Amos Oz - The Slopes of Lebanon

The words that follow are addressed to you, Mr. Begin, not to your advisers. Adolf Hitler destroyed one-third of the Jewish people, among them your own parents and relatives, and some of my family. There are times when, like many Jews, I feel sorry I didn’t kill Hitler with my own hands. I’m sure you feel the same way. There is not, and there never will be, any healing for the open wound. Tens of thousands of dead Arabs will not heal that wound.

But, Mr. Begin, Adolf Hitler died thirty-seven years ago. Pity or not, the fact is: Hitler is not hiding in Nabatiyah, in Sidon, or in Beirut. He is dead and burned to ashes.

Time and again, Mr. Begin, you publicly betray a weird urge to resurrect Hitler from the dead just so that you may kill him over and over again each day: sometimes cast as Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, at other times in the role of terrorists, or the Soviets, or Bruno Kreisky, or the Iraqis, or virtually every Gentile who has ever fought us or opposed our conduct. This urge to revive Hitler, only to kill him again and again, is the result of pain that poets can permit themselves to use, but not statesmen. For them, it’s dangerous. You, Mr. Begin, are not — at least not to the best of my knowledge — a poet. Some of your feelings have been expressed in blood and fire, not in rhymed couplets. Even at great emotional cost personally, you must remind yourself, and the public that elected you its leader, that Hitler is dead and burned to ashes.

You also must remind yourself that now, at the cost of the blood and sweat of four generations, the people of Israel have a state whose existence is at present under a double threat: not only from an enemy that seeks its extinction, but also from our own well-known tendency to extreme hysteria tinged with messianic madness; a tendency that has brought catastrophe and destruction upon us before in our long history.

As for the PLO, I once had my hopes and illusions, but I have abandoned them. The PLO is indeed unwilling, and apparently unable, to make any concession acknowledging the very existence of Israel. And that is why the PLO is continuing the brutal, wretched tradition of the fanatical Palestinian leadership that brought down one calamity after another upon its people. To this extent we can be in agreement, you and I. To this extent I would support, in principle, your position with regard to fighting the PLO (although not the simplistic, clumsy, sterile battle you are launching now in Lebanon). But you didn’t lead us into this particular war in order to destroy the PLO. You led us astray.

Your real purpose is to reduce the Palestinians to a submissive group of serfs brought to its knees within the Greater Israel of your fantasies. This goal of yours is neither humane, nor realistic, nor in keeping with Jewish tradition at its best; nor is it appropriate to mainstream Zionism, which agreed, time and again, over decades, to partition this land between its peoples (on the bases of various lines) — until you turned up and reneged on this consensus.

Your withdrawal from the historic Zionist position of compromise with the Palestinians was encouraged, of course, by the stubborn refusal of the Palestinians to make any compromise at all. But this withdrawal contains the seeds of a disaster that threatens our very existence no less than do our enemies. If you deny the identity of one nation, you will eventually come to resemble those who deny your identity.

I am addressing you, not your followers, some of whom openly advocate doing unto our enemies what our enemies are striving to do unto us. I have no basis for argument, nor even a common language, with them. If we want to turn Israel into a copy of Russia, the oppressor of national entities, or of Assad’s Syria, or of the PLO and Iraq, what good does it do us to spill our own blood in a war against those we are trying to copy? Better to assimilate with them, to be barbarians of the Mosaic persuasion, and to draw the curtain on the Zionist dream of creating a just and enlightened society here. You, Mr. Begin, have declared more than once (far from the populous town squares of Lod and Netanya) your devotion to humanist ideals. So it is to you that I turn and ask: Why did you lie to the people? Why, in a massive bombing attack on Beirut, did you deliberately and cold-bloodedly provoke the enemy and drag him into a barrage in Galilee? Was it in order to have an alibi for invading Lebanon and to create a “new order” there? Why did you choose this year, which perhaps had the fewest casualties since the establishment of the State of Israel, to initiate a calculated war? Why did you send the Israel Defense Forces (you never call the IDF by its name — you always refer to it as “our army” or “the army of Israel”; this is not by accident!), for the first time since we achieved independence, to fight, not for our survival, not to repel an attack, not to save Israel, but in order to obtain “advantages” and “gains”? (Advantages and gains for whom? Only time will tell.) This is the first time we have gone to the battlefield as though to the stock market: a correct investment (perhaps), a cautious gamble (as it were, “striking while the iron is hot,” “reasonable” risks and “relative” sacrifices). There has been nothing like it since the beginning of modern Zionism. Until now we have gone out to kill and be killed only when our very existence was at stake. I am talking about the threat of extinction, not about infiltrational harassment.

The goal of this war is not “peace for Galilee.” You have misled the nation; just like those whom you and I have always despised, you have given the name “peace” to a calculated, instigated war. The purpose of your war is to break the back of the Palestinian people, to install a “friendly” regime in Lebanon and to create — at the cost of the lives of soldiers — conditions to make your dream of a Greater Israel come true. But even so, if you were to stand up in the midst of the fighting, if you were to stand up tomorrow or the day after, and propose to the Palestinian people once again the historic compromise that has characterized the mainstream of Zionism, then, perhaps, the blood will not have been spilled in vain.

Mr. Prime Minister, there can be either a compromise, albeit a painful one, between the two peoples in this land, or else perpetual war. There is no third alternative.

The entire nation, or most of it, wanted peace for Galilee and peace for the whole country and hoped for the emergence of a Palestinian leadership with whom we could talk. But you took advantage of this consensus, and of the self-sacrificing spirit of our soldiers, for purposes that are acceptable only to your own party and its fellow travelers, and perhaps not even to all of those. You summoned the soldiers to battle in the name of that broad consensus, but you abused that consensus for the sake of goals that are rejected by at least half of this nation: “Greater Israel,” the destruction of a Palestinian identity, “the entrapment of Hitler,” changing the regime in Lebanon, and prospects of political dividends.

I do not question, Mr. Begin, your legal right to use your majority (of sorts) in the Knesset to involve us in a war that you desire. We have not disobeyed, nor will we disobey, your orders to report for duty. The parliamentary majority (some of it acting as though bewitched) is in your hands, and we are left to grit our teeth. But your lie will not be forgiven: You called upon our soldiers to sacrifice their lives for goals agreed upon (though the manner in which agreement was arrived at is subject to debate), but in fact you led them to kill and to die for goals to which a great many of us are opposed. Please do not come to comfort our mourners: You have caused a rift unlike any that has ever been before. Half the nation is turning its back on you in resentment, in fury, and in grief. But then, I think that this final sentence should really be addressed to the leaders of the opposition, not to you.