Editorial: Blood and Paint and Beirut
Fein, Leonard
EDITORIAL BLOOD AND PAINT AND BEIRUT LEONARD FEIN If they show me a stone, and I say stone, they say stone. If they show me a tree, and I say tree, they say tree. But if they show me blood, and...
...Nor is it naive to propose that the friendship felt for Israel is rooted in admiration for Israel's behavior, respect for Israel's deserved good name...
...There is no precedent to which one can refer that shows that terror from the sky accomplishes its stated purpose...
...But the bombing in Beirut was wrong...
...Our name is blackened one way or the other...
...In the jungle, one hunts...
...Careful, careful: Israel is not without friends...
...But," says the weary Jew, the Jew made cynical by the slaughter of his parents and his children, "we live in a jungle, and must learn the law of the jungle...
...these allusions serve as indictments, not as alibis...
...it is not we who have chosen as our exclusive targets the centers of civilian population...
...The differences matter little to the dead, the maimed, the mourners, but to us they are all-important, the distinctions sustain us...
...we know, and take some comfort from the knowing, what most Jews felt on the morrow of Beirut...
...In the aftermath of the bombing, the world, predictably, excoriated Israel...
...For Israel's good name is not only (as if that were not enough) its ultimate raison d'etre...
...From our earliest times, we have rejected the prevailing standard, and sought to persuade others of the wisdom and Tightness of our own...
...Israel was widely and wildly accused of "indiscriminate" attacks, eve"n though the bombings-wrong, stupid, outrageous—was hardly indiscriminate...
...and the 120-mm...
...Their covenant commits them to politicide, yet they are welcomed by the family of nations...
...and the 105-mm...
...there is no benefit in seeking to preserve its goodness, long since lost...
...Far be it from You," he who was dust and ashes said to the Almighty, "to do such a thing, to bring death upon the innocent as well as the guilty, so that the innocent and guilty fare alike...
...They have killed not only in Israel, but also in Jordan, in Lebanon, in the Sudan, in Germany, in the United States, in a dozen other countries, yet they are accorded amenity, offered respect...
...The frustration of the one permits it any excess...
...boundaries change, a peace treaty is signed, new generations are born, and the madness continues...
...The Jewish people and the Jewish state have chosen for themselves their standard...
...But that cannot be shown here, cannot even be argued...
...Once again, as so tediously often in the past, the double standard: the PLO can do no wrong, Israel can do no right...
...No wonder there is anger and frustration in Israel and among those who love Zion...
...Some day, we shall even come to understand that all the dead, the boys in khaki not less than the babies in gingham, were innocent victims, that it is only our perversity that permits us to be shocked by the killing of an eight-year-old at play but not of an eighteen-year-old at war...
...cannon and the armored personnel carriers and the SAM-7 and the SAM-9 missiles and the 85-mm...
...we dare not call it paint...
...In Eden, all was one...
...Its benefits were at best modest and unlikely...
...And it was Abraham our father, the very first of our kind, who taught us that there must be a sense of proportion even when the provocation is great, is grievous...
...Those who mourn in Beirut have ample company...
...That good name may be thought a burden, but before it is a burden, and after, it is also a resource, a precious strategic resource, more precious than the latest warplanes, and that resource must not be squandered...
...not to Jerusalem, but to Sodom...
...It is doubtful, however, that the rest of us will...
...those excuses persuade no one, they entangle their makers...
...We saw the blood...
...not to survival, but to perdition...
...It does Israel no service to try to justify it...
...And where does it point, where does it lead...
...No, it is not easy, for we are ashamed...
...We earn no credit for our restraint...
...There are no decisive turning points, no sudden revelations...
...And of course, Israel and its supporters are angry, bitter...
...All the dead, the soldiers not less than the students, are innocent victims, victims of human error...
...hence why restrain ourselves...
...We would do better to acknowledge the blood than to deny it...
...Distortion destroys our credibility, hence our usefulness...
...For now, we insist upon the difference, upon all the differences...
...the frustration of the other permits it no margin at all...
...If they show me blood, and I say blood, they say paint...
...Of course the PLO is monstrous, callous...
...None of it makes any sense, but it is not all equally senseless...
...The Saudis and the Iraqis and the Kuwaitis pay for the T-55 and the T-54 and the T-34 and the T-62 tanks and the BM-21 Katyusha 40-round multiple rocket launchers and the 130-mm...
...Some day, we will understand that...
...and the 155-mm...
...And that is why the bombing was not merely a mistake, but a stupid mistake, literally a miscalculation...
...Prime Minister Begin does not help Israel's cause when he asks how the United States—of Hiroshima and Vietnam—and the France—of Algeria—can condemn him...
...It cannot be justified by our frustration...
...That is the way it is in the Middle East, and has been as far back as any can remember...
...We have chosen it, and we have taken pride in it...
...Nor is it humiliating to acknowledge that Israel's safety and welfare depend in no small measure on those friends...
...it wins him new adherents...
...Amir Gilboa (translation, T. Carmi) The neighbors will remember, and perhaps also the pilots...
...And that is why it is so terribly important that we neither hide nor hide from what happened in Beirut...
...Some make romantic heroes of these savages...
...and the 57-mm...
...No mitigating circumstances were acknowledged (except, happily, by President Reagan), no causal chain was recognized...
...No such gains could plausibly have been anticipated in the case of Beirut...
...Soon enough, fresh atrocities and fresh stupidities will take its place...
...There is no outrage, no atrocity the PLO can perpetrate the world will not indulge...
...and the 122-mm...
...If it could be shown, if there were any serious reason to believe, that with the death of 300 bystanders, the killing would end at last, then, perhaps—but only perhaps—we are confronted with a genuine moral dilemma...
...Dear reader of these words: The double standard according to which Israel is judged and on the basis of which Israel is condemned is not imposed upon the Jewish state and the Jewish people by a thoughtless world...
...We are not nor have we been a people of hunters...
...But," says the weary Jew, "they kill our women and children...
...antiaircraft artillery and the 60-mm...
...They are the demonic barbarians of our time, a clear and present danger to the fragile world order—and they are here and there applauded, everywhere indulged...
...They place their headquarters in civilian buildings knowing that Israel will not bomb—or, if it does, that it will be condemned, and condemned far more harshly than the PLO has been for its repeated barbarity...
...That is how it begins, always...
...In order to justify the predictable loss of bystanders' life, the anticipated gains must be substantial...
...The world will not be persuaded that Israel is infallible, because Israel is not...
...We do not know what the citizens of Damascus, the good citizens, felt the day after the gruesome slaughter on the coastal highway near Tel Aviv back in 1978...
...we have not sought trophies, but a good name...
...and the 160-mm...
...But shame is more praiseworthy than evasion...
...Thus: It is not we who sought this madness...
...We expect more of ourselves, and our expectation is rooted in our history and experience, the history and experience of our people and of its state...
...But if they show me blood, and I say blood, they say paint...
...But," says the weary Jew, "we are condemned no matter'what we do...
...The political infrastructure of the PLO (as both Moshe Dayan and Yitzhak Rabin have observed in recent weeks) cannot be shattered so, nor can the PLO be bombed into moderation...
...Are we now so fatigued that we can no longer live with the difference, insist upon it, so drained that we demand to be judged according to the debased standard that elsewhere prevails...
...mortars, and the Syrians and the Libyans and the Russians supply all these to the PLO, and the PLO employs them without restraint, without honor, killing whenever they can, whomever they can—and the world winks indulgently...
...All this while Israel, governed by law, restrained by its own regard for civility, for decency, for human life, is snubbed, calumnied, condemned...
...Fewer than it deserves, fewer than it would like, to be sure, but not abandoned...
...Israel has erred, and will, and sometimes the errors are bloody...
...the ranks of the Middle East mourners stretch beyond the horizon, the ritual of mourning the fallen young is a life cycle event...
...We are called to account, after all, not only by a perverse world, but by our children, and, unless we suffer amnesia, by our own memories...
...Each bang fades into a whimper, and the madness continues...
...Israel did not, after all, drop its bombs over a randomly selected housing project...
...It is only the PLO—the PLO alone among all the world's terrorists—that kills at random...
...it is not we who "take credit" for atrocity...
...In judging the cruel choices that Israel confronts, and in reacting to the cruel judgments the world imposes, we must be cautious...
...And the Jews of America do Israel no service when they swallow their distaste and mouth the stale excuses...
...there is no infraction, no error, no mistake Israel can commit the world will not condemn...
...The bombing of Beirut will join all those other names that moulder vaguely in the corners of our mind...
...others, in the name of "realism," invite them to tea...
...The bombing of Beirut was a mistake in its conception, a tragedy in its execution...
...Nor was the dying in Beirut more tragic than the other dyings, in Nahariyah and Kiryat Shmonah, in Zahleh and Ma'alot, in Munich and Misgav Am, in Zion Square and in Bet Sh'an, in all the streets and fields and markets of carnage...
...And when the decency falters, the restraint fades, they gloat...
...They hold their own kinsfolk hostage, thinking to exploit Israeli decency, to take advantage of Israeli restraint...
...Aerial bombing does not soften the will of the enemy...
...And that, of course, is exactly the point: we are not they...
...Far be it from You...
...We do Israel no service when, thinking to compensate for the world's distorted favor of the PLO, we distort in Israel's favor...
...its costs were high and virtually certain...
...and the 82-mm...
...Not to the Jordan but to the Styx...
...outside Eden, the distinctions became important...
...it is not we who have vowed to destroy another people, another state...
...it is also (or was) a fact of considerable political significance...
Vol. 6 • September 1981 • No. 8
