A Crash Course in Humility

When I think about it, I am happy that our national anthem, Hatikva, is about hope and not about rockets exploding or bombs bursting in air.

By ELIEZER YAARI
DO NOT USE - JER REPORT IMAGE (photo credit: AVI KATZ)
DO NOT USE - JER REPORT IMAGE
(photo credit: AVI KATZ)
EVERY SO OFTEN, I WOULD LIKE TO TALK TO YOU about victory. We Israelis, just like everybody else, love victories. Victories release special endorphins into our systems – we smile, we listen to music, we feel young again, as if we are starting afresh. For us, a good victory is the best revenge for 2,000 years of atrocities. When we are victorious, we believe that God is on our side.
We especially love our victories to be followed with grand philharmonic concerts, hopefully concluding with the resounding ta-ta-ta taaam! ta-ta-ta taaam! of Beethoven’s 5th. Or, if there is no philharmonic available, at the very least we should have a band that plays the kind of patriotic music that sends icy waves of pleasure up and down our spines, brings tears of excitement to our eyes, and delivers bursts of pride into our hearts. By the dawn’s early light, we are able to see the rockets’ red glare and the star-spangled banner waves over the land of the free and the home of the brave.
We want our victories to be fundamental, clear and utterly final. The 1967 Six Day War created expectations that all our victories would be nice and clean. We’d go to war for just six days and come home victorious and happy. And even though, ever since that war and as the years go by, victories are harder and harder to come by, we remained victims of our own expectations.
And so we talk about victories. Especially, I’ve come to realize, when we are afraid that we are about to be defeated, when we feel that we are progressing from failure to failure, when we feel we have no control over own fate and security. A victory will make us feel safe. And that’s when we look for a strong leader who will unyieldingly lead us to victory, planting our flag in the heart of the enemy’s territory and parading the spoils of war through our streets.
And we can once again delude ourselves into believing that we are in control of history, and not the other way around.
Unfortunately, Israel isn’t feeling very victorious these days. We are pushing our own backs up against the wall. In recent weeks, Israel’s ambassadors were kicked out of the two largest countries in the region, Egypt and Turkey, amid explosions of volcanic ash of hatred. The next stage is set to happen in late September, when the independent Palestinian State, within the 1967 borders, will likely be recognized by the UN General Assembly by a large majority. We can then expect the Palestinians and their supporters to do their best to make the Israeli presence in the West Bank illegitimate and unacceptable, and the entire world will reject any Israeli actions taken over those boundaries.
We are told that in the days following the UN resolution, tens of thousands of Palestinians will march from their cities towards Jerusalem and other Israeli towns and cities along the border. Politicians and publicists are already talking about the “tsunami of 2011.”
Government spokespeople will decry the double standard, bemoaning the fact that nobody pays attention to the heinous crimes committed by the Syrian government against its own people and against humanity, while the world media bashes Israel. They will plaintively point out that Israel isn’t the bad guy in this drama, that we’re not the ones who aid and abet terrorism and that we’re always ready to negotiate. And anyway, they will add for good measure, there is a global economic recession going on.
But no one will listen. The temperature in the political pressure cooker will go into the danger zone, and so will the need for the kind of quick and loud victory that can drown out the catastrophic effect of the UN decision against Israel’s settlement project in the West Bank, a victory that will be stronger than the condemnation coming from the rest of the world.
ISRAEL IS ALREADY WORKING ON PRODUCING THAT victory. Over the past few months, as part of the “Seeds of Summer” operation, the military has been preparing to deal with the tens of thousands of unarmed Palestinians, who are going to be try to tear down the fences and march on Jerusalem.
For the Palestinians and to the rest of the world, this will be a powerful symbolic and political action. But it is likely to end badly. Too quickly, the confrontation between the Palestinians and the Israeli soldiers will get out of hand and lead to bloodshed. Israel’s soldiers, most of them only 19 or 20, have been well-trained for the one thing that all soldiers everywhere are supposed to be trained for: victory. All soldiers are taught to use their weapons to kill their enemies. All soldiers are supposed to be hot-blooded and they are supposed to keep their fingers on the triggers.
Relegating the handling of the marches to the military can easily lead to disaster. Sure, at first, the army will deploy snipers and they will aim to shoot demonstrators in the legs. And then the situation will escalate and the confrontation between non-violent Palestinian protesters and a barrage of Israeli bullets will end the way it usually does: with dozens of dead and wounded, as the world watches.
And this is why, every so often, we have to stop and really think about the meaning of victory. For more than 40 years, Israelis and Palestinians have been engaged in a delicate choreography that must be directed in a language other than the language of victory. Since there is no political solution available in the foreseeable future, we need a solution that will contain the conflict. And a conflict between the victors and the vanquished cannot be contained for very long.
Every so often, at least, we should know that we must turn down the sounds of the marching drums and turn back the victory parades. Events in the region have already taught us that the tone and the beat are sometimes more important than the words and that words can kill. First Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman declared that Israel would seek revenge, but then, within less than 24 hours, he was running back into the TV studios to explain that wasn’t what he meant. But within that brief less-than-24- hour period, Israel’s Ambassador to Egypt and his staff had to be rescued from the hands of a furious mob.
It is time to look for partners, not for enemies, and those partners have become very difficult to get. For Israelis, these events should be viewed as a crash course in humility. The meaning of victory has been downgraded to simply not being defeated, and talking softly has proven to be the most effective weapon.
Every so often, when I think about it, I am happy that our national anthem, Hatikva, is about hope and not about rockets exploding or bombs bursting in air. If we focus on hope, maybe we will be able to understand the hope that the other side wants to feel. And then maybe we’ll recognize that it’s more important to get to win-win than it is to win.