Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Absolute Folly


1. The following is in my opinion one of the best article that has
appeared in the Israeli media in recent years.
I reprint it here in full even though it is a bit long:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArtVty.jhtml?sw=ari+shavit&itemNo=749564
Incredibly, it appeared in Haaretz, of all places:
A spirit of absolute folly
By Ari Shavit

In the difficult summer of 2006, the State of Israel is declaring in
astonishment: They surprised us. They surprised us in a big way. They
surprised us with Katyushas and they surprised us with the Al-Fajr rockets
and they surprised us with the Zelzal missiles. They surprised us with
anti-tank missiles. And they surprised us with the operational skill of
the anti-tank squads. They surprised us with the bunkers and the
camouflage. They surprised us with the command and monitoring. They
surprised us with strategy, fighting ability and a fighting spirit. They
surprised us with the astonishing power that a small death-army with low
technology and high religious motivation can have.

However, more than they surprised us in Summer 2006 with the strength of
Hezbollah, they surprised us this summer with our own weakness. They
surprised us with ourselves. They surprised us with the low level of
national leadership. They surprised us with scandalous strategic bumbling.
They surprised us with the lack of vision, lack of creativity and lack of
determination on the part of the senior military command. They surprised
us with faulty intelligence and a delusionary logistical network and
improper preparedness for war. They surprised us with the fact that the
Israeli war machine is not what it once was. While we were celebrating it
became rusty.

Generally it is not right to conduct an in-depth investigation of a
wartime failure during a war. However, at the end of the most embarrassing
year of Israeli defense since the establishment of the State of Israel,
the Israeli government is not drawing conclusions. It is not reorganizing
the system, there is no evidence of a real learning curve and it is not
radiating a new ethos. On the contrary: It is adding another layer of
folly onto a previous one. Its slowness to react is dangerous. Its caution
is a recipe for disaster. Its attempt to prevent bloodshed is costing a
great deal of bloodshed. So that now of all times, just when the forces
are moving toward south Lebanon, there is no escaping the question of
where we went wrong. It is so that Israel will be able to achieve a
last-minute victory and so that the troops will be able to achieve their
goals and so the soldiers will be able to return home safely, that we must
ask already now: What happened to us? What the hell happened to us?

A simple thing happened: We were drugged by political correctness. The
political correctness that has come to dominate Israeli discourse and
Israeli awareness in the past generation was totally divorced from the
Israeli situation. It did not have the tools to deal with the reality of
an existential conflict. It did not have the tools to deal with a reality
of an inter-religious and inter-cultural conflict. That is why it focused
entirely on the Palestinian issue. It made the baseless assumption that
the occupation is the source of evil. It assumed that it is the occupation
that is preventing peace and causing unrest and perpetuating the
instability.

At the same time, political correctness assumed that Israeli strength is a
given. That Israel is insanely strong. Therefore, political correctness
disdained any attempt to build and maintain Israeli strength. The defense
budget was cut, the values of volunteerism were mocked, the concepts of
heroism and fortitude became despicable. Since the Israel Defense Forces
was identified as an army of occupation - rather than as an army defending
feminists and homo-lesbians from the fanaticism of the Middle East - they
had reservations about it, they shook it off and became alienated from it.
After all, in the spiritual world of political correctness, power and army
have become dirty words.

Any national idea was rejected because of the sanctity of the private
sphere. Every cooperative ethos was dismantled in favor of the individual.
Power was identified with fascism. Masculinity was publicly condemned. The
pursuit of absolute justice was mixed with the pursuit of absolute
pleasure and turned the reigning discourse from a discourse of commitment
and enlistment to one of protest and pampering.

Another thing happened: We were poisoned with an illusion of normalcy. The
State of Israel is fundamentally an abnormal state. Just because it is a
Jewish state in an Arab region, and just because it is a Western country
in a Muslim region, and just because it is a democratic state in a region
of fanaticism and despotism, Israel is in constant tension with its
surroundings. On the one hand, because of the situation in which it finds
itself, Israel cannot live a life of European normalcy. On the other hand,
because of its values and its structure in terms of identity, economics
and culture, Israel cannot avoid being a part of European normalcy.

Therefore Israel is in a constant state of basic contradiction. The way to
resolve this contradiction is to create a positive anomaly ? both
ideological and ethical - that will provide an answer to the negative
anomaly in which Israel exists. There is no other way: Israel must prepare
a defense envelope that will protect its internal environment from the
external environment surrounding it. Life in defiance of the environment
is an essential part of Israeli existence.

However, in the past generation this cruel insight has dissipated, the
delusion has spread that we have overcome our problems and reached a state
of tranquility, and that we can live in this place like any other nation.
This illusion led to a situation where the positive Israeli anomaly
gradually became blurred, and the energies devoted to maintaining the
defensive shield that isolates Israel from the region and protects it from
this region were drastically reduced. Weakness prevailed. Our willpower
was weakened. The bubble so inebriated the Israelis that they didn't
bother to surround it with a fortified wall. Therefore, the pressures of
the external environment steadily increased - with the terror of 2002 and
the Qassams of 2005 and the Katyushas of 2006 - until they penetrated deep
inside the Israeli environment. Thus was created the paradox that those
who wanted to believe that Israel could be totally normal were the ones
who caused it to decline into a chaotic situation of total anomaly and a
loss of balance.

Both political correctness and the illusion-of-normalcy spread first and
foremost among the Israeli elites. The Israeli public in general has
remained for the most part sober and strong. It did not err with illusions
of a new Middle East. It did not turn its back on the existential
imperative, the defense ethos and the IDF. Even its core values were not
destroyed. Therefore, it impressively withstood both the test of terror of
2001-2003 and the test of "fire-on-the-home front" of 2006. It
demonstrated an almost British fortitude and continues to do so.

On the other hand, the Israeli elites of the past 20 years have become
totally divorced from reality. The capital, the media and the academic
world of the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century, have blinded
Israel and deprived it of its spirit. Their repeated illusions regarding
the historical reality in which the Jewish state finds itself, caused
Israel to make a navigational error and to lose its way. Their unending
attacks, both direct and indirect, on nationalism, on militarism and on
the Zionist narrative have eaten away from the inside at the tree trunk of
Israeli existence, and sucked away its life force. While the general
public demonstrated sobriety, determination and energy, the elites were a
isappointment.

Capital brought the illusion-of-normalcy ad absurdum, and established a
crushing social-economic regime here that does not suit the historical
situation. The academic world promoted political correctness ad absurdum
and conducted a somewhat suicidal spirit of criticism here. And the media
combined the two and created a hallucinatory state of mind, which combines
unbridled consumerism with false righteousness.

Instead of being constructive elites, in the past generation the Israeli
elites have become dismantling elites. Each in its own area, each by its
own method, dealt with the deconstruction of the Zionism enterprise. Step
by step, the top 1000th percentiles abandoned the existential national
effort. They stopped doing reserve duty, they stopped sending their sons
to the fighting units. They mocked those officers who warned about
unilateral withdrawals. They mocked those officers who warned that the
emergency warehouses were emptying out and the enemies were becoming
stronger. And they deceived themselves and those around them that Tel Aviv
is in fact Manhattan. Money is in fact everything. And thus they
bequeathed to young Israelis a legacy of values that makes it very
difficult for them to attack even when the attack is fully justified.
Because a country that lacks equality, that lacks justice and that lacks
faith in the rightness of its path, is a country for which it is very
difficult to go on the attack. It is a country for which not many are
willing to kill and be killed.

And in the Middle East of the 21st century, a country whose young elites
find it difficult to kill and be killed for it is a country on borrowed
time. A country that cannot endure. So that what is now being revealed
before our eyes, as the smoke of the Katyushas continues to rise from the
Lebanese thicket, is not a failure of the IDF but a failure of the elites
that turned their back on the IDF. What is being revealed now, when Israel
cannot properly protect the lives of its citizens, is not problems of
command and problems of tactics, but rather deep-seated problems of a
society whose elites have abandoned it. It is not Major General Udi Adam
or Brigadier General Gal Hirsch who are the problem, it is the Israeli
spirit. A spirit that for far too long has been a spirit of stupidity. A
spirit of absolute folly.

Usually, the accusation of folly is directed at battle-hungry generals and
warmongering politicians. However, at the end of this war, the accusation
of folly will be directed at an entire cadre of Israeli opinion-makers and
social leaders who lived in a bubble and caused Israel to live in a
bubble. The army will be required to put its house in order and to
rebuild, but the true anger will be directed toward the elites who failed.
Elites who betrayed the trust of a wise, impressive and strong nation.

However, now it is wartime. The citizens of the north are still in bomb
shelters, the soldiers of the regular and standing armies are risking
their lives in a war that was not properly planned or properly defined and
is being conducted poorly. Therefore, what is needed now is to operate
quickly, to operate while in motion, in order to strengthen the spirit of
those participating in the battle. What is needed is to create immediately
a new discourse that will suit the new situation. Without a new spirit and
without a new language there will be no victory in the fighting.
Therefore, while the war is raging we must find the spirit and we must
find the language that we lost in the years preceding the war.

Israel tried with all its soul and all its might to be Athens. However in
this place, in this era, there is no future for an Athens without a speck
of Sparta. There is no hope for a society-of-life that does not know how
to organize itself to deal with death. Therefore, after decades during
which the right and the left and the center took Israeli power for granted
and wastefully exploited it, now there is no escaping the need to place
the renewed building of Israeli power at the top of the agenda. We are
returning to the encounter with our fate; returning to what is decreed by
the reality of our lives.

2. Contender for the dopiest statement of the century:
http://israelnn.com/news.php3?id=110002

3. Ken Harwood summed up the situation the best to date:

"it used to be that we could count on Israel to
win the war and lose the peace. now we can't
even count on them to win the war."

4. Shlaim Slime:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/750505.html

5. Like love and marriage, terrorism and leftist academia go together:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=23847

6. Why Israel Lost:
http://wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=51519






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