Death and Sacrifice in Israel

Death and Sacrifice in Israel EYAL PRESS One evening the summer before last, in the fourth week of the war between Israel and Hezbollah, I had dinner at an Italian restau- rant in Jerusalem with my cousin, Ronit, and her husband, Aryeh, a commander in the Israeli army. Aryeh had just returned from Leba- non, his second stint there. The previous day, he had attended the funeral of one of his childhood friends, who was killed in the fighting. Somehow, the conversation got around to a topic about which Jews seem to be perennially obsessed, particularly in stressful times —where, in a world full of danger, it is best to live. “You know,” said Ronit, “if I could leave this place and live some- where else, I would do it.” The statement struck me as perfectly understandable. Ronit was pregnant, had a two-year-old son at home, and had spent many sleepless nights over the past few weeks worrying about her husband’s safety. Like many Israelis, she looked into the future and saw more wars, more conflict, more suicide bombings, along with the moment when she would have to send her children into the army. If offered the choice to avoid all of this, who in her situation would not be tempted? But Aryeh was having none of it: the only place where Jews could feel a true sense of belonging, he insisted, is Israel. Only in their own country could they control their own destiny, and thus feel genuinely secure. I mentioned to him that the Jews I knew who resided in the United States, where I lived, did not feel that they were excluded, much less under threat. “But do you think you’re really accepted?” he pressed me. I told him that I did. He smiled in a manner suggesting he was not persuaded. I tried another tack, pointing out that the chance I might be the victim of an anti-Se- mitic attack in New York, or, say, Portland or Seattle, was extremely remote, whereas the possibility an Israeli citizen might be killed or 125 126 N rar itan maimed by someone harboring ill will toward Jews in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem was very real. Shouldn’t this be taken into account? “Okay,” he finally conceded, “so you can live well in New York. But you live for yourself.” It was the last phrase that explained the gap between us. The gist of our argument was not about where it is safest to live. It was about what one ought to live for. To Aryeh, the answer was obvious: for one’s people, one’s country. This is what imbued his life with larger meaning. It is what redeemed, indeed made honorable, the death of his friend. It is why he was willing to go back to Lebanon again, even though when I asked him what prolonging the war would ulti- mately change, a cynical expression spread across his face: “Nothing,” he said, “it won’t change anything.” I could see why, to someone convinced he was defending a be- leaguered country, living in a place like New York might seem com- paratively bereft of purpose. But I was also struck by the assumption implicit in his perspective: that living for something larger than one- self requires special devotion to the members of one’s faith (as op- posed to, say, humanity at large or a set of abstract principles); that it is worth not only weathering certain inconveniences for this but, if need be, sacrificing one’s life. NNN It is common these days to speak of a culture of martyrdom that has taken root in large parts of the Middle East, a scourge that has arisen in tandem with the spread of radical Islam. The trend is, in fact, unmistakable. But the State of Israel has a culture of martyrdom of its own. The day after my dinner with my cousin, I caught a glimpse of it while sitting at a pizzeria in Tel Aviv, when a news report came on announcing the identity of the latest Israeli soldiers who had lost their lives in Lebanon. One by one, the name, the age, the home- town, and in some cases the picture of various officers and reservists flashed on the television. Immediately, the people around me fell silent; pedestrians who had been strolling by paused to gaze at the screen. Behind me, two middle-aged women stood with their arms eyal press N 127 folded across their chests, their expressions sullen. Only when the segment was over, when the last soldier’s name had been announced and the news switched back over to other matters, did the air of solemnity lift and conversation resume. On one level, the point of the news segment was simple: to honor the members of a society who had made the ultimate sacrifice for their country. But honoring soldiers who have perished on the battlefield is never merely about the dead. It is also about the living: about the place of sacrifice in a culture (and the particular form that it should take); about whose deaths are sanctified and mourned; about the uses to which the memory of the fallen are put. During the Second Lebanon War, there was much talk in Is- rael about how the spirit of volunteerism among young people had waned: that, in effect, too many Israelis these days live only for themselves. The problem was not that the nation’s youth were devoting insufficient time to, say, helping the poor (whose ranks in Israel have been growing) or participating in other socially beneficial activi- ties. It was that too few were growing up dreaming of distinguishing themselves in the military, of giving back to their country by rushing into the ranks of the Israel Defense Force. In the press as on the streets, complaints were voiced repeatedly that Israel had indeed failed to win a resounding victory in Lebanon not because the war was poorly planned and managed but because its citizens had grown soft, allowed their fighting spirit to wither, slackened into a nation “for which not many are willing to kill and be killed,” as the colum- nist Ari Shavit put it in a widely quoted article in Ha’aretz. Some even suggested it would have been a good thing had the kids growing up in the so-called “Tel Aviv bubble” seen their neighborhoods come under rocket fire: then, the implication went, they would stop imagining they live in a normal country and learn that it is their duty to fight. I put this theory to an aunt of mine one day. “It’s true,” she said, “if young people here are not willing to fight and die for this country, I’m afraid we will not survive.” She was voicing a sentiment that Israel’s founders began cultivating long before the state existed on 128 N rar itan the map. The first memorial book commemorating Jews in Palestine who died in clashes with Arabs appeared in 1911. Nine years later, on 1 March 1920, a one-armed Russian soldier named Joseph Trumpel- dor was shot and killed while defending an isolated Jewish settlement that had fallen under Arab attack at a place called Tel Hai, in the up- per Galilee.“No matter, it is good to die for our country,” Trumpeldor reportedly uttered on his deathbed, a phrase that would transform him into a national icon. He and seven other Jews who died in the battle were buried in a cemetery, on top of which now stands the stat- ue of a roaring lion. The cemetery became a shrine to Israeli school- children, who still make pilgrimages to the site. Israel is not, of course, the only country where martyred com- batants have been honored in this way. In Imagined Communities, the historian Benedict Anderson observes, “No more arresting em- blems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers.” Anderson notes that nationalism arose in the eighteenth century partly to furnish individuals with a sense of continuity and transcendence at the very moment when reli- gion began to lose its monopoly on this function, which explains why “death and immortality” have long been central to what he terms “the nationalist imagining.” Any American who has visited a military cemetery or memorial understands what Anderson means. But in Israel, the feelings aroused by images of fallen soldiers are particularly visceral and intense, perhaps because the nation is so small, perhaps because it lacks a volunteer army, perhaps because it has never known peace. Or maybe it is something else: the need that the Zionist move- ment’s founders felt to transform Jewish consciousness of death from a tragic to a redemptive mode, and to restore honor and dignity to a people who might otherwise have felt burdened by a sense of shame and powerlessness. The latter feelings derived, of course, from the fact that virtually every Israeli family could point to relatives who had died senseless, unheroic deaths within recent memory. In the case of my family, my mother’s older sister, Anika, who died of typhoid after the Nazis ordered the Jews of Romania to be deported to work eyal press N 129 camps, fell into this category. My mother herself was born in a camp called Yampol. Her parents survived several brutal years there. There was a black-and-white photograph of Anika, their lost daughter, on a mantle in the house in which I grew up, showing a pretty girl in a ponytail sitting next to a white dog.

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