Cheshbon Hanefesh

In advance of Yom Kippur, I am agonizing over the Lebanon War, what I saw and experienced in northern Israel during my brief but deeply effecting stay there, and what I have written on this forum.

I called my piece of two days ago 'More In Sorrow than in Anger', but the truth is that I evinced plenty of anger at Israel for its barrage of cluster bombs in the last days of the war and the devastating impact that will have on the people of south Lebanon for years to come. I wish my tone had not been so sharp but I stand by the main points I made there. Some people have already said to me, with considerable justice, 'How can you say there was moral equivalency, given that Hezbollah started the war and intentionally tried to kill Israeli civilians?' Very true, and I despise Hezbollah for its launching of the war, for its brutish hatred of Jews and fundamentalist fanaticism. I said during the war and still believe that Israel had no choice but to respond militarily. However, as I predicted then, Israel's decision to launch an all-out air war and later ground war, that intentionally or not, caused five times or more the number of fatalities as happened in Israel, ended up driving the vast majority of Lebanese into Hezbollah's camp and thereby strengthened Hezebollah, not weakened it. Israel's military response should have been more limited and of shorter duration, as many Israelis now acknowledge.


By killing so many civilians and especially through its use of cluster bombs, Israel threw away its claim of 'no moral equivalency'. As I wrote, randomly fired katushyas filled with deadly pellets shred human flesh of soliders and civilians alike, and so do cluster bombs sprayed over a wide area of south Lebanon. How can one claim with any credibility that causing the deaths of civilians with cluster bombs is more humane or morally justifiable than doing the same thing with pellet-filled katushyas? Both acts are abominations.

I love Israel deeply and would not want to go on living in a world without Israel. I plan to return to Israel to live in the not-so-distant-future. Yet I do not believe that loving Israel means blindly supporting everything its government does or shutting our eyes to acts we know to be wrong. Morality aside, by doing that, we may end up hurting Israel more than we help it.

Example: Back in 1977, when Menachem Begin came to power and promised that he would build "one, two, many Elon Morehs" in the West Bank and Gaza, American Jewish leaders swallowed their strong reservations about whether a massive settlement buildup was a wise or moral step, and instead resolved to run political interference for Israel in Washington. They did a spectacularly successful job at that; so much so that successive Likud governments, freed of any American pressure to stop, were able to place more than 200,000 Jews amidst two million Palestinians in a vain attempt to ensure permanent Israeli control of the "Greater Land of Israel.' Think of the tens of billions of dollars flushed down the drain, the many lives lost, the enormous suffering on both sides, the growth of political extremism on both sides that flowed from that decades-long effort. And at the bitter end of it all, in 2005, there was the spectacle of Arik Sharon, the bulldozer, the man who did more to build the settlements than anybody else, deciding in the sunset of his life that he had been wrong, that the whole operation had been futile; that he could not change demographic reality and would have to pull the settlers out of Gaza and much of the West Bank if Israel was to be preserved as a Jewish state.

What if the American Jewish leadership had the guts and integrity to say to Begin and Sharon back in 1977, "We think your policy of settling the territories is a disaster, and we won't support you on this. We wont press Carter or Reagan or Bush the first to give Israel a free hand in settling the West Bank."? In that case, the US government would have taken a much more assertive stand against settlement building--perhaps even threatened the cutoff of aid to Israel to stop it--and the Israeli public, seeing that the US was not giving their government a free ride, would have woken up and realized what a terrible mistake the whole settlement project was two decades earlier than actually happened. And history might well have turned in a better direction.

In short, love of Israel is not about blind support of a particular set of Israeli government policies. It is certainly not about saying in effect, 'We are angels and the Arabs are devils, so we can do anything we want to them.' Rather, it is about speaking truth to power, including our own leaders, when necessary. It is about trying to live according to the Jewish precepts of tikkun olam. And it is about acknowledging that both sides are human, that we, like they, are capable of cruel and inhuman acts that increase mutual hatred and make reaching peace and reconciliation that much harder. Both the katushyas and the cluster bombs had that effect, and therefore both were profoundly wrong.