DAVID TWERSKY
585
As our confusion about the war grew-as we realized that,
alongside the "why-we-went-in-we-knew" there was a "why we
didn't know"-the debates began. The Lebanese issue, the war,
even the welcome decline in the power of the PLO, cannot be sepa–
rated from overall political strategy. This is the first war since the
Likud took power five years ago; it is the first war whose unclear
aims hid a political agenda; it is the first war in which there was no
immediate military threat to Israel. It is the first war in the five years
since the Likud agreed upon the minimum "red line" above which
the nation would be prepared to go to war. This is no abstract propo–
sition in Israel; it deeply affects every family, every neighborhood,
every town and kibbutz. Three hundred Israeli dead is close to
twenty-five thousand in American terms. America lost fifty thou–
sand in Vietnam over ten years; Israel lost the equivalent of more
than half that in Lebanon in a few weeks. The Begin government
has stretched the consensus to the breaking point by upping the min–
imum, an Israel secure and at peace, to a maximum of annexing the
West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Whatever the merits of the cases for
or against annexation-and I for one am unwilling to annex the
heavily populated Arab heartlands of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza
even if world public opinion were in favor-if roughly half the body
politic opposes annexation, no Israeli governmeLt i'as the moral
right to force the issue, because it leads to war. And
in
lsrael, to take
responsibility for a war means to be able to look the widows and
aggrieved parents and children in the eye when you tell them their
husband or son or father isn't coming back. That is why Colonel Eli
Geva resigned his commission. For sending men to die when there
are political alternatives, even when the objective-breaking the
PLO's power-seems justifiable, is a greater crime than when the
alternative is national suicide, as in June 1967 or October 1973.
Hence the acrimonious debate within Israel, which began sev–
eral weeks after the war. The criticisms are fashioned out of two
strains, one political and one existential. The political emphasizes
that the real solution to the Israel-Palestine dispute lies in a reparti–
tion of western
Palestineleretz yisrael
between the two nations, and
not in a strategy of war and annexation. The existential strain
emphasizes that it is beyond the rules to send men to war unless
there are no alternatives. The old slogan,
ein breira,
there's no alter–
native, has slipped out of the political lexicon.
Begin, defending himself against charges of excessive violence
against Lebanese civilians, explained that the PLO had holed up in
