The stale myth of battlefield bravado

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Israel doesn't want peace: Gideon Levy - Haaretz
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Last update - 11:22 12/04/2007

By Meron Benvenisti

Only the naive expected a positive government response to the Arab initiative offering normalized relations in return for a withdrawal and a resolution to the refugee problem. The knee-jerk skepticism to peace offers has characterized the response of nearly all Israeli governments since 1949, and not only during the years after 1967 and the occupation of the territories. When Ehud Olmert has reservations about the Arab peace initiative, he is following in the footsteps of Moshe Dayan who said half a century ago: "I am against concessions in any area, and if the Arabs will want war over this, I am not opposed."

The governments of Israel have always been quick to initiate military operations and slow to engage in restraint or seek compromise and settlement. After all, it is always possible to find justification for aggression, arguing that we were responding to their attack. The definition of provocation, compared to a response to it, is a matter of perspective. When there is an unending chain of violence and counter-violence, every cause in the eyes of one side is an effect for the other. Indeed, there are many instances in which one side initiated provocations that served as a pretext for a disproportionate response, which in turn fed the cycle.

Behind the slogans "war imposed on us" and "war of no choice" hides an old attitude that says the use of force serves strategic objectives, such as occupying territory and clutching territorial assets gained in previous wars.

There is also an ideological foundation to the aversion to peace initiatives. The governing ideology maintains that Arab hostility is a permanent situation, that the Arabs lack a basic willingness to relate to the Jewish state as a legitimate entity, and that the violent nature of the region does not allow for real peace but, in the best case scenario, a cease-fire that will be violated the very moment its enemies sense Israel's weakness.

This dismissive approach to any chance at peace stood out once again when the negative response to the Saudi peace initiative stirred nearly no protest, except among a small group of peace activists. There is even more evidence to the impact of this eternal war of the "no choice" approach: the public's anger at its leadership for failing in the supreme objective of military victory, which "will etch on the psyche of the enemy" Israel's superior deterrent power.

The urge to punish the leaders stems not only from the failures in the conduct of the war, but also from the fact that their conduct exposed the deep chasm between the fiery belligerence of arrogant generals and the lack of motivation and inability to carry out the mission, the erosion of the public's willingness to bear bereavement, and most of all, the unwillingness to give up the good life in favor of the demands of an eternal war of no choice.

The exposure of this gap is unforgiven. Because if this is the situation, how is it possible to persist with the pretense of "a war for the sake of our existence," which rejects any possibility of dialogue?

"The Lord Almighty blessed us with a miracle," the prime minister said in his apologetic speeches, "which created that which exposed the situation today and not, God forbid, in two to three years." Ehud Olmert was referring here to the growing strength of the enemy, but it would have been appropriate for him to relate to what was really exposed by the Second Lebanon War: The Israeli public has had enough of the stale myth of battlefield bravado and wishes to lead a normal life.

Something happened since the 1950s, and the public is not afraid of the privatization of defense and its transformation into an irreverent matter, empty of pathos. A daring leader will discover that it is not the conflict that is preventing normalization but the absence of normalization that is preventing an end to the conflict.