Deja Vu All Over Again in the Middle East
Israel & Hezbollah once more fight a war that can never be won in a place where I lived and came to love
Fifty years ago almost to the day, the peacefulness of my relaxed sunny and warm fall afternoon on a Colgate University study group at Kibbutz Shaar Haamakim near Haifa, Israel was shattered when the Yom Kippur War broke out. After the Hamas surprise attack on Israel last week and reports of the brutal Israeli response, I now know just what the iconic Bronx Bomber and gifted mangler of the lexicon Yogi Berra meant by his pungent phrase in the headline of this missive.
After reading as much of the latest news as I could take – the war I lived through in 1973 was way too close for immediate comfort, hence this latest blast of missiles and explosions resulting in terror, injury and death on both sides also feels too close to my memories – I spent last Saturday feeling unsettled and ill at ease. The profound immediate emotions evoked by by Israeli/Arab warfare breaking out before were ginned up from memory if not the deepest recesses of my soul.
Just as in ‘73, this latest outbreak represents a major failure of Israeli intelligence to detect the impending danger. There’s aspects in the nation’s character that wish to believe that its current situation, both then and now, was and is safe and secure. And fail to see how, in too many ways, the Palestinians are now like the Jews were for nearly 2,000 years – a people wihout their own country.
They also fail to fully comprehend how a repressed people will continue to rebel and strike out against their oppressors. And how it’s the sort of movement that the uusual means of might and warfare cannot battle against to victory. Witness “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland. South Africa during apartheid or the American misadventure in Vietnam for evidence of that.
Yom Kippur in ‘73 began as a glorious day, also the Jewish Sabbath but just another Saturday off to our atheist yet racially and culturally Jewish kibbutzniks. Much of the rest of their nation was in the shul all day, pondering, atoning and resolving to be better, as good observant Jews should on that high holy day. I spent my morning swimming and sunning at Shaar Haamakin’s Olympic-sized pool paid for by German Holocaust reparations.
At about two in the afternoon, I was writing an aerogramme to a friend back at school when I was engulfed by a near ear-splitting whooosh from above that rattled the one-story wooden dorm building I was in. Less than 30 seconds later another blast from above followed.
I looked out the window and saw some of my fellow students outside on a lawn looking towards the sky, and went out and joined them. As we gazed eastward towards a hill topped by the village of Kyriat Tivon at the edge of the kibbutz fields, another Phantom fighter jet from the Israeli Air Force field in the next valley zipped up over the rise, hugging the ground as near as possible to avoid radar detection, so close that as it flew directly overhead I could see the bolts holding the plane together. Then another. We watched them circle round and fire off back eastward towards the Golan Heights.
Not long after, the kibbutznik overseeing our group, Ezra Amit, dove up in a jeep. “Israel has just been attacked by Egypt and Syria,” announced the smart and compassionate yet tough Holocaust survivor and onetime Haganah fighter for Israeli statehood. “But not to worry!”
Sure, Ezra, whatever you say…. I retired to my room with huge flocks of butterflies churning in my stomach, my entire being suffused with fear and anxiety for the next half hour or so. But then – and I can’t even fully tell you how – I reasoned that if there was a missile, bomb or bullet with my name on it, there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. My fearfulness subsided and I simply decided that all I could do was go on with my life, come what may.
There had been some signs in the previous weeks that trouble could be brewing. It was now obvious some major shit had just hit the fan, catching Israel unprepared. The illusion that peace and security had been achieved was in fact a delusion that was shattered.
Over lunch earier in the day with a younger kibbutznik who was an army reservist, he acknowledged rumors of an imminent call-up. “They’ll probably ask me to report to my base in a day or two.” As soon as the attacks happened, a fellow reservist burst into his apartment. “Grab your gun and let’s go!”
Because Egypt and Syria were cagey enough to choose as their day of attack one when the majority of Israel’s reserve fighting forces were in temple, by dinnertime almost all of the adult men up to well into their 50s on the non-religious kibbutz were gone as the initial available responders to the attack.
After supping, some of my fellow students and I went out to the kibbutz gate and silently watched in the fading twilight as the seemingly unending line of troop carriers and truck ferrying tanks and artillery passrd by on the hghway from the outskirts of Haifa to the east headed to the Golan Heights. After sundown, from the porch of our dorm, we could see flashes and hear faint echoes of the bomb, missile and artillery shell explosions from the battle there.
I was experiencing something almost every American alive today has never known – warfare breaking out in a pitched battle within proverbial spitting distance of where you reside, in my case on that fateful day some 80 or so klicks (60 miles) away, or mere seconds as the missile flies. Sadly, too many others around the world have known the terror of war at close proximity (such as these days, Ukrainians).
***
From almost the moment the United Nations partitioned Palestine into Jewish and Palestinian territories in 1947, Israel had been under some form or another of attack until the nation’s decisive victory in the 1967 Six Day War, occupying the Sinai peninsula, West Bank and Golan Heights. The conquered territories gave Israel what was thought to be “defensible borders” that would provide a buffer against future aggression from neighboring Arab nations (excepting Lebanon). A feeling of “peace at last” pervaded the Jewish homeland other than terrorist attacks across the porous Lebanese border from Palestinian refugees in camps there, which is where Hezbollah first raised its militant head (a complex and related story beyond the focus of this post).
Israel when I arrived in early September 1973 felt like a nation that finally for the most part seemed safe and secure. From soon after leaving the airport throughout the hour or so drive to the kibbutz I felt a palpable energy all around me generated by a young nation hurtling hurlry-burly towards a dynamic and prosperous future as a first-world outpost in the Middle East.
When we passed through the front gate of Kibbutz Shaar Haamakim – where, interestingly, socialist US Senator Bernie Sanders spent time 10 years before, but has declined to speak about in public or to the media – it was like entering a lush slice of paradise, almost an Eden in the region embroiled in conflict, warfare and foreign occupation since the dawn of recorded history.
It only took a few days for me to become enthralled by the salubrious climate and natural beauty of a desert sprouting with green as Israelis cultivated innovative agriculture and reforested the lands denuded by ancient occupiers like the Romans to deprive rebels of places to hide. Though when a college friend suggested we go on the study group my immediate reaction was, “Are you crazy? There’ll be a war and I’ll get killed!” once I settled into my stay, the prevailing Israeli sense of (finally) some peace and relative security overtook me.
I contend that the Yom Kippur War was a critical turning point that launched Israel towards its officially militant intransigence on Palestinian statehood. Though I had come to love Israel and all but unequivocally support it from both living there as well as going through a war with its people, over time objectionable events like the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and West Bank settlement sullied my feelings. I became convinced that there is only one path to peace: a Palestinian state consisting of the West Bank and Gaza.
That notion has never felt more like an impossible dream since 1973 than it does now. Fears of the conflict growing wider are justified and obviously further troubling. Hezbollah has been supported, financed and suppled by Iran since its inception. It’s not hard to also detect Russian fingerprints on this latest Palestinian attack. I do find some small comfort that the decades-long Arab threat to “push the Jews into the sea” is mitigated by Israel’s nuclear arsenal, an open secret in Israel and beyond (read Seymour Hersh’s superp book on Israel’s nukes, “The Samson Option,” for more details) – one I am consistently perplexed to witness being ignored in media accounts of the ongoing Israeli/Arab conflict and the potential dangers to Israel of Iran becoming a nuclear power (if the Cold War theory of mutual assured destruction as a deterrent still holds).
I imagine I will be writing more posts as this situation unfolds. For now, all I can do as someone who believes in some form of higher power is say this in whatever passes for prayers from this born and raised (and very progressive) Episcopalian:
Shalom! Salaam! Peace! Please, dear God/Yahweh/Allah.
Amazing story! And I remember aerogrammes....
I have Texan friends who are Jewish and they did a stint working at a kibbutz over one summer, or maybe longer, when they were young adults I think, and one of them told me that he never felt healthier or happier or more relaxed and fulfilled than when he was living and working at the kibbutz. Those are models for us all, I believe, and we should imitate them. Imagine the good that approach could produce for American Indians, for example, who are trapped on reservations and ignored and living in despondency and dependency. Society should follow "best practices" and learn!