Israel: Fact & fiction

The Israeli assault on Gaza is horrific in its ferocity and far exceeds the limits of justifiable and even acceptable retribution. There was once an image of Israelis being a people of heroic dimensions and sterling character forged by the many tyrannies that the Jewish diaspora suffered, including the industrial-scale pogrom of extermination undertaken by Nazi Germany. The founding of the state of Israel held out the promise of a new nation that, tempered by their experiences and motivated by the high idealism of its founders, would give the world something to look up to. It was this idealism that inspired India to be among the first three countries to recognise it.

The first generation of Israeli leadership was drawn from the European Jewry known as the Ashkenazimm, who were generally liberal and progressive. This was seen in the early Israel when most agriculture was under co-operative farming organised around the Kibbutz, which also entailed a communal (sharing) lifestyle. Histadrut, the labour union, which was the bedrock of the Labour Political Movement led by Israel’s founding father, David Ben Gurion, is also Israel’s biggest employer and owns much of its transportation, dairy, construction and services sectors. Israel was intended as a progressive, socialist and democratic state. It has moved away quite a bit from that goal.

During the initial years of its existence, Israel heroically defied the odds and many writers, like the late Leon Uris, captured this new promised spirit of the Israeli people. His 600-page masterpiece, Exodus, created a sensation in 1957 and propelled him to the highest literary fame. It was a detailed and heroic chronicle of European Jewry from the turn of the last century to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

Exodus, while being the epic story of a nation seeking a state, was also the touching love story of Ari Ben Canaan, an Israeli freedom fighter, and Kitty Fremont, an American nurse who joined Canaan’s fight for a Jewish state.

In 1958, after it became one of the most popular novels of the century, Exodus was made into a film by Otto Preminger featuring Paul Newman as Ari Ben Canaan. The book and the movie contributed the most to the mythologising of the Israeli fighter as an indomitable and idealistic hero.

But it is not that Israel lacked such men those days. The founders of the Palmach, the elite strike force of the Haganah that was the forerunner of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), men like Moshe Dayan, Haim Bar Lev, Ezer Weizmann, Yigael Yadin, Yitzhak Rabin and Yigal Allon, were all men of heroic proportions and each one could have been a prototype for Ari Ben Canaan. But it was Yigal Allon who came closest. Allon began life as a Haganah field commander in 1936 when he was merely 18 years old. In 1941, he was one of the founders of the Palmach, a commando style strike unit of the Haganah.

In 1948, he was made Lt. Gen. and commanded Israeli forces in the south that “liberated” the Negev in what became to be known as the War of Independence. He retired from the IDF in 1950, at the ripe old age of 32. In 1960, Allon went to Oxford University’s St. Anthony’s College to study international relations. Allon later entered public life and became deputy Prime Minister of Israel in 1967 and devoted himself to seeking durable peace with the Palestinians. He died in 1980.

The Haganah was founded in 1920 as the underground military organisation of the Jewish yishuv or community and was then a loose organisation of various local defence groups. The Palmach was its first mobilised unit which gained battle experience in the Second World War as the Jewish Brigade under British command. The Palmach consisted of many first-generation sabras, or Palestine-born Israelis who were also fluent Arabic speakers, which gave it the ability to remain concealed among the Arab population and to wage a lethal unconventional war on them.

The British learnt as much from this experience. Capt. Orde Wingate, who led the famous Chindits Brigade in Burma, was originally from the Palmach. Wingate was a charismatic dreamer who, though a Christian, had joined the Jewish movement and led the Special Night Squad of the Haganah, which carried out reprisals against the Arabs. Wingate’s Palestine experience found expression in Burma and its successes led all traditional armies to establish special warfare forces to give them similar deep-strike capabilities.

The combination of unconventional warfare by British SAS and US Special Forces and deep and precision airstrikes by modern fighter and bomber aircraft in Afghanistan has now given modern warfare a new dimension. Of the three battalions that formed the original Chindits Brigade, the 2/4 Gurkha Rifles is still with the Indian Army and carries the Chindits tag with great pride. Wingate is buried in the small Israeli town of Sharon near Tel Aviv.

The heroic sheen of the IDF has now largely dissipated with its emergence as a mighty Army with latest weapons and an unstinted support of the US. It is no longer David with a slingshot facing mighty Goliath. In the four major wars it has fought, the IDF worsted numerically superior Arab armies with ease.
It’s difficult to remain a heroic David against such adversaries for long. The Palestinian intifada is now the heroic struggle of a people seeking to find their identity and their freedom. Just like Israel was before 1948.

The atrocities during the War of Independence can be justified by the fact that there was a war declared on the Jewish state by all its Arab neighbours — Egypt, Jordan and Syria — supported by the entire Arab world. The Israel mandated by the UN was not tenable in terms of security, and addition of territory to gain security could have even been justified. But the continued occupation of West Bank since 1967 and the continued building of settlements in defiance of UN resolutions and in the face of world opinion are ugly and contemptuous manifestations of a narrow nationalism.

Israel is no longer the valiant and beleaguered underdog, but increasingly seen as an arrogant oppressor seeking to crush another old nation under its jackboots. The sad truth about Israel is that now Benjamin Netanyahu is fact and Ari Ben Canaan is fiction.

The writer held senior positions in government and industry, and is a policy analyst studying economic and security issues. He also specialises in the Chinese economy.