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>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. >>
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