Thinking About Lebanon

Fein, Leonard

THINKING ABOUT LEBANON LEONARD FEIN I write on July 4, four weeks to the day since Israel moved into Lebanon. A few hours from now, just a few blocks from here, the Boston Pops will play its...

...This is not an arithmetic exercise, a moralistic body count...
...Minds made soggy by flowing emotion are as useless as hearts drained by austere analysis...
...This war was not, in short, for nothing...
...If it were possible to remove the threat of terrorism with no attendant loss of life, who would oppose its removal...
...It is shocking that some Western observers suggest a moral symmetry between Arafat's exclusivism and Be-gin's exclusivism...
...he is adept at managing factions, inept at exploiting facts...
...Had they done so, they would have opened irreversibly the door to self-determination...
...I want us to examine the costs, and to examine the benefits, and I will not allow us to omit the bodies of the bystanders from the calculation of the costs...
...But about wars, man's last resort, we must ask not only whether they were about something, but whether they were about enough, and about the right thing...
...there, the sounds that served Tchaikovsky as his raw material are still untamed...
...And there are future costs, as well, though these are still speculative...
...It also helps create a problem, for now our virtue is directly on the line in ways it was not, could not have been, back in the days of our castration...
...Ought we not do Israel the courtesy of imagining that its actions might be valid in their own terms...
...We cannot know, because that is not the story or the lesson we were meant to learn...
...Palestinian nationalism will not go away...
...In a different world, each of the dead has a name, and neither death nor suffering can be aggregated...
...For some ?f these soldiers, that is a heavy burden to bear, and so must be counted a cost...
...No, there is only one adequate offsetting benefit which might yet make sense of the tragedy, and that is peace between the Palestinians and Israel...
...with his father, I rejoice that we have learned them so well...
...It is grisly to observe that out of havoc, new opportunities arise—but to ignore such opportunities is worse than grisly...
...In our world, there is no way around summing up the costs, and then the benefits, and thus arriving at judgment...
...Our grandfathers may have been as sweet and gentle as we like to think, and I am happy we praise them for such qualities...
...We will slay the innocent along with the guilty for the sake of the greater good, as we see that good, if there is no other way...
...courses...
...I will not accept a hardened heart as a substitute for a tough mind...
...This war was, for example, neither about peace nor about the Galilee, though peace for the Galilee is one of its important fringe benefits...
...Sloppy sentimentalism," "bleeding heartism...
...Some would have it that because each life is sacred, because each single life contains the entire universe, each life taken is an unacceptable excess...
...We do not make war against people simply because we do not like them, or because they are not likable, we do not make war against people even when those people are our enemies...
...More Israelis were killed during the last year in the West Bank than in the Galilee, more, far more danger to the safety of the State was there encountered...
...Still, we are not quite so unpleasantly confronted, reduced...
...This is not Egypt, and the Sinai...
...as a nationalist leader, he is a pygmy, a betrayer of the people he leads...
...It must not be that this war was fought for timid and trivial reasons, for reasons that were not part of the compelling needs of the Jewish State, in the name of a vain idea that threatens the Jewish body not less than its soul...
...the second cadaver cannot be added to the first...
...Eyes that have followed the cannon in their steady northward movement, that for ten days now have been fixed on West Beirut, will move outward again, to all of Lebanon, back to the Galilee and to the West Bank, back to the Palestinians, to the Arab-Israel conflict, back to war and peace, back to the tragic imperfections of humankind...
...Now that the PLO has for all practical purposes been destroyed, what will Mr...
...Yes, there can be—there is—such a question...
...But Mr...
...Our instinct has always been to rally 'round Israel's flag in times of trouble, but that flag has been carried to the suburbs of Beirut, and that's a bit far to go on instinct alone...
...So for once, just this once, let's set aside our anger at a calloused world that has no regard for Jewish safety, our anger at the media distortions, at the double-standarding to which Israel is so subjected...
...They count, and it is our way—our law—to count them...
...I will instead insist that the case be made, that this war be defended not by epithets or instincts, but by cold analysis...
...But thinking about Lebanon is not advanced by our resentments...
...Jews without guns are not—as some seem to think—more authentically Jewish...
...He is fueled by fantasy, not by vision...
...There was never any question that, left to its own devices, Israel could do what it planned to do...
...Long before we reach the question of how much is too much, we reach the rough sense of it...
...As with so much of what has come down to us, we have adapted the ancient lesson...
...But, no, I will nbt accept it...
...In Beirut today, July 4, a far more ancient ritual drags on...
...Because we are tragically imperfect, there is war, and war is senseless, and war is cruel, but some wars, at least, are about things worth fighting for, and some wars therefore we call "just...
...But tragedy is not the same as evil, not at all...
...There are the traumatized, and there is, on all sides, the coarsening that comes with killing...
...We do not accept it as an absolute teaching that brooks no compromise...
...Begin's vision of a West Bank tamed, its national aspirations deflected, its territory incorporated into Israel...
...Impotence was merely our circumstance, not our destiny...
...For if they had, they would have entered the autonomy negotiations from the start...
...It is shameful, criminal even, that in this world there must be victims and victors...
...The status of those exposed to death matters, and their numbers do as well...
...Begin say...
...All of us abhor violence, but some of us seem to me to be heirs to a dismal diaspora tradition that comes very close to making a virtue of Jewish impotence...
...Never again...
...His own son had just been graduated from the most demanding of these, the Harvard of warmaking, summa cum laude...
...But even if we count the lives of PLO fighters (12-year-olds...
...No more sheep to the slaughter for us, no more dreamy martyrdom...
...It seems to me, for example, that in whatever crude equation we develop, the death of the innocent bystander must be doubly weighted...
...It cuts both ways: Others of my friends have lost their sense of irony...
...And there are other kinds of costs...
...It is about threats that cannot be removed in any other way, it is about goals that are large enough to warrant the heavy costs of war and that cannot be achieved by more pacific means...
...No, we are not done with the costs, not yet, not even if we note in passing the nearly three billion dollars this war has so far cost Israel, and the higher taxes its citizens must now pay...
...Twenty-five miles, maybe-—but not this far...
...Thoughtful people in Israel, from both left and right, knew exactly that...
...For Mr...
...Begin with regard to Palestinian self-determination have been substantially compounded...
...Or do we mean to argue merely that a world that failed to condemn Syria has not the right to condemn Israel...
...That is a brutal way to put it, but I know no other...
...If it's the best we can do, so be it—but it does Israel little service and less credit to imply that we have no stronger argument, that we are reluctant to take the stand in our own defense...
...Little comfort to the dead and the bereaved, but for us, the central question...
...A few hours from now, just a few blocks from here, the Boston Pops will play its annual Independence Day concert that culminates with the " 1812 Overture" and the synchronized explosion of cannon and fireworks over the Charles River...
...The unadorned fact that the Jews of Israel have been engaged in killing does not make them guilty of anything more than living in this world, does not even provide grounds for indictment...
...Begin and his colleagues genuinely believed that the circuitous road to peace passed through Beirut, and now that the first part of that road has been traversed, the second half of the journey may begin...
...According to His promise, God would have spared the city for the sake of those ten, but perhaps the evil that was in Sodom would then have infected the entire country...
...It is no small thing that the children of the North will now be able to sleep in their own beds, in security...
...But if such there must be, as the old saying goes, we've been both, and victor's better...
...This war was meant, from its start, as a war against the PLO...
...Even later in the day, after Prime Minister Begin eviscerated the original proposal for "full autonomy," Palestinian participation in the talks would have initiated a process bound to culminate in self-determination...
...Some number of Israel's soldiers have now fought a war that was, to put the matter plainly, optional, have killed, that is, not because Israel was immediately and severely threatened, but because Israel's government decided it was time...
...No need to strut, but no need either to turn up your nose at the smell of the tanks, the roar of the jets...
...This time, it is assault with a deadly weapon he has committed, not surgery performed...
...That sounds more callous than it is, for we are free to assess the costs as we choose...
...I can hear the murmuring...
...there is a new and urgent argument in its favor, the need to make retrospective sense of the war in Lebanon...
...Begin, a compromise of his most fundamental beliefs, an end to his self-willed imprisonment by futile slogans...
...Of course it is true that the others have expressed far greater outrage at Israel's actions in Lebanon than they did, say, a few months back when Syria was destroying Hamma...
...Would not the dilemma facing Mr...
...But only the most compelling reasons will justify the incidental killing of people who are neither citizens nor enemies, merely hapless witnesses...
...Little wonder that no Arab country wants to receive him and his comrades...
...For those who wince at the inclusion of another people's dead as a cost to our people, here is a practical item that must be included...
...A terrorist to others, a traitor to his own: Can there be any question that this war was justified...
...But the world's wrongness does not establish Israel's Tightness...
...How can one oppose a war against so scurrilous a gang as the PLO...
...The larger the scope of the killing, the maiming, the dislocation—that is, of the ravages of war—the more compelling the reason must be...
...The strongest argument against Palestine—terrorism, the PLO—has been dealt a mighty blow...
...Yet the "image problem" cuts the other way as well, suggesting that Israel must be doubly certain, before it acts in ways its enemies will exploit, that its action is unavoidable...
...In any such analysis, the tragedy must be figured in, a heavy cost of war...
...At the other extreme, some would shrug their shoulders, as did one writer in a local Jewish newspaper last week, and say, "C'est la guerre...
...Begin and his colleagues had in mind was the replacement of the PLO with a more moderate Palestinian leadership, with which Israel might now negotiate an honorable and enduring resolution of the Palestinian question...
...For war is a tragedy, all war...
...Killing people, whether the people are those we call "innocent bystanders" or those we call "the enemy" (who are in fact usually children) is a terrible thing, a tragic thing...
...It would be comforting to think that Mr...
...And Abraham, trembling, interceded...
...The same surgeon, with the same knife and the same deftness, slices open a person on the street...
...Some of my friends, people I care for and from whose decency I draw strength, do not seem to understand that...
...As my visitor from Israel put it just last month, here in America Jewish parents compare notes on the colleges to which their children have been admitted...
...Is it really by the expectations that people have of Syria that we insist Israel now be judged...
...Yes, it is ironic, even cruelly so, that in the Jewish State, where we'd hoped to develop our finest talents, so much of our energy has perforce been turned to warmaking...
...Yet if Mr...
...I have yet to encounter even one Middle East scholar who thinks there is any chance that the Lebanese, left to their own devices, free at last of foreign intervention, can pull off stability on their own...
...But neither did Mr...
...Nations cannot live on poems or on dreams, and we're a nation now...
...Both evade the wrenching problem that haunts the rest of us: Where is the limit...
...As of this day, 271 Israeli soldiers are dead, and some 30 are missing, and some of the wounded will not recover, and some will be scarred...
...We may believe that Israel has done the West a favor, and yet another favor to American military planners...
...for nothing, there are all those other lives—Israeli soldiers, Palestinian and Lebanese civilians...
...More generally, Israel's good name must be seen not merely as a knee-jerk obsession of Jewish sentimentalists, but as a critical resource in its struggle for survival...
...There are as well the homeless, and it is not enough to say that the world has grossly exaggerated their number...
...If the repression of Palestinian nationalism and the incorporation of the West Bank into Israel were the goals of this war, then vanity is its proper name and bitter fruit its evil harvest...
...they also tended to die from unnatural causes...
...Arafat, it turns out, is simply not a serious person...
...It takes no special virtue, after all, to refrain from hunting if you've not been given weapons for the hunt...
...Suppose that on the morrow of Israel's encirclement of Beirut, Mr...
...it does not depend on the PLO...
...What, for example, will it mean if that "strong central government" everyone has suddenly decided the Lebanese deserve can be maintained only through periodic Israeli intervention—or, more likely, through the appointment of a de facto Israeli proconsul for Lebanon...
...Danger to the safety of the State, and danger to Mr...
...There has to be a reason for the killing, a reason beyond hate...
...It is one thing to lament the killing, another to condemn it...
...Begin is not now prepared to compromise those beliefs, to adjust to the new facts his own policies and actions have created, then this war in Lebanon was fought for folly, the dead have died in vain...
...As a terrorist, he may be a giant...
...Those are Jewish tanks and Jewish jets, the smells and sounds of civilization...
...But no matter how deeply we feel, no matter how wrenching the pictures and the agony they bespeak, we are required to think, not just to feel...
...It would be comforting to think that Mr...
...If we are forced to play God, to decide who shall live and who shall die, we are bound as well to play Abraham, from whom, it sometimes seems to me, we have truly descended...
...For those many thoughtful people, lovers of Zion in and outside Israel, who so believe, partition is no miracle cure, no guaranteed antidote to all the problems that afflict the region...
...No, this war was about the PLO and its destruction...
...Begin and his colleagues know these things, and, knowing them, will act accordingly...
...Yet it is far more likely that the purpose of this war was less to bring peace to the Galilee than to bring silence to the West Bank...
...If your enemy rises up to kill you, go out to kill him first, and don't feel that on your return you've got to write gentle poems to prove your decency...
...And I wonder: If you stop writing poems and dreaming dreams, if you stop knowing irony, if you stop retching at death, won't you start hunting for sport...
...And so forth...
...Where do we draw the line and say, "With the very next death, you have crossed the boundary from justice to injustice...
...It is time, they argue, to shuck our supersensitivities...
...And more than that...
...Not all the costs of Lebanon are known...
...And it is time to say plainly that such a peace requires that there be a Palestine...
...But the story of Sodom reminds us to pause before so doing, to consider well what we are about to do, perhaps to draw back from the doing of it...
...Winning on such technical grounds is not much of a victory...
...One must look to the benefits as well...
...they cannot move beyond...
...On balance, I'd rather confront the new problem than the old...
...It is not precision we seek but proportion...
...The larger that number, then, the more compelling must be the reason for the destruction...
...He is, as his father wistfully says, "an expert in ruining...
...There is no way around that...
...Is there, we simply need to know, a proportionality between the havoc and the good that's meant to come of it...
...Would not his prospects and those of the people he leads have risen quite dramatically...
...Arafat had declared that the military option was now closed, that he therefore accepted President Mubarak's invitation to move to Cairo and establish there a Palestinian government-in-exile...
...That we know from our own tradition, which very early on teaches us that it is wrong, as Abraham put it, "to make the innocent perish with the guilty," and that Sodom was ultimately destroyed by God because the number of its innocents was not large enough...
...But a tally of the costs, no matter how extensive, does not settle the question...
...This generation of American legislators increasingly remembers Vietnam rather than World War II, and the pictures of the fleeing families evoke unpleasant recent memories...
...The Hatfield proposal that aid to Israel be stopped forthwith will not prevail, but the erosion of support for Israel will accelerate...
...And what of the sharpened divisions the move beyond the Litani has meant within Israel...
...I do not regard the centuries of Jewish impotence as the "good old days," and I do not join in the celebration of Jewish powerlessness...
...Unless we fear the harder questions, and the harsher answers, why seek to have the case dismissed on the grounds that the witnesses against us are impeachable, biased, incompetent...
...that is why the left supported the autonomy, and the right opposed it...
...The pictures of the mothers and children fleeing in terror, of the old men sitting in confusion and despair amidst the rubble, haunt us, and they become, inevitably, a part of the equation...
...But these last two weeks or so, the PLO has not had to submit to Syrian demands...
...No cost, much benefit...
...It is plainly the case that Israel's leadership entered this war before it had exhausted all other alternatives, before, that is, it had adequately explored the possibility of a political resolution to the conflict...
...We know to our regret that Israel has an "image problem...
...But no, the PLO could not see that, or did not want to...
...Instead, the redactors of the Bible meant for us to learn—at the least—restraint...
...We cannot know what would have happened had there in fact been ten innocent people in Sodom...
...We do not rejoice, we are forbidden to rejoice, at the death of our enemies...
...Surely there has never been a more contemptible collection of nationalist leaders, people who send 12-year-olds off to do battle, who hold their own kinsfolk hostage in order to save their own lives, who kill those of their own people who deviate from their rejectionist line, people, above all, who have no sense of opportunity, of reality...
...back home, on his kibbutz, the talk is not of colleges, but of officer training Is there a proportionality between the havoc and the good that's meant to come of it...
...Some of my friends argue that since, no matter what Israel does, it will be condemned, Israel should simply plunge forward, doing what it feels it has to do in order to survive...
...It was not about peace for the Galilee because such a peace could have been secured after the first three days of fighting, when only 25 Israelis and commensu-rately fewer others had fallen...
...And it is no small thing to have captured such massive amounts of arms and ammunition, many times more, we are told, than the PLO could possibly have put to use...
...A surgeon with a knife in the operating room deftly slices open a patient, and we approve...
...It is obscene...
...It was not about peace for the Galilee because there had been relative peace in that region for the 11 months before the war, because even the children in the shelters, had they been asked to name a fair price for the right to sleep in their own beds, would have thought the lives of 300 Israeli soldiers too high a price to pay, and some of them might even have added the lives of the bystanders to the price...
...With his father, I curse that we have had to learn such things, worse yet teach them to our children...
...If Lebanon is freed of Syrian troops and of the PLO, that, too, is a major benefit...
...The number of the dead is not yet known, not even of the Israeli dead...
...Its costs will haunt us for years to come...
...Begin has given us in the past for his rejection of Palestinian self-determination—the only basis for an honorable and enduring resolution—is that a Palestinian state on the West Bank would surely be a PLO state, a base for continuing terrorist activity against Israel...
...If Israel had been able to go no farther, dayenu—that would have been sufficient in the eyes of Israel's planners...
...Can Israel and its supporters not risk more rigorous judgment...
...surely, the PLO did not contribute to its development...
...It would be comforting to think that what Mr...
...The pictures hypnotize them...
...Nor is that problem solved if, like Abraham, we count by tens...
...Perhaps no such solution was possible...
...I, too, am proud that we are not a hunting people, yet I vastly prefer—the world being what it is—that we are today non-hunters who have guns rather than disarmed non-hunters...
...But who can be so confident that such favors will be recognized, let alone remembered, as to be indifferent to the support Israel derives not from its strategic contributions to the West, but from the values for which it stands—and according to which it behaves...
...It is merely the only plan that might yet bring an end to violence, for while partition is no guarantee of peace, exclusivism is a guarantee of war...
...this is the West Bank, and the compromise here called for if a serious political solution is sought would necessarily mean, for Mr...
...War is not about likes and dislikes, even when these are entirely justifiable...
...The question was whether Israel would be left to its own devices, how, that is, others—especially the United States—would react...
...But the plan, from its inception more than a year ago (so Chief of Staff Eitan informed us last week) called for a far more comprehensive victory, called for an Israeli move all the way to Beirut and the destruction of the PLO as an effective organization...
...there is no escape from that...
...It is either that, or a war that was far darker than tragedy, and a future that is np better...
...Governments have the right to expose their own citizens to risk, and their enemies...
...Begin and his colleagues cannot be unaware that there will be no honorable peace in Zion until there is a negotiated solution to the Palestinian question, a solution based on a return to the principle of partition...
...PLO apologists claimed, with some plausibility, that it was Syria that vetoed Palestinian participation in the talks, as it was Syria that forced the PLO tb reverse its initial endorsement of the Fahd plan...
...Begin, and only by his future actions carv he relieve the dark suspicion that the reason for that is that he wants no political solution...
...They see nothing awry, no distortion, in the triumph of muscles over morals...
...Justly or not, the likelihood is that the next time an AWACS-type vote comes before the Senate of the United States, we will lose by more than two votes...
...This is the first war that Israel has fought where its survival was not immediately at stake, the first war where battles raged in heavily populated places...
...But they are not the whole of it...
...It reminds us that we must—where innocents are involved—meet a higher burden of proof before we let loose the dogs of war...
...And it was not about independence for Lebanon, desirable a goal as that might be, for Israel has not been charged with the responsibility to impose independent governments in its region...
...Minimally, its aim was to clear the area south of the Litani River of a terrorist presence...
...Israel's war in Lebanon is entitled to be judged, as all wars are, analytically...
...the world is a mean and brutish place, where nice guys are finished first...
...in Lebanon, he's put his new knowledge to practical use...
...What symmetry, either moral or intellectual, is there between a "revolutionary" who would rather kill than win, who sends small children to the front and abandons them there, and a leader who, myopic though he be, pursues his faulty vision with some sense of responsibility and even—by comparison—restraint...
...This way, this ugly way, we have the weapons, and that helps solve a problem to which we Jews have historically been particularly susceptible, the problem of being murdered...
...It does matter how many were killed and maimed in Lebanon...
...In the event, the United States blessed Israel with faint rebuke, and the Israelis pressed forward, well beyond the Litani...
...Tomorrow, next week perhaps, soon in any case, the ritual will end...
...After all, the reason that Mr...
...And if on the death of our enemies we are forbidden to rejoice, then surely we are bound to mourn the death of the bystanders...
...Things that can-be justified when the cost in lives is low cannot be justified when the cost soars...

Vol. 7 • July 1982 • No. 7


 
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