by Avraham Burg
For Israel, the Six-Day War was somewhat akin to what World War II was for the West: the instant removal of a prolonged siege. The six days of the amazing military victory changed the face of Israel. The war redefined the strong and the weak and changed the face of the Middle East beyond recognition. David became Goliath, the heads of the previous Goliaths of the region were severed, and the Palestinian nation became the sole entity confronting Israel.
It is said that wars are won by the human spirit. But not everything that emanates from the human spirit is necessarily positive. What are the elements in the victory of the West at the end of World War II and that of Israel in 1967 that carried within them the seeds of failure? Why did the tremendous victory of those six days turn into an endless seventh day of nightmares? And why is the West failing in its attempts to reap the fruits of its victory in the complex realities of the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and the Far East?
Two powerful forces faced each other in World War II. In the end, the allies, with their greater resources and more advanced technology, triumphed. Germany was left isolated. Its reservoir of human resources had dwindled and it could not sustain its efficient fighting machine. Japan suffered defeat through cataclysmic nuclear technology dropped from the sky. Looking back after many years, it seems to me that their victories frightened the victors. The vanquished nations were forced to dismantle the totalitarian regimes with which they had threatened the world. Today Germany has no military ambitions and little desire to be involved in international conflicts. It would seem that Italy, pleasant, aesthetic, and tolerant, had never really belonged in the Nazi-Fascist valley of death. On the other hand, the victors sank into an orgy of soul searching, including a reckoning with the ability of humanity to wipe itself out.
The Soviet Union reached the conclusion that military superiority was the supreme national goal whose attainment would defend it from outside threats. The Russians vowed that no one would lay siege to Moscow and Leningrad again. No one would be able to destroy the collective soul in favor of material pleasures resulting from exploitation, discrimination, and inequality. Violence and deterrence became the defenders of human values in the new revolutionary society. The Soviet Union invested heavily in conflict, and in the end drowned under the burden of preserving a wall of isolation between itself and the surrounding world. Soviet citizens became weary of sacrificing their well-being for the good of the state’s values, which offered nothing in terms of personal freedom.
The United States of America, by contrast, saw the allied victory as that of humanity triumphing over madness. In the euphoria of victory, America took the human spirit to absurd ends. Competitiveness at any cost. Individualism was the medicine that would ward off any symptoms of national collectivism, Nazism, fascism, or communism. The spirit of individualism and competitiveness brought America to a terrible indifference toward the perceived losers. Winner takes all. The arrogance of the lone wolf, concerned only with its prey, hiding under a generous smile and deep pockets of foreign aid. Today’s presidents Putin and Trump are the quintessence of both civilizations; the Russian one, brutal and heartless, and the American one, aggressive and merciless.
Professor Eliezer Schweid, one of the most important and influential Jewish philosophers of the twentieth century, sadly summarized:
Only the achievements whose effectiveness was proven in the cruelest wars have stood the test: science, technology, the efficient administrator. The natural conclusion was then to develop them at an accelerated pace in order to make the most of what they had to offer to satisfy universal human needs. The principle of free market competition between the individuals in every group and between groups in every nation was seen as the most efficient principle of economic success: It suits the selfish traits of human beings.… Liberal selfish-individualism took the place of an awareness of overall responsibility for a fair distribution of resources.†
From a distance, American society, especially Trump’s America, seems to zealously sanctify these values, which conceal the seeds of its destruction. His America First policy, and a selective concern for world peace, are based on the dark legacy of Charles Lindbergh’s America First. This America came to the conclusion that tough, rigid competitiveness in every arena is a worthy goal. Sophisticated technology can bestow personal and economic well-being, not just military superiority. However, the World War II victory exposed the weakness of American society: the widening economic gap between the nation’s haves and its have-nots.
And this, exactly, is what the Six-Day War did to Israel. The overwhelming victory mercilessly revealed deep scars on the nation’s soul. The first and foremost—the gathering around the tribal campfire and erecting an iron curtain of military might between us and the surrounding Arab environment, a curtain that prevented us from even noticing the rare times when an Arab hand was held out to us in peace. Power became the god harnessed to the great redemptive plan. A frightening synthesis was created between national militancy and zealous messianism to produce an extreme image of modern Israel. The distances between various strata of the population widened, so much so that the cohesiveness of Israeli society was threatened. The contention that the investment in the settlements robbed Israel of precious resources is misleading. The settlers coalesced quickly, with military efficiency, and managed to place themselves at the center of politics, ideology, and the economy. Jewish national fundamentalism moved from the periphery to the political mainstream around the same time that the Tea Party and Christian fundamentalists became more and more prominent and successful in North America.
All of a sudden, for me and for those like me, the situation no longer is an open, pluralistic United States on one side and a diminishing liberal Israel on the other. Today’s partition lines are between those of us who are devoted to liberal values and those who embrace authoritarianism. Some of us on both sides of the ocean versus some of them, also on both sides of the same ocean. Equality and rights in Israel, the US, Europe, and elsewhere against those who fear openness, abhor equality for all, and believe in any form of racial, religious, cultural, or political superiority.
The future of liberal democracy is not local, here or there, but global. Democracy is ill and urgently requires demo-therapy. Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, Erdoğan, and their like are inspiring and empowering each other. And so should we. We must move from indigenous politics to global democracy, to a worldwide front of liberal values as a sand wall against the ocean of conservative hostility and intimidation.
* See Zygmunt Bauman, Culture in a Liquid Modern World [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2013). Originally published in English (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2011).
† Translation mine; compare with Eliezer Schweid, The Philosophy of the Bible as Foundation of Jewish Culture, trans. Leonard Levin (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2008), 23.
CHAPTER TWELVE
OF TRAUMA AND RECOVERY
THE CONVERSATION ABOUT EQUALITY DIRECTLY AFFECTS both sides of the Palestinian reality. It affects my Palestinian friends who have lived in the refugee camps in the occupied territories and other Arab countries since the 1948 war. And it affects my close Israeli partners, who are part of the tens of thousands of Palestinians who did not escape their homes in 1948 and eventually became Israeli citizens, and whose hardships, caused by the establishment of the state, are ignored. Every time conversations and debates reach the Palestinian refugees, the trauma contest begins. The Palestinian tells the Israeli, “You know, when you established your state in 1948, you created with your own hands the Palestinian national tragedy. Why do we have to pay the price for that?” And the Jew replies, “Some tragedy! Wait until you hear about the Holocaust. Ours is bigger.”
A bitter contest in which nobody wins, and that can’t be resolved. These are the psycho-politics that prevent any political solution.
As long as we don’t learn to relate to the pain and trauma of the other, to respect them, and especially to make them present in our lives, it won’t e
nd. I am writing these pages in Jerusalem, in the library of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. One day, my partner at the table, Professor Christoph Schmidt, left me a draft of a fascinating paper he was working on, in which he wrote, “Berlin owes its drawing power also to the fact that it has turned the confrontation with German guilt… into part of the architecture of the entire city. There is no street, house entrance, museum, or television program that does not mention these crimes. Berlin tells the story of the victims through monuments, signs and memorial stones. These symbols are the characteristics of a deep and profound moral confrontation, a symbol of the changed course of an entire city, of the whole nation. Berlin is Nineveh, the city that renounced the paths of evil.”
This connection between the city and its past, between the trauma and the recovery, between the crimes and the rehabilitation, is what underpins the successful unification of the city and what draws tens of thousands of Israelis yearning for such a change of consciousness here among us.
The current question is, can the underpinning of hatred and anger built by us and the Palestinians be removed? The answer is yes, of course.
A few years ago, I wanted to translate into Hebrew an exchange of letters from the early thirties (during the lull between the wars) between Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein on the question, “Is there a way to free humanity from the scourge of war?” After reading and studying the original text, I learned that it had already been translated. So, although I abandoned the project, my consciousness profited greatly. To one of the questions Einstein asks Freud directly—“Is there any chance to guide the development of human beings so that they will be more resistant to the psychoses of hate and extermination?”—Freud’s answer was very clear: “Yes!” According to Freud, conflicts of interest, in the human as well as animal realms, are decided by force. In the past, the stronger person could choose between the complete elimination of his adversary and repressing him and subjugating him to his needs.*
Force was decisive between the strong and the weak. That was the original situation, but it changed when government authority shifted from force to rights. My thoughts moved from those two Jews to the Jews among whom I live, and to an essential internal contradiction that we find convenient to ignore: the Israeli government system—democratic—is based on rights, but our relations with the Palestinians are based on variations of force, without a shred of recognition of their natural and inalienable rights, as individuals and as a collective. In the gap between the Israel of rights and the Israel of domination lie many of the evils of our reality. What, then, is the basic right that unites so many Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza against us? It is difficult to discuss today, but a few years after the state was founded, Moshe Dayan examined it for a moment with a penetrating one-eyed clarity of vision unequaled before or since.
At the end of April 1956—when Israel was only eight years old—Ro’i Rotberg, a soldier from Kibbutz Nahal Oz, was murdered by infiltrators from Gaza. At his grave, he was eulogized by Moshe Dayan, then the admired army chief of staff, the man of political activism. Cold and calculating, but also courageous and poetic. It was a strategic eulogy, full of internal contradictions and riveting truths. He said, as I remember it:
Yesterday morning Ro’i was murdered. The quiet of a spring morning blinded him, and he didn’t see those lying in ambush in the furrow of the field. Let us not level accusations today at the murderers. How can we complain about their seething hatred of us? For eight years they have been in the refugee camps of Gaza, and before their very eyes we have been transforming the land and the villages where they and their forefathers lived into our own. We should not seek Ro’i’s blood from the Arabs in Gaza, but from ourselves. We will reckon with ourselves today. Let us not flinch from seeing the hatred that accompanies and fills the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who live around us and are waiting for the moment in which they can shed our blood.†
Dayan knew better than many others that the “infiltrators” were mostly refugees from the villages where they were born and from which they were expelled. That they returned at night to their abandoned or stolen homes. Poor, uprooted, angry, and homesick. A son of this land, he understood their seething hatred and the brutality of their acts. He was also like that, a farmer who was brutal. As a celebrated military leader, he drew with his words the real map of hostility.
Today, if we really want to deal with the challenges of Gaza and the entire Palestinian issue, we must go back to the map of Moshe Dayan and “reckon with ourselves today.” Why should we, in his words, decry the murderers and “complain about their seething hatred of us?” The time has come to turn inward and ask bravely, as he did: What have we done to dampen the burning hatred? Israel—the people and the state—was established on the ruins of many villages and communities that were here before us. The refugees, who were expelled and fled, were erased from consciousness, and the campaign of silence waged from above (by David Ben-Gurion), filtered down, to the last talkback on the Internet, sweeping us all up. But the hatred of the injured refuses to die. It is handed down through the generations. Not only because it has no solution, but because it grants no recognition. The Jewish Israelis still stubbornly refuse to recognize the Palestinian tragedy and the suffering caused by the establishment of the State of Israel.
I WANT TO SEE A REALITY HERE IN WHICH THERE ARE NO wars, so I have to go back to the fundamentals. To the actual reasons why the hostility refuses to dissipate. The locations of many of the Israeli communities around Gaza were once someone’s home and village. And that is true across Israel, as evidenced by the abandoned cactus rows and the memories of people who are still alive. The Gaza Strip is a strip of refugees. Half the population there (and perhaps more) is of refugee origin. That is the real fuel for the Qassam rockets fired at southern Israel. Only a brave Israeli reckoning with the pain of the Palestinians carries the potential of a change in direction and fundamental treatment of the causes of the war, not only its deteriorating symptoms.
In that fascinating exchange between the two great minds of that earlier generation, the father of psychology explains to the genius of physics that human beings have two types of urges: “Urges to exist and unite, and urges that seek death and destruction.” If it were possible to put Israeliness on Freud’s couch, he would have talked to us about his most complex and fundamental insight: “It is impossible to erase the aggressive tendencies of human beings. The way to weaken the destructive and aggressive urge is by strengthening the urge for emotional affinity and love.”‡
In real life, it means a strategic political decision of the highest order to weaken the lust for destruction by strengthening emotional connections. Instead of leaving the complicated issue of the refugees for the end of the negotiations, it must be immediately brought to the fore. An alternative Israeli policy based on rights and not force should be formulated. We must break down the barrier between our feelings toward ourselves and the callousness about the suffering of others. It must be a policy of “refugees first,” with or without political negotiations, and even without an agreement on political borders (artificial lines on maps can wait, but people’s feelings cannot anymore).
And there are just two principles needed to embark on this difficult path. First, it is impossible and forbidden to correct previous injustices by creating new ones. And second, there must be public Israeli recognition of the plight of the refugees and readiness to act. Understanding that the birth of the refugee issue is bound up with the birth of Israel, with a real expression of willingness to deal with it together and suggest real solutions, will generate a totally different energy here. I truly believe that only a piercing look—like Dayan’s at the time—at the bases of the past, and acts of atonement, unification, and building in the present, will make it possible to genuinely create a vision of the future for both Israelis and Palestinians, without wars.
THERE ARE MANY WAYS TO MAKE HISTORY FELT IN contemporary life. Some are completely symbolic, like the memor
ial “stumbling blocks” (stolpersteine) embedded in the sidewalks of many German cities, designed and installed by the artist Gunter Demnig. A quiet, unobtrusive, penetrating statement, commemorating near the entrances of homes those who left them and did not return. Parts of the old route of the Berlin Wall have not been erased from the city streets. In Warsaw, there are small signs in several languages commemorating what happened in each place. Not large and alienating monuments. On the contrary: a silent presence that is part of daily life for every pedestrian or bystander. In Israel, a place addicted to history and archeology, it would be very easy to do. Nothing would happen to anyone if history did not start in 1948, but with what was here earlier. Aside from the sense of partnership and respect for the place of Palestinian Israeli citizens, no harm would be done if we marked in every place all of Israeli history, both Palestinian and Jewish.
I don’t believe that all the wheels of history can be turned back. But wherever possible, why not do it? The condition of the Palestinian refugees became one of Israel’s strongest propaganda claims almost from its first day. “Look at the difference,” the Israeli propagandists argued, “while we have absorbed a million of our refugees from Arab states, housed and rehabilitated them for the greater glory of Israel, they, the Arabs, have not lifted a finger for their refugees. To this day, they live in wretched camps, perpetual clients of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Constantly increasing, miserable and neglected.” On the face of it, a powerful argument, but at bottom one of the hollowest of claims. Because Jewish Israel did nothing for the Palestinian refugees inside it. It’s important to remember: according to Zionist rhetoric, immigrants are not refugees, by definition. Immigration to Israel is a positive ideological decision, and refugee status is a negative result of expulsion, flight, and defeat. In contrast with the Zionist immigrants, Palestinian Israelis are for all intents and purposes our refugees.