The Love
That Dares Not Call Itself By Name
Mapam’s “Officers’ Circle” – The
Politicization of the IDF and
Ideological Delinquency in the State of Israel
Amnon Lord
This past autumn was laden with intensive
signing activity: Conspicuous among that activity was that which was
characterized as the “pilots’ letter”, with approximately 27 signatures;
subsequently, they were supplemented by petitions of support signed by writers
and artists and then by additional petitions, for example, from the Forum of
Documentary Filmmakers, who, with their signatures, expressed support for the
previous petitions of support. Ami Ayalon has already been working, since the
early summer of 2003, on a mass signing of a peace agreement between him and
Sari Nusseibeh, which he himself signed; on October 10, senior members of the
Labor Party traveled to Amman to sign the “Geneva Agreement”, which was
festively signed again in Geneva.
The late Stephen Possony, apparently the
greatest expert in the study of communist ideology, defines signing activity
of this sort as a type of non-reversible psychological commitment:
Normally, a person sins, nothing more, and his sin can be
forgiven. However, in the case of Mephisto, it is different. He sees to it
that Faust, in addition to the sins, which he commits, also sells him his soul
and he does so in writing. Thus he achieves real control. The primary
objective of the campaigns of collecting signatures supporting what was
presented as the Soviet Union’s peace policy was not to convince anyone, but
rather to get a person’s signature on a piece of paper and thereby establish
in his consciousness a commitment to the cause in whose support he signed.1
The Roots of Israeli Disobedience
The present disobedience activity, whose
primary manifestations are the signing of “letters” and petitions, began a
year-and-a-half ago with the “Refusenik’s letter”, which became the “Courage
to Refuse” organization. It did not appear out of thin air. It exists in
patterns, which already began to function in the State’s early years. We can
decipher the genetic code of the anti-democratic tendencies latent in the
present activity, if we investigate the roots of the profound politicization
of the IDF in the fifties. In a conference on ideological disobedience
conducted at Tel Aviv University, the Commander of the Air Force, Dan Halutz,
characterized the serious challenge posed by the organization
of officers, appearing in their uniforms displaying their ranks,
identifying themselves by their military professions (in this case pilots), as
a threat of a “split in the army”, as “one of the greatest dangers to the
State”.2 Apparently, the infuriated public
response to the pilots’ course of action confirms General Halutz’s
determination. Most of the public felt under attack and threatened by that
action. No less important were the supportive reactions, which were gauged in
Yossi Vadana’s survey for Kol Yisrael radio, which reached 18% – a rate approaching
the total support for the Meretz, Communist and the significant part of the
Labor parties. In other words, the support and opposition to the move are
perceived in their political context, with the moral claim only a cover.
The origin of
this phenomenon dates back to the State’s early years, in what may be
characterized as “Israeli communism”, which reached its peak during the
Stalinist period and was organized in the framework of the powerful Mapam
(United Workers) Party, and especially in its component, HaShomer HaZa’ir. Prime Minister David
Ben-Gurion, after deciding to confront the subversiveness in the IDF head-on
in 1953, characterized HaShomer HaZa’ir as “Zionists in their tents and
communists outside”.3 Based on the name,
which he chose for his compilation of articles, he apparently identified Mapam
as the authentic communism in Israel as opposed to the Israeli Communist
Party, which openly identified itself as a communist party. However, Mapam,
despite the fact that it identified with the “revolutionary world, the Soviet
Union and all of its statements and actions were like those of a communist
movement – it did not identify itself as a communist party. To borrow Oscar
Wilde’s quote regarding homosexuality during the Victorian Period, it was,
from the perspective of Mapam’s Stalinists, “the love that dares not call
itself by name”. The “revolutionary world” was perceived during that period as
a world movement with great momentum after the Chinese Communist Revolution in
1949 and the outbreak of the Korean War one year later. The third world war
seemed imminent in the view of the members of Mapam. Members of the party,
which was then the second largest in the country (with 19 members of Knesset)
were confronted with a dilemma of loyalty: would they serve the communist
“world of tomorrow” or would they support the State of Israel, whose
government had opted for a Western orientation in the conflict between the
blocs, which was then underway. The beginning of the argument in Israel came
with the dismantling of the Palmah (the Haganah strike force) in November
1948: “Now, after they [HaShomer HaZa’ir and United Labor] joined together, it
was obvious that the United Party [Mapam] would utilize its political weight
and applied power to guide the army and the rear guard during the war.”4
“The Palmah Will Not Carry Out a Mission for a Prime
Minister Named Begin.”
Mapam, which controlled the Palmah and,
following its dismantling, remained dominant in the IDF, perceived itself,
according to the characterization of Gidi Eilat, as the “Security Party”. As
part of its revolutionary ideology, Mapam considered the army a central
factor which must be controlled, and in the least radical case (from its
perspective) – maintain within it strong nuclei of influence. At the
conclusion of the War of Independence, 8 of the 12 brigadiers and the three
primary theater commanders – were members of the Mapam leadership. They were
referred to as the “security activists”, i.e. the party activists in the army.
Gidi Eilat writes:
The ideological consideration played an important role among
the factors, which influenced the security strategy and activity
management…[Commanders and party personalities] sensed no conflict between
their ideological consciousness and their military discipline, as on the one
hand they stood at the military evaluation centers while on the other hand,
they were present in the institutions of the political organization
institutions [Mapam].5
After the dismantling of the Palmah, in a
discussion conducted among the Mapam leadership, which included Yigal Allon
who attended the session in uniform, Yaakov Hazan employed a phrase which
still resonates today: “The Palmah will not carry out a mission for a prime
minister named Begin, and I don’t consider that to be a tragedy.”6
After the War of Independence and the exacerbation of the Cold War, Ben-Gurion
himself was faced with the dilemma. The possibility of “expressing
no confidence in Ben-Gurion as Defense Minister”7
was already raised in the course of the war.
Yisrael Bar articulated the ideological
theory of utilizing the army as a revolutionary political impetus after the
war. Bar, who was arrested 10 years later on the charge of spying for the
Soviet Union, was the head of the Planning Department in the IDF Intelligence
Branch. At the same time, he was also a member of the Mapam Military
committee, of which Baruch Rabinov, a member of Kibbutz Beit Alpha, and Yizhak
Sadeh were also members. Bar, in his position at the head of the Planning
Department rejected the position of the Chief of the General Staff regarding
the organization of the IDF, and demanded total organization of army and
labor, creation of a force based on marshalling all of the national resources
for the purposes of defense.8 This position
is consistent with the perception of military communism and would have enabled
Mapam, by means of its control over the power centers in the army, to direct
most of the economic and security activity in the country. Bar demanded to
“raise the issue for public discussion” – that is the constantly repeated
motto – meaning to undermine the authority of the democratic decision-makers.
“Now We Will Take Over the Government”
After Mapam’s dominant stranglehold over
the IDF weakened, Mapam organized its officers into underground cells in the
first year after the War of Independence.9 In
his article, “The Security Party”, Gidi Eilat, who took part in that
organization, disagreed with Prof. Zeev Zahor’s thesis and claims that it was
not an underground:
In regional meetings, Rabinov explained to his enlisted friends
the role of the cells [in the army], which was “preserving the human assets of
the party – its consolidation and maintaining its ideological awareness”. The
objective of the cells is to “learn and accompany the development of the IDF
and consolidate a position of constructive criticism” – “not an underground
but rather a branch of a revolutionary party”.10
In December 1950, the career and reserve
officers were invited to participate in an “Advanced Military Study Seminar”
which was prepared and organized by the Mapam security department. The seminar
directors were Baruch Rabinov and Yisrael Bar. They prepared a work program
which was disseminated among the senior Mapam officers. Its recipients were:
Sinai (Arnan Azaryahu), A. Yaffe, M. Goren, Y. Rabin, Z. German, Haim Kidoni
(Bar-Lev) and Dado (David Elazar).11
The seminar participants consolidated an
assessment that the exacerbation of the Cold War and the battles in Korea
would accelerate the outbreak of world war between the two blocs. That topic
and the “question of Mapam’s integration in the revolutionary camp” were at
the center of the deliberations at the conference. All of the participants
emphasized that world war was inevitable.12
They disapproved of the fact that the Israeli government headed by Ben-Gurion
had decided to side with the free democratic world. “We are cooperating with
this world [the world of the revolution], and we have no differences with it
other than the Zionist problem,” said Yaakov Hazan.13
Yisrael Galili’s statement seemed to indicate that the Mapam members tended
toward revolutionary action a bit too much. He warned the commanders of
“grave phenomena of members worried that we might be late in welcoming the Red
Army”. To eliminate all doubt, Galili said that regarding “assuming power –
circumstances are not yet ripe for that.”14
Major Dov Yirmiya, who then served as the
district commander of the Regional Defense Brigade, determined:
[In light of this] we must really become a revolutionary party.
We must clarify certain fundamental truths and from now on each member –
including the party leaders – must prepare for the final battle!…We must
operate like a military unit and prioritize.
Yirmiya demanded that party authority be
asserted from now on as we “stop participating in Knesset votes – now we will
take over the government.”15
Shimon Avidan characterized Mapam’s
dilemma in more moderate terms, in a manner much more relevant to the
Israeli Left’s perception of military service:
The State of Israel is following a path of integration with
forces incapable of developing the image of a warrior, but rather of a soldier
who does his duty in the framework of his unit in accordance with orders,
which he receives, without attempting to contravene, that which is incumbent
upon him.
In other words, Avidan feared that the
soldier in Ben-Gurion’s IDF would be too disciplined and professional, and
would be unfit for ideological disobedience.
The Mapam Officers’ Circle
In a seminar held in Givat Haviva,
officers holding the post of regiment and
brigade commanders, and intelligence and operations officers participated.
Among them was that same group of correspondents which received the seminar’s
agenda – those who within a decade became high-ranking IDF officers and then
Chiefs of General Staff and senior Israeli government ministers. Yaakov
Riftin, one of the senior leaders of Mapam and a member of the Knesset Foreign
Affairs and Defense Committee told them that the party has responsibilities
“including actually taking control of the government in the Land of Israel”.
“A cadre of people who are engaged in combat is essential to carrying out this
mission.”
The senior members of the Mapam’s
“Officers’ Circle” – Yizhak Rabin, Meir Zorea, Dado, Avraham Yaffe and Bar-Lev
continued to convene as a party forum with the party leaders until after the
Sinai Campaign in 1956. Gidi Eilat hints in his article that the “circle”
continued to function in the army for many years thereafter.16
Ben-Gurion Confronts the Question of the Loyalty of Israeli
Communism
In light of the position of “Israeli
communism” regarding the possibility of conquests of the land by
“revolutionary forces”, Ben-Gurion anticipated that the dilemma – to fight
against the future invader or to cooperate with him – would lead Mapam to
cross the lines to treason. In general, the present day reader might wonder
whether a Soviet invasion of the Land of Israel in the early fifties was a
real possibility. Almost certainly not. However the members of Mapam
cultivated the Stalinist revolutionary passion among themselves to the point
of psychosis. They cultivated among themselves a mentality of a party army
besieged behind enemy lines. The image of the old, homogeneous, small Israeli
society changed quickly. A society, which reached the War of Independence
under collective, socialist dominance, was transformed with the arrival of
the stream of refugees from the Holocaust and the Arab countries, into a
pluralistic society of immigrants with the foundations of a democracy with
extraordinary vitality. The cultivation of loyalty to a
foreign power from the “revolutionary world”, created a pattern of alienation
and hostility towards the developing society.
Ben-Gurion decided not to enforce the law
against the Mapam underground organizations in the IDF and the GSS, and
against the private news service operated by Mapam. He chose the path of
ideological, political confrontation, as practiced at that time in the United
States and England. Paul Keckemeti in his article, “How Totalitarian Rulers
Achieve Absolute Power”,17 recommended a
similar course of action, a public struggle against communist bodies, which
threaten the democratic regime.
Ben-Gurion posed the questions pointedly:
And if the opportunity presents itself and the rulers in Moscow
decide to “liberate” the masses of Jewish workers from the oppression of the
Israeli presidents and to remove their yoke of “enslavement to American
imperialism” and decide to impose a “peoples democracy” in Israel like the
Soviet Army did [in the Eastern European countries]…What will be the position
of the “Zionist pioneers”, HaShomer HaZa’ir in that case? How will the
HaShomer HaZa’ir members in the IDF act? Will they side with the State of
Israel, which is “enslaved to American Imperialism” and defend it despite the
fact that it is only a formal democracy lacking “genuine democracy” and does
not have a people’s democracy…Or will HaShomer HaZa’ir, with its farms,
leaders and IDF soldiers…be loyal to Mapam’s declared policy – and support the
“liberators” on behalf of the “revolutionary world” in its war against the
enemies from without?18
Ben-Gurion concentrated his attack
against HaShomer HaZa’ir in order to complete the schism in Mapam. He knew
that the members of the United Labor faction – who were also zealous
Stalinists – were impeccably loyal to the values of the Land of Israel and the
independence of the State of Israel, while HaShomer HaZa’ir has a problem of
dual loyalty. This subversive activity in the army, the GSS and the existence
of a private new service – were primarily among the HaShomer HaZa’ir members
of Mapam. Ultimately, in the wake of the Mordecai Oren episode and the Prague
trials, the process of division of Mapam began (and concluded in 1954), with
Tabenkin, Galili and Allon leading their movement out and reestablished United
Labor as a separate party.
Ben-Gurion went one step further and
envisages the possibility that the vision of a “peoples democracy” will be
realized in a neighboring Arab country:
It is possible that this “miracle” will take place in Iraq, and
the “inseparable parts of the revolutionary world” among us, from the Israeli
Communist Party through HaShomer HaZa’ir, will rejoice and celebrate and even
exult in the face of that “revolution”. Let us assume that Syria and
Transjordan follow Iraq [B.G. forgot Egypt for some reason], and all of those
“people’s democracies” come to “liberate” the masses of workers enslaved in
Israel …-What will the knights of pioneer “Zionism” and revolutionary
socialism do then? – Will they fight alongside the “reformists and the
bourgeoisie” for Israeli independence as is, or will they join hands with the
people’s democracies?…In other words, who will HaShomer HaZa’ir betray in that
case? Will it betray “the socialist homeland in its realization”…or will it
betray the Jewish people in its Israeli homeland…?19
Unit 101 and the General Staff Special Operations Unit
This question remained latent in the
Israeli experience for many years, however since the Peace for Galilee War, it
has resurfaced in different forms. As early as September 1952, HaShomer
HaZa’ir disseminated a seditious manifesto regarding the extension of military
service by a half year. The manifesto addressed the “youth, students, Hebrew
youth and soldiers”. In it, HaShomer HaZa’ir asserted that the Knesset
extending military service is dictated by American imperialism and its plans
for a Middle Eastern Command: “Soldiers, learn from your brethren around the
world…who oppose war. Oppose the extension of service because it is
detrimental to peace.”
In 1953, Unit 101 was established, and
subsequently command over the paratroopers was transferred to Ariel Sharon.
According to pre-state conventional thinking, the paratroops with their
reprisal raids seemed a sort of “Irgun” – a unit outside the “Officers’
Circle” sphere of influence. Two members of the National Kibbutz Movement,
Hanan Samson and Zvi Sadan, who were in Unit 101 and participated in the
reprisal raid in Kibiah, were summoned for an inquiry before the Mapam
Security Department. When the members of Kibbutz Beit Alpha were about to
enlist into the paratroops, they were summoned for an inquiry before the
kibbutz secretary, Natan Shaham, who demanded that they not enlist into the
unit. They enlisted anyway.20 The paratroops
caused the Mapam leadership to lose control of the kibbutz members.
In 1958, due to security and intelligence
needs, a new unit called the General Staff Special Operations Unit was
established. Avraham Arnan, a former member of the Palmah’s Fourth Regiment,
who had been a member of Kibbutz Cabri, established it. “The Unit”, as it was
called by its soldiers, over the years became the IDF’s “spearhead” and was
shrouded in secrecy. It was also a social unit. Avraham Arnan created a social
surrounding of personalities from the world of culture, who were involved in
the internal folklore of “The Unit”. Dado was a close friend of Arnan’s. In
the context of his position as a senior officer in the Armored Corps
(Commander of the Seventh Brigade), Dado had no connection to the General
Staff Special Operations Unit, to whose existence he was not supposed to be
privy. Nevertheless, it is well known that it was he who located Ehud Barak in
the Seventh Brigade’s Armored Infantry Unit, and saw to his transfer to “The
Unit” under Arnan’s command. A detail of that sort, ostensibly insignificant
but it became public years later, attests to the fact that it was not
forgotten and was significant. The significance was – “the chain was unbroken”
– and thus the future IDF elite in the early sixties was developing with a
connection to the “Officers’ Circle”. It was Ehud Barak and Dovik Tamari who
years later testified to the extra-military, Palmah-like nature, which Arnan
introduced into The Unit.
Dovik Tamari, who succeeded Arnan as
commander of The Unit in 1964, said:
He had far-reaching vision, therefore he created an entity,
which in its first generation had characteristics of the Palmah and of the
pre-Kadesh paratroops…He was a product of the Palmah and it can be said that
he remained with one foot firmly planted in the Palmah, even in terms of his
manner. His is a generation, which since the War of Independence has fought
for its political existence – a struggle, which it has lost. It is struggling
for its social identity as the generation, which consolidated from the ethos
of the establishment of the State by means of the War of Independence. Those
who remained in the army were successful preserving substance and content –
people like Rabin, Dado, Shaike Gavish, Narkis and Bar-Lev.21
Tamari implies that in order to attract
talented youths to The Unit, it was necessary to grant them the external
characteristics of the paratroops, but to inject Palmah content into that
framework. Among the people with whom Arnan shared the secret of “The Unit”
were the writer, Natan Shaham, who just ten years earlier tried to prevent
members of Beit Alpha from joining the paratroops. Regarding Shaham’s attempt
to forge a connection between the Palmah and the General Staff Special
Operations Unit, Ehud Barak testified:
Arnan sent a intellectual named Natan Shaham, who was in the
Palmah, to write the history of the General Staff Special Operations Unit. He
met me and started to interview me. He told me that he has tracked the history
of the Palmah youths: The select few who shaped the underground unit, which
later shaped the nation’s security. And he [Shaham] said, “I am interested in
the manner in which elites are formed and in the manner in which they lead.”
I, at that moment, found it astounding, to consider myself part of an elite!
But there was certain insight in what he said. Was it the unit, which shaped
the individuals within it, or was it something else?22
What did Natan Shaham see in the General
Staff Special Operations Unit that he didn’t previously see in the paratroops?
Was this not an attempt, in addition to purely military considerations, to
create a new center of gravity in the IDF, in which the old Mapam “Officers’
Circle” will be influential? Most of The Unit’s commanders until the mid-80s
were members of a kibbutz as were most of its recruits. The senior members of
the “Officers’ Circle” sent their sons there. Two of them, Giora Zorea (son of
Meir Zorea) and Omer Bar-Lev became The Unit’s commanders (Dalia Rabin was a
clerk in The Unit). During the 1982 Peace for the Galilee War, The Unit reservists
sent a letter to Prime Minister Begin, in which they informed him that they
had no confidence in the Minister of Defense (Sharon), a distant echo of the
Palmah’s indecisiveness in the midst of the War of Independence. The Unit soldiers
were supposed to participate in battle operations in Beirut. An entire team of
regular soldiers, whose commander was a member of a HaShomer HaZa’ir kibbutz,
decided to refuse to enter Beirut for combat. The Unit commander reacted
quickly and threatened to discharge them from the army, and the rebellion was
suppressed. (This is based on the testimony of a soldier in the General Staff
Special Operations Unit, in a conversation with me.)
Netanyahu…You Forgot What We Learned Together
The phenomenon of the Unit as a
political-social unit, manifested itself in the most blatant and strange manner
in October 1997, when the former Unit member, Binyamin Netanyahu, served as
Prime Minster of Israel. Netanyahu’s well-publicized whisper into Rav Kaduri’s
ear that “the Left has forgotten what it means to be Jewish”, led the former
Unit members to place a full-page ad in the press condemning the Prime
Minister: “We cannot believe that Bibi was in the General Staff Special
Operations Unit”, screamed the headline, and the subheadline:
“(Yes we know that it is true) and
nevertheless it is difficult to believe that Bibi was once one of us. We are
simply unable to believe that a person from The Unit developed into one
capable of saying what Netanyahu said...” Then they address him directly:
“Bibi, your statement is totally opposed to the spirit of The Unit... You have
forgotten everything we learned together, you have forgotten what it means to
be in The Unit.”23 More than a hundred
former Unit members used the name of the General Staff Special Operations
Unit and their identity as reserve soldiers in it as an opposition instrument,
as if it were a branch of the Labor Youth.
That ad was an integral part of the
process of regression to the patterns of the old “Israeli communism”, a
process whose beginnings were at the end of the War of Attrition in 1970 and
after the Yom Kippur War. It received its greatest impetus in the wake of the
1977 change in government. In 1970, some HaShomer HaZa’ir students, among them
the son of one of the Mapam ministers, Shmulik Shemtov, were among the
initiators of the famous “Letter of the High School Seniors”, which shook up
the country. The letter came immediately after Prime Minister Golda Meir
prohibited Nahum Goldmann from travelling to Cairo to meet with President Gamal
Abd-al-Nasser. The spokesmen for the group, which numbered 54 youths, most
from Jerusalem, due to their connection with the Left elite during that
period, benefited from a quick reaction by the press and extensive coverage.
In addition to Shmulik Shemtov, Eran Patenkin, son of Professor Patenkin, and
Kobi Tor, were conspicuous.
Patterns of Refusal Have Remained Unchanged Since Then
The “Seniors”, employing a formula which
has since become the norm among political youth groups, wrote:
We, a group of high school students, on the brink of enlistment
into the IDF, protest the government policy in the Goldmann-Nasser matter.
Until now, we believed that we were going to fight for three years because
there was no alternative. After this episode – we have proof that even when
there is an alternative, no matter how improbable, it is ignored. As a result,
we and many others, are considering how to fight a perpetual war with no
future, while our government directs its policies in a manner that the chances
for peace are wasted...24
This was a direct continuation of the
Mapam manifesto, disseminated in 1952, the year that those twelfth-graders
were born. In the context of political psychological warfare, the “Letter of
the High School Seniors” was a precise surgical bomb. The identity of the
leaders of the group indicates a guiding political, organizational hand.
The IDF at that time was under the
control of the Mapam “Officers’ Circle”, whose prestige was severely
compromised three years later in the Yom Kippur War. Avraham Arnan, who was
then an IDF brigadier-general, encouraged Moti Ashkenazi in the protest
movement, which he organized against Defense Minister Moshe Dayan. Yizhak
Rabin, the most senior of the members of the “Circle”, became Prime Minister.
While he was still a minister in Golda’s government, he demanded to send the
Agranat Report back to its commission, because the report harmed Dado and left the
“political echelon”, i.e. Dayan, unscathed. In the wake of the Yom Kippur
calamity and the 1977 change of government, when the Labor movement lost
control of the government for the first time in the nation’s history, all of
the opposition factions – the Labor Party, Meretz and the Communist Party –
joined together under one organizational roof, which has now become
identity-defining: The “Left”. The organization of the common front became the
Peace Now movement, which reached its peak when it united all of the factions
in a mass rally in September 1982, after the massacre in Sabra and Shatilla.
The Palmah was transferred to the command of “a prime minister named Begin”,
and the feeling was, as Yaakov Hazan prophesied 30 years earlier, that it was
intolerable.
Peace Now – Mapam’s Successor
The worldview of the socio-political camp
supporting Peace Now has become polarized to the same degree that it was in
the early fifties. The writer, Amos Oz, the most articulate and authentic
spokesman of the Israeli Left at that time, expressed this in a long article
published in The New York Times.25 Oz
analyzed how Israeli society had been transformed from an exemplary,
egalitarian society to a chauvinist, nationalist, clerical and primitive
society for which the invasion of Lebanon is a natural part of its world. He
describes the founders of the socialist society created in the Land of Israel
during the first half of the twentieth century as revolutionaries, romantics,
utopians, dreamers and men of action who emerged from the pages of Micah and
Amos in the Bible, and reached the Land of Israel through the novels of
Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Turgenev. However, with the establishment of the
State “the first signs of the existence of ‘pockets of capitalism’, which
began beneath the surface with the arrival of anti-socialist Jewish
immigrants”, became apparent.
Oz wrote:
In brief, Israel could have been an exemplary, open, polemic,
involved society with unique values…a miniature laboratory of democratic
socialism – or as the older generation would say, “a light unto the nations”.
However, just as everything was prepared for the development of that sort of
society, a crisis came about.
What was the crisis, which caused the
original, exemplary Israeli society to go off track, with the establishment of
the State of Israel?
Why didn’t Israel develop into the most egalitarian, most
creative and most social-democratic society in the universe? [Oz asks and
answers:] I would say that one of the most significant causes was the mass
immigration of Holocaust survivors; east-European Jews and just plain
anti-socialist Zionists…The Holocaust influenced many Jews…[toward] a
pessimistic attitude regarding the use of military force.
Yesh Gvul: Between Hadash and the Israeli Left
The “Yesh Gvul” movement, which was an
organization designed to unite the anti-Zionist, openly communist Hadash and
the agnostic Israeli Left, was established on the basis of the Left’s feelings
of alienation and hostility towards Israeli society, adeptly expressed by Amos
Oz. The beginnings of the “Yesh Gvul” phenomenon appeared as early as 1979 in
what was then characterized as the “Letter of the Hundred”. Some of those who
organized the “Letter of the Hundred”, were, three years later, among the
founders of “Yesh Gvul”. A large portion of the signatures were gathered from
the bloc of HaShomer HaZa’ir kibbutzim, Kerem Shalom and Magen, and the Hebrew
University. The primary message was: Refusal to report for reserve duty to
guard the settlements.26 With the March 7,
1978 officers’ letter, which was the founding event of Peace Now, there was a
latent threat of draft refusal as in the letter of the twelfth graders in
1970; “Yesh Gvul” collected the signatures of reserve soldiers and officers
on an explicit declaration of refusal to serve in Lebanon. Two senior officers
in active service, Colonel Eli Geva and Brigadier-General Amram Mitzna, issued
personal declarations of refusal.
Brigadier-General Mitzna wrote to his superiors:
Under the circumstances, which have developed in the wake of
the recent events (Sabra and Shatilla), I have reached the conclusion that I
can no longer continue to execute my duties. I no longer have confidence in
the echelon responsible for the army…I feel that I will be able to return to
the army after the Defense Minister resigns.27
It was easy for “Yesh Gvul” to recruit
those who refused to serve in Lebanon, however in 1988, after the outbreak of
the intifada in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, they believed that the conditions
were ripe for an additional extreme step – “refusal to serve in the
territories”. Conspicuous in the movement’s leading group were youths from a
communist family background, like Sinai Patar, but there were also HaShomer
HaZa’ir products like Yoav Hess.28 There was
also Michael Warshavsky (Mikado), who was convicted in the “Derech Hanizoz”
episode, which had ties with the Naif Hawatmeh’s Democratic Front terrorist
organization. The “Yesh Gvul” people delivered their message by means of a
“Reservist’s Letter”, which said:
The intifada in the territories and its brutal suppression by
the army clearly prove the terrible price exacted by the continued occupation…
We hereby declare that we will refuse to take part in the suppression of the
intifada and the rebellion in the occupied territories.29
Among the young members of “Yesh Gvul”,
the image of one rather old man, who accompanied their activities as a sort of
father figure and continues to participate in their demonstrations even today
at age 85, was conspicuous. It is the very same Dov Yirmiya, who in the early
1950s, while still in uniform, called to take over the government by force.
Then there was anxious expectation of the meeting with the “revolutionary
world” in the guise of the liberation forces of the Red Army; today it is a
different “revolutionary world” – the “Palestinian revolution”, conducting a
“popular war” against “Zionist colonialism” and the “occupation”. It appears
that the renewed confrontation between the Jewish state and the “revolutionary
world”, this time in its Palestinian manifestation, is once again situating
significant parts of the Left before the loyalty dilemma put in place by
Ben-Gurion 50 years ago.
Ideological Delinquency
“Loyalty” in this context must be understood not only in
its narrow security sense but also in the dimensions of sustaining democracy
and the rule of law.
Supreme Court Justice Yizhak Zamir said:
The State of Israel, more than other countries, must deal with
the widespread phenomenon of ideological delinquency. Under Israel’s
circumstances, it is a particularly dangerous threat. Is there any
justification to expose Israel to a threat of that sort? In my opinion there
is no such justification…those same people who refuse to serve in the
territories for reasons of conscience, or for reasons of social or political
philosophy…if they wish to sustain it [the State of Israel] as a democratic
country, they must not expose it to an additional danger – the danger involved
in ideological delinquency.30
It is doubtful whether Justice Zamir and
the first Prime Minister entertained the possibility that undermining
democracy and rendering the Israeli system of justice ineffective are
precisely the objectives, which those signing letters and agreements outside
the national consensus, are striving to achieve. According to Stephen Possony,
the primary objective of the strategy of the “popular war” is to bring the
opponent to political, moral and economic bankruptcy. In a practical sense,
the intention is to create conditions in the target country which will
undercut the effectiveness and the efficiency of the government, to disrupt to
whatever degree possible, its ability to rule and to undermine its authority.31
The actions of Yossi Beilin and his
people in Geneva in early December 2003, is a classic example of that sort of
action. It challenges the rule of law in the country, in the knowledge that
the law enforcement system in Israel is not strong and confident enough in
order to exercise the law against them. This attack against the rule of law
and the government’s legal authority constitutes, therefore, an attack against
Israeli democracy, and it should be seen as coordinated with the PLO’s combat
strategy against the state of Israel.
Endnotes
|
1 |
S. Possony, “Communist Psychological Warfare”, Orbis
Volume 1, Spring 1957, No. 1. |
|
2 |
Haaretz, October 8, 2003. |
|
3 |
S.S. Yariv, The Communism of HaShomer HaZa’ir, p.
47. |
|
4 |
Gidi Eilat, They Cannot Do It Without Us, Yad Yaari,
March 2000, p. 93. |
|
5 |
Eilat, “The Security Party –1948-1956”, ibid, p. 94. |
|
6 |
R. Safri, We Have Lost All That Is Dear To Us, p.
48. |
|
7 |
Eilat, ibid, p. 97. |
|
8 |
Eilat, ibid, p. 105. |
|
9 |
Zeev Zahor, Hazan, A Life Movement, Ben-Zvi
Publishers, 1998. |
|
10 |
Eilat, ibid, p. 112. |
|
11 |
Eilat, ibid, p. 118. |
|
12 |
Eilat, ibid, p. 120. |
|
13 |
Eilat, ibid, p. 121. |
|
14 |
Eilat, ibid, p. 121. |
|
15 |
Eilat, ibid, p. 122. |
|
16 |
Eilat, ibid, p. 126. |
|
17 |
It was published in the pamphlet, “The New Red
Anti-Semitism”, published in Commentary, 1953. |
|
18 |
Eilat, ibid, p. 81. |
|
19 |
Eilat, ibid, p. 83. |
|
20 |
Gadi Lans, member of Beit Alpha, in a conversation with me,
1989. |
|
21 |
In a conversation with me for the purposes of preparing an
article about Avraham Arnan, Makor Rishon, May 5, 2002. |
|
22 |
An interview with Connie Brook, New Yorker, April
17, 2000. |
|
23 |
Maariv, October 28, 1997. |
|
24 |
Haaretz, April 30, 1970. |
|
25 |
The New York Times, July 11, 1982. |
|
26 |
Noam Ziv, in a conversation with me, October 15, 2003. |
|
27 |
Makor Rishon, October 3, 2003. |
|
28 |
In a conversation with me, October 9, 2003. |
|
29 |
Makor Rishon, October 3, 2003. |
|
30 |
On Democracy and Obedience,
Siman Kria Books, An anthology edited by Yishai Menuhin, p.118. |
|
31 |
Yoel Fishman, “The PLO’s Popular War”, Nativ,
Edition 95, November 2003, p. 6. |
