In my previous post I asked a question: does Hamas’ war crimes justify Israel’s? Apparently the answer is yes, for most Israelis. This article recently appeared in the New York Times. In it you find a remarkable insight into the Israeli mind:
The Israeli theory of what it tried to do here is summed up in a Hebrew phrase heard across Israel and throughout the military in the past weeks: “baal habayit hishtageya,” or “the boss has lost it.” It evokes the image of a madman who cannot be controlled.
“This phrase means that if our civilians are attacked by you, we are not going to respond in proportion but will use all means we have to cause you such damage that you will think twice in the future,” said Giora Eiland, a former national security adviser.
It is a calculated rage. The phrase comes from business and refers to a decision by a shop owner to cut prices so drastically that he appears crazy to the consumer even though he knows he has actually made a shrewd business decision.
The “public” argument of Israel has been that the war in Gaza is a proportional response to the threat of Hamas’ missles on southern Israel. I’ve stated many times that this is outright propaganda. Here we have a public admission by an Israeli official that the war is actually a disproportionate attack targeted specifically against civilians, with a purpose of creating a certain mindset amongst Israel’s “enemies.” Since by most accounts terrorism is defined as using violence against civilians to attain a political end, what Eiland is essentially saying is that Israel is consciously engaged in state terrorism.
One might find it astonishing that Israelis would admit this publicly. However, anybody who listens to Israeli military men and government leaders when they address the Israeli people, will be quite familiar with this mode of thinking. It goes way back. Here is an article by Amira Haas, written nearly six years ago, which shows how this logic was applied to justify the massivee targeting of the Palestinian Authority. The result of Israel’s brutality was not Palestinian surrender, but the rise of Hamas as the legitimate representative of the Palestinians. One can only imagine the negative results of the current mass destruction in Gaza.
The idea that the other sides’ crimes justify one’s own is a common aspect of war. Chris Hedges fascinating book War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, beautifully expresses this twisted mode of thinking. Part of what Hedges portrays is tribal insularity.
But there is a very specific Israeli aspect to this. Eiland is expressing a variation or perhaps a theorem of Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall ideology. Essentially the argument goes that the Arabs are fighting for their home and will stop at nothing to kick the Jews out. We Jews must use vastly disproportionate force with the Arabs to make sure they will be afraid to attack us. There is no ethical limit to the amount of force we Jews can use, since we are the victims. Anything we do is justified and so remain morally untainted no matter what we do.
The Holocaust just gave greater force to Jabotinsky’s ideology, at least on the side of moral justification. Nonetheless, for many years this mode of thinking was common only among the heirs of Jabotinsky in Herut (and later Likud). Most Israelis still hoped for some sort of reconciliation with their Arab neighbors. Even when Likud came to power in the Seventies, it was not because of this ideology, but because of the corruption of Labor. The first Camp David accords showed how even in (or maybe because of) a moment of apparent weakness Israel could reach agreement with its neighbor. Real world evidence repeatedly shows how the Iron Wall ideology backfires (cf. the first war in Lebanon). Despite this, the appeal of Jabotinsky actually grew over time among Israelis.
While Jabotinsky expresses his ideology as “calculated rage” (using Bronner of the New York Times words) it is in fact true madness, a futile act perpetrated by hopeless people who have lost touch with reality and with their moral center. This explains why Hamas suicide campaign helped push this ideology to become conventional wisdom for the overwhelming majority of Israelis. The popularity of Jabotinsky’s approach grows precisely as Israelis are feeling more hopeless and lose all faith in even the possibility of reconciliation.
The idea of Israel as a mad dog that needs to be restrained on a leash is another metaphor and perhaps a more apt one than Eiland’s. After all, what kind of terror does cutting prices induce and what kind of shrewd business decision is the shopkeeper really making? The mad dog induces a person to run for their life, which is exactly the effect Israel wants to evoke in the Palestinians. As for the mad dog, it is insane – not acting rationally nor in its best interests. Neither is Israel.
A few days after writing this post I found this via a Google search:
In his excellent book “The Gun and the Olive Branch,” David Hersh quotes Hebrew University’s professor Martin van Creveld and his pessimistic appraisal of Israel’s potential reaction to another existential threat (at the time the second Intifada).
If Israel were going to be destroyed by the terrorists, there was only one thing to do:
“We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force…Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: ‘Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.’ Our armed forces…are not the thirtieth strongest in the world, but rather the second or third. We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that will happen, before Israel goes under.”
Tags: Feature, Moral Equivalence, Nationalism, Propaganda, War Crimes, Zionism