August 6, 2006
Pondering, Discussing, Traveling Amid and Defending the Inevitable War
> By BERNARD-HENRI LEVY
>
> 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 de'ja` 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 Levy, 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. >