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Mr. Timerman that the invasion had liberated them from a PLO
reign of terror and an oppressive burden that they were incapable
of removing by their own efforts. They may want the Israelis out
of their country (along with the Syrians and the Palestinians)
but they are certainly well aware that without the invasion, with
its inevitable though tragic overspill of destruction, they would
have had no chance to regain their sovereignty, freedom , and
independence.
The curious truth about this book remains , however, that
Mr. Timerman is not really interested in Lebanon or in the Leb–
anese any more than he is concerned that Israel's northern set–
tlements are no longer in range of the terrorist bases and training
camps of the PLO and their accumulated stocks of Soviet weap–
onry. For to go into such trifling details, to acknowledge that Is–
rael had a real security problem, that Lebanon had already
de
facto
lost its sovereignty, and that any government in a similar
position to that of the Israelis would probably have acted sim–
ilarly-might seem to justify " General Sharon's War." That in
turn would undermine Timerman 's basic thesis-that the inva–
sion was an " infamy" and that its architects "have made the Jewish
people lose their moral tradition, their proper place in history."
Such sweeping judgments are characteristic of a book that con–
stantly judges Israel against impossible moral standards in the
name of a Diaspora Judaism that never had to confront the di–
lemmas of the use of power in the real world.
Having discovered in Israeli Jews "a capacity for cruelty
that I had never believed possible," and convinced that only the
Diaspora has "maintained the values of our moral and cultural
traditions-those values now trampled on here by intolerance
and Israeli nationalism, " Timerman calls on a world Jewish
tribunal to pass judgment on Begin, Sharon, Eitan, and " the en–
tire general staff of the Israeli armed forces." This is certainly a
strange call for a self-professed Zionist who throughout the book
poses as an
insider,
adopting the royal "we" at every opportunity–
"we Israelis" did this and "we" conquered that, to the point that
the unsuspecting reader might forget that this self-appointed
expert has only been in the country for three years and has yet to
learn Hebrew. Modesty, humility, and respect for facts are not,
however, Mr. Timerman's strong points, for his self-confessed
ignorance of Hebrew "is no problem," least of all in generalizing
about the Israeli psyche or about the abnormality, alienation,
