Logic and Illogic

Back in Israel after a three-week family vacation in South Africa. Before leaving, I said facetiously to friends at work that they had three weeks to sort out the mess in Lebanon. I figured I was on safe ground, but it turns out that I was wrong.

The war is still raging - though limping is probably a better way of putting it. I have spent the time since my return immersing myself in the Israeli media. Unlike my 22-year-old daughter, for whom war news is an unwelcome distraction from the really important things in Tel Aviv life, I can’t bear to have major events unfolding around me without knowing the minutiae. Wars are made for news junkies like myself.

This is what I’ve found:

Israel is reverting to fractious form. The initial national consensus in favor of the war is fragmenting – at least as portrayed in the media. According to a poll in Ha’aretz today, a minority of Israelis now believes that the war will end well for Israel. Other reports portray government ministers as being at loggerheads with each other (Prime Minister Olmert and his Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, for example) and sharp differences between the political and military echelons. Some things never change, apparently.

Not that the war is universally unpopular, of course. The TV is full of interviews with wounded soldiers lying in hospital beds who, to a man, seem to be itching to get back to the fray. I even heard a prominent TV commentator describe it as “a war of survival,” which surprised me somewhat. Clearly, a reasonably convincing argument can be made that Israel had to respond in force to the initial Hizbollah attack, but to describe the threat posed to Israel by Hizbollah as existential seems to me to be stretching things a bit.

It wasn’t too long ago that Hizbollah was treated with disdain by Israeli officials and the media. But the fundamentalist militia seems to have benefited from some elastic arithmetic as the fighting has ground on and Israeli military losses have mounted. I could swear that Israeli intelligence sources credited them with far fewer men and missiles at the start of the hostilities than they do today. Hizbollah seems to be a unique form of fighting force; its numbers increase as its men are killed and its missiles multiply as launchers are destroyed. We should all be so lucky.

Not being a betting man, I have no intention of predicting how all this is going to play out eventually. But it’s a safe guess that the wisdom of going to war will come under close scrutiny, along with the manner in which the war has been waged. Olmert’s initial bravado, intelligence estimates about Hizbollah strength and preparedness, the early reliance on air strikes only – all are already being questioned in the media. In all likelihood, yet another Israeli judge will soon be giving his name to yet another commission of inquiry.

The question that irks me is how a country with so many ostensibly smart people can behave so stupidly. When Chief of Staff Dan Halutz said in the first days of the campaign that Israel was bombing the Lebanese so that they would turn against Hizbollah, surely there was someone in his immediate circle who could have pointed out the ludicrousness of such thinking? (It’s too much to expect that the a man who feels only a slight shudder of the wing when dropping a bomb on civilians would be able to figure it out for himself.)

Surely, when Defense Minister Amir Peretz gave the go-ahead for the destruction of Lebanese bridges, refineries and other infrastructure he did not actually believe that it would endear Israel to the Lebanese and instill in them a belated understanding of their true self-interest?

Did the leaders of Israel honestly believe that the civilized world (with the exception of George Bush and his Downing Street puppet) would regard the bombing of Beirut and the killing of hundreds of civilians as a proportionate reaction to the killing of one Israeli soldier and the capture of another two?

Difficult as it may be to believe, I suspect that the answer to all these questions is that Israel’s leaders and generals did actually believe their own perverted logic, I say that because the alternative is too horrible to contemplate: that our neophyte prime minister and his military masters launched a war under false pretences and with scant preparation, at the price of dozens of fatalities and hundreds of wounded, the collapse of normal life in the entire north of the country and the opprobrium of the civilized world.

And that leads us to the deeper question: what is it about the Israeli reality that distorts our judgment to such a degree? We have some of the world’s smartest scientists, businessmen and academics, but confront us with the existential questions of war, peace and relations with the Arabs and our reason deserts us. Our vision is suddenly channeled through a prism that turns white into black and wrong into right. We act and react in a manner that is usually counter to our own self-interest.

I have a work colleague of messianic bent who would probably say that it is in fact Israel which sees the true dimensions of the Islamic threat and it is the rest of the so-called civilized world which is suffers from reduced vision. (in fact, he would attribute clarity to only a small minority of Israelis, namely those living in the occupied territories. He’s no fan of the government.)

I don’t buy that. There’s no doubt that fundamentalist Islam is a malignant force with which Israel and the rest of the world need to contend. But Israel’s myopia began long before Bin Laden entered the picture and the intractable conflict in the Middle East has only added fuel to the fundamentalist fire. Terrorism is a consequence of the inability to reach peace between Israel and its neighbors, not its cause.

The illogic of Israeli logic comes from different places entirely. It has to do with the legacy of the Holocaust and our compulsion to apply the lessons of the Nazi genocide to our modern day lives in the Middle East, which is an historical absurdity. It comes from the centuries of Jewish suffering prior to the Holocaust and the “poor Samson” complex that has resulted from the contradiction between past weakness and current strength. It comes from too many years of conflict and loss which have amputated our ability to see the suffering of others. It comes from almost 40 years of occupation of Palestinian land and people, which has engendered in us a baleful hard-heartedness and anti-Arab racism.

Most of all, it comes from the seductive power of military might and the blinkered world view of men and women whose formative experiences occur in the military environment. Armies are dangerous things, not only to those against whom they are wielded but to those who wield them as well. They can foster leadership and initiative in young people but only within a tightly restricted frame of reference. Armies do not, as a rule, expand horizons. Israel would be a lot better off living in peace with its neighbors in a small and modest state than as the regional super-power in constant conflict.