In 2006 I was living in Israel when I witnessed an aggressive war, by a state that sees the domination of its neighbors as a matter of life and death.
By then I was already disillusioned in Zionism, the great lie that grows out of our ancient dreams of redemption and yet delivers only unending fear and destruction. I knew that Israel exists in the shadow of the War; and that our wounds were never healed, but instead kept open and manipulated by a leadership that may or may not itself be trapped in the nightmare. But when in July of 2006 the Second Lebanon War began, and the whole country had gone war-mad around me, it was an opportunity to know in advance the course of events. I was barely out of my teens, and I took pleasure in the opportunity to be thoroughly unsurprised, to put my cultivated absolute lack of hope and faith in my fellow citizens to the test of reality. I saw my cynicism win unambiguously, beyond any shadow of doubt, and the events of that summer absolutely and without question vindicated the lowest possible opinion of the Jewish nation that I was able to cultivate in the years of my brooding adolescence.
I have a special, personal connection to that war. In those days I used to hang out with what turned out later to be an unofficial ring for the sexual exploitation of teens by older men, but at the time we used to call it the “Rocky Horror Picture Show.” One of the older guys, who played Rocky in the oldest, most well-regarded cast, was on reserve duty on July 12th, 2006. He was a member of a tank crew that was ordered to retaliate against a Hezbollah hostage-taking raid in the territory held by Israel. His tank was caught by a landmine and the crew was killed; in my mind, this incident marks the beginning of the war. My only memory of him (I no longer remember his name) is that a couple of weeks earlier, during a show, when he was on leave from reserve duty, he brought a military night-vision set to the theater and showed it to his friends.
So the war went on and escalated. We started hearing air-raid sirens in Haifa, and ran to the northern windows instead of to the southern stairwells to see where the rockets fell; I remember one time when I visited a friend who lived on the crest of Mount Carmel, there was the bang of Katyusha rockets, followed by the ultrasonic booms of IDF fighter jets and the long, slow, low thunder of extensive aerial bombardment on the other side of the border.
I remember being at work, stocking shelves at the neighborhood grocery. It was evening, towards the end of my shift. There was a soccer game on the TV. The owner, a big Georgian man who could address his customers and make a deal in any language that was likely to be spoken in the neighborhood, was having an argument with someone, a Palestinian: “you did this,” “you did that…“I couldn’t stop myself, and swore. “How can you say ‘you did this’ this when thousands of people are being bombed to dust?!!” My boss looked at me sternly and told me, “you can’t say that.” He was referring to my swear; since I was speaking Ivrit, the swearing could be either in Russian or in Arabic. This one was in Arabic, and a little extreme - not something you’d say around an Arabic speaker. I still blush with embarrassment mixed with rage every time I remember this. Evidently the proprieties of polite society must still be observed even in war, and entire neighborhoods full of children being torn to pieces by cluster bombs and burned alive from the inside with white phosphorus is not as profane as swearing by “your mother’s cunt.”
But the memory that has occupied my consciousness the most over the years was from a little later. It was towards the end of the war, there was a degree of war-weariness in the Israeli public, as Israel’s massive bombardment of civilian targets in Lebanon didn’t seem to make a dent in Lebanese rocket attacks against cities in Northern Israel; Israeli civilian casualties could now be measured by a few dozen, and military casualties were over a hundred; a ceasefire was imminent. Inexplicably, Israel’s attacks on civilian targets increased steeply: 90% of the anti-personnel area munitions that Israel fired at Lebanese civilian targets were shot in the last 72 hours of the war. I was, of course, firmly unsurprised: I already knew what Israel and Israelis were capable of - what they relished the opportunity to do. But for some reason my lack of surprise and the absolute pointlessness of talking about anything with anyone, I had a shouting match with my mother’s boyfriend on the subject of targeting civilians in war, especially when the war is basically over but for the formalities.
My mom’s boyfriend Vitek was much older than her, with big white curls around the bald center of his head, bright, smiling blue eyes, a wide nose, and the hairiest back, arms, chest, belly, and legs that you’ve ever seen. He immigrated to Israel from Poland as a young man in the 1950s, when Communist Poland finally managed to get rid of the few remnants of Jews that managed to survive and remain after the work the Nazis did. He was a kibbutznik, a member of Ein HaMifratz, a small kibbutz about halfway between Haifa and Acre. He lived in small apartment with a yard and vines growing over trellises in the back yard, which he harvested and made passable white wine. He always voted Meretz - he had been a member since the days when it was still relevant, the stalwart tip of the left wing of the Zionist movement, the stronghold of Marxist Jewish labor, the good old political arm of the Kibbutz movement, the conscience of Zionism. He was a nice guy. He introduced me to Howard Fast’s Spartacus, and showed me the Kibbutz library copy of the Communist Manifesto. He played tennis, made wine, fucked my mom, helped out financially, respected my grandmother, and stayed out of my way.
So I asked him, why are we shooting all those bombs? The war is almost over. Why are we covering towns and villages in southern Lebanon in cluster bombs and white phosphorus, munitions that are banned by international agreements even against military targets, and the use of which in civilian areas is considered a grievous war crime?
I don’t know if you’ve ever had the opportunity to look a nice old man in the eyes as his soul is suddenly overwhelmed by a murderous, genocidal rage; but I saw it. His usually cheerful grin transformed into a rictus, as he held his face absolutely still, and I will never stop seeing whatever looked at me out of his eyes as he said: “because we should kill them, all of them, and their wives and their children, kill all of them so that they would know what happens when you mess with us.”
And how can anyone expect something else? Vitek was born right after the Holocaust, in Poland, the former center of Ashkenazi civilization which finally expelled the surviving remnants of its Jews a decade or so after the end of the war. As a child, he must have known nothing but trauma of an unimaginable magnitude, clinging to life in the ruins only to be driven out by the violent hypocrites of the Communist government, wanted nowhere except in this tiny land where, as soon as he came of age, was attacked by all its neighbors in the 1973 war. How can such a man imagine peace except through the institution of terror? Some Rov once told me that we are not all of us tzadikim, that we can only be expected of the level of righteousness that we are capable of. At least during peacetime Vitek opposes provocation and land grabs.
Nonetheless, I think that it is an important fact that it is davka this, “kill them all so that they fear us,” which is the disfigured face of Judaism through the lens of militarist nationalism, even the left, even the peaceniks, those who claim the heritage of international solidarity. Palestinian villagers and slum-dwellers, and ragtag Lebanese guerillas, have taken the place of the Nazi murderers in the Jewish imagination as enemies more fitting for our small might and short stature. And our might is small, if we discount the might of God.
What might we have accomplished had we, after the War, taken on not a nation of poor farmers under the thumb of the British, but the Great Powers? They are the inheritors of Malchus haRisha (Rome, the Kingdom of Wickedness), who may have been on the opposite side from the Nazis but in the same business, the business of temporal power, violence and oppression, in defiance or ignorance of God’s law… With God on our side, we might have made a difference. We might have trusted God and acted from the greatness of our spirits; instead we have retreated into our human limitations, into the smallness of the possible, and away from God and His redemption.
We have called the few tiny military victories that accompanied this great spiritual rout evidence of God’s support, and surrendered our destiny to the Way of the World, “kill them all so that they fear us, and we might survive.”