Death as a Way of Life Page 6
But when you look back today on the many years during which our soldiers have participated in this bloody ritual, your heart breaks. It’s the thought that perhaps most of the retaliatory operations were no more than superfluous and dangerous acts of revenge, an automatic outlet for the well-known overconfidence of military men—as well as of politicians who were once military men—who know no other way but force.
Yes, we realize that they are undoubtedly levelheaded, responsible, sober men, but what’s to be done if their sobriety and levelheadedness prompt them to take two or three steps that repeat themselves in a sort of mechanical routine? At most, they can “suspend” or “examine” their response until what seems to them an appropriate moment, and then, as usual, they react with force and aggression, and recommence for the thousandth time the vicious, bloody circle.
But how is it possible, ask many Israelis who have already come to terms with the idea of a withdrawal, how can we leave this way, with our tail between our legs? How can we allow Hezbollah to humiliate us so?
Because, the answer is, there is no longer any alternative. We’ve got to get out. It’s not important how the retreat is called, or what other people may call it. In any case, we should keep in mind that this won’t be the first time that Israeli soldiers have left Lebanon without completing their mission. In 1986, after four years of plodding slowly through the Lebanese mud, Israel withdrew from Lebanon, finally understanding that the price it was paying in human life was too high.
Nor is there any longer a genuine need to deal with the “public relations” of such a withdrawal. Everyone, in Israel and the world, knows the truth. Israel will be able to exert its deterrent force far better from within its borders, yet with a much greater sense of justice and in national unity. We must do it now.
Get out. Because we are conquerors, and because throughout history an army that was stationed in an occupied land, imprisoned for all intents and purposes in outposts and trenches, has never succeeded in fighting for any length of time against mobile forces, even if much less powerful.
Get out. Because the army of a democratic country, whose actions are restricted by law and by accepted moral norms, can never defeat a guerrilla army fighting for its land, supported by the local population, knowing that justice is on its side.
Get out. Not because Hezbollah is a fairer or more moral adversary than we are. It is an organization that cynically trades in the body parts of its enemies, that has no compunctions about using women and children as human shields in shooting attacks, and that does not hesitate to launch indiscriminate attacks on civilian settlements over the border. But Israel’s position against Hezbollah will be much more determined and ethical if it redeploys on the international border, ends the state of occupation, and denies every enemy the right to act against it. If, after the withdrawal, Hezbollah attacks the inhabitants of northern Israel, Israel will have every right to act against Lebanon, a sovereign country.
Get out. Because, in doing so, Israel will deny President Assad his main bargaining card—his ability to use Hezbollah as a proxy to attack Israel’s soldiers and so apply intolerable pressure on Israel during the negotiations over Israel’s withdrawl from the Golan Heights.
Get out. Not in July, which Prime Minister Barak has set as his target date. After all, July is just an arbitrary and artificial deadline set a year ago as part of Barak’s election campaign. If it can be done in July, why can’t it be done next week? Why not start the retreat today?
Get out. Evacuate the outposts, bring our soldiers home, redeploy on the border. Get out. Swallow our dubious pride. Stop feeding the miserable hubristic fire within us with ever more young soldiers. Every soldier killed now is an unnecessary victim of military arrogance. The same is true of every Lebanese civilian who is hurt. We need to state explicity: It’s not the doubts and protests being heard on Israel’s home front that are destroying the Israeli Army’s chances of success there. It’s the sense of error and pointlessness, and the feeling that the fighting will never end.
Get out. We began this war defeated, and if Barak gets us out now, it will be his first great victory as prime minister. But to achieve that, he will have to recognize that we’ve lost this war. We are defeated. We can say it out loud—and not die of it.
Of that you don’t die.
On May 22, 2002, Israel withdrew its forces back to the international border with Lebanon in a quick forty-eight hour operation—two months before the original deadline set for withdrawal by Barak.
The Pope’s Visit to Israel
March 2000
Pope John Paul II made a historic official visit to the State of Israel on March 20, 2000, as part of a wider, millennium-commemorating visit to the holy Christian sites of the region. He was accompanied by tens of thousands of pilgrims. During his weeklong stay, the Pope visited the Christian holy sites both in Israel and in the Palestinian Authority territories, as well as sacred Muslim and Jewish sites and “secular” sites like Tad Vashem and a Palestinian refugee camp. The visit elicited much attention and interest around the Christian world and among Israelis and Arabs.
Day One: The Pope Arrives
An Israeli sits in front of his television set in his home in Jerusalem and watches the Pope arrive in his country.
This person is not religious. Religious ceremonies are foreign to him, and religious institutions in particular are foreign to him. He is very Jewish, and he respects those whose religious fervor burns in their hearts, but he himself has not performed what Kierkegaard called “the leap of faith.”
For a few days he’s been telling himself that this visit, historic as it is, will certainly neither move nor impress him. He’s been explaining to himself that the Pope’s visit is of no relevance to him, to his day-to-day routine, to the immediate problems of his private life, or to the political and moral dilemmas that his country has been agonizing over for decades. But when the airplane lands in Israel and the Pope emerges atop the stairway leading down to the tarmac, something suddenly happens.
The Israeli looks at the Pope, an old man, bent and burdened with years, weighted down with experience and the vicissitudes of life. Real sorrow, personal and very human, is also evident in his everyman’s face. He gazes at the Pope and suddenly sees, as if by an epiphany, what the Pope himself sees, perhaps: the state of Israel. The reality, both symbolic and concrete, of a country born after two thousand years of exile, religious persecutions, inquisitions, blood libels, pogroms, and the Holocaust.
The man in the armchair isn’t in any way resentful about this. He does not in any way see Israel as reprisal for what the Gentiles have done to the Jews, under the leadership and inspiration of most of this current Pope’s predecessors.
The opposite is true. In the meditative, profound gaze of the Pope he sees the marvel and the opportunity of the Jewish state. He sees the Jewish people’s life force for revival and renewal, which in these difficult times is the source of the great hope that Israel can save itself from the curse of war and attain peace.
The Israeli sitting and watching television fidgets uncomfortably in his chair. He really had had no intention of being carried away by such “historic” sentiments. Nor has he had any intention of reopening old accounts with either the Christian world or the Christian religion. Keeping such score would not, in any case, repair anything, and who today has the strength to peer again into the darkness in which Jewish-Christian relations have been conducted over the last two thousand years?
But then the Pope passes before the honor guard of Israeli soldiers. Bent over, leaning on his cane, deep in his own thoughts, he moves past the strapping armed men, who embody an ironic reversal of ancient stereotypes. The man in the armchair, who is no great fan of armies of any kind, reflects to himself that had any Jews of the last forty generations seen this Jewish military honor guard—even his own father, who fled Europe only seventy years earlier—they would not have believed their eyes. Then the Israeli suddenly comprehends, more than he ha
d allowed himself to do up to this moment, that the restrained, well-planned ceremony is a thin veneer of formality, behind which seethes an entire history. It is a cruel, primal, deep open wound, but maybe now, finally, there is a new opportunity, the first of its type, to heal it.
Then the Israeli national anthem is played. There’s no way of knowing whether its words have been translated for John Paul II. Perhaps they ought to be explained here. They speak of hope—the Jews’ two-thousand-year hope to establish a free nation in their own land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem.
Then the Pope speaks. He conveys fine and moving thoughts. This brave man, who had the courage to change the Church’s position toward Israel and Judaism. He speaks of his spiritual journey here, and a thought about what this great journey can become steals into the Israeli’s heart: a journey of elucidation and study, of identification and remorse, a religious and physical journey traversing all the terrible stations we have passed, Jews and Christians, human beings, men, women, and children; a journey to the beginning, from which will, perhaps, begin a new future, a life that is more possible and more human. This will certainly not happen in one short week. But it can begin here.
Day Two: Visit to a Refugee Camp
The Israeli and Palestinian officials were worried and tense as they sat and measured each word of the Pope’s speech. Would he depart from the text that had been prepared and agreed to by all the parties? Would he refer to the status of Jerusalem? Would he mention the Palestinian demand for a return to the 1967 borders? In the struggle between the two peoples, each gain by one side is still perceived as a defeat for the other. But beyond the words that were said, something deeper was becoming evident. The Israelis and the Palestinians look now like two inimical brothers, modern incarnations of Jacob and Esau, waiting for the blessing of their father. Each brother eyes what the other receives, and has faith in the magical power of the blessing.
I wonder whether the Pope—in his talks with this and that side—was able to comprehend the extent to which their long struggle has made them eerily similar to each other. Both have the same, almost hysterical sensitivity to what other people say and think about them. There’s the same manic-depressive excitability, the same need for any former enemy to love them, really love them. They share a potent self-destructive instinct, a compulsion to trip oneself up, and a bitter gravity that is nearly devoid of faith in any promise or hope.
Precisely because the Pope took care not to enter the political minefield, he was able to pronounce some important truths that have almost been forgotten after years of conflict. He spoke of the simple human suffering of millions of refugees, of the pointlessness and inexplicability of this ongoing misery. He reminded those people that their plight does not make them less deserving. With a few simple words he restored to them the honor that the “situation” has stolen from them.
And, in passing, he also spoke of the responsibility that all the leaders in the Middle East have for this suffering. I believe that this wholesale indictment was intentional. It’s not just Israel’s leaders who bear responsibility for the refugees’ misery. The leaders of the Arab world do as well. The wealthy Arab countries could long ago have alleviated the refugees’ day-to-day distress to some extent, but they preferred to preserve their misery and to cement their suffering in the ugly setting of the refugee camps.
In the Pope’s visit to the Deheisheh refugee camp, there was, however, something more important. In conversations I’ve had with Palestinians, I’ve often heard them say that they are now paying the price of the persecutions that the Jews suffered from the Christians. “We,” say the Palestinians, “are the victims of victims.” They often say that the fears that history has instilled into the Jewish soul have made it impossible for Israel to ever feel fully secure. The result, say the Palestinians, is that there will never be true peace.
I reminded them in these conversations that the Arab world has never shown any genuine goodwill toward the tiny Jewish refugee state, and that Israel is not exactly surrounded by the Salvation Army. Even today, I point out, you can still hear Arab radio stations broadcasting calls for the destruction of the “Zionist entity.”
But there can be no doubt that the Jewish people’s tragic past—a past for which the Church is largely responsible—has created some of the convoluted psychological complexities that make it very difficult for Israel to act today with more courage and largesse, with greater confidence in the Arabs.
From this point of view, the fates of the three religions, and of the Israelis, the Palestinians, and the Catholic Church, are tangled up in a tortuous and tragic knot. When I saw the Pope in the narrow streets of Deheisheh, when I saw him bless the children, the fourth generation of misery, I felt how right this visit was, this visit into the wound; how important was this direct contact with plain human suffering. Redemption will not come, of course, from this short visit, but as an Israeli, I also see recognition of the Catholic Church’s obligation to try to loosen, carefully and delicately, the noose that is strangling millions of Israelis and Palestinians.
Day Three: Yad Vashem
Today, after the ceremony at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, even the most out-and-out cynics must realize how the Pope’s visit to Israel touches the foundations of our identity, our most primal emotions.
In their planning of the visit, the parties seem to have thought mostly about abstract symbols, the big images. Yet now, during the visit itself, symbols and human beings are melding time and again; abstract ideas are mixing with tears and wounds and human fragility.
So it was when the Pope spoke of the suffering of the Jews, and so it was when he met with people from his hometown in Poland, with the woman that he himself bore on his back out of the ghetto, to whom he gave a slice of bread and whom he saved from death. And so it was when he stood, head bowed, and communed with the memory of the victims.
Allow me to tell a brief story, a private one. A very dear member of my family, a survivor of the Treblinka death camp, arrived at my wedding with a bandage on her forearm. She was covering her tattooed number so as not to mar the celebration with a memento of the Holocaust. I remember how I was unable to take my eyes off that bandage. I understood then, very sharply, how much all of us here in Israel are always walking on a surface as thin as that bandage, under which lies a void that threatens, every moment, to drag down our daily lives, our illusion of routine.
I was reminded of that feeling again yesterday, when, at the ceremony, they read a letter that a Jewish woman named Jennia wrote to the woman who hid her son, Michael. The mother asked that he not forget to wear his pajamas at night, and pleaded that he eat well, to strengthen him for what awaited him. At the end, the reader concluded by saying that Jennia and her son had perished in Auschwitz. I felt then—perhaps not only I—all at once, that the thin bandage that separates our “here” in Israel from the “there” of the Holocaust had suddenly been ripped off.
True, the Pope did not ask for the Jewish people’s forgiveness, and did not apologize for the Church’s deeds during the Holocaust. Perhaps he refrained from doing so for internal Church political reasons, but to my mind it was just as well.
Think of the outcome had he apologized. Hundreds of millions of Christian believers would have felt that the Pope had absolved them forever of any personal obligation to face up to the Holocaust.
I don’t belong to those who believe that the Holocaust was a specifically Jewish event. As I see it, all civilized, fair-minded persons must ask themselves serious questions about the Holocaust and what permitted it to take place.
These are not Jewish questions. They are universal questions about the relations between human beings, about attitudes to the foreign, the different, and the weak. They are questions about the human soul that can so easily be made to stop speaking as “I” and to begin roaring about “we.” They are questions about attitudes to force, about the way a person can preserve his humanity in the face of an arbitrary power that seeks to oblitera
te him, and about the greatest courage of all—the courage to do a kindness to the oppressed, when it is so easy to collaborate with evil.
It is good that the Pope did not ask for forgiveness. No one can ask for forgiveness for the Holocaust in the name of others, and no person may forgive in the name of the victims. The Pope’s presence in Yad Vashem, within the most profound dimension of Jewish suffering, like the deeds of human kindness that he, as a human being, performed during the war, are more eloquent than any official declaration.
It is impossible to sum up what happened in the Holocaust in one sentence, or in one gesture, as important as that gesture might be. What happened there will remain forever mute, like a mouth wide open to scream. Something of that cry is present in the silent, missing line at the end of the poem by Dan Pagis, “Scrawled in Pencil in a Sealed Boxcar”:
Here in this transport
I Am Eve
With my son Abel
If you see my oldest son
Cain son of Adam
Tell him that I
Day Four: Service at the Mount of the Beatitudes
Yesterday, for three hours, faith and myth united concretely with the landscape in which events happened, with the names that became the building blocks of Western civilization.
More than anything else, you could perceive, in the faces of the people sitting in wheelchairs, the sense that this was a once-in-a-lifetime event. You could feel—and identify with all your heart—the magnitude of the hope and the faith here, in this place, where miracles happened.
And I, the Jew that I am, watched the ceremony, and I thought that this was the first time that most of the Jews in Israel had seen a Catholic prayer ritual. I know this may seem strange to anyone who has grown up and lived in a Christian country, or anyone accustomed to thinking of the Jews as a tiny minority, but this is the reality in Israel, and if you think about the history of relations between Jews and Christians, maybe you will be able to understand the Jewish aversion to everything having to do with Christianity and with Christian religious institutions.