August 6, 2006
Pondering, Discussing, Traveling Amid and Defending the Inevitable War
By BERNARD-HENRI LÉVY
When I arrived in Israel, it was the anniversary of the day the Spanish
Civil War began. It was 70 years ago that the Spanish generals set off the
war — civil, ideological and international — that the fascist governments of
the time wanted. And I could not help thinking about this as I landed in Tel
Aviv. Syria in the wings. . .Ahmadinejad’s Iran maneuvering. . .Hezbollah,
which everyone knows is a little Iran, or a little tyrant, taking Lebanon
and its people hostage.. . .And behind the scenes, a fascism with an
Islamist face, a third fascism, which is to our generation what the other
fascism, and then communist totalitarianism, were to our elders’. As soon as
I arrived; yes, from the very first moment I visited with my old friends in
Tel Aviv, whom I had not seen so tense or so anxious since 1967; from my
first conversation with Denis Charbit, an ardent peace activist who did not,
it seemed to me, doubt the legitimacy of this war of self-defense; from my
first discussion with Tzipi Livni, the young and talented Israeli foreign
minister, whom I found strangely disoriented in this new geopolitics, I
sensed that something new, something unprecedented in the history of Israeli
wars, was being enacted. It was as if Israelis were no longer in the
framework of Israel and the Arabs alone. It was as if the international
context, the game of hide-and-seek between visible and invisible players,
the role of Iran and its Hezbollah ally, gave the whole crisis a flavor, a
look, a perspective that were entirely new.
Before I went to the northern front, near the border with Lebanon, I
traveled to Sderot — the martyred city of Sderot — to the south, on the
border with Gaza. Yes, the martyred city. Because the images that reach us
from Lebanon are so terrible, and because the suffering of Lebanese civilian
victims is so unbearable to the conscience and the heart, it is hard to
imagine, I know, that an Israeli city could also be a martyred city. And
yet. . .these empty streets. . .these gutted houses, riddled by shrapnel. .
.this mountain of exploded rockets piled up in the courtyard of the police
headquarters, all of which fell in the last few weeks.. . . Even that day
(it was July 18), a rain of new bombs fell on the center of town and forced
the few people who wanted to take advantage of the summer breeze to scurry
back down into their basements.. . .
And then, finally, piously pinned on a black-cloth-covered board in the
office of Mayor Eli Moyal, these photos of young people, some of them
children, who have died under fire from Palestinian artillery. One thing
obviously doesn’t erase the other. And I’m not one to play the dirty little
game of counting corpses. But why shouldn’t what is due to some also be due
to others? How come we hear so little, at least in the European press, of
those Jewish victims who have died since Israel pulled out of Gaza? I have
spent my life fighting against the idea that there are good deaths and bad
deaths, deserving victims and privileged bombs. I have always agitated for
the Israeli state to leave the occupied territories and, in exchange, win
security and peace. For me, then, there is a question here of integrity and
fairness: devastation, death, life in bomb shelters, existences broken by
the death of a child, these are also the lot of Israel.
Haifa. My favorite Israeli city. The big cosmopolitan city where Jews and
Arabs have lived together ever since the country was founded. It, too, is
now a dead city. It, too, is a ghost city. And here, too, from the
tree-covered heights of Mount Carmel down to the sea, the wailing of sirens
forces the rare cars to stop and the last passers-by to rush into the subway
entrances. Here, too, it is clear that this is the worst nightmare in 40
years for Israelis.
Zivit Seri is a tiny woman, a mother, who speaks with clumsy, defenseless
gestures as she guides me through the destroyed buildings of Bat Galim —
literally “daughter of the waves,” the Haifa neighborhood that has suffered
most from the shellings. The problem, she explains, is not just the people
killed: Israel is used to that. It’s not even the fact that here the enemy
is aiming not at military objectives but deliberately at civilian targets —
that, too, is no surprise. No, the problem, the real one, is that these
incoming rockets make us see what will happen on the day — not necessarily
far off — when the rockets are ones with new capabilities: first, they will
become more accurate and be able to threaten, for example, the petrochemical
facilities you see there, on the harbor, down below; second, they may come
equipped with chemical weapons that can create a desolation compared with
which Chernobyl and Sept. 11 together will seem like a mild prelude. For
that, in fact, is the situation. As seen from Haifa, this is what is at
stake in the operation in southern Lebanon. Israel did not go to war because
its borders had been violated. It did not send its planes over southern
Lebanon for the pleasure of punishing a country that permitted Hezbollah to
construct its state-within-a-state. It reacted with such vigor because the
Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s call for Israel to be wiped off the map and
his drive for a nuclear weapon came simultaneously with the provocations of
Hamas and Hezbollah. The conjunction, for the first time, of a clearly
annihilating will with the weapons to go with it created a new situation. We
should listen to the Israelis when they tell us they had no other choice
anymore. We should listen to Zivit Seri tell us, in front of a crushed
building whose concrete slabs are balancing on tips of twisted metal, that,
for Israel, it was five minutes to midnight.
We should also listen to the bitterness of Sheik Muhammad Sharif Ouda, the
leader in Haifa of the little Ahmadi community, a Muslim sect; his family
has lived here for six generations, and he welcomes me into his home, in the
hilly Kababir neighborhood, dressed in a Pakistani turban and shalwar
kameez. Hezbollah’s crime, he says, was its decision to strike
indiscriminately. It was to kill Jews and Arabs alike — consider the
massacre at Haifa’s train depot, where there were 8 dead and more than 20
wounded. And it was also to establish a climate of terror, of anxiety every
instant, as in Sarajevo, where people used to speculate about the fact that
all it took was a stroke of luck, a change of plans at the last minute, a
meeting that went on longer than expected, or that was cut short, or that
miraculously changed its venue, to escape being at the point of impact when
a rocket landed. Creating such conditions is a crime.
Ouda insists, however, that there is another crime: Hezbollah has in effect
relegated the Palestinian question to the background. As indifferent as the
traditional Arab leaders may have been, in their innermost selves, to the
fate of the inhabitants of Gaza and Nablus, at least they still pretended
they cared. Whereas the Hezbollah leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, doesn’t
even try to pretend. The suffering and rights of the Palestinians are no
longer, in his own Islamo-fascist geopolitics, either a cause to fight for
or even an alibi. You just have to read the very charter of his movement, or
listen to his proclamations on Al Manar, the Hezbollah TV channel, to see
that he has little concern with that relic from ancient eras that is Arab
nationalism in general and Palestinian nationalism in particular. (Only the
naked hatred remains.) Instead, he dreams of a reconciled Islamic community,
a new umma, with Iran as the base, Syria the armed branch and Hezbollah the
invading spear tip. He will employ the means of war without the usual
practical goals of war. There remain the three neglected casualties of this
new Iranian-style jihad: Israel, Lebanon and Palestine.
More rockets. I have traveled from Haifa to Acre and then, along the
Lebanese border, to a succession of villages and kibbutzes and other
cooperatives that have lived, for 10 days by this point, under Hezbollah
fire. There’s a veritable rain of fire today over these biblical landscapes
of Upper Galilee, not to speak of a storm of steel. “I’ve never really known
what you should do in these cases,” Lt. Col. Olivier Rafovitch says to me,
forcing himself to laugh, as we approach the border town of Avivim and as
the noise of the explosions seems also to be coming closer. “You tend to
speed up, don’t you? You tend to think that the only thing to do is get away
as fast as possible from this hell.But that’s stupid, really. For who can
tell if it isn’t exactly by speeding up that you come right to where it’s. .
.?” In response, we speed up all the same. We rumble through a deserted
Druze village, then a big farming town and a completely open zone where a
Katyusha rocket has just smashed up the highway.
The damage these rockets can do, when you see them up close, is insane. And
insane, too, is the racket you hear when you’ve stopped talking and are just
waiting for the sound they make to blend with the noise of the car’s engine.
A rocket that falls in the distance leaves a dull thud; when it goes over
your head, it creates a shrill, almost whining detonation; and when it
bursts nearby, it shakes everything and leaves a long vibration, which is
sustained like a bass note. Maybe we shouldn’t say “rocket” anymore. In
French, at least, the word seems to belittle the thing, and implies an
entire biased vision of this war. In Franglais, for example, we call a
yapping dog a rocket, roquet; the word conjures a little dog whose bark is
worse than his bite and who nibbles at your ankles.. . .So why not say
“bomb”? Or “missile”? Why not try, using the right word, to restore the
barbaric, fanatical violence to this war that was desired by Hezbollah and
by it alone? The politics of words. The geopolitics of metaphor. Semantics,
in this region, is now more than ever a matter of morality.
The Israelis aren’t saints. Obviously they are capable in war of
Machiavellian stratagems, operations, even denials. In this war, though,
there is a sign that they did not want it and that it landed on them like an
evil fate. And this sign is the Israeli government’s choice of Amir Peretz
as defense minister: a former activist for Peace Now, long committed to the
cause of sharing the land with the Palestinians, Peretz was head of the
trade union Histadrut and was in principle much better prepared to organize
strikes than to wage war. “I didn’t sleep a wink all night,” he tells me,
very pale, his eyes red, in the little office in Tel Aviv where he welcomes
me, along with Daniel Ben-Simon, a writer for the Israeli paper Haaretz.
This office is not at the ministry but at the headquarters of the Labor
Party. “I haven’t slept because I spent all night waiting for news of a unit
of our boys who were caught in an ambush yesterday afternoon in Lebanese
territory.” Then a young aide-de-camp who also looks like a union activist
holds out to him a field telephone. Without a word, his eyes lowered, his
big mustache trembling with ill-contained emotion, Peretz receives the news
he has been dreading. He looks up at us and says: “Don’t spread the news
right away, please, since the families don’t know yet — but three of them
died, and we still haven’t heard about the fourth one. It’s terrible.. . .”
I have known many of Israel’s defense ministers over the past 40 years. From
Moshe Dayan to Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin, Ariel Sharon and others, I have
seen heroes, demi-heroes, tacticians of genius and talent, skillful or poor
or mediocre men succeed one another. What I have never seen before is a
minister who was so — I won’t say “human” (the sanctification of the life of
every soldier fallen in combat is a constant in the country’s history), or
even “civilian” (Shimon Peres, after all, didn’t really have a military past
either), but one so apparently unprepared to command an army in wartime
(wasn’t his first decision, unique in the annals of Israeli history, to cut
the budget of his own ministry by 5 percent?). What I have never seen before
is a defense minister answering so exactly to the famous saying by Malraux
about those miraculous commanders who “wage war without loving it” and who,
for this very reason, always end up winning.
Amir Peretz, like Malraux’s commanders, will probably win. He’s facing a
tougher enemy than expected; he will experience heavier casualties as well;
there will be growing doubts, throughout the country, about the wisdom of
his strategy; but he will probably win. And in any case, the point is here:
the very fact that he was appointed to the post shows that Israel believed
that after withdrawing from Lebanon and Gaza it was entering a new era when
it would have to wage not war but peace.
I met another war leader, also a member of the Labor Party and a supporter,
like Peretz, of a negotiated peace with the Palestinians. It was in the
field that I met him, near the Lebanese border, in a place called Koah
Junction, which means “junction of the force” and is for the kabbalists one
of the places where, when the day comes, the Messiah will become manifest
and pass through. His name is Ephraim Sneh. In his youth he was a medical
officer with the paratroopers, the commander of an elite army unit and then
commander of the Southern Lebanon Military Zone from 1981 until 1983. And he
has the air of a calm father, at once friendly and gruff, that reserve
generals often have in Israel when they come back to the service — which in
the present circumstances takes the form of a kind of inspection mission for
the defense committee of the Knesset. Why this meeting? Why here, in this
landscape of dry stone, brought to a white heat by the sun, to which he has
invited me but where I can’t see a living soul aside from ourselves? Does he
want to show me something? Explain to me some detail of army strategy that
would be visible to me only here? Will he take me to Avivim, less than a
mile north of here, where a battle is taking place? Does he want to talk to
me about politics? Will he, like Peretz, like Livni, like almost everyone in
fact, tell me about Israel’s disappointment with France, which could have
played a great role in the region by pushing for the refoundation of the
Land of the Cedars and for the disarmament of Hezbollah, as demanded by
United Nations Resolution 1559, but which prefers, alas, to confine itself
to opening up humanitarian corridors?
Yes, he does tell me that. A little of it. In passing. But I quickly see
that he had me come here to talk, first of all, about a matter that is not
related, at least apparently, to the present war: nothing other than my book
about the kidnapping, captivity and decapitation of Daniel Pearl.. . .A
conversation about Danny Pearl at a stone’s throw from a battlefield.. . .An
officer with a literary bent deciding that, with our two cars immobilized in
the blazing scree, nothing is more urgent than discussing jihad,
enlightenment Islam, the trouble with Huntington’s theory of the clash of
civilizations, Karachi and its terrorist mosques.. . .I had never seen
anything like this before — for it to be conceivable, it took this
expedition to the front lines of a war in which Israel and the world are
entangled as never before.
At the same time.. . .It would seem that history has, sometimes, less
imagination than we would like, and that old generals don’t have such bad
reflexes after all. For the fact is that a few miles to the south, in the
commune of Mitzpe Hila, near Maalot, I will not long after experience a
deeply moving reminder of the Pearl affair. I visit the home of the parents
of the soldier Gilad Shalit, whose capture by Hamas near the town of Kerem
Shalom, along the border with Gaza, on June 25, was one of the things that
brought about this war. I wonder about the irony of history, which has
placed this young man, without any special distinctions, just an ordinary
individual, at the origin of this enormous affair. We are sitting now in the
sun on the lawn where Shalit played as a child and where you can hear, very
close, a few hundred yards away maybe, Katyusha rockets falling, to which
his parents seem to have stopped paying attention. We are sitting outside
around a garden table, discussing the latest news brought by the U.N. envoy
who visited the Shalits just before me, and I find myself thinking that if
this war has to last — if the Iranian factor will, as I have sensed since
the instant I arrived, give it new scope and duration — then this modest
army corporal will be the new Franz Ferdinand of a Sarajevo that will bear
the name Kerem Shalom.. . .
What is happening, then? Is it his mother Aviva’s expression when I ask her
about what she knows of her son’s captivity? Or his father Noam’s look when
he tries to explain to me, a faint gleam of hope in his eyes, that the young
man has a French grandmother, Jacqueline, who was born in Marseille, and
that he hopes my government — that of France —will link its efforts with
Israel’s? Is it the debate, which I can guess is raging inside Noam, between
the father who is prepared for any kind of bargaining to get his son back
and the former army soldier who, out of principle, will not give in to
blackmail by terrorists? Is it my visit to the corporal’s childhood bedroom?
Is it the house itself, so similar, all of a sudden, to Danny Pearl’s house,
in Encino, Calif.? Whatever the reason, I am overcome by a feeling of déjà
vu; over the faces of this man and this woman it seems to me as if the faces
of Ruth and Judea Pearl, my friends, have been superimposed, the courageous
mother and father of another young man, like this one, kidnapped by
religious fanatics whose ideological program wasn’t very different, either,
from that of Hamas.. . .
Up north again, near the Lebanese border, I travel from Avivim to Manara,
where the Israelis have set up, in a crater 200 yards in diameter, an
artillery field where two enormous batteries mounted on caterpillar treads
bombard the command post and rocket launchers and arsenals in Marun al-Ras
on the other side of the border. Three things here strike me. First, the
extreme youth of the artillerymen: they are 20 years old, maybe 18. I notice
their stunned look at each discharge, as if every time were the first time;
their childlike teasing when their comrade hasn’t had time to block his ears
and the detonation deafens him; and then at the same time their serious,
earnest side, the sobriety of people who know they’re participating in an
immense drama that surpasses them — and know, too, they may soon pay a steep
price in blood and life. Second, I note the relaxed — I was about to say
unrestrained and even carefree — aspect of the little troop. It reminds me
of reading about the joyful scramble of those battalions of young
republicans in Spain described, once again, by Malraux: an army that is more
friendly than it is martial; more democratic than self-assured and
dominating; an army that, here, in any case, in Manara, seems to me the
exact opposite of those battalions of brutes or unprincipled pitiless
terminators that are so often described in media portraits of Israel. And
then, finally, I note a strange vehicle. It resembles the two self-propelled
cannons, but it is stationed far behind them and doesn’t shoot: this is a
mobile command post that you enter, as in a submarine, through a central
turret and down a ladder; there are six men in it, seven on some days, and
they are busy working with a battery of computers, radar screens and other
transmission devices. Their role is to determine the parameters of the
firing by collecting information that will be transmitted to the
artillerymen. Here, at the root of Israeli firepower, is a veritable
laboratory of war where soldier-scholars deploy their intelligence, noses
glued to the screens, trying to integrate even the most imponderable facts
about the terrain into their calculations. Their goal is to establish the
distance to the target and how fast the target moves, as well as to consider
the proximity of the civilians, whom they want to avoid at all cost.
Does it work? And are these soldier-scholars infallible? Of course not!
There is no way, everybody knows, to wage a clean war. And the fact that
Hezbollah long ago made the strategic choice to establish its fighters in
the most populated areas and thus to transform Lebanese civilians into human
shields obviously doesn’t help matters. The fact remains that at least an
effort is being made to avoid civilian targets. Here at least, in Manara,
that is the Israeli approach. And, as distressed as we may be by the
suffering of the Lebanese civilian population, the terrible deaths of
hundreds, you cannot conclude that the Israelis have the strategic intention
or the will to harm civilians.
When I met David Grossman, it was in an open-air restaurant in the Arab
village of Abu Gosh, on the outskirts of Jerusalem, which seems like a
garden of Eden after the hell of the last few days — bright sunshine, the
buzz of insects rather than airplanes or tanks, a casualness in the air, a
light breeze.. . .We talk about his latest book, which is a retelling of the
myth of Samson. We talk about his son, who was just called up for duty in a
tank unit, and about whom he trembles with anxiety. We talk about a
statistic he has just read, which worries him: almost a third of young
Israelis have lost faith in Zionism and have found tricks to try to get
themselves exempted from military service.
And then of course we discuss the war and the huge distress it seems to have
plunged him into, along with other progressive intellectuals in the
country.. . .For on one hand, he explains to me, there is the terrible
extent of the destruction, women and children killed, the humanitarian
catastrophe under way, the risk of civil war and of Lebanon burning — and
the government’s mistake of, at first, setting the bar so high (destroy
Hezbollah, render its infrastructure and its army incapable of doing any
more harm) that even a semi-victory, when it comes, risks having a whiff of
defeat. But, on the other hand, there is Israel’s right, like any other
state in the world, not to sit by in the face of such crazy, groundless,
gratuitous aggression; there is the fact, he adds, that Lebanon plays host
to Hezbollah and permits it to participate in its government: where could an
Israeli counterattack have taken place but on Lebanese soil?. . .I observe
David Grossman. I examine his handsome face, the face of the former enfant
terrible of Israeli literature, who has aged too quickly and is devoured by
melancholy. He is not just one of the greatest Israeli novelists today. He
is also, along with Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua and a few others, one of the
country’s moral consciences. And I think that his testimony, his firmness,
his way of not yielding, despite everything, on the essential soundness of
Israel’s cause, ought to convince even the most hesitant.
And then, finally, Shimon Peres. More than ever I did not want to end this
journey without going, as I do each time, to visit Peres — the country’s
elder statesman. I met him in the company of Daniel Saada, an old friend and
founding member of the French progressive organization SOS Racisme, who has
now settled in Israel and become a diplomat as well as a friend of Peres.
Shimon, as everyone here calls him, is now 82 years old. But he hasn’t lost
any of his handsomeness. Or the look of a prince-priest of Zionism. He still
has the same face, all forehead and mouth, that emphasizes the melodious
authority of his voice. And I even have the impression, at times, that he
has adopted a few of the mannerisms of his old rival Yitzhak Rabin: a slight
bitterness in his smile, a gleam in his eyes, a way of carrying himself and,
sometimes, of shading his words.. . .
“The whole problem,” he begins, “is the failure of what one of your great
writers called the strategy of the general staff. No one, today, controls
anyone else. No one has the power to stop or overpower anyone else. So that
we, Israel, have never had so many friends, but never in our history have
they been so useless. Except.. . .”
He asks his daughter, who is present as we talk, to go to the neighboring
office and find two letters, one from Mahmoud Abbas and one from Bill
Clinton. “Yes, except for the fact that you have them,” he then continues.
“The men of good will. My friends. The friends of enlightenment and peace.
The ones who will never renounce peace because of terrorism, or nihilism, or
defeatism. We have a plan, you know.Still the same plan for prosperity, for
shared development, which will end up triumphing.Listen.. . .”
Shimon, a young man who is 82 years old, has had a dream. His invincible
dream has lasted, in fact, for 30 years; the present impasse, far from
discouraging him, seems mysteriously to stimulate him. So I listen to him. I
listen to this Wise Man of Israel explain to me that his country must
simultaneously “win this war,” foil this “quartet of evil” made up by Iran,
Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah and clear the way for “paths of speech and
dialogue” that will, one day, lead the Middle East somewhere. And as I
listen to him, and let myself be lulled by his oft-repeated, indefinite
prophecies, I find that, today, for some reason, those prophecies have a new
coefficient of obviousness and force. I, too, catch myself imagining the
glory of a Jewish state that would dare, at the same time, almost in the
same gesture and with the same movement, to deliver two things at once: to
some, alas, war; to others, a real declaration of peace that would be
recognized as such and accepted.
Bernard-Henri Lévy, a French philosopher and writer, is the author, most
recently, of “American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of
Tocqueville.” This article was translated by Charlotte Mandell from the
French.
http://select.nytimes.com/preview/2006/08/06/magazine/1125017165605.html?8tp
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