DAVID TWERSKY
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it will have soldiers, statesmen, industrial workers (as though the
world did not have enough of those), and that it will not produce
a Bergson or a Spinoza, is only partially justified by the record .
Surely Doeblin and the "Prophets Without Honor" of the Weimar
Renaissance , not to mention the secular Yiddishist whom he quoted,
would have welcomed the Israel Defense Forces rescuing them in
Theresienstadt, or the Israeli Air Force bombing the rail lines
to
Auschwitz.
Still, the Israeli intelligentsia, the writers, poets, artists, politi–
cal analysts, the kibbutz idealists, are in opposition today. And no
single eve nt in the past decade has highlighted the deep rift within
Israel-not Dos Possos 's "two nations ," not that existential abyss,
rather a broken heart, that most delicate and slender of fault lines–
as has Operation Peace in Galilee, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon .
And yet, the PLO , our ostensible adversary in Lebanon, is an
easy enemy to dislike . The elimination of its military potential is
undeserving of the lamentation one hears from the strange Greek
chorus, standing just off center stage to the left, of international oil,
and the well-meaning liberals who sign the advertisements the for–
me r pay for. The situation is too complex to shout "hoorah" from
the sidelines-cluster-bombs of uninformed intrusion in the heavily
populated regions of newsprint and the electronic airwaves. Some
quiet and ca reful reflection, a cease-fire by the international chorus
as well as by the Israelis and Palestinians, is long overdue.
A Journey to the Trenches
Writing in the
New Republic
of July 5, the " Sunset for the P.L.O."
issue, Michael Walzer call s for a new "magnanimity" on Israel's
part , for an end to the fighting , and for "politics" to take the place
of "war." This notion, that the war had no politics , fueled by unfor–
tunate comments like that made by Chief of Staff Raful Fotan in late
May, that there is a purely "military solution" to the Palestinian
problem , is guilty of the very shortsightedness it seeks to address.
For Ariel Sharon, the architect of this war, has an elaborate design, a
master plan, a political structure the war is meant to serve. And so,
to suggest that what was at work here was "Israeli machismo," as a
recent guest at my kibbutz , a feminist professor from California,
asserted, a militarism run wild, is to miss the point.
