I recently bumped into a mild-mannered, bookish paratrooper I know. He had come home to Jerusalem for a short weekend after spending two weeks in Gaza. I didn’t know what to expect when I asked him what he thought of the war.
I thought I might hear him echo my own thoughts, and say that he was shocked and upset by the havoc wreaked by Israel. Instead, he responded roughly as follows: We had to show Hamas that we’re not suckers, we had to show them that we won’t hesitate to beat the hell out of them if they provoke us. We’re not, by military means, going to end Hamas rule in Gaza or stop them from smuggling in rockets — but we had to invade, and we had to be tough.
And I was happy to hear that.
Many of my fellow critics of the war would have reacted differently. They lament that Israeli soldiers have lost their moral compass and are shocked that we have soldiers who were willing participants in the carnage that we just saw in Gaza.
I take another view. Soldiers like this one are the kind that Israel needs — willing, even eager, to use their strength against our enemies, but realistic about what they and their army can achieve.
Soldiers in the field do not make policy. They do not decide when to go to war, what the war’s aims should be, what tactics should be used, or when and under what circumstances hostilities should cease. Rather, they are charged with fighting the war that their political leaders decide to pursue, according to the strategy that the army’s command devises. Of course, soldiers are bound by law and honor to refuse to obey orders that are manifestly immoral and illegal, orders that, as Israel’s Supreme Court ruled in a landmark case in the 1950s, have a “black flag flying over them.” Within those constraints, however, soldiers must give the best fight that they can.
A soldier is trained to use his personal strength and the weapons at his disposal to battle the enemy. Whatever his political views and his moral values, these are the means he has to protect himself and his comrades, and to accomplish his mission. So we should not be surprised at his readiness to use bullets, mortars and shells to cause death and destruction of a kind that may appall observers on the sidelines. Diplomacy is not part of the soldier’s kit, and hesitation, for a fighter, is a peril rather than a virtue.
Consequently, when an Israeli soldier sees Gaza’s rulers launching rockets against his country’s cities, his immediate reaction is to want to hit back. And when a comrade of his languishes in enemy captivity, every good soldier will want to fight to free him.
But the training a good soldier receives also makes him aware of the limits of force, and of his own vulnerability. When he charges up a hill at an enemy position in training maneuvers, he can’t help thinking about what would happen if the enemy were real, and what might happen if the enemy snuck up from behind, and what might happen to him if his commander, or his platoon medic, or his friend next to him, is felled. He can be thoroughly trained and fight as hard as he can, but he knows that the outcome is always in doubt, and that many may die without achieving the mission. He does not want to die, or see his friends die, especially if in dying they accomplish little or nothing.
The paratrooper I spoke to saw the war from the only perspective he could properly see it — that of a fighter who wanted to fight back when he saw his fellow Israelis being rocketed, and who entered enemy territory and spent a fortnight in a small sector where he could see only the threats in his immediate vicinity. We should be thankful that he was eager to fight, and thankful that in his eagerness he did not lose sight of the limitations of violence.
“The pride of young men is their strength and the glory of old men is their gray hair,” King Solomon said. I think the Gaza war went on far longer than needed, killing more people and causing more destruction than its goals and achievements warranted. Some weapons — like phosphorus shells — seem to have been used in forbidden ways. But my anger and frustration is directed at the men and women with the gray hairs — that is, those with the experience, wisdom and ability to see the big picture. There’s no contradiction between that and being grateful and proud of the soldiers who fought at the front.
Haim Watzman is the author of “A Crack in the Earth: A Journey Up Israel’s Rift Valley” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) and “Company C: An American’s Life as a Citizen-Soldier in Israel”( Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005). He blogs at southjerusalem.com.
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Well Mr. Watzman (I read both your books with awe and delight, given my experiences in Israel), I don't doubt that many Israelis soldiers on the ground did their duty and did it well because they are citizen-soldiers not professional killers or sucidal meniachs. There is an Israeli poem about the old man who spends all day weeping for his fallen IDF hero son, sitting on a bench by the grave. Form the grave his son calls to him: cry not for yourself, father, but for me; I lie under the dark, damp, cold ground-- all by dreams and potentials buried with me-- because I gave my life to your ideologies. Israel is indeed the dream of old men seeking "meshch-hood" by sending their sons to humiliate helpless Palestinians as they were humiliated by the Germans. But the sabra sons are as of the land as the sons of Palestinians and so they have nothing to prove just a lot to accomplish. And yet, a few Haredi psychos whose manhood in Brooklyn was spent hidding from the Schwartzas, thought this a great opportunity. L'HUMANITE reports of a Hasidim shooting the children of a Palestinian family point blank after getting out of his tank. Yes, Jews and Israelis, realize that there are hateful types who seek to assert their mensch-hood, as Germans did in Poland-- shotting helpess civilians point blank. This should make you realize that the "Holocuast" is no one time anomaly but the action of almost any man with a gun before his utterly helpless civilian victims. So it could be anyone, anywhere-- we old guys have seen it often before. Now, as the engorged American $ placenta from which the 60 years old fetus, Israel, draws sustenance goes broke, how will Israel be maintained? If Netayahu wins, his brain will have to remind his mouth that he promised, as Sharon's Finance Minister, that he would make Israel free of American aid. He failed as it needed $billions more. But now there is no choice and, unfortunately, Israel is more still literally a "wefare-state" on US dole. If all those soldiers had been given the chance to lead the Arab World in modernization instead of phosporous bar-b-quing Palestinians, Israel could indeed be "a light onto the [Arab] nations," as Zionism's Founding Fathers so desperately wished to be. Pehaps for both Israelis and Palestinians the current Holaucostian Nekba can be an opportunity for integrating two states with one economy. And then, as Israel offers a nuclear umbrella to the Arabs, deterring Iran's puny A bomb, it could lead them out of their untenable one crop (oil) banana republic economies into sci/tech modernity. It would be nice to see Israel doing with its Arab cousins what Bush so miserably failed to do. I am sure most Americans would be more than willing to pay for that out of their meager economy.
In all of this people seem to forget that Hamas is a brutal, barbaric, fundamentalist group that teaches hatred, intolerance and murder. None of this battle in Gaza needed to be fought if Hamas would just start building an open and free society. Instead it murders gays, denies women equal fights, murders anyone that speaks out against it, uses the general population as shields and this is what the Left wants to protect?!? Just as in WWll we did not decide to negotiate with Germany or Japan but chose to defeat it so to we must do with these unrepentant murders. Even now they vow to rearm, to spend precious resources on the tools of war and not the tools of peace and civil society. It will come out in the next few weeks that fewer people died than the Hamas propaganda has been spewing and most of the dead will have been fighters. Stop all this self-flagellation. The IDF conducts itself better than any army of the face of the earth. War is brutal and horrific and every other army behaves worse.
Seth, no one on the left is in love with Hamas. The question is what are the circumstances that led to the rise of Hamas and how we can work to change the factors that give Hamas its power. Does Hamas deserve to be defeated? Of course. Would it be wise to do that now? I don't think so. The world has allowed many reprehensible regimes to remain in power because geopolitical and military circumstances made their defeat on the battlefield impossible or because such a defeat would have ignited a much larger and more deadly conflict. The fight against Nazi Germany and Japan is simply not comparable to the circumstances here in the Middle East. And the IDF's moral standing is something that has to be worked at on a day-to-day basis--it's not just something to be declared.
I’m afraid I don’t really understand this piece. On the one hand, you talk about how good it is that young Israeli men should be “willing, even eager, to use their strength against our enemies,” who apparently include the wives, children and neighbors of Nizar Rayyan, for example. You then say that a soldier is “bound by law and honor to refuse to obey orders that are manifestly immoral and illegal.” You don’t really draw the line here, though. You seem to admit in your last paragraph that Israel has committed war crimes (although your choice of the word “forbidden” as opposed to “illegal” is interesting to me), while still managing to be proud that the soldier is eager to be a part of what is essentially an exercise in vengeful muscle flexing. How can you reconcile these two points? Hundreds of civilians were killed so that Israel could show that they’re not suckers? If that’s not illegal, it’s certainly difficult for me to understand how it could be called anything but immoral, particularly since anyone who thinks Hamas has been “taught a lesson” is naive or blind. If anything, the lesson Hamas, and Hezbollah before them, learn in these bursts of cathartic violence is that the only common language between Israelis and Arabs is violence.
how can one say the war went on too long when the objective was not met! smuggling stills goes on, bombs are still falling?????????????????//
Israel cannot be defeated by the Arabs or even the Iranians.It can only be defeated internally by leftist Jews.
gaza is packed with civilians either end the blockcade or occupy and deport the refugees in gaza, there is no such thing as being halfway pregant. 6 months or a year and the idf will have to do it all over again.
It's hard for some readers to comprehend exactly where haim stands on the issue of disproportionate retaliation against the civilians of gaza. As the paratrooper said - this was about showing hamas "who's Boss". So, if the current punishment was insufficient (ie, a few more firecrackers are launched in israel's direction from the prison known as gaza), presumably, it'd be OK next time to kill and maim thousands of children instead of hundreds. And if that's still not enough, then mayve tens of thousands will do the trick. The problem is that with this frame of mind, there really is no limit to how many dead kids israel will tolerate. the answer is, obviously - as many as it takes, no? and in any case, it's all hamas' fault, just as it always is, leaving israel's conscience lily white. One little problem: the rest of the civilized world does not seem to agree with this assessment. In addition to the gathering stem of boycotts and divestments, what this attitude means is that we'll recoil in horror upon meeting anyone who served in the IDF. Not because of what they are, but because we now know exactly what they are capable of. You could say that the 95% approval ratings for the revenge attacks against the palestinians tell us all we'll ever need to know about the mentality now pervading an entire country. Israel has indeed managed to do the impossible - making hamas look good (by comparison).
Yet one more lefty condescending anti-Israel propaganda piece from the Forward. Israel is libeled with claims of having perpetrated "havoc", and "carnage". In fact, Israel engaged in the most "civilized" limited military action imaginable, more so than any other army on earth, actually risking its own soldiers and military goals, and at immense cost, in order to avoid "civilian" casualties. But the anti-Israel lefties just can't stand any war, even if it is necessary for the protection of Israelis - particularly if it means the protection of Israeli Jews. The spectre of Jews defending themselves (and not being slaughtered doing so) particularly offends the antisemites. The miniscule number of true arab "civilian" casualties (all entirely caused by the arabs themselves), is a tribute to Israel's troops and leaders. By the way, if the "gray haired" Jews made any mistake, it was being constrained by the cynical attacks by the world's antisemites.
Frank, the antisemite name-calling tactic in reference to any criticism of israeli policies is getting played out, and more importantly it belittles the actual cases of antisemitism which still exist, so be mindful of when you use the term and use it sparingly please :) Many jews within Israel and around the world stand against the apartheid policies of Israel and its violations against law and humanity, but the media fails to show coverage of the thousands of Jews who take to the streets in protest to Israel...I wonder why?
Also, do you not take offence to people belittling the numbers of Jews murdered in the holocaust? Please be respectful to those who 1434 murdered in Gaza, those whose names and ages have been recorded, 288 of whom were young children according to The Ministry of Health, and let's not forget the maimed and injured 5,303 Palestinians, including 1,606 children and 828 women. All guilty of what? being confined to the Gaza prison.