A Durable Peace
Page 39
The first result of the atrophy of Jewish resistance was physical destruction on an unimaginable scale. No other people has paid such a price for being defenseless. But there was a second fateful consequence: Slowly and surely, through the centuries of exile, the image and character of the Jew began to change. For non-Jews, the glorious Jewish past faded into dim memory and irrelevance. The word Jew became an object of contempt, derision, at best pity. It became synonymous with the word coward in a hundred different tongues. The adjective wandering was affixed to it, signifying the rootlessness and precariousness of Jewish existence. Not a trace could be found of the grudging admiration that the peoples of antiquity had harbored for Jewish courage and tenacity.
Worse, a substantial segment of Jewish opinion assimilated this disparaging image of the Jew, and many Jews came to view themselves as others had come to view them. This took on a particularly pernicious twist in the modern era. As the doctrines of modern pacifism emerged, many Jews rushed to embrace them, pretending they could transform into a universal virtue what had always been a unique vulnerability of the Jews. That the Jews “would not” (could not) resort to arms, that they would not “demean” themselves by “stooping to violence,” was taken to be a clear sign of their moral superiority over other peoples who were not similarly constrained. Once leading segments of Jewish opinion in Europe had transformed Jewish weakness into a positive good, the Jewish people’s chances of escaping its fate reached a new low.
Of all Zionist leaders, Jabotinsky was virtually alone in seeing where all this was leading. Throughout the 1930s, he sounded the alarm of impending danger. In Warsaw in 1938, on the Jewish fast day of Tisha B’av (marking the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans), he said to Poland’s three million Jews, almost none of whom were to survive the war:
For three years I have been imploring you, Jews of Poland, the crown of world Jewry, appealing to you, warning you unceasingly that the catastrophe is nigh. My hair has turned white and I have grown old over these years, for my heart is bleeding that you, dear brothers and sisters, do not see the volcano which will soon begin to spew forth its fires of destruction. I see a horrible vision. Time is growing short for you to be spared. I know you cannot see it, for you are troubled and confused by everyday concerns… Listen to my words at this, the twelfth hour. For God’s sake: let everyone save himself, so long as there is time to do so, for time is running short.
But Jabotinsky also saw a glimmer of light in the blackness:
And I want to say something else to you on this day, the Ninth of Av: Those who will succeed in escaping this catastrophe will live to experience a festive moment of great Jewish joy: the rebirth and establishment of the Jewish State! I do not know whether I myself will live to see it—but my son will! I am certain of this, just as I am certain that the sun will rise tomorrow morning. I believe in it with all my heart. 2
Even a year before the outbreak of the war, few could see the catastrophe coming, and fewer still could share in Jabotinsky’s note of hope. For those who could see the danger clearly, the Jewish people was approaching the end.
A scene at the close of Claude Lanzmann’s haunting documentary, Shoah, captures this hopelessness. Shoah ends with the testimony of one of the survivors from the Warsaw ghetto. He describes how in the last desperate days of the fighting, when the ghetto was being pulverized by the German forces, he was sent to seek help from the Polish Resistance. Lowering himself into a sewer, he made his way through the German lines to the “Aryan” section of Warsaw. The Poles refused his request, and after doing what he could, he decided to go back. He reentered the sewer and surfaced in the midst of darkness in the heart of the Warsaw ghetto. He was greeted by utter silence. Everyone was dead. The survivor remembers saying to himself: “I’m the last Jew. I’ll wait for morning, and for the Germans.” 3
His assessment about being the last Jew was not so far off the mark. In 1942, the rulers of Nazi Germany had met in a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to design the Final Solution. As was later learned from the Wannsee Conference documents, the Nazis planned to annihilate every Jew in Europe, from Britain to the Soviet Union. They drew up detailed lists for the liquidation of eleven million human beings, down to the two hundred Jews of Albania scheduled for destruction. 4 The original German plan dealt only with European Jewry, but when the Nazi armies reached North Africa, they began deporting the Jews of these lands to the death camps as well. They, like the Jews of Russia, were saved only by Hitler’s defeat.
It seemed this was to be the inevitable consequence of the long, horrible transformation of the Jews: The sons of the Maccabees had become the ultimate victims, destined to vanish from the earth.
Yet at this lowest of lows in Jewish history, the Jews were beginning to experience a second great transformation: They were rediscovering the capacity to resist, a rediscovery that had begun slowly in the previous century. The huge citizen-armies of Europe after Napoleon had begun to train a Jewish soldiery, and by World War I hundreds of thousands of Jews were under arms and fighting with distinction on both sides. In World War II such Jewish strength was committed to the Allied cause. But the most telling sign of a transformation was occurring at the very bottom of the abyss itself. In the Warsaw ghetto, as in Treblinka and in Sobibor, Jews were undertaking the most heroic resistance in the annals of man. In rising up against the Nazis in the most desperate and impossible of circumstances, they were showing that the ancient thread that ran through the fabric of their character had not been severed after all.
This resurrection of the Jewish capacity to resist had been fashioned as a deliberate policy only within the Zionist movement. As early as World War I, the Zionists had set out to reconstruct, after many centuries of neglect, the elements of Jewish military power, starting with Jabotinsky’s Jewish Legion during World War I, through the makeshift Hashomer units in the 1920s, Orde Wingate’s Special Night Squads in the 1930s, and the Jewish Brigade in the British Army during World War II. From these sprang the various underground forces, the Hagana, Irgun, and Lehi, which in turn paved the way for the establishment of the Israel Defense Force on the eve of Israel’s independence.
With the founding of the State of Israel, the majority of Jews quickly came to understand the critical importance of military power—a change far more abrupt and spectacular than the gradual loss of this understanding had been. For if the rendering of the Jews from a militant to a docile people had taken place over many centuries, here in the space of only a few years a reborn Jewish sovereignty rediscovered the art of soldiering. Israel devoted an enormous part of its economy and the finest of its youth to the task of militarily defending the state. Much to the amazement of the world, the Jewish state was soon producing fighters second to none and an army that proved itself capable of routing far larger and better-equipped fighting machines again and again. Furthermore, in the war against terrorism Israel’s soldiers showed a demoralized and paralyzed world that civilized societies could fight this scourge: In countless raids and special operations culminating in the rescue mission at Entebbe, Israel proved that terrorism could be fought and beaten.
All this not only changed the condition of the Jews of Israel, enabling the Jewish people to successfully resist assaults aimed at its annihilation for the first time in centuries. It also changed the image of the Jew in the eyes of non-Jews. The respect for Israel’s military prowess against overwhelming odds did not necessarily mean that the anti-Semitic stereotypes of the Jews were replaced everywhere and in every way; in some cases, the anti-Semites, encouraged by the Arabs, created a strange amalgam of the cowardly, mercenary Jew bedecked in a storm trooper’s uniform. But notwithstanding these grotesque distortions, most of the world was keenly aware that the Jewish people was experiencing in Israel a great transformation. As in antiquity, many marveled at the resolve, resourcefulness, and audacity shown by the Jewish army, changing for millions their conception of the Jews, or at least of some of them.
> But the change in the way the Jews viewed themselves was even more dramatic. It had begun as early as the 1890s. Visitors to Palestine at the time noted a change in the first generation of Jewish youngsters who had been raised on the land outside the enclosed ancient Jewish quarters of Safed and Jerusalem. Unlike their Orthodox brethren, these young Jews, mostly sons and daughters of recent immigrants, cultivated the land, rode horses, learned to shoot, spoke a revived Hebrew, and were capable of befriending or confronting the Arabs, earning their respect if not their love.
A quintessential example of this new breed was the Aaronsohn family of Zichron Ya’akov, which gained renown both in Palestine and abroad after the turn of the century. Well-to-do farmers, they received international acclaim through the achievements of the family’s eldest son, the strong-willed Aaron Aaronsohn. Aaronsohn was a multifaceted personality: a talented agronomist whose experimental work was crucial in convincing many that the barren land could indeed be brought back to life and successfully cultivated, a political thinker of great sagacity, a hard-headed organizer and leader of men. As such, he was totally committed to driving out the Turks by helping the British liberate Palestine. He, his equally strong-willed sister Sarah, and a band of young Palestinian Jews that included the colorful adventurer Yosef Lishansky and the sensitive romantic Avshalom Feinberg organized an espionage ring that transmitted signals to British ships from the family’s estate on the cliffs overlooking the Mediterranean. Each of these extraordinary figures of the “Nili” group, as it was later known, was to die tragically: Sarah, by her own hand while being tortured during interrogation by the Turks; Avshalom, murdered by Bedouins in the sands near Rafah while he was en route to British lines in Egypt; Lishansky, hanged by the Turks in Damascus after he was caught in the north of the country; and Aaron, lost at the age of thirty-nine when his plane mysteriously disappeared over the English Channel after the war. Nonetheless, the audacity and courage shown by these young Jews, the special spirit they exuded, combining worldliness with fierce pride and an equally fierce determination to overthrow the Ottoman occupation of the Jewish land, shaped the ethos of generations of young Palestinian (and later Israeli) Jews. It also influenced the non-Jews who came into contact with them, most notably the remarkable Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen (described in Chapter 2), who as General Allenby’s intelligence officer worked with Aaronsohn’s group and as a result reversed his previous opinion of the Jews.
This essential transformation of the Jew occurred with great rapidity on the soil of Palestine over the first half of the century. By the eve of Israel’s independence, a distinctly different Jewish character had emerged, ready to take up the struggle to deliver the nation. Fifty or sixty years may be like the blink of an eye in the collective life of an ancient people, but in the lives of individuals it can seem like an eternity: What is true in a person’s own life and in his or her parents’ lives comes to seem as though it has been true forever. By the time the second or third generation born and bred into the change reached adulthood, the Jews of Israel had begun to lose their awareness of what it meant to be a Jew in the ghettos of Europe or Yemen. Sometimes it would take an unexpected event to awaken this understanding anew.
This was very much my own experience. One of the young Israeli recruits whom I met in an elite military unit for which we had both volunteered was Haim Ben-Yonah. Haim was a good half a head taller than the rest of us, and he stood out in other ways as well. A self-effacing smile disguised an inner toughness, wedded to a basic integrity that made him the first of our induction to be sent to officers’ school. If ever there were a person exemplifying so many of the things that we valued in the Israeli character, Haim was that person. This was obvious to all of us from our first days in the army together. Our induction into our unit entailed a twenty-four-hour, eighty-mile march, some of it over grueling terrain, and all of it during one of the worst winter storms in years. Early in the march, when the officer leading Haim’s team twisted his ankle and had to be evacuated, he asked Haim, then a raw recruit like the rest of us, to take command—which Haim did calmly, almost matter-of-factly. And while the position of leadership Haim assumed naturally distanced him somewhat from the others in the unit, his habitual reserve did not prevent him from opening up when it was needed. I remember in particular the friendship he struck up with a young recruit whose family had come from Allepo in Syria. The youth found himself on perpetually unfamiliar ground in dealing with the clannish kibbutzniks, but Haim was undeterred, spending hours speaking Arabic with him using what little of the language he had managed to pick up on his kibbutz and sending both of them into paroxysms of laughter over the absurdities of his pronunciation.
One dark night in 1969, as the unit was carrying out a counter-strike across the Suez Canal after deadly Egyptian raids on the Israeli side, Haim was killed in a burst of gunfire. His body fell into the waters of the canal and disappeared. We searched for him fruitlessly that night and the next, and his body was finally returned to us days later by the Egyptians. It was at the end of a long row of cypress trees at Kibbutz Yehiam in the western Galilee, Haim’s home, that he was buried. It was there also that I met Haim’s mother Shulamit and discovered that Haim had been born shortly after she and his father had been freed from the death camps of Europe. Had he been born two years earlier, this daring young officer would have been tossed into the ovens, one of the million nameless Jewish babies who met their end in this way. Haim’s mother told me that while she felt a great deal of pain, she felt no bitterness. At least, she said, her son had died wearing the uniform of a Jewish soldier defending his people.
I was nineteen years old then, and these words had a profound effect on me. I found myself thinking again and again about the possibility that Haim might not have lived even the short life that he did live. Or, eerily, that he might have outlived the war, but in a world in which Israel had not come into being. Would Haim have come out the same way in another land—a Hungarian-speaking version of the same dauntless Israeli youth, sure of his place in the world, possessed of the same inner calm? For me this was an unsettling question, and I was not at all sure of the answer. I had been born into the Jewish state and therefore believed that the values and attitudes with which I and my generation had grown up were natural, long abiding, and even shared by all, or most, Jews.
But this was not the case. A distinguishing feature of many Jews raised in Israel is the absence of the sense of personal insecurity that accompanies many Jews in the Diaspora, even the most successful ones. While Israel itself may come under periodic attack, the sense of being a Jew in Israel seldom does. There are occasional existential musings, limited to tiny fringe groups in the society, about the purpose of it all and whether the Diaspora was not really preferable to all this, but these are sharp aberrations from the norm: In the deepest personal sense, the overwhelming majority of Israelis feel completely and naturally at home in Israel, notwithstanding its many problems. There are, of course, quite a few Jews who feel at home in America as well, but a few sharp incidents of anti-Semitism may deprive them of this sense of security. When non-Jews sense this vulnerability in Jews, some wrongly ascribe it to cowardice. I could not fully understand until much later in life the view of the Jew as a pusillanimous creature because, although I had certainly met some noteworthy cowards in my childhood and youth in Jerusalem, I had also seen the very opposite qualities in the young Israelis who grew up with me. In any case, the issue here is not individual courage or lack of it, but the inner sense of belonging that produces in turn a personal sense of security about one’s place in the world. This was the other great result of the Return. In addition to the physical ingathering of the Jews, it stimulated a spiritual ingathering where feelings and attitudes that had been lost in the dispersion were retrieved.
The speed with which a new generation raised in Israel had developed and absorbed this old-new ethos was one of the most remarkable transformations in the history of any culture and of any people. No doubt it
could take place so rapidly because the Jewish people maintained the memories of its life in antiquity and preserved intact its desire not only to restore its independence as a nation but its integrity as individuals. This is why what was happening in Israel radiated to the farthest corners of the Diaspora and affected the self-perception of many Jews around the world. In particular, the victory after the Six Day War stiffened Jewish pride and made many Jews speak out and declare their activism and commitment to the Jewish people and the Jewish state. It was anything but coincidental that the great awakening of Soviet Jews, buried under half a century of Communist amnesia, took place after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War in 1967, as Natan Sharansky and others have testified. The reestablishment of the State of Israel and the rediscovery of the Jewish capacity to resist dramatically transformed the objective and subjective condition of the Jewish people worldwide.
* * *
But this was not a complete transformation. Indeed, it could not have been complete. For the Jewish people, having lived outside politics for so long, having not wielded power for so many centuries, could not adapt to an independent existence all at once. If your fate has been entirely determined by others for centuries, it is difficult to internalize the idea that not only can others bend you to their will, but that you can shape the actions of others to conform to your needs. A culture that is truly political assumes that the mustering of support and the periodic exercise of political power is a natural and inevitable part of the ongoing struggle to survive.
But for the Jews, even reimplanting an understanding of the elementary need for military power entailed a bitter battle to overcome the entrenched view that Jews ought to have nothing to do with armies. The calls by Theodor Herzl, Vladimir Jabotinsky, and others to challenge this state of helplessness by creating Jewish military and political power met with derision even from many Jews and were dismissed as irrelevant absurdities or fascistic fetishes. Jewish critics from all quarters warned that the establishment of Jewish military might would throw the Jews into the arms of militarism and extreme nationalism, as though the act of wielding arms were in and of itself morally repugnant. If the Allies fighting the Nazis had adopted such a view, it would have doomed humanity. Yet in rejecting the Zionist message to organize political and military resistance, the Jews of Europe wasted a full four decades in which they could have obtained arms, allies, and escape routes to save themselves. The result was Auschwitz.