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Eating away our innards

By Doron Rosenblum

Remember the fable of the thin, sleek fox who enters a vineyard through a hole in the fence?.After gorging himself greedily on the grapes, he finds that he has become too fat to use the same hole to get out again. His only recourse is to starve himself and wait until his normal size returns. Only after he loses everything he gained by going in is he able to pass back through the hole in the fence and regain his freedom.

This week, a scrawny, gloomy Israel crawled back through the Lebanese fence with a metabolism somewhat inferior to the one with which it entered.

What did we gain from all those wasted years, from all the needless bloodshed, from the hundreds of lives lost? Decades of security geniuses have left us, in the final analysis, with a pro-Iranian military organization, Hezbollah, sitting on the very edge of our Northern Highway. They have left us without an ounce of stamina. No one, I think, has the faintest idea what we gained.

However, unlike the fox, who at least learned his lesson and resolved never, ever to return to that vineyard, we are quite prepared to repeat the whole process again, and again, ad infinitum. In any case, that's the impression created by the gutsy prophecies we've been hearing this week immediately after we pulled out of Lebanon.

These prophecies are remarkably and bizarrely similar to the delusions that sent us into Lebanon in the first place - a mixture of hysteria, threats, fragility and an addiction to excessive responses.

However, let us we recall why and how we entered Lebanon 18 years ago. One reason for sending the troops to Lebanon was emotional - to "erase the trauma of the Yom Kippur War" as Prime Minister Menachem Begin put it at the time. If we recall the how and why, we can only conclude that psychologically, we have returned to Square One.

The proof is that after all the pointless agony we endured on Lebanon's soil for two decades, our generals and evening newspapers are now asking how will we erase "the trauma of our withdrawal."

Here you have Israel's military history in a nutshell - shuttling from one trauma to the next.

Hence it is not at all surprising that the vision of the next episode of infrastructure-bashing in Lebanon - an apocalpytic, liberating, redeeming act of pulverizing that will allow us to vent our revenge and to "recover our lost pride," just one more time of course - is not just a threat. It is, in our eyes at least, our sole source of comfort and encouragement.

Who the hell needs the fables of Krylov or La Fontaine when we have opposition leader Ariel Sharon - a fable and its moral lesson all rolled into one frame? This week, he performed the incredible act of caricaturing himself, standing beside the exact same fence through which, as defense minister, he sent Israel Defense Forces into Lebanon.

In the very same trance that has accompanied him for four decades, he shouts, almost choked with the emotion of it: "We must launch strikes against Lebanon's infrastructure! We must do so immediately! We must not wait even one second longer!"

(He used almost the same words when he gave Prime Minister Ehud Barak his very bad advice two months ago about pulling the troops out of Lebanon: "We must do so immediately! Without any further delay! We can do it without a signed agreement with Syria!"

Standing by the fence Sharon screamed: "We must silence them! We must silence them! We must silence them!" He sounded as if he were desperately clinging to the very inertia of war.

"A war is going on right now! This is a real war ... we are in an emergency situation! We must not wait even one second! We must act immediately! Syria has many interests in Lebanon ... we must launch strikes against them! ... We must not wait even one second! Not even one second! ... We must act immediately!"

Sharon is not the only symbol of that peculiar mixture of demoralization, fear-mongering and saber-rattling which got us into the Lebanese mess. However, he does have the distinction of being one of the most prominent proponents of excessive reaction, the disastrous over-kill - that other side of the coin of fear and ghetto fragility.

This over-kill attitude - sometimes totally insane, lacking all proportion in relation to the provocation, sheer blind rage - has marked all our operations in Lebanon.

There was the capture of Beirut as a reaction to the near-fatal shooting of Israeli Ambassador Shlomo Argov in London. There was the banishing of hundreds of thousands of civilians in retaliation for every Katyusha rocket fired at Israel, there was the pulverizing of entire cities in the wake of every frustration.

This is the same self-overkill that has trapped us during our existence as a state - from the "retaliatory operations" of the 1950's to Operation Grapes of Wrath. It has kindled wars, turned minor enemies into major forces, and has caused two Gorgon heads to sprout for every one we chop off.

This over-kill attitude has been with us so long that, for all the pulverizing we have done, we have ended up pulverizing ourselves. We have returned from Lebanon, but come back to what? To a country whose civilian soul has been neglected, melted down and squandered in pointless wars, a civilian soul misled by generals and molded by violence.

People say of us that the only language Israelis understand is the language of force.

It's a statement that can be interpreted in more than one way. Not only have our policies been mainly knee-jerk reactions to force used against us by our enemies but, would we have withdrawn from Sinai if there had been no Yom Kippur War? Would a Palestinian state have been created if there was no Intifada? Would we have pulled out of Lebanon if Hezbollah didn't exist?

In other words, we are unskilled in that language of diplomacy where self-restraint, compromise, cunning equal strength and power are needed.

The other meaning of that statement is that understanding force constitutes almost our entire substance - the brutal use of military force has come to define us as a state. When the IDF pulverizes, we are in seventh heaven. When the IDF withdraws, we are in the depths of depression. What else pervades our daily lives so totally (except the hatreds and violence of our own society)?

A historic opportunity will be missed (as it was missed by Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres) if Barak in his hour of glory - his idealistic, courageous diplomatic initiative in cutting the Gordian knot in Lebanon - he does not fill the vacuum. He must supply an updated, civilian, Israeli-Zionist vision to replace both the mentality of the barracks and the khaki-hued world of endless retaliation.

Lacking such a positive civil vision, the only sound coming from our empty stomachs will be the rumbling inertia of the generals. It's as if we have no vineyard of our own to cultivate (and thus cannot heed the advice of Voltaire's Candide. It's as if the only grapes that exist in our vision are the grapes of wrath