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It’s Always About Choice

I was all set to write an end of year/end of century column for this week\'s issue. You know, the prospects for a future that looks exciting, but also that seems new and unfamiliar and even a bit threatening to someone over 40.
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December 30, 1999

I was all set to write an end of year/end of century column for this week’s issue. You know, the prospects for a future that looks exciting, but also that seems new and unfamiliar and even a bit threatening to someone over 40. And, of course, I intended to conclude with some profound musings on what Jews have learned these past 100 years. Stuff like that.

But then I began to read the mail and the manuscripts that were coming across my desk. To my surprise, the most intense editorials, columns and press releases were much more specific. They were concerned with Syria. Not with the millennium and our future in the next decade; not with the Jewish past this last, painful century; and not with any personal insights or recognitions that often accompany the closing of the books on a single year; but with Syria. Which is another way of saying with Israel.

Let me share some of the comments with you. What are we to make, for example, of this from an eminent political scientist and president of a foundation devoted to constitutional democracy in Jerusalem: “Prime Minister Ehud Barak is a military simpleton. That’s right, a military simpleton…”

He “suffers from the arrogance of ignorance, quite typical among Israel’s poorly educated elites…” and he “not only continues to release (subsequently armed) Arab terrorists, but is prepared to enter into an agreement that would result in the American modernization of Syria’s military establishment.”

Or this from a former Israeli minister and former director of the government press office: “The US Administration has claimed that Assad is a man of his word, misleading friends of Israel into a false sense of security in order to facilitate a total withdrawal from the Golan Heights.” This followed by a litany of historical accounts detailing how Assad invariably broke his word to Israel. But, he concludes with heavy irony, “Assad is an honorable man.”

These are just the lead tenors in a chorus of voices from Israel. We are it appears at some critical watershed; where significant numbers of Israelis are not convinced that they support their government’s policy.

The outcry is not confined to Israel. Gary Rosenblatt, editor of New York’s Jewish Week, wrote last week “that Yossi Beilin, Israel’s brilliant and dovish justice minister met recently with about 60 leaders of the American Jewish community in New York.” His agenda? To convince those assembled that it was in Israel’s best interests to give up the Golan in return for a peace agreement with Syria. Implicit was that such an agreement would include security guarantees for Israel.

His message to the American Jews was quite different from what they had heard in earlier briefings in Jerusalem. Namely, that today Israel needs to balance the “heavy price” of surrendering important territory against the possibility that war with its neighbors would finally cease. Beilin stressed that the gains were ” strategic, diplomatic, economic and psychological.”

But then, Rosenblatt added, “Most of those who responded to Beilin at the meeting of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations were skeptical at best.”

Why skeptical? In large measure because so many of them had visited the Golan Heights and listened to the official story in the past: Syria was a formidable enemy; intractable. The command of the Heights had been essential for Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. It was Israel’s key to survival today.

Now, the American leaders are saying, eyebrows raised, with nothing changed we are being offered a different script. That’s Rosenblatt’s account, and it is a most compelling one.

But of course (I believe) everything has changed, not just the words and the music. History has moved the earth beneath our feet and in the process has altered the shape and perspective of the globe, though not everyone is looking. The Soviet Empire has ceased to exist; the Berlin Wall has come down; South African apartheid has been disassembled. Some Israelis have discovered that today the price of victory in a series of Mideast wars, not to mention an ongoing conflict with terrorists, is more than they personally want to pay; and that the nation itself may not be able to survive further victories. Indeed, as the United States learned in Vietnam, despite massive firepower, ultimately there are some wars that cannot be won, because they demand unacceptable choices of action.

Recognition of this has led individuals to unexpected decisions. I thought of this earlier this month when a friend of mine, visiting from Jerusalem, talked about Syria with me. I would characterize him as an Israeli centrist, though more right than left, more hawk than dove.

So where do you stand, I asked him. He seemed a bit embarrassed. Politically, he said, I’d never give up the Golan Heights. But I have a son who will soon enter the army and, like every parent I know, I dread the prospect that he will be assigned to Lebanaon. I can’t bear the thought of his being stationed there… or that the sons of my friends might have to serve in that northern territory. So today I’m for gambling. Barak, after all, is no fool; no stranger to war and security. But, he had to add, it seems strange placing personal feelings over political ones in Israel. Happy new year. –Gene Lichtenstein

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