Timerman's New Country

...His observations on Likud economic policies that substitute financial speculation for productive investment, on politically-influenced hiring in Israel's bureaucracy and state-controlled industries, and on the collapse of civility that he sees spreading throughout the society would all certainly be worth pursuing...

...Timerman is resigned to leaving the young man "in the hands of the...

...I am convinced...

...But Timerman is so absorbed in self-serving posturing that all complexity must be smothered beneath a landslide of unsubstantiated denunciation...

...He ignores previous Arab-Israeli wars and earlier attempts at forging a binational arrangement between Israelis and Palestinians...

...In one four-page stretch, nearly every paragraph is an opinionated outburst: "It is a shame that...

...Indirectly, the war was related to Jerusalem's commitment to the Camp David accords-already dramatically demonstrated by the return of Sinai to Egypt...

...His reductionism erases the multiplicity of issues and interested parties extant, leaving simply Israeli "we"s and Palestinian "they"s, synthesized-with a look toward the brighter future-by "us...

...But he cannot respond to his own son, who as a member of the IDF expresses his reluctance to return to the front for a second tour of duty...

...The Diaspora Jews who have maintained the values of our moral and cultural traditions-those values now trampled on here by intolerance and by Israeli nationalism-should establish a Jewish tribunal to pass judgment on Begin, Sharon, Eytan and the entire general staff of the Israeli Armed Forces...

...The Longest War could have survived Timerman's personality...

...We are choking here...

...While Israel's Defense Minister of course favored the invasion, it certainly was not some personal vendetta...

...Being Jewish may impose special moral requirements upon those who, like Timerman, proffer advice...

...It is doomed by his impulse to saddle policy options with unrealistic ethical imperatives...

...He concedes that the opinions of students, intellectuals and immigrants, as well as newspaper articles, must be translated or explained to him...

...As you drive along...

...Sorely lacking, though, is the same knowledge...

...He addresses the Israeli public in the grand tradition of a politician seeking approbation, rather than as a journalist or analyst of current national policy...

...I don't exactly converse...

...Reviewed by Irving Louis Horowitz Hannah Arendt Professor of Sociology and Political Science, Rutgers...

...Unfortunately, psychological discernment is undermined by sociological vacuity...

...Several random insights make one realize what he is capable of when exercising self-control...

...In a country of some 4 million, a rally of 400,000 demanded the investigation of their government's complicity in a war atrocity-surely an extraordinary political outpouring...

...It does not, however, relieve political leaders of the responsibility to prevent degradation from within and destruction from without...

...The author's overwhelming anger blinds him to what might be a more salient line of criticism...

...He conveys no sense of either the long history of the Jews or the short chronicle of their modern state...

...Timerman writes as if he invented Israel, or really not even Israel, but a new land that did not exist prior to his arrival close to three years ago...

...Timer-man offers a vision of "we"-meaning Israel-and the Palestinians rebuilding Lebanon...

...New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis noted of the New Yorker pieces: "Timerman writes with the authority of a survivor...

...The book's highlight is its description of the anguish engendered by the bombing of West Beirut and the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, its portrayal of the disasterous impact those events had on the ordinary Israeli's sense of Jewishness...

...author, "Israeli Ecstasies/ Jewish Agonies," "Beyond Empire and Revolution" Jacobo Timerman's first book haunts his new one...

...I believe...

...Although this makes a neat Wagnerian exit, the reality is that Israelis have devoted a great deal more energy to the moral, legal and intellectual implications of Lebanon than have the Diaspora Jews...

...His appreciation of the risks inherent in the sort of reactionary partisanship that has underwritten Prime Minister Menachem Begin's government is also provocative, even if already noted by many other commentators...

...From Timerman's depiction one might think that Sharon is another Juan Peron, an analogy that is ludicrous on its face...

...For the first time, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) proved incapable of successfully executing a surgical strike, of invading Lebanese territory and routing the PLO without dire consequences for the local population...

...Direct effects of the invasion have included the removal of a chronic mortal danger to citizens in northern Israel, a critical weakening of Syrian influence, and a significant softening of Jordan's position concerning the West Bank and the recognition of Israel...

...The ample tragedy of the Lebanon war is less a moral than a military matter...

...He is unable to grasp that Lebanon can only be rebuilt by the Lebanese, who soon may be free to do so in the absence of a massive Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) presence, a dominant Syrian Army, and Israeli meddling...

...Until last June, such Israeli military operations had always avoided the agony of civilian casualties and protracted occupation with pinpoint attacks on enemy forces and strategic targets...

...Chapter six, the seventh week of conflict, plumbs "images of fascism" and the loss of Israel's innocence, not to mention its democratic values...

...Israel under Begin has confronted external threats more effectively than internal ones, and Timerman might even be right to declare that the process of bolstering the frontiers has led to a certain debasement at home...

...The marginal nature of his involvement in important events is masked by every device from name-dropping ("I was talking to the writer, Amos Oz...

...Timerman discovers the truth driving around, picking up "representative hitchhikers," and within a few days comprehends the views of all factions of Israeli public opinion...

...An account that focused on this breakdown of military professionalism, it seems to me, would be at once a moving and reasonable protest...

...Chapter four, the fifth week of the campaign, is dominated by ruminations on the Nazis...

...He himself remarks early on that Israel is a country of great verbal violence-then he proceeds to further the tradition mightily, using a self-righteous mace in the place of analytical argument...

...Beyond all this, no volume of shrillness can disguise a certain loss of nerve from Prisoner Without a Name to The Longest War...

...Timerman is "courageous" enough to compare Israel to Argentina and, inevitably, to recondemn the Vietnam War as the unmitigated abomination of our generation...

...Israeli Army" (which sentenced him to 28 days in prison when he decided not go back...

...can no w do something for us...

...For this alone...

...Far from pointing Israel toward peace and tranquility, his wartime diary can only exacerbate the tensions that so distress him...

...Like the Scarlet Pimpernel, "Sharon is everywhere...

...I think...

...The reporting here is no more than crude empiricism that sometimes degenerates into downright conceit...

...Timerman's extended essay is mired in highly personalistic judgments, too...

...Consequently, the bearing of witness that was so compell-ingly rendered when he related his experiences as a prisoner of the Argentine military, emerges in the case of Israel as strident and derivative...

...Timerman's imagination roams unbridled through the remainder of the book-chapters seven through 10 plus epilogues entitled "Rage and Hope" and "The Massacre...

...Sharon's interview with Oriana Fallaci made that much clear...

...it is simply to question the assumption of Israeli immorality...

...His prose is harsh, acerbic, first person...

...Characteristically, he treats academics largely with disdain, yet is not above hobnobbing with them or gratuitously invoking their authority when the occasion demands: "We cut pathetic and ridiculous figures, Michael Walzer and I." Although the book is divided into chapters, the rationale for them is difficult to assess...

...The Israeli citizen, in defining his place on the map, must regularly ask himself whether he continues to play a role in history...

...This alone could be the means of working free of the sickness that is destroying Israel, and, perhaps, of preserving Israel's future...

...The fighting in Lebanon is always "Sharon's War...

...The Longest War: Israel in Lebanon exhibits the same passions and the same furies that motivated Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number...

...As he did in his earlier work, Timerman exhibits a remarkable ability to capture whole thesoul of a nation, or at any rate the psychology that informs its polity...

...At the start, each chapter corresponds to one week of the war effort, but any sense of chronology gradually disappears in a paroxysm of stream of consciousness writing...

...Timerman ends his book with an appeal to world Jewry: "Only the world's Jewish people...

...But by raising this contradiction and leaving it unresolved, Timerman merely underlines the fact that it is not he who has to make the difficult decisions...

...Whatever one's feelings about Timerman's memoir of personal repression, it was unmistakably a deep response to a lifetime spent on the firing line of Argentine society...

...People, places and occurences are aggrandized, internalized, made part of Timerman's experience...

...This is not true of his reaction to Israeli society...

...Timerman's slim volume-two-thirds of which appeared originally in the New Yorker-is less an analysis of the assault on Lebanon launched last June than its title suggests, and more one man's searching critique of that war and of an Israel he has barely digested...

...This is not necessarily to dispute the appropriateness of a peace-now stance...

...to converting weaknesses into strengths ("My ignorance of Hebrew is no problem...

...None of these elements are remotely factored into Timerman's equation...

...The sorrow and frustration Timer-man succumbs to are valid reactions, shared by many who saw the war in Lebanon as an action affording limited military gains and involving unexamined political risks...

...Ultimately, the work is consumed by its egoism...

...Although that statement would be eminently true of Prisoner Without a Name, it would be more accurate to say that The Longest War is written with the authority of an ideologue and the fanaticism of an isolate...

...In chapter five, week six, Timerman is moved by weary, disillusioned troops returning from the battlefront...

...Nonetheless, a fair treatment would not consider Lebanon in a vacuum...

...This deadening style compels one to wonder whether a similar extended diatribe by a less celebrated author would be serialized in the New Yorker, or be described as "A major, urgent addition to the Knopf fall list...

...It is doubtful that a reasonable fraction of that number could be similarly mobilized among, say, American Jews...

...The Longest War deserves consideration -particularly since the country in question is one where the national psyche counts for so much...