By the mid-1990s the effect of trying to put down the Intifada had become plain for all to see. The fighting power of Israel’s once-heroic army steeply declined in front of opponents who are numerically and materially incomparably less powerful than itself but, as they have repeatedly proven, determined to the point that there is no shortage of volunteers ready to commit suicide for their cause. Given the lamentable state to which the army has been reduced, there is no prospect of the old fighting spirit reasserting itself.
CHAPTER 21
THE BETRAYAL OF FAITH
HIM WHOM THE gods wish to destroy they first strike blind.
From the day that Rabin ordered the IDF to put down the Intifada, possibly even from the day TSAHAL mounted “Operation Peace for Galilee,” the tragedy unfolded and the decline in its morale became inevitable. Worse still, in a country whose military consists very largely of conscripts and reservists the distrust eating it up from inside could not but spread to civilian society. Early on it was a question of a few dissenters who refused to go along, as well as relatives and friends standing by soldiers accused of using too much or not enough force. Later, growing distrust meant that with every incident the army found itself accused not only of negligence but also of deliberately covering up the truth; the number of cases it promised but failed to investigate must run into the thousands. Things have deteriorated so far that most of the Israeli written media will publish only negative stories about the IDF. Those who try to put in a word to the contrary risk having phone receivers slammed in their ears.
It was not merely a question of isolated individuals venting frustration or of sensation-hungry journalists echoing their claims. The parents of many conscripts now see the army as a greater danger to their children’s welfare (including, specifically, their moral welfare) than are the Arabs. The result has been constant interference on their part,1 culminating in one bizarre case in early 1997 when a mother was discovered hiding on base, having spent four days videotaping the activities of recruits to make sure her daughter came to no harm. To better allow parents to monitor their children Israeli technical ingenuity has come up with specially designed cellular telephones. Known as “mangos,” they are popular presents and allow recruits to call parents at the latter’s expense—much to the army’s chagrin, which sees discipline undermined and has tried to ban their use in the field.
In 1978, when Chief of Staff Eytan relieved the commander of the navy’s frogmen after one of his men had been killed in a training accident, the rest of the unit came close to mutiny.2 By contrast, after two young commandos were killed in 1995—the cable by which they were being lifted onto a hovering helicopter snapped—their parents accused the air force of covering up. To make their point they went on a hunger strike. Next they turned to the High Court, which considered the matter and appeared ready to rule in their favor. Fearing as much, Minister of Defense Yitschak Mordechai beat a hasty retreat the following autumn. For the first time in Israel’s history he agreed to the appointment of an independent (i.e., nonmilitary) commission to look into the affair.3
The Betrayal of Faith: Israelis demonstrating against the continued occupation of the Territories, Tel Aviv, March 1988.
Since then, though the IDF has been waging a rearguard action to prevent every statement made by an officer during a tachkir (debriefing) from being recognized as evidence in court,4 the writing has been on the wall. As the chief of manpower put it in a seventeen-page staff paper that was leaked to the press, there exists “a growing gap” between the demands of relatives for a thorough investigation of each and every accident and the declining ability of the IDF to provide it.5 This is not surprising; in any army, commanders are a precious asset into which much time, effort, and resources are invested. Prevented by the courts and public opinion from backing them up yet unwilling to let them go, the IDF has played a ghastly game of musical chairs. In at least one case, an air force squadron commander cashiered for allowing a major accident to happen was replaced by another who had previously been reprimanded for the same reason.6
Meanwhile the public’s loss of faith in its army began to spread from the living to the dead. In contrast to premodern fighting organizations, but like its opposite numbers in other countries, the IDF has always insisted that it owns its fallen heroes. It buries them in dedicated military cemeteries and, in the name of equality, dictates a standard formula that is inscribed on their graves. Of late, however, some bereaved families have refused to go along with this policy. They insist that all kinds of other details be recorded (including, in a number of cases, the fact that their sons and daughters were killed by accident rather than “while performing their duty”). Predictably meeting with a refusal on the authorities’ part, they too have threatened to take the matter to the courts. On this and other matters the IDF, fearing courts will side with the plaintiffs and change the legal status quo, has been forced to retreat. For example, the parents of some of the seventy-three soldiers killed in the early 1997 helicopter accident successfully pushed through their demand that the words “died on the way to Lebanon” be engraved on their sons’ tombs.
“The difference between the Six Day War and subsequent ones,” according to Ariel Sharon in early 1997, “is that IDF commanders and their decisions were trusted.”7 “TSAHAL,” according to Chief of Staff Shachak while addressing an audience of thousands on the anniversary of Yitschak Rabin’s assassination, “that TSAHAL which you [i.e., Rabin] led to victory and which you loved and cherished and respected so much, is losing its social standing.... Direct contact between it and civilian society is being broken.”8 “The IDF,” he added on another occasion, “has been turned into a national punching bag.”9
Two decades after public pressure caused Bathroom Queen to be taken off stage, a play named Gorodish, which portrayed the man who commanded Southern Command in 1973 as a brutal megalomaniac, became a smash hit. With so many negative things being published about the army each day, inevitably people began to believe it had always been that way, causing the past as well as the present to be dragged through the mud. The years since 1985 have witnessed the rise of the so-called New Historians—actually a very small group of persons armed with word processors. Relying on the archival sources that are now available for the period to 1956, Benny Morris,10 Avi Shlaim,11 and a handful of others have started casting doubt on Israel’s longtime self-perception as a peace-loving society surrounded by bloodthirsty enemies who seek to destroy it. Instead they brought to light an unflattering picture of a bellicose country with a cocksure and trigger-happy defense establishment. Time after time the latter went behind the civilian authorities’ backs. It exceeded its orders and used more force than authorized, almost always to no avail and sometimes with results that were counterproductive as Israel’s neighbors, instead of ceasing their attacks, saw themselves constrained to rearm and react. From time to time it also committed atrocities, whether against fleeing refugees (as in 1948-1949), unarmed infiltrators (1950-1955), or prisoners of war (1956, 1967, and 1978).12
Thus, not only is the IDF losing the battle for the present, but it stands in danger of being robbed of its past—that quasi-mythological past that is essential to the morale of any army, new or old. Long gone are the days when soldiers were proud to wear uniforms off-duty13 and when people sent each other pictures of TSAHAL on New Year’s cards. All but forgotten is the fact that this high-tech but soft, bloated, strife-ridden, responsibility-shy, and dishonest army was once the superb fighting force of “a small but brave” people ; spokesmen’s declarations were believed as if they were gospel truth. Swamped with almost daily reports concerning fashlot and demands that they be investigated, few people in Israel can recall the last time the military booked a success; in the eyes of the young, even brilliant operations such as the Entebbe raid are memorable chiefly, if at all, because of the few casualties that the commandos took. As to the ongoing campaign to resist Palestinian progress toward a sovereign state, like similar efforts elsewhere it
can only end in disgraceful failure while wrecking the IDF in the process. To quote the title of one popular book that records the experiences of individual Israelis during the uprising, 14 about this struggle “poets will remain silent.”
THE GOOD AND THE EVIL
IN 1971 the well-known Israeli sculptor Yigael Tumarkin received a commission to erect a monument.1 It was to be built in honor of the mirdafim, the Jordan Valley skirmishes that cost the Israelis considerable effort and blood during 1967-1970 and were finally brought to an end by the intervention of King Hussein’s army in September 1970. The design he selected, approved by the overseeing committee, consisted of a sixty-foot Kalashnikov-like barrel pointing toward the sky, made entirely of bits and pieces of steel taken from various weapons. Mounted atop a large concrete pedestal overlooking the Jordan Valley, the monument evokes the rough nature of the countryside as well as the toughness of combat at close quarters. It is a splendid construction, provided fighting is what you like.
The years after 1973 have seen the erection of many additional monuments to the IDF’s fallen heroes. Only one, built in 1977 to commemorate the battle for Rafah in 1967, was nearly as dramatic as Tumarkin’s, and that one had to be moved back into Israel a few years later as part of the Camp David Accords. Most of the rest consist of simple stones or tables that record the names of those who died on this occasion or that, sometimes in alphabetical order but often by rank as if God in Heaven cared about the insignia that men and women carry on their shoulders. Memorials established in honor of the October War tend to be surrounded by Israeli and captured Arab weapons in various states of disrepair, thus presenting the destruction that war wrought in no uncertain terms. Many small memorials commemorate people who were killed by terrorists; indeed, erecting them has turned into a cottage industry as relatives and friends insist that the least their loved ones deserve is some sort of marker, however humble. None, however, celebrate the IDF “victories” over the PLO and its successor organizations in Lebanon or over the inhabitants of the Occupied Territories—the countless cases when guerrillas were intercepted and killed, acts of terrorism allegedly preempted, arms caches uncovered, and the like. It is as if the army and the people to whom it belongs have lost their pride, leaving behind little more than sorrow, pain, and regret.
The Good: Rabin and Arafat shake hands at the White House, 1993.
And the Evil: Israeli military cemetery, 1998.
The armed forces of other developed countries were usually created pari passu with their states, a process that took hundreds of years. Not so the IDF, which grew out of illegal and semilegal self-defense organizations such as Ha-shomer, Hagana, FOSH, CHISH, and PALMACH. Thus far it resembles the armed forces of many other former colonial countries that also had to fight for their independence, but here the similarity stops. Unlike so many others, the IDF grew into an exceptionally cohesive force that, however large the role it played in national affairs, normally ended up obeying its political masters. Unlike them it never got even near the point where it might launch a coup—although, as we saw, that may change in the future. A rapidly expanding, comparatively well-educated population; the growing foreign technological and economic aid, first from France and then, in the years after 1967, the United States; and the pervasive feeling of en brera, which in turn translated into high motivation and a clearly defined doctrine; all these permitted phenomenal quantitative and, above all, qualitative growth. To this must be added the typical Israeli qualities of tushia (resourcefulness) and iltur (improvisation). Systematically inculcated into the army, they helped produce one of the best militaries of the twentieth century and, as many people in and out of Israel once believed, of all time.
Looked at from a different perspective, Israel’s army is not so much a unique creation but a typical modern force that has traveled, and is still traveling, along the trajectory taken by other modern armed forces—albeit at much greater speed. At first, in 1948-1949, it was mainly an infantry force slugging it out with enemies at a slow pace and heavy cost. In 1956-1967 mechanization came; centering around the fighter-bomber and the tank and guided by the system of optional command, it resulted in a blitzkrieg campaign as typical of its kind as it was brilliant. Having been caught with its pants down, the IDF was compelled to adopt combined arms warfare by the October 1973 earthquake. Finally, the mid- to late seventies initiated the age of electronics, missiles, and long-range strike forces capable of operating far beyond the country’s borders.
Even as Israel’s conventional military might increased during the late seventies and early eighties, its entire strategic position was being revolutionized by the widely reported introduction of nuclear weapons and their delivery vehicles. Though their existence has never been officially acknowledged, from the early sixties on, the widespread expectation that they would be introduced into the region represented one factor in the strategic calculus both of Israel and its neighbors. By 1973, at the latest, they were playing a critical part in shaping the plans of the Egyptians and the Syrians; subsequently, and as has also happened in every other part of the world where states possess nuclear weapons, their presence made the outbreak of another large-scale interstate war less and less likely. During the early nineties it even led to the first tentative exchange of views concerning eventual arms control.2
Following the economic crisis that struck Israel in the mid-eighties, the IDF’s quantitative growth in terms of formations and hardware has ended. Not so qualitative progress; although during the years since 1986 the research and development budget has been cut almost in half,3 continuing U.S. assistance and burgeoning native defense industries still allowed the introduction of many new weapons and weapons systems, some of which are the envy of the world. Yet when the Gulf War came it turned out that some of Israel’s security problems were simply beyond the IDF’s reach. They could be solved, if at all, only within a larger framework of an alliance with the United States, which alone possessed the necessary means for surveillance, reconnaissance, early warning, and command and control, and which, as the Gulf War demonstrated, might or might not be inclined to put them at Israel’s disposal.4 Since then, not only has the number and sophistication of surface-to-surface missiles available to various Arab countries grown; the Iranians too were reported to be experimenting with missiles capable of reaching Israel.5 The development of the Chets notwithstanding, one may conclude as Rabin did6 that Israel will almost certainly never again enjoy the luxury of waging a war against one or more of its neighbors without its rear being threatened by weapons of mass destruction; indeed in 1997 there were disturbing reports about as many as 120 Syrian missiles standing ready for near-instantaneous launch as well as attempts to develop a new poison gas for them.7
At the time of this writing the size of the IDF and the weaponry at its disposal remain very impressive, both absolutely and, even more so, relative to the country’s size. Since Egypt and Jordan are at peace with Israel, on paper it has little to fear from its principal remaining enemy, Syria; underneath, though, it is affected by dry rot. Hindsight allows us to identify the beginning of the decline during the mid- to late seventies. Breakneck expansion, triggered by the 1973 October War, was causing the available manpower resources to be stretched to the limit—and beyond. The rate of “churning” increased; organization became more complex and more cumbersome. The results showed themselves in 1982. The Lebanese adventure saw a superbly prepared and equipped but clumsy and heavy-handed armed force that, except in the air, failed to perform as well as expected. Next that force floundered helplessly in the face of a nasty guerrilla war, one that (no doubt because it trusted to a short “operation”) it had neither foreseen nor prepared to counter. This in turn was followed by the IDF’s Indian summer, lasting from the late eighties to the early nineties. As three successive chiefs of staff have admitted, it was during this period that TSAHAL was transformed into a soft, bloated, top-heavy force brimming with surplus and underemployed manpower.
One of the causes
as well as symptoms of the decline was the evolving position of female soldiers. As has happened in countless uprisings that took place in other countries, even Muslim ones, so long as it was a matter of fighting the mighty British occupant, the participation of women in the struggle presented no problem. As in other countries, too, no sooner had open warfare broken out before Israeli women were withdrawn from combat units and sent to the rear. Later Israel became the only country in history to subject women to conscription, which, supposing the purpose of waging war is to protect the weak, constitutes a doubtful honor. What saved the situation was the fact that until the late seventies women were secluded in CHEN and their position was marginal. This permitted the IDF to have the best of both worlds, in other words, to make use of women and maintain itself as a high-prestige (i.e., male-dominated) institution.
From the late seventies on, manpower shortages and then feminist pressures—which, as in other Western countries, were supported by the courts—caused women to become more prominent. By 1997 even the air force was beginning to suffer as female pilot trainees who, despite having been given special privileges (bathing, etc.) failed to complete the course, accused the IDF of discriminating against them and enlisted the support of the Knesset women’s lobby.8 Elsewhere the growing use of women in nontraditional roles caused all sorts of problems. Pressed from outside, the IDF even experimented with putting women and men destined for noncombat slots into mixed companies and passing them through the same basic training.9 Should this experiment be judged a success and extended, then it can only lead to a situation where the majority of the IDF’s troops are as well prepared to fight as its women used to be.
The Sword And The Olive Page 48