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WAR UNITES ISRAELIS
By Gil Troy
The Jewish Week
July 20, 2006
Even as Hezbollah’s Katyusha barrages forced one million Israelis into shelters, Jerusalemites remained calm. Life proceeded normally — as long as you did not ask people how they were actually doing. The most habitual “How are you?” pleasantries triggered expressions of concern, while some shopkeepers challenged characteristically rude Israelis that “there is no time for such behavior at a time like this.”
Although different regions experienced different levels of terror, Israelis remained remarkably united in supporting the war and refusing to indulge the genocidal yearnings of Hamas and Hezbollah any longer. Israelis again became addicted to the hourly radio broadcasts’ beep-beep-beep, the evening news shows’ chatter, the perpetual Internet updates. Radio DJs resurrected their usual morale-building songs and clichés, reassuring listeners sh’yiheyeh beseder (it will be okay). Young boys reflected the national mood by making their bad guys “Hamas” and “Hezbollah” as their sisters wondered how underground shelters get fresh oxygen. While everyone assessed their safe room’s solidity — or a shelter’s proximity — visitors learned Hebrew words their Hebrew schools never taught: cheder moogan (secure room), peekud oref (home front command), eeranut (alertness), teel (missile) and sateel (military shorthand for missile boat).
Regardless of each citizen’s tension or calm, the searing stories of lives interrupted united all Israelis in sadness and outrage. As during the terrorism epidemic, an overarching, ever-changing national hologram of heartbreak offered the community glimpses into the individual tragedies. The two injured soldier/hostages, Eldad Regev, 26, and Ehud Goldwasser, 31, joined 19-year-old Gilad Shalit as Israel’s “most wanted” – to return home safely. Among the eight soldiers Hezbollah murdered first, Israelis mourned Eyal Benin, a 22-year-old from Rehovot, whose status as an only son meant that he needed his parents’ approval to enlist as kravi (a combat soldier). Yaniv Bar-On, the 20-year-old son of a South African father and a Canadian mother, was among the other soldiers mourned.
Among the civilians killed, the deaths of Omer Pesachov, 7, and his grandmother, Yehudit Itzkovich, 58, stood out because Omer’s family fled Nahariya that morning only to be bombed in Moshav Miron later that evening as the family prepared to welcome Shabbat. Haifa’s eight railway workers who had showed up to do their jobs despite Katyushas falling became national martyrs.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah mocks Jews and Westerners for loving life too much. A nihilistic terrorist, he sees us as weak. Yet such stories strengthened the national resolve, which Hezbollah clearly had underestimated, and further clarified Israel’s moral position. Hezbollah’s opening ambush of a routine patrol and subsequent targeting of Israel’s cities created what Vice Premier Shimon Peres called an ein breira (no alternative) war. Hezbollah’s despicable actions undermined Israel’s usual critics. Hezbollah is a radical Shiite group, not a Palestinian “resistance” organization. Whatever “occupation” they fought ended in May 2000, when Israel withdrew from Southern Lebanon. Hezbollah’s continued commitment to fighting Israel and seeking the Jewish state’s eradication highlights the fundamental struggle behind the Arab-Israeli conflict.
“We’re still fighting the 1948 war,” a friend remarked. The rights and wrongs of the Palestinian case are only a subset of the broader issue — too many Arabs continue to reject Israel’s right to exist, and too many Islamic radicals like Hezbollah still find that targeting the Jewish state offers the easiest route to popularity in the Arab and Islamic worlds.
On the ground, Israel’s war aims are clear, justified and noble. The Hezbollah threat must be eliminated or severely degraded, as Pentagon briefers like to say. Future missiles will only get greater range and more firepower. Israel has tolerated the intolerable for too long and must now end the Iranian and Syrian ability to fight proxy wars with Israel via extremists in Lebanon. But beyond the Middle East, Hezbollah’s deadly, and hopefully self-destructive gamble should reinforce the lesson which should already have been learned by the rise of Hamas, the demise of the Oslo agreements and the continuing Palestinian addiction to terrorism, maximalism, and an exterminationist all-or-nothing ideology: No peace can develop, no rights can be wronged, no compromises can last until the vast majority of the Arab and Islamic world accepts Israel’s right to exist and until violent radicals can no longer find cheap public acclaim by murdering Israelis.
With luck and much Israeli skill Hezbollah’s collapse will bring this lesson home and mark a turning point in the Middle East. But regardless of what happens in this war, it is time for some of Israel’s perennial critics, Jewish and otherwise, to acknowledge reality, stop rationalizing terrorism, take responsibility for encouraging radicalism and admit that the Palestinian problem will not be solved until the broader Islamic and Arab delusion that Israel can be eradicated is itself eliminated. n
Gil Troy is professor of history at McGill University. An updated version of his book, “Why I Am a Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today,” was recently published. He is spending the summer in Jerusalem.
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