628
PARTISAN REVIEW
Yitzhak Rabin, the rugged and handsome Chief of Staff who deliv–
ered a stirring speech in the amphitheater of Hebrew University on
Mount Scopus, facing the inhabited land, his back to the desert, seemed
an embodiment of all that was admirable in the new Israeli paradigm:
fusing ancient Jewish tradition with the new reality, a brave conqueror,
yet compassionate in victory and sensitive to the sufferings of the enemy,
illustrious in battle but fully aware of its heavy price, ready for war but
desirous of peace. Never before or since was there an Israeli identity
more self-assured, more clearly defined and unequivocal.
In
the forge of the Six-Day War, a link was welded between those two
Israeli generations. The officers were "native sons," the enlisted men
under their command were soldiers raised and trained in the State. For
the first time in Israel's military history, fathers and sons fought together
shoulder to shoulder, but their responses to the war differed. The fathers
felt they were returning to the homeland they had known and loved in
their youth. By contrast, the sons were burdened by the perception that
they were invaders in a foreign land. The "native sons" were endowed
with a distinctive facility : they were able not to see the Arabs, be blind
to them.
Prior to
I967,
it had been Yitzhak Shalev's wont to accompany his son
Meir to the Notre Dame monastery to gaze together at the vista of the
Old City. This was part of his son's upbringing, a lesson in love for Eretz
Israel and Jerusalem. From afar, it was impossible to make out the flesh–
and-blood inhabitants who lived there. But, as a soldier on the Jericho
Road, Meir Shalev would encounter Arab refugees fleeing with their
bundled belongings. He also came face to face with the harsh reality of
the occupation-the kowtowing and abasement of the humbled con–
quered, the overbearing arrogance of the conquerors. For him, these
experiences expunged once and for all the dream of Greater Israel- the
land in its Biblical entirety.
Another young man from Jerusalem had an analogous experience, he
too was from the ranks of the sons of the State. Amos Oz returned to
East Jerusalem after the war: the city resembled new Jerusalem in the
west-the identical sky, the same stones.
But the city is breathing, alive. People live there who are strangers.
I don't understand their language. They're in their homes, their
shops and businesses, and I'm the stranger from outside . . . .The
city where I was born. The city of dreams. The city of my fathers'
longing, the yearnings of my people. And I was sentenced to walk
through its streets and alleyways, submachine gun in hand, like a
