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PARTISAN REVIEW
The invidious image of fathers sacrificing their sons began cropping
up in the immediate wake of the Six-Day War, and intensified in the
period of the War of Attrition between Egyptian and Israeli forces
(October 1968 to August 1970): a leadership waiting for a phone call,
portrayed as incapable of seizing upon the slightest crack of light for
advancing peace, prepared to sacrifice their young sons to the Moloch
of a war without end. Gyrating around that motif were such public
manifestations as the famous "letter of the '68ers" in which the sons of
the state's leaders upbraided their elders for not pursuing the cause of
peace with greater resolve, and the staging of the
Queen of the Bath–
room,
a political satire that triggered a storm of public controversy,
chastising the army and the older generation in general.
Of course, there was also the impact from the broader climate of tur–
bulence abroad: the 1968 revolt in France, as students rose in violent
protest against the establishment, and the student unrest against the
draft and the war in Vietnam that was rocking the United States. The
Israeli "Song of Peace" that entered history on that momentous evening
in November 1995 was patterned on a similar song in the 1969 musical
Hair.
To a much greater extent than the pre-1967 provincial state,
Greater Israel was now opened up and exposed to the wide world
beyond.
It
discovered Israel and Israel discovered the world .
Yet this protest was an authentic indigenous Israeli expression of the
contradictions between the established and younger elites that was man–
ifested in the profound sense of resentment and exasperation felt by the
young, no longer confident that the leadership at the state's helm was
indeed steering a course toward peace. As Amos Eilon had already
remonstrated in a 1970 series of articles on the "gap between genera–
tions and the gulf in credibility": "When you take from this nation the
belief in peace, you shatter something vital and essential deep inside."
But Israeli identity was still coiled around the armature of prepared–
ness for sacrifice, the obligation of courage, and the disgrace of evading
one's duty. The authors of the "letters of the '68ers" did not contemplate
the idea of refusing to serve in combat. American students were heading
north across the border to Canada, their Israeli peers ended their quan–
daries in the trenches at the Suez Canal. But this was the first intimation
of the tremors below shaking the consciousness of educated Israeli youth.
In
the public mind, the Yom Kippur War marked the defeat of the
Sabra generation. Moshe Dayan, the dauntless warrior, was emblematic
of all that was good and bad in that generation. He symbolized creativ–
ity and cockiness, courage and boastfulness, simplicity of manner that
could mutate to hedonism. He had a gift for improvisation that led to
