Practicing History: Selected Essays

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  The pressure of the Arab threat is constant. No place in Israel is beyond artillery range from its borders with Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon. In their own countries the Arabs are gracious and attractive people, friendly and courteous to strangers, possessing dignity, charm, and even humor. On the subject of Israel, however, they are paranoid. Israel does not appear on Arab maps. The Arabs keep up, at violent cost of common sense and convenience, an elaborate pretense that it does not exist, or if it does, that somehow, by refusal to deal with it in any way whatsoever, it can be choked off by isolation. At intervals, when Arab unity flags or internal politics demand a bellicose posture, they make explicit threats. “We could annihilate Israel within twelve days,” announced President Nasser of Egypt last March 26, “were the Arabs to form a united front and were they prepared to join battle.”

  The depth of Arab bitterness stems, one suspects, from humiliation. Much of the land they lost in Palestine had been sold as worthless to the early Zionist settlers who, draining the swamps in spite of malaria, and building on sand dunes, made it livable. The Jews became in the process a reminder of Arab failings. Then in 1948 an astonished world watched as the assembled military forces of five sovereign Arab states were fought off by the Jewish colonists of Palestine, who declared themselves a state, held their ground, and, to put an end to infiltration and border raids, reaffirmed the verdict in the Suez campaign of 1956. The Arabs were left, like a woman scorned, with a fury matching hell’s, while the Israelis for the time being could afford to feel satisfied with their performance, if never off guard. They have put territory under their feet at last in the land they once ruled, and they do not intend to be uprooted again. The Arabs’ undying intransigence in the face of accomplished fact has a quality of Peter Pan faced with growing up. Territory lost through the fortunes of war is a commonplace of history. What is Texas but 267,339 square miles of Mexico settled by Americans and then forcibly declared independent? In any event, the territory never formed part of an Arab state in modern times, having passed from Turkish sovereignty to the British Mandate.

  With their enormous preponderance in size and manpower, why do the Arabs not attack? Partly because from previous experience they have a rather nervous respect for Israel’s powers of retaliation; further, because of fear of one another and of internal opponents given to bloody coups d’état. Yet, since acceptance of reality does not always prevail in dealings among nations, Israel can never be sure that the Arab inundation will not roll, nor free themselves of the thought that someday—next month, next year, or tomorrow—they may wake to the sudden scream of a hostile air force in their skies. They must live and plan in that constant expectation. Meanwhile, from day to day the small pressures continue. Yellow signs proclaiming DANGER! FRONTIER mark an erratic curve through the countryside. Visitors to the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, must pass through a maze of guards and precautions before entering the visitors’ gallery, and ladies must leave their handbags, presumably capable of concealing a bomb or pistol, outside. Driving down through the Negev along the new highway that skirts the bleak, eroded slopes of Jordan to the east, the chauffeur stubbornly refuses to stop for a visit to the Nabatean ruins of Avdat or other sights along the way, and when finally pressed for an explanation, admits, almost apologetically, to a desire to reach Eilat before sunset. Why? Well, in case of—the word comes reluctantly—“trouble” from over there, nodding toward the somber mountains on the left. A startled American, unused to thinking in these terms, is reminded of covered wagons and Indian ambush.

  At Almagor, a hilltop settlement in northern Galilee where clashes with Syria involving machine guns, tanks, and aircraft took place during the past two summers, one looks down on a silver stream winding through a green delta to the lake. The stream is the River Jordan where it enters the Sea of Galilee (otherwise Lake Tiberias). The land on its far bank, backed by a range of hills, is Syria, with snow-capped Mount Hermon looming hugely in the distance. On one of the hills is a cluster of the Arabs’ characteristic flat-topped sandstone huts, many of them painted pale blue to ward off evil. Down on the delta black cattle graze, white egrets stand on the sand flats of the river, Arab families and farmers go about their business. The air is filled with a spring breeze and the twittering of birds, the hillside with weeds and wild flowers blossoming as profusely as a garden. Lavender thistle mixes with blue gentian, daisies with wild mustard and wild pink geranium, and scarlet poppies are scattered everywhere. A solitary young soldier sits with binoculars on a pile of stones, intently scanning the hills opposite.

  Almagor is a settlement founded by Nahal, a pioneer corps in which military training and land cultivation are combined in a system Israel has developed to defend and simultaneously settle the frontier. The young recruit points to a long straight scar on the side of the hill opposite and says it is the track of the Arabs’ attempted diversion of the headwaters of the Jordan. Involving seventy-five miles of open ditch, the scheme could hardly be carried out secretly, and is not an operation that Israel could idly watch. After the Syrians started shooting in August 1965, the Israelis’ answering fire, according to their communiqué, damaged “tractors at work in Syria on the diversion of the Jordan headwaters,” after which the work “appeared to cease for the time being.” When I was there in March before last summer’s battle, the hillside scar, from what anyone could tell through binoculars, was quiescent.

  Down on the lake, which is wholly Israeli territory, two fishing boats were moving out from the Syrian shore. The soldier remarked without heat that last year Syrian guns in the hills fired on an Israeli fishing boat and a cruising police patrol boat. Handing me the binoculars, he pointed to two black dots far out in the center of the lake. Slowly moving into vision, they took shape as Israeli police boats. The Syrians kept on fishing, and the patrols approaching. Gripping the binoculars, I waited, feeling as if the air had suddenly gone still. The police were within hailing distance when, unhurriedly, the Syrians rowed back to shore, beached their boats, and wandered off. Equally without fuss the patrol boats turned back the way they had come. Almagor remained quiet for that day.

  The hillside scar, mentioned on return to Jerusalem, aroused no excitement. “It could be a road,” they said. Israel so desperately needs peace—to divert taxes from the crushing defense budget to other vital needs, to rejoin the continent of which it is a part, to live with neighbors on reasonably neighborly terms, above all to breathe normally—that it has usually leaned over backward to avoid cause for quarrel. It tries to remain suave and, for as long as possible, unprovoked, in the effort to leave room for whatever tiny chance of negotiation might appear. Israel too has its hotheads of irredentism, the “adventurists” who clamor to “take the west bank,” but this is largely lip-service to old slogans. They know, or if not, the country’s leaders know, that to swallow western Jordan with nearly a million Arab inhabitants (or equally the Gaza Strip), thus increasing Israel’s existing Arab minority of twelve percent who already outbreed the Jews, would be to court disaster. What Israel needs is not more land populated by Arabs but more people to populate its own empty Negev, a problem which in turn depends on water to make the desert habitable.

  Even the wound of the Old City’s loss is not so fresh anymore. For Jews its essence was the Wailing Wall for bewailing lost Zion, but since restoration of the state, who needs to wail? From long association, many still yearn for the Wall, but the native-born generation are not wailers. On their own land the Jews have successfully become what they were never allowed to be in the ghetto—farmers and soldiers. The transformation has literally changed the Jewish face. Complexion and lighter hair-color can no doubt be explained by sun and climate; blue eyes one must leave to the geneticists, but the fundamental change is one of expression. The new face has an outdoor look and, more noteworthy, it is cheerful. This is not of course true of the immigrant settlements, where the look among the adults is compounded of bewilderment, strangeness, difficulties, and resentments, nor of Tel
Aviv, which has been unkindly (if not inaccurately) described as a mixture, on a smaller scale, of New York and West Berlin. The Tel Aviv look, compounded of traffic, shops, business deals, and culture, with a sprinkling of beatniks, is no different from Urban the world over.

  The new face is elsewhere, notably in the army. At the officers’ training school outside Tel Aviv it was visible in students, instructors, and in the commandant, Colonel Meier Paeel, a tall, vigorous, smiling man. Colonel Paeel had smile crinkles at the corners of his eyes, a characteristic I noticed among many of the other officers, although someone else might say it came from squinting at the sun.

  The school had pleasant tree-lined quarters inherited from the British Army, which was always accustomed to do itself well. The tradition continues in one respect, for the secretaries, all girl soldiers in khaki, were so invariably pretty, without makeup, that it was hard to believe they had been chosen at random. Because of its essential role in the creation of the state, the army’s prestige is high, and it attracts the best. It has a noticeably breezy air. The open shirt collar—spotless and correctly starched—prevails. Saluting is casual, but there is an underlying seriousness and sense of tension. At the general-staff school, where virtually all the students wore the two campaign ribbons of 1948 and 1956, there was once again the outdoor face, and a commandant, Colonel Mordecai Goor, no less handsome and confident. “You are making a new breed,” I said to one officer. He looked around thoughtfully at his colleagues and searching for the right English words, replied deliberately, “Yes. Jewish sorrow has gone out of their eyes.”

  Reclamation of the land, after centuries of being strangers and rootless in the lands of others, has helped to achieve that result as much as anything. The Jews are at home: not a home taken over ready-made, but one they had to clear, clean, repair, and reconstruct by their own labor. Palestine, under Arabs and Turks during the thousand years before 1900, reverted to the nomad, and for lack of cultivation was left to the desolation predicted by Isaiah: a “habitation of dragons and a court for owls.” English explorers in the nineteenth century found it a stony goat pasture with “not a mile of made road in the land from Dan to Beersheba.” To be made livable again, reported the Palestine Exploration Fund in 1880, the land required roads for wheeled transport, irrigation and swamp drainage, restoration of aqueducts and cisterns, sanitation, seeding of grass and reforestation to check soil erosion. This was the task that faced, and all but overwhelmed, the early Jewish colonists. Internal dissension and self-made problems, as prevalent then as today, did not help. While they starved, they engaged in furious dispute over whether to keep the commandment of a sabbatical year during which no work on fields or among livestock could be done.

  The issue survives. At Kfar Yuval, a little colony in northern Galilee settled by an Orthodox group of Indian Jews, a schoolteacher apologized for the weed-grown yard that could not be cultivated because it was sabbatical year for the village. When I asked, “What do they eat?” my guide shrugged and said, “They pray and eat less.” The fossilized rules of Orthodoxy hamper progress and convenience in the nation out of all proportion to the number who take them seriously. Because the Orthodox party holds the political balance of power, it has an official grip on the country, and Orthodoxy strikes a visitor as the most stultifying of Israel’s self-made problems.

  Yet the Jews have made the land bloom—with terraced hills and delicate orchards, hedges of rosemary and the thick lush green of orange groves. Everywhere around the groves in springtime the pungent sweet fragrance of orange blossom hangs in the air like smoke. Yellow mimosa and feathery, pine-like tamarisks grow along the roadside, punctuated by great cascades of purple bougainvillaea. Away from the urban strips and gas stations and industrial plants and somewhat shoddy emergency settlements, Israel has an extraordinary beauty. Cypresses like dark green candles point upward against the blue sky, and windblown olive trees shimmer as if their leaves were tipped with silver. When the wind blows, the palms bend like reeds over Lake Tiberias, and from western Galilee one can see, far in the distance between the hills, the whitecaps of the Mediterranean glint in the sun.

  It is no wonder the Jews have grown a new face. Perhaps what accounts for it most of all is that Israel is theirs; here they are not a minority; they are on top. Which is not to say they will live happily ever after, or even now, for they are the most contentious people alive, and Orthodoxy is not their only self-made problem. Their quarrels are legion, they abuse each other incessantly and without compunction, and settle differences of opinion within any group by splitting instead of submitting to majority rule. The Haifa Technion, Israel’s MIT, was recently plunged in battle over the teaching of architecture. The issue, roughly one between scientific and humanistic schools of thought, exists in other countries as well, but the solution in Israel was radical. By dictate of the Technion’s president, the faculty of architecture was split into two faculties—a decision which enraged the students, since they would have to choose between one or the other, and many wanted elements of both. Carried over to political life, the habit causes factionalism which Israelis explain as the natural consequence of long centuries without political power or responsibility. They consider that the experience of self-government is gradually providing an enforced cure.

  Israel is not an affluent society; it is hard-working, with the six-day week still in force. Until last March Israel had no television. This circumstance grew from the strong puritan strain of the early settlers, who were founders of Histadrut, the labor federation, and of the kibbutzim. Although the kibbutz system of communal ownership is neither predominant nor spreading, the influence of its people is out of proportion to their numbers because they came early, were self-motivated, and, to survive at all, had to have vigor and grit. Kibbutz members in government took the view, violently disputed, that TV would distract from work, disrupt family life, and intensify economic and class differences between settled residents and the newcomers who could not afford to buy television sets. Besides, it would cost money, and the government had none to spare on a luxury. The awkward result is that anyone who buys a TV set, and that includes a large number of Arab citizens, tunes in Cairo or Beirut. Since last March educational television is being tried.

  Because Israel is a small country, the individual is able to feel that what he does counts. No more powerful incentive exists. It will make a man work even at a job he dislikes. One government official, who detested going abroad to beg for funds for an essential operation, told me he continued to go because he felt “on the front line of defense.” Seeking something of this feeling, students from abroad, particularly Scandinavian refugees from too much welfare, come every summer to work in the kibbutzim.

  With all its problems, Israel has one commanding advantage—a sense of purpose: to survive. It has come back. It has confounded persecution and outlived exile to become the only nation in the world that is governing itself in the same territory, under the same name, and with the same religion and same language as it did three thousand years ago. It is conscious of fulfilling destiny. It knows it must not go under now, that it must endure. Israelis may not have affluence or television or enough water or the quiet life, but they have what affluence tends to smother: a motive. Dedication is not necessarily total, and according to some who see materialism displacing the idealism of the early days, it is already slipping. Israelis are not all true, honest, loyal, industrious—a nation of Boy Scouts. Many (an estimated total of 80,000 to 90,000 so far) leave for more pay (Israeli salaries are low and taxes high), more comfort, wider opportunities and contacts, a life of less pressure, or for a variety of reasons which add up to one: to escape geography. But on the whole and for the present, the pacesetters of the nation have what Americans had at Plymouth Rock, a knowledge of why they are there and where they are going. Even the visitor begins to feel that there may be a design to history after all, a purpose in the survival of this people who, ever since Abraham came out of Ur to mark the turn to monotheism,
have fertilized civilization with ideas, from Moses and Jesus to Marx, Freud, and Einstein. Perhaps survival is their fate.

  Paradoxically, Arab hostility has been useful in forcing Israel to face westward, to find her contacts and competition with the West, including a trade agreement with the European Common Market. While this exacerbates the problem of acclimating her growing proportion of Oriental Jews from Iraq, Iran, and North Africa, it also drives her to greater enterprise, to “think deeper,” as the manager of the Timna Copper Mines said. “Of course,” he added a little wistfully, “if we had the whole of the Middle East to trade with, we would have an easier life.” As it is, necessity has required the development of such enterprises as his own, the former mines of King Solomon, unexploited under the Turks or the British Mandate, and now restored to production by Solomon’s descendants.

  Timna is one of those projects, like almost everything in Israel, undertaken against the soundest advice of practical persons who declared it “impossible.” Originally the resettlement of Palestine was impossible, the draining of malarial swamps impossible, the building on sand dunes (where Tel Aviv now has a population of over 600,000) impossible; the goal of statehood, partition, self-defense, the Law of Return, absorption of a million immigrants, then of two million immigrants—all impossible. The country has been created out of impossibilities, embraced sometimes from idealism, more often because there was no other choice.

  Since no one would invest in a dead copper mine, Timna was subsidized and its shares taken up by the government; during the first three years of effort to begin operations, the project drew sarcastic press comment about “putting gold in the ground to get out copper.” Now with production booming, and a convenient world shortage caused by strikes in Chile and by Rhodesia’s troubles, it is exporting ten thousand tons of copper cement a year, at explosively profitable prices, to Spain, Japan, and Hungary, while the public offers to buy the government’s shares. No one expects this happy condition to last forever, but future, even present, limitations frequently fail in Israel to have a limiting effect. If Israelis looked ahead at the stone wall or ditch looming up, they would stop dead from sheer fright; instead, they go on out of optimism or necessity, and trust that God, or their own inventiveness, or some unforeseen development will provide.