despite overwhelming odds, the Jewish state was established...

...The Roman army was thus capable of fighting effectively both en masse and when scattered over a wide area in small semiautonomous units...

...Hadrian, according to Dio Cassius, was unable to inform the Senate of victory with the customary addendum: "I and the legions are in health...

...During the period between the wars of 1967 and 1973, he was generally regarded as something of a hard-liner (although not an annexationist...

...But these Judean victories at the tactical level were overcome by the overwhelming strategic advantage enjoyed by the Romans...

...but he never overestimated what a small country could obtain (politically, diplomatically, socially) through sheer might...

...Ben-Zvi's house, and when my turn came to report I 193 projected on the screen through a film slide the colored photograph of part of a document and read out loud the first line of writing upon it: "Shimeon Bar Koziba [Bar Kochba], President over Israel...

...It is interesting, as Harkabi stresses, that Sabbatai Zvi—the self-proclaimed Messiah of the 17th century who brought tragedy upon his generation— identified wholeheartedly with Bar Kochba...

...EDS...

...The fun Lytton Strachey had with his Eminent Victorians is denied the would-be iconoclast in these irreverent times...

...The thrust of his analysis at that time was in harmony with and probably served to reinforce the unbending policies of Golda Mein Today Harkabi is a prominent professor of international relations at the Hebrew University...

...Mapam with its strong Marxist tradition, writers with an acute awareness of the multifarious roots of Israeli life (Amos Oz, A. B. Yehoshua), faculty members and students at the universities with close intellectual links to the West—all demonstrate, in their different ways, this truth...

...Among the many second-century papyrus documents discovered in an almost inaccessible cave, high in the sheer cliffs above the Dead Sea, were 15 letters by Bar Kochba himself...

...It would have been hard to gather this fact, though, from the way Yadin first presented his find, which had initially been kept secret...

...And if this was possible, why should it be considered fantastic to think in terms of 10 million Jews in the Holy Land settled "in accord with the faith of the Sages from the Euphrates to the Nile...

...First, he wants at all cost to show that there is no middle ground between the two types of Zionism, that there is a fundamental choice to be made: either/or...

...If the Jews could keep secret their vast preparations for the rebellion, they were certainly capable of avoiding public knowledge of circumcision rituals...

...Again, over 60 years had passed since the destruction of the Temple and a radically new turn had been given to the practice and theory of Judaism by Rabbi Yohanan Ben Zakkai and his school of thought...

...It is indeed hard to think of any hero, even in modern English or American history, who could not be brought down today with impunity...

...They were held up as the antithesis of rabbinic passivity, the answer to Yohanan Ben Zakkai and the tradition of his academy at Yavneh—precisely because they died fighting for national liberation...

...That this revolt was not inevitable, even given the values and imperatives of the time, follows from the fact (this is a central strand in Harkabi's argument) that the Jews of Galilee and of the Diaspora—many millions—joined in hardly or not at all...

...Many of the arguments put forward by Eldad and Rokeah are essentially technical 198 and, beyond a certain point, primarily of interest to specialists...

...Nearly all the major newspapers carried not one but several full-length articles, pro and con, on the Bar Kochba issue...

...The maximalists thus see the goal of Zionism in the gathering-in of all the exiles from the four corners of the earth into the entire historic homeland...

...All this is understandable enough...

...Or can one imagine the German nationalist movement without the idealization of the Teutonic resistance to Rome and of the Hohenstaufen...

...Was it possible, for example (as Harkabi suggests en passant), that the decree on circumcision did not cause the revolt but, instead (a Roman act of reprisal), resulted from it...

...More than anything else, though, Shavit's argument about Bar Kochba's marginality was disproved by the response to Harkabi's iconoclastic campaign...

...The answer lies in the magic of the name, a name treasured by folklore but almost lost to authenticated history, and the realization . . . that after nearly two thousand years the desert had given up factual links with the man who led the last attempt of his people to overthrow their Roman masters...

...He has, rather, set out to seize the myth and use it as a lethal weapon against the camp of extreme nationalism that now is politically dominant...

...Even the long-established national states proved unable to dispense with their heroes, not men but supermen...

...For the most part, though, the Israeli leadership and people have found themselves increasingly unable to handle the problem of the territories conquered in 1967...

...This archeological find by Yigael Yadin's expedition was highly dramatic...

...Boys graduating from the best high schools of the cities and kibbutzim have always (at least until the last year or two) volunteered for the crack fighting units, as paratroops, combat pilots, commandos...

...To denounce those who had the courage to stand and fight means, consciously or unconsciously, to identify with the national enemy...

...The questions of failure and cost can be analyzed, but it is essential nonetheless to identify with those who led the fight and died for the cause...

...This put him very much in conflict with many other Israeli Arabists—most conspicuously, perhaps, with Shimon Shamir—and with important sections of the academic world in general...

...If there is an important weakness in Harkabi's approach it is not that he is wrong to subject the national heroes of the past and the national fantasies of the present to critical scrutiny...

...Yisrael Eldad, drew a huge crowd, and both protagonists also pursued the argument more elaborately in book form...

...Zionism, argue the minimalists, means a secure and democratic state for the Jewish people living in peace within its homeland— not the sacrifice of the Jewish people for boundaries...

...The "pragmatism" on which Dayan so prided himself meant in fact the absence of all fixed principle, a change of line with every new wind and whim...

...Thus Rome could shift military units from Germany, Britain, or Spain to Egypt, Anatolia, or Syria (or vice versa), as circumstances demanded...

...Eager to advance the formation of the "new Jew," he threw all his prestige behind Moshe Dayan as his heirapparent...

...One can take that system of thought or leave it, but it is impervious to mere empiricism...

...Yadin's discovery in the Dead Sea cave surpasses understanding, could hardly have been a coincidence...

...During the siege of Jerusalem in the year 70 C.E., he had slipped out of the city and, with Roman consent, had established an academy—a new spiritual center— in Yavneh...

...The 2,000 years of exile were denied legitimacy, real value...

...It is different in Israel...

...But, on the basic issue, there was no break between the debate about the ancient war and the one that still is not over...

...In the wake of his succes de scandale, Harkabi even added an epilogue on the Lebanese War to his book's English edition, The Bar Kokhba Syndrome: Risk and Realism in International Politics (Chappaqua, N.Y.: Rossel Books, 1982...

...It was there that the Mishnah as well as the so-called Jerusalem Talmud were composed...

...It is thus no wonder that the Israeli-born population grows up with a kind of historical amnesia ensuring that events that took place two or three thousand years ago are grasped more vividly than anything from the intervening period until the present...

...True, it often suffered military defeat at its borders but time and again, when challenged, it proved able to muster sufficient force to preserve the Empire intact...

...All this is 195 deliberate...

...It is indicative of the swing to the right in Israel that over the last few years he has been writing a column for the liberal paper Ha'aretz, which thus hopes to demonstrate some semblance of "balance" (his role being rather like that of William Safire in the New York Times...

...In other words, it was an anthropocentric idea, which demanded that the Jews treat the political process as autonomous, as the art of the possible...

...In reaction to the catastrophic defeats, rabbinic authorities turned sharply against the 197 idea that political action of any kind could advance the messianic coming...

...The basic question at issue throughout, of course, has been whether or not Israel should seek at the appropriate time to exchange territorial gains made in 1967—including the West Bank and Gaza in whole or in part—for a secure peace...

...Some 20 years after the Bar Kochba discoveries, the religious establishment, led by Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren, suddenly remembered that among Yadin's finds had been a large number of human bones, which had been removed for examination and storage...

...Is there any parallel to this in the history of the nations...

...But it does by no means follow that his name and his story are not deeply implanted in the national psyche...

...And so it was from a "realistic"— meaning unimaginative—point of view...

...Is it possible to conceive of Italian or Greek nationalism divorced from the largely unsubstantiated theories of continuity between the modern and the classical age...

...In rabbinic sources, the same picture was drawn more allegorically: "They slew the inhabitants until the horses waded in blood up to the nostrils...

...Next day the newspapers came out with banner headlines...

...The first of these two propositions is no doubt correct...

...Would it have been possible to sustain the total effort in the two World Wars without demonizing the enemy and idealizing the coming era of peace...

...There was never a chance worth considering, as Harkabi sees it, that the Bar Kochba revolt could have succeeded...

...In the last resort, though, Eldad's case rests on three major theses that are part of an entire value system...

...ultimately—there is much talk among people on the right of a hundred-year war— peace will have to be imposed and secured by the consolidation of a Greater Israel too strong to be challenged...

...Fortunate the rare state or regime that had founders who were aware of this danger at the moment of its establishment...

...Unlike the Maccabean wars and the revolt of 66-73 C.E., respectively described in detail in the Book of the Maccabees and by Josephus in his History of the Jewish Wars (both, incidentally, preserved for posterity by the medieval Church, not by the Jews), the only overall description of the Bar Kochba uprising is to be found in a brief passage, a few hundred words, written by the Roman historian Dio Cassius...

...Can one imagine any revolutionary socialist denouncing the leaders of the Paris Commune or the June Days...

...Such warrior leaders as Judah Maccabee, Shimon Bar Giora (a leader of the Zealots in the Revolt of 66-73 C.E...

...The two sides have been loosely called "doves" and "hawks," but the terms nonannexationists or "minimalists" as opposed to annexationists or "maximalists" are probably more accurate descriptions...

...Nothing has been more highly valued in the young than bravery—and not only in the young...

...How could the new national states conduct policy based on a rational alliance system abroad and on ethnic homogeneity at home, when true greatness meant the attainment of the "historic" (meaning the maximal) frontiers...

...Harkabi does not attack the Maccabees, but was their uprising against the Seleucid Greeks anything but utterly Quixotic...

...Most Israelis have no more detailed knowledge about Bar Kochba than most Americans have about Madison or Jefferson...

...Theoretically a moderate on the issue of the territories, Yadin was nevertheless ready to serve some four years as deputy prime minister under Begin...

...A ten-year-old child going to the Israel Museum can read much of the Dead Sea scrolls (dating from the period of the revolts against Rome) without any great difficulty...

...Are we so stone deaf that we cannot hear their shrieks...

...The pendulum has swung fast and far toward messianism, eschatology, and chiliasm in their myriad manifestations, religious, quasi-religious, and secular...

...Could revolutionary socialism have sustained itself throughout its long periods in the underground without its utopian vision of the future (and usually of the distant past), or without its black-and-white theory of class war...

...The Roman decrees, it seems, did not impose any of these three cardinal sins...

...In sum, what the Romans chose to do with the Temple Mount, laid waste 60 years earlier, should hardly have been seen in 132 C.E...

...Maimonides, for example, wrote that he "was killed because of his sinfulness...

...and Jerusalem may have been captured and held for a time by Bar Kochba...

...But for the maximalists, this position is a loss of nerve, appeasement, a Munich...

...Its slogan read: "In blood and fire Judea did fall...

...Everybody is, in principle, against futile risks and for sober calculation...

...For the other side, however, the idea of surrendering any area of the national homeland, of Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel), is unthinkable...

...A public debate on the subject, held at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem between Harkabi and Dr...

...Once the tanks were on the move, nobody was in the mood to polemicize about battles fought some 1,800 years ago...

...He constantly pursued a policy of partition, leaving Jordan and Egypt to deal with the vast majority of the Palestinian Arabs...

...To find the limits of what can be attained by courage and will it is essential to put reality to the test...

...By emphasizing the extent and depth of Arab intransigence, he seemed to preclude the possibility of any negotiated settlement in the foreseeable future...

...But while this distinction comes easily with the benefit of hindsight, it is impossible to employ it with any confidence where the future is concerned...

...The case that Harkabi makes against the Bar Kochba uprising is far-ranging and touches on its causes, the tactics and strategy it adopted, its outcome, and the place it has occupied in Jewish thought over the centuries...

...Harkabi's intentions are clear...

...The fact is, though, that every movement of mass mobilization requires the energizing and unifying force supplied by myth...

...How could the Bolsheviks (or the Maoists) ensure a measure of popular well-being and participation ("Soviet democracy") so long as the class enemy had not been totally extirpated and full communism attained...

...The phenomenon of the general as archeologist and archeological author—true of both Yadin (the professional) and Dayan (the gifted amateur)—is thus hardly surprising...

...It was still an era of European colonization overseas...

...On the contrary, in its eagerness to produce a rooted, uncomplicated, "normal" youth, the leadership may have deliberately (albeit unconsciously) rejected such a balance...

...The visitor to the Thames Embankment will even find that imperial England built a statue of Queen Boadicea riding into battle—and to eventual defeat—in her war chariot...

...For the one side, the dangers inherent in annexing a hostile Arab population (now almost half the size of the Jewish population), in turning a democratic and ethnically Jewish state into one at best only half democratic and half Jewish, and in recklessly deepening hatred and antagonisms within that state far outweigh the dangers involved in seeking to negotiate an eventual territorial compromise...

...And, second, Harkabi is desperately anxious to reach the man and woman in the street...

...Eldad accuses Harkabi of taking his stand not, as he would have it, with Yohanan Ben Zakkai but, by clear implication, with Josephus Flavius, who went over to the Romans during the First Revolt, and with others who chose to surrender rather than fight to the end...

...But neither of these eventualities was probable in 132 C.E.—apart from anything else, Hadrian had concluded a firm peace treaty with Parthia on becoming emperor in 117 C.E.—and neither in fact materialized...

...Applying this principle to recent events, Eldad denounces the hesitations that inhibited the expulsion of the Arab population from Hebron and Nablus in June 1967, a preventive strike on the eve of the Yom Kippur War, and a march on Cairo at its close "in order to dictate peace like any normal nation...

...in blood and fire Judea shall rise...

...Extremely erudite in both European and Jewish culture, he has been working for years on a multivolume Hebrew translation of Nietzsche, and he sees himself in many ways as a disciple of the Nietzschean philosophy...

...Labor is unlikely to have another chance...

...Providence is clearly at work in our own days, and only the blind can ignore 199 the fact...

...For decades, the Zionist movement itself was denounced by its opponents as dangerous fantasy...

...There were Bar Kochba sports associations, and Bar Kochba clubs (the one in Prague was frequently addressed by Martin Buber...

...Queen Boadicea, for instance (a firstcentury leader of the Britons who, like Bar Kochba, rebelled against Rome), won't kindle even a spark of interest in present-day England except, perhaps, in some scholarly journals...

...But Ben Gurion combined this wisdom in practice with an uncritical myth-mongering, in no way modified by the establishment of the state...

...Certainly, very little time in Israeli schools is devoted to the study of the democratic system and the history of democracy, or to the Israeli declaration of independence...

...They now described God as binding the Jews by an oath not to rebel and, by a second oath, not to return demonstratively, en masse—until the days of the Messiah—from exile to the Holy Land...

...In order to decide on the exact site to be used, Goren, who for many years had served as chief chaplain of the army (with the rank of general), had himself lowered, with much publicity, from a helicopter onto the cliffs above the Dead Sea...

...Did they not in their agony revile Bar Kochba and the revolt...

...q 202...

...the second, the emperor's decree forbidding circumcision throughout the Empire...

...Bonaparte was, of course, the classic case—a myth that proved impervious to the defeats of Napoleon I and brought on new disasters with Napoleon III...

...Then the silence was shattered with spontaneous cries of astonishment and joy...

...If Labor does come back to power in the next year or two, which is now more than possible but less than probable, it should ensure before all else that it takes over the Ministry of Education...

...The case marshaled in reply to Harkabi has been led primarily by Yisrael Eldad, who entitled his small book on the subject, published in Hebrew in 1982, A Controversy: Our Perceptions on the Destruction of the Second Temple and of Bar Kochba's Revolt...

...The more dashing among them (Dayan, but also Sharon and Weizman) benefited enormously from the widespread hero worship they had inspired...

...But it was precisely this thought that inspired the Prophets and the Sages...

...Millions of Jews were hoping to leave Europe...

...Anything else would have been surprising given popular beliefs and the teaching of history in Israeli schools...

...Nor can it be blamed only on the difficulties of educating a Jewish population of which about half has come from the Arab world, although that too is a factor...

...He has long been known for his fierce polemical skills, both verbally and in print...

...But many others joined the fray...

...Thousands of years passed, hundreds of scholars have studied the subject, and is it not the finger of God that brought Bar Kochba's letters into Yadin's hands, the letters handed on as it were from Chief of Staff to Chief of Staff...

...In order to understand the enormity of all this, it has to be recalled that Yehoshafat Harkabi is no ordinary rebel...

...Ben Gurion invested enormous effort to ensure the creation of a near-unified school system, excluding the religious schools but incorporating (and so abolishing) the network of labor education that had been developed in the prestate days...

...A succession of battle-scarred generals has made a rapid or even direct transition from command in the armed forces to the upper echelons of the political hierarchy—Allon, Dayan, Rabin, Ezer Weizman, Sharon, Bar-Lev, Gur...

...True, one of Harkabi's critics, Yakov Shavit (in Yediot Ah'ronot, June 12, 1981), argued that the Bar Kochba issue is merely marginal, for the average and even the better-educated Israelis know little about Bar Kochba and care still less...

...Indeed, to gauge the depth of the crisis now overtaking both state and society, it is enough to read him and his critics on Bar Kochba...

...The archeology of ancient Palestine enjoys a wide following in Israel, and it is only logical that the dig on the site of David's City in Jerusalem should have become the front line in the symbolic battle between the anti- (and non-) Zionist Orthodox Jews, who lay claim to the area as an ancient cemetery, and Israel's academic community (backed in this case, however hesitantly, by the state in the form of the Ministries of Education and Police...

...Once challenged, Emperor Hadrian had no choice but to muster force sufficient to crush the revolt utterly...

...Let all Jews . . . attempt to sense the nightmare visited upon the Jewish population...

...Rather than Bar Kochba (Son of a Star), he was now usually called Bar Koziba, which suggests deception or false hope...

...It was Bar Kochba's misfortune, argues Harkabi, that Palestine was not some peripheral outpost of the Empire (unlike Scotland, heartland Germany, or Parthia) but a key link in the network of defenses that preserved the Mediterranean as a Roman lake...

...Begin spoke on that occasion about Bar Kochba, praising his bravery and avoiding all mention of the cost of Bar Kochba's battles in human lives...

...On the contrary, until the mid-'70s he was a highly respectable and respected member of the ruling elite...

...Like Harkabi, Eldad is no closet intellectual...

...Knowledge of the tactics they adopted as they fought in these same hills and wadis can be useful to the modern officer...

...Nonetheless, the Labor leadership, whose members had received a many-sided education (part Marxist and part social democratic, Jewish and European, Hebraic and English), made no concerted effort to ensure that something approaching this kind of balance would be maintained in the schools...

...In 1982, Harkabi published an enlarged and revised edition of his book (in Hebrew) in order to deal with points that had been raised by his critics...

...And let us remember here that Betar, the nationalistic, Revisionist (Jabotinskyist) Zionist youth movement in which Begin served as a leader in prewar Poland, bears the name of the mountain-top fortification near Jerusalem, Betar, where Bar Kochba made his last stand...

...And his "negation of the Diaspora [galut]" was also applied retroactively across the span of Jewish history...

...In its early stages, the movement had to throw off the political passivity, the self-denying oaths characteristic of most rabbinic thought over the centuries (and still upheld in full by the ultra-Orthodox Neturei Karta and in part by Aguda...

...What is needed to overcome the objective hurdles is an iron will combined with belief in the providential destiny of the Jewish people, in the Rock of Israel...

...England experienced nothing quite like this but had, rather, an entire Pantheon of minor heroes: admirals, generals, and other warriors...

...This rule applies, above all, to nationalism...

...After the painstaking and arduous process of unraveling the documents, it turned out that these were notes containing specific orders on various matters (supplies, arrests, recruitment) sent by the leader to his local officers, agents, and followers...

...In the case of Israel, the legacy left by the leadership of 1948 was highly ambiguous, Janus-faced...

...Or, again, was it really so unrealistic to expect that the Parthians and other enemies of Rome would not let slip by so opportune a moment to join in the fight...

...Bar Kochba, along with Shimon Bar Giora and 200 other leaders of the revolts against Rome, served to symbolize (as Eldad rightly notes) the idea of national liberation and total dedication to that idea...

...and Palestine was very thinly populated, at least until 1917...

...And Yadin's meteoric political rise in 1977 can only be explained by the aura of authority associated with his name ever since he had served as Israel's first chief of staff...

...Betar also stands for the movement's full name, Brit Trumpeldor —the Trumpeldor Union...

...And it was Rabbi Akiba's prestige that guaranteed Bar Kochba the general support of the population in Judea...

...To take just one instance...

...I knew nothing," he writes, "of its toll in Jewish suffering...

...Rome was the only world power of that period and its war machine was immensely powerful...

...Thus the Zionist movement set itself the task of solving finite problems—most notably the problem of the homelessness and helplessness of the Jewish people, so sorely endangered by modern anti-Semitism—by finite, mundane means (Jewish statehood...

...And the ban on circumcision could hardly have been enforced except in the most haphazard way...

...Such people as Yigal Allon, Moshe Dayan, and Shimon Peres —the successor generation—clearly lacked the intellectual and moral tools to make the necessary and hard choices that were, and are, demanded...

...Rokeah, arguing along the same lines, recalls that Isaiah had regarded the defense of Jerusalem against Assyria's King Sennacherib as hopeless, yet resistance proved justified when the plague, "a miracle," saved the city...

...As Dio Cassius put it: Very few of them [the Jews in Judea] in fact survived...

...This brings us to the final theme in Eldad's crescendo...

...And their no-holds-barred response can largely be explained by the reputation that Harkabi acquired over the years as an army man, Arabist, and (one-time) "hawk...

...to surrender territory is to betray that goal: treason...

...In all probability, it was this idea or similar concepts of imminent redemption and providential intervention that prompted the greatest rabbi of the age, Akiba, to give his backing to the revolt...

...As a result, Jewish life in Galilee survived intact, and so the work of salvaging Judaism from the wreckage could go forward...

...And certainly, Zionism too had its myths, for it was dedicated to the restoration of the ancient homeland and it rejected, at crucial moments of decision, the offer of alternate territories (most notably, Uganda...

...In The Bar Kokhba Syndrome, Harkabi (who is a second-generation Israeli) describes how he grew up with a totally positive view on the Bar Kochba rebellion...

...The ancient warriors fought over the same terrain as today's Israeli army in its various military actions...

...There was usually no more than a single legion stationed on a permanent basis in Judea...

...We need only recall the awe with which the discovery of the Bar Kochba letters was greeted in 1960...

...At this point, it is perhaps superfluous to review the countertheses that can be marshaled in response...

...Why was a whole nation elated over the discovery of a name on a fragment of papyrus...

...Incidentally and ironically, Harkabi lives in an apartment on Bar Kochba Street on Jerusalem's French Hill, an area taken over from Jordanian control in 1967...