My parents visited the State of Israel in 1973 and came back with all sorts of knick-knacks and souvenirs, ranging from a camel carved from a piece of olive wood, to keffiyehs for my brother and me, to a couple of bottles of Sabra liqueur from the Tel Aviv duty free. What caught my eye, however, were the postcards: stacks of 6” x 4” cards bearing the images of the things that they had seen and the places that they had visited. There were postcards of the Seven Gates of Jerusalem, of the Shrine of the Book, and of beautiful sun-kissed bodies frolicking on the beaches of Eilat.
These were images of a highly-saturated, exotic land in brilliant Mediterranean sunlight, images that I had imagined but had never really seen before. My father had taken many pictures with his Pentax Spotmatic, but these artfully composed, brightly colored postcards captured my imagination. And none were so compelling as the three or four military postcards somehow randomly tossed into the mix.
I was a young boy of the early-1970s and, like my peers, fascinated with the technologies of war and the aesthetics of the military (much, I might add, to my parents’ distress). I collected the Ballantine Illustrated History of World War II books and built model airplanes, painstakingly painting them and apply the decals. I pored through a copy of Jane’s Fighting Aircraft intently until I could expertly recite the specification differences between the McDonnell Douglas F-4B and F-4E.
Even as the Vietnam War was winding down, the space-age military had great mystique for little boys like me. I played with Major Matt Mason and G.I. Joe and read about “Our Nuclear Navy” and “Tomorrow’s Air Force” in the issues of National Geographic that came to our mailbox every month. Steve Austin was an Air Force Colonel, and the heroes of The Aeronauts syndicated on the CBC wore the uniform of France’s Armée de l’Air. So I was primed to find the Israeli military postcards particularly interesting.
I mean, one even featured a McDonell Douglas F-4 Phantom II jet fighter, how cool was that? I also remember a postcard of Israeli women soldiers marching with Uzi submachineguns in khaki skirts, one of tanks on patrol, and one of a torch-light ceremony atop Masada, where officers of the Israeli Armored Corps were invested. It was all so compelling and fascinating to a young mind conditioned by reruns of The Rat Patrol on TV.
Looking back, however, these postcards tell me something about the State of Israel that I was not, and perhaps could not have been, aware of when I was a young child. The fact that Israeli tourist postcards of the time were as likely to feature killing machines and soldiers as beaches and historical sites strikes me as highly significant. I concede that the tourist world is full of postcards of the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace and the Musical Ride of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, but rarely of fighter bombers, armored vehicles, and marching khaki battalions.
My father later told me that they often bought postcards in shrink-wrapped packages, and this was how the military postcards came into their hands. But even this makes me stop and think: Images of the Israeli war machine were so common and mundane, or deemed so representative of Israeli life and culture that they were just randomly included in the tourist variety pack?
The State of Israel is, of course, a highly militarized society. Most Zionists argue that this is a matter of “necessity,” and have done so since before 1948, often citing the “bloodthirsty” Arab enemies of their imaginations and promoted in Zionist romances like Exodus and Cast a Giant Shadow. They really believe that the State of Israel is a “tiny embattled outpost of democracy surrounded by enemies” even though whether it is a democracy at all is a matter of considerable debate, and only one of its three major wars since 1948 was, in any way, defensive.* But old myths die hard, especially when they are at the foundation of identity narratives.
More than that, however, it is also a highly militaristic society. By this, I mean that Israeli culture is suffused with celebrations of the IDF, military service, and military life. Military service is not merely a requirement of citizenship, but also a qualification for it. When secular Israelis complain about the Haredi communities in their country, the very first thing that they mention is the Ultra-Orthodox exemption from mandatory military service, often saying outright that, because of it, they are not “real Israelis.” And there has never been an Israeli prime minister, apart from Golda Meir, who did not serve in uniform or in a paramilitary terrorist organization.
In the State of Israel, as Karl Liebknecht said of the German Reich during the Great War, “the soldier’s coat is represented as the most distinguished of all coats, the soldier’s honor is lauded as being of special excellence, and the soldier’s status is trumpeted forth as the most important and distinguished and is indeed endowed with many privileges.” While this might be said of many societies, including the United States, few since 1945 have elevated the military to such a level of veneration, or equated it so completely with citizenship and nationhood. Few other societies promote themselves to tourists with postcards of bombers and tanks.
The Israeli celebration of the military has taken on the ghoulish form of a death cult. The landscape is punctuated with memorials to martyrs of the State of Israel’s wars, and especially to Zionist terrorists who were killed in a hail of bullets or executed by British authorities during the Mandate. The memorial to Josef Trumpeldor, a Russian Zionist killed in a skirmish with fellahin in 1920, is a pilgrimage site for Zionists and Israelis, and his last words as he lay dying, “never mind, it is good to die for our country,” is a kind of national motto, on par with Nathan Hale’s “I regret that I have but one life to give for my country.” Never mind that Trumpeldor almost certainly never actually uttered these words, the myth of military honor leading to a cheerful sacrifice to the State of Israel has greater traction than reality.
Indeed, the IDF still holds those postcard torchlight ceremonies on Masada for army officers. The ceremony concludes with all of them shouting “Masada shall not fall again!” implicitly declaring that they will gladly sacrifice their lives for the State of Israel. Masada, after all, was the last stronghold of the first Roman-Jewish War. It fell in 73 CE when, according to legend, the besieged defenders committed mass suicide rather than surrender to Rome.
The Israeli ritual, indeed the whole mystique of the archeological site, instantiates the idea – for this is ideology – that the very un-Jewish act of slaughtering your family and then committing suicide is a heroic Jewish act. This, despite the fact that the incident probably didn’t happen. The story of it comes from the first century CE historian Josephus; not a single other writer of period even mentions it and, if anything, contemporary classical writers like Tacitus and Appian utterly delighted in relating stories of Jewish weirdness. The Israeli archeologist Yigal Yadin (a former commanding general of the IDF) claimed to have found evidence of the mass murder-suicide, but he had only found human remains (as one might expect from the site of a battle).
The truth of the Trumpeldor and Masada myths, or the lack of it, does not matter; they are only important as myths that promote the death cult at the heart of Israeli militarism. The State of Israel is a thoroughly militarized and militaristic society where fighting and dying for the Zionist project is celebrated not merely as the best way to be an Israeli, but the only way.
In his 1989 book Thinking About Peace and War, Martin Ceadal wrote that militaristic societies regard frequent wars as both unavoidable and desirable. Militarism “regards war as a positive good (rather than a lesser evil) and as essential for human development.” One need not even wonder then why members such a society would be untroubled about the deaths of 27,000 Gazans in the pursuit of an impossibly elusive total victory.
The State of Israel does not want a ceasefire or a permanent peace. Both must be imposed from without.
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* I exclude the 1948 war from this list. In the 1956 war, the State of Israel joined with Great Britain and France in imperialist aggression against Egypt and, in 1967, aggressively attacked its Arab neighbors, claiming it was a “preemptive strike.”
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My friend T’Cha Dunlevy uncovered a letter that I wrote to the Montreal Gazette in 1982, when I was teenager. It was my response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and I well remember writing it (on our family’s Smith Corona electric typewriter), and even more when it appeared in print in the Gazette’s editorial page on 20 July that year. The letter marks, in my memory, my irrevocable break with Zionism almost 42 years ago.
As I have noted before, while my parents fully supported this very public statement of heresy, it did cause some consternation among my extended family at the time. I know that this was the moment when many of my relatives wrote me off as perhaps “too clever by half,” or “clever but unsound.” It did not really damage my relationship with any of them, but it did leave many in something of a permanent eyeroll: “Oh, there goes Joe’s smartass kid again, what do you expect?” To some extent, I think that this letter haw inoculated me against most of their ire as I comment on the current War on Gaza. This is, after all, nothing new to them.
But still… “What if someone deliberately spills their coffee on your sofa?” My aunt asked the following Sunday in my parents’ living room, smiling in that way that kindergarten teachers do when they teach particularly slow children complex ideas with simple parables. She waved her coffee cup over the couch. My mother cringed, no doubt considering the exact same question as the liquid precariously slopped over into the saucer. I think I was supposed to learn a lesson from this example.
Over the years, I misremembered some of the context. I had thought that I came out publicly as a critic of the State of Israel in the wake of the Sabra and Shatila massacres, but I wrote this letter in July, but that incident, where IDF troops stood by and watched approvingly while their Lebanese Christian allies murdered three thousand Palestinian refugees would not happen for another two months. I might have conflated the dates because Sabra and Shatila was such a nightmarish horror, and in my letter, I seem to be expecting such an atrocity.
I also remembered the letter being more passionate and polemical, but I really seemed to be striving for some kind of analytical middle ground. Perhaps I remember the polemic because, in the context of the time, and of my still very young life, it was a passionate break. For me, this was the beginning of something. I had grown up in the cocoon of a kind of casual, unquestioning Zionism that characterized so much of Diaspora Jewish life at the time: The State of Israel was there, a part of our wider community, and we were proud of it.
The post-1967 Jewish world was saturated with all things Israeli. There were gift shops selling Israeli knick-knacks in many shuls, we did the March to Jerusalem every spring, and we all knew the words to “Hinei ma Tov.” Looking back, it was a strange time, when my synagogue Hebrew School hired young Israelis to instruct us in “the language of the Jewish people,” and the blue-and-white Mogen David was unquestionably a Jewish symbol that tied us to our homeland. We ate Jaffa oranges and falafel, really believing that they were “Israeli.”
I’m not absolving myself of that easy Zionism of the 1970s: I embraced it as much as any Jewish kid, fed on the exploits of the One-Eyed General and brave Yonatan Netanyahu and his band of heroes. But I must wonder if that explains the equivocation that I find so unfamiliar. This was the moment of my departure, the very beginning of my heresy, when the cognitive dissonance of believing in justice and in the State of Israel finally became too much to bear. Something had to give, even if I gave up on the latter with regret.
I also remind myself that 1982 was a different world. The First Intifada, which would make any return to the comfort of Zionism impossible for me, was still five years off, and the Camp David Accords were four years behind. The settler invasion of the Occupied Territories had begun, but it hadn’t yet become a flood, and there was promising talk about a “two-state solution.” Today, that world seems like a dimly recalled cloud cuckoo land, a wistful fantasy glimpsed on a summer day where moderation was not only possible, but desirable.
That is not the world I inhabit today. But this letter is evidence of a decisive moment in my life; a beginning. And I am infinitely grateful that I can today read teenaged M.W. Friedman’s plea for humanity 42 years ago.
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One of the things that worries me about the situation in Gaza is the relatively lack of reporting on the actions of IDF. This is certainly by design, and a consequence of targeting independent journalists. But there is also a paucity of reporting from Israeli sources embedded in IDF units. So, Israeli soldiers are maneuvering through Gaza like wraiths, with occasional sightings and reports of combat and atrocities, often whittled down to reports of relatively few Israeli casualties and engagements. It is weird: A void of darkness where we hear the cries of those dying under Israeli bombs and barrage but see little. The fog of war perhaps. Yet, some reports do get out thanks to those journalists whom the State of Israel has not yet silence. These are whispers of horrors that suggest, in their scarcity, even greater and more frequent horrors.
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