Amos Oz - The Slopes of Lebanon

I am referring to the legal, not the moral, aspects of this war. In moral terms, this war has been unjustified from its very inception. There can be no atonement for what we did in Beirut. Even if we accept Begin’s claim that an entire city has been taken over by murderers, who are holding it hostage and shooting at us from behind the backs of innocent civilians, we could not accept his conclusion that it is permissible to kill the hostages together with the kidnappers, to bomb a plane full of innocent passengers, as it were, in order to kill its hijackers. If, God forbid, the PLO were to take over Haifa instead of Beirut, would Begin give orders to bomb and shell Haifa almost indiscriminately until its terrorist captors surrendered?

But as long as the orders are legal — as long as the orders are to strike, with clear intent, only at the enemy and to try not to injure civilians — they must be obeyed. Anyone who suggests that a soldier should, in every instance, act not only in accordance with the law, but also outside the law, in accordance with his own personal moral values, is essentially suggesting that we also legitimize the conduct of the radical right. Indeed, he is suggesting that we should begin to dismantle this society and this state. And there are situations in which one would have to go that far — for instance, if your country has been taken over by a gang of criminals. But we have not yet reached that point, and I hope we never will.

THE SECRET OF BEGIN’S STRENGTH

During a debate in the Knesset, when the dovish opposition raised some stammered criticisms, most of them in halfhearted, embarrassed mutterings, about the moral aspects of the war in Lebanon, Begin got to his feet and did what the nationalist right always does when it is attacked on moral grounds: It claims that the critics are hypocritical and self-righteous, because they, too, in their turn, have done unspeakable things to the Arabs. In this manner, the right retroactively besmirches all of Zionist history as one continuous crime. Thus Begin produced one foolish, obtuse interview, which Motta Gur, a Labor party leader, gave several years ago, and from which he quoted extensively and declared with provocative glee, “Look who’s talking about morality! Why, Israel always did contemptible things! Israel, under a Labor government, always bombed centers of Arab population. Israel was always what it is now!”

This argument, “Look who’s talking,” is a very effective weapon against both the opposition and what Begin calls alternately the “hypocritical world” and the “free world.” Begin has struck a deeply sensitive chord in the Jewish psyche. In essence, he is winking at the persecuted and is offering them, in exchange for the “popular-priced” ticket of a war against Arafat, the “deluxe” spectacle of a worldwide war against Jew-haters through the ages. Hitler, according to Begin’s implied message, has risen from the dead and is sitting in a bunker in Beirut. Whoever wants to kill Hitler no longer has to swallow his frustration. Hitler now “rides again,” this time within reach, in a guest appearance right around the corner, and we can give him his just deserts at last. At the same time, we can give Sennacherib, Titus, Antiochus, Chmielnicki, Bevin, and Stalin, too, what’s coming to them. All for a package price.

There is one more message: Our sufferings have granted us immunity papers, as it were, a moral carte blanche. After what all those dirty goyim have done to us, none of them is entitled to preach morality to us. We, on the other hand, have carte blanche, because we were victims and have suffered so much. Once a victim, always a victim, and victimhood entitles its owners to a moral exemption. (There is no difference between this argument and the claim of Palestinian leaders when they justify blanket terror: “The Palestinian people have lost everything. Therefore, anything and everything is permissible to them.”)

This is a powerful, effective message. Opposition leaders have not managed to find an emotional and intellectual reply that the public will comprehend. Begin presents the war in Lebanon as an act of “settling accounts” with Jew-haters through the ages. And thus a large part of the public perceives the war in Lebanon as a “worldwide struggle” (and a neurotic one) against all our past and present foes.

This, and more: How morbid — and how effective — is the attitude that presents Israel as a ferocious Goliath (“We are the fourth superpower in the world; we have enormous power; we drove out the British; we did the Arabs in; we struck at Russia; and now we are saving the free world from the jaws of terror and from the clutches of its own weakness; and we’re destroying Hitler once again”), and at the same time portrays Israel as a lamb surrounded by a pack of wolves (“We are wretched, isolated, besieged, and beleaguered; the whole world is against us; no one understands us and no one sympathizes with us”). This message gives its consumers the best of two worlds, the intoxication of power along with the pleasures of self-pity; to be both Samson the Mighty and Rachel mourning her children. Two for the price of one.

In the Knesset Committee for Security and Foreign Affairs, Begin sneered at his opponents, “If Adolf Hitler were hiding in a building along with twenty innocent civilians, wouldn’t you bomb the building, gentlemen?” It is characteristic that Begin spoke of twenty “civilians,” not twenty “Jews.” This is the sort of autism whose most prominent symptom is the use of the expression “Jewish blood.” There is no such thing as “Jewish blood.” Neither in the Bible nor in the Talmud will you find even a single use of the phrase “Jewish blood.” On the other hand, there is an abundance of references to “innocent blood” or “the blood of innocents.” Members of the opposition don’t react to this. Not one of them had the courage to say, “No, sir! We would not have blown up that house. We would have found a way to get at the murderer without spilling innocent blood.”

Within the framework of the Beginist effort to save Lebanon, how many Lebanese, who are not the enemy, is it permissible to kill in order to “save” Lebanon from the clutches of the PLO? A thousand? Ten thousand? A hundred thousand?

CHIPS AT THE CASINO

Begin himself doesn’t use pretenses. The juxtaposition of the arrogance of power with self-pity, of “the God of vengeance” with “the Divine Presence in mourning,” expresses his own most fundamental experiences, and, it would seem, those of most of the people of Israel. Golda Meir expressed similar sentiments in a similar world view. In her eyes, too, we were always pictured as a lamb at the mercy of vile predators. But then, she truly felt pain at the deaths of those who fell, whereas Begin appears downright gleeful and vivacious these days. Ever since the war began, his public appearances have been marked by venomous, vengeful arrogance, by pugnacious jubilation. A feeling of profound relief shows on his face and echoes no less in his voice than in his words. He looks, on the TV screen, as if he is having the time of his life and loving every minute of it.

Not long ago, he spoke at the College of National Defense. He took issue with a Zionist consensus, which had crystallized over the course of decades, that you go to war only as a last resort. In unavoidable wars, he argued, when you fight with your back to the wall, there are always heavy casualties. In wars of choice, the “price” is lower. It was as though he were talking about some sidewalk slot machine: You keep on dropping into the slot the price — the lives of children, albeit children of eighteen — and at the bottom out come assets, advantages, and gains.

From this view, the war in Lebanon is a good “cost-effective” investment. Oh, there may be investments that are even better. We could, for example, parachute several Israeli divisions onto the Iranian oil fields and annex Iran’s Persian Gulf coast. Khomeini is, after all, no less an enemy than Arafat. He, too, has vowed to march on Jerusalem and finish us off. Surely the Russians will not come to Khomeini’s rescue; surely the Americans will give us a pretty thank-you; surely the Iraqis will send us bouquets of flowers. All we have to do is drop in a few hundred soldiers and “win” the oil fields. All this could be done in a war of choice that may be much more “profitable” than all our previous wars put together. But when you go to war as if you were going to the stock market, when you relate to the lives of the fighters as you would to poker chips, the end of the road is a field strewn with the boots of soldiers who have run back home because they don’t want to be someone else’s poker chips. This is the ineluctable logic that many other nations learned after they ceased to consider war only as a last resort and started thinking of war in terms of investments and dividends.