Israel
In this third winter since the “victory” of the Six-Day War, Israelis face increasingly hostile relations with their Arab neighbors. Indeed, some Israeli politicians have discarded the term Six-Day War, and refer instead to the 1967 war, and the subsequent period of almost daily flare-ups on the cease-fire lines with Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon as the “Two-Year War.”
In such an atmosphere, Prime Minister Golda Meir’s visit to the United States brought a sense of relief and even euphoria; the friendliness of her reception by President Nixon and the general public pleased even the quick-to-feel-aslight Israelis. At the end of it, government sources insisted, however, that Israel’s positions had not changed, despite Mrs. Meir’s declarations in Washington and New York that “everything is negotiable.”
“Everything,” of course, is the Arab half of Jerusalem and all other areas occupied by Israel since 1967, and all of it is not negotiable. “Everything can be discussed,” one high-level official said, “including free access to Jerusalem and religious autonomy over holy places.” But, the official cautioned, there is “nothing new” in Israel’s current posture. Despite pressure from some friendly big powers, discussions of the final disposition of the occupied territories will take place only when the Arabs sit down with Israel to talk peace and negotiate real national boundaries, not just fragile cease-fire lines.
“We have to get ready”
But some things have changed in the past months. Israel’s “hawks”— among them a large part of the public—have stiffened their positions. Returning to Israel after a four months’ absence abroad, one could not help feeling that the attitude of Israelis had hardened.
Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, the popular general whose black eyepatch has made his face identifiable 10 newspaper readers throughout the world, recently analyzed the reasons behind the hawks’ growth, terming it “natural.” “Just after the war,” General Dayan said, “we expected the Arabs to make peace. The war had ended. It started when the Arabs blockaded and stopped navigation through the Gulf of Aqaba. When the war was through and they lost the war, everybody was ready and expecting to have peace with them. Now after two years and into the third year, people are disillusioned and say, what is going on here? The Arabs don’t want to make peace with us and we have to get ready for another war.”
The public’s mood is matched by a similar tendency among Israeli leaders, many of whom now outspokenly call for independent Israeli action to settle strategic areas of the occupied Arab lands. Several political groups call for outright annexation of the entire territory. Many attribute this to Mrs. Meir. In a way, said one veteran soldier, “Golda is the biggest hawk of all.”
He attributed this to what he termed the Prime Minister’s “oversimplification" of the strategy behind Israel’s retaliatory attacks on Egyptian bases along the Suez Canal and guerrilla camps in Jordan and Lebanon. “She sees them merely as counterblows, but these things are never that simple. We can’t engage in simple revenge. In the Suez area, lor example, we must make certain that we don’t hit sectors where we might kill Russian advisers, and there are many such problems.”
Mrs. Meir’s “oversimplification” and her constant repetition of basic stands—such as Israel’s determination this time to stand fast until the Arabs sit down at the peace table— often serve their purpose by broadening the audience for Israel’s case. Her visit, to Washington helped clear the air on relations between Israel and the United States, a friendship that was clouded early in Mr. Nixon’s term by the declaration that American policy in the Middle East was to become more “evenhanded.”
To Israelis and Arabs alike, that meant that LJ.S. policy would be less favorable to Jerusalem than it had been under President Johnson. When Israelis speak of “world opinion,” they mean “America.” With France’s two-year-old arms embargo still in effect and Britain refusing to sell Chieftain tanks to Israel, the United States remains the Jewish state’s stile source of supply for jet fighter-bombers and other weapons.
Increased defense, needs are seriously straining Israel’s limited resources. She would like a little “give” from Washington on the price she pays for military equipment, perhaps a lowering of the 7 percent interest rate on fifty Phantom jets already purchased and on subsequent weapons orders. Israel also wants economic aid resumed; it was halted by both the States and the World Bank some years ago when Israel graduated from the underdeveloped-nation class.
Israel would settle for an arms deal, depending on the timing of the agreement. But the Meir Cabinet would also like to keep the request for financial help unrelated to two other issues—some say demands—on which America wants changes made.
First, the U.S. State Department wants Israel to sign the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, a move Jerusalem has resisted, while vowing not to he the first to use nuclear weapons in the Middle East. Informed foreign opinion varies about whether Israel already has a small stock of nuclear bombs, but there is agreement that, with the present state of The nuclear program’s development, such bombs could be produced there within a few months.
The second point which separates the diplomats in Foggy Bottom front those housed in the sprawling “ tempo" barracks out in Jerusalem’s Hakirya Romeina is the question of a possible political solution to the military stalemate that has existed since the Six-Day War. Premier Meir and Foreign Minister Abba Eban make a point of emphasizing that the United States is not pressuring Israel to withdraw before a final peace settlement. But there is no hiding the fact that Washington would like the Israeli government to be more agreeable and openhanded about its willingness eventually to withdraw from almost all of the occupied territory.
Sources here say that there is no truth to news reports of another issue between the two countries. Some reports claim that Washington is extremely unhappy over Israel’s recent retaliation across the Gulf of Suez during which tanks and armored personnel carriers demolished all installations along a forty-mile stretch of Egypt.
But Israeli men downgrade the reports. Instead, they say, “there has been no American pressure or even excessive interest” over the heightened military activity along the Suez, the Jordan River cease-fire line with Jordan, or the northern frontier with Lebanon. The lack of U.S. protest is attributed to the Pentagon’s recognition that a community of interests exists between the United States, NATO, and Israel on the one side, and the militant Arab states, Egypt and Syria, and the Soviet Union on the other side.
American generals and admirals, it is said, differ with the diplomats “over what the real American interest in this region is.” NATO was already concerned over growing Soviet naval strength in the eastern Mediterranean and the military and economic penetration of Egypt. The fretting was not eased by the recent Libyan coup that overthrew a proWestern monarchy and installed a revolutionary regime which wants to close down American military installations there.
Furthermore, this view holds, the Arab states which are closely linked commercially with the United States —Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Lebanon—“are not really involved in the intense combat regions.” The United States, a highly placed Israeli official said, “knows and appreciates the fact that Israel’s actions are basically defensive and that she does not intend to go any further” into Arab territory. Washington also knows that the retaliatory attacks of September were intended to cool down daily Egyptian barrages which take a high casualty toll, said the official.
A big question, however, is whether Israel can live with a “war of attrition,” announced by Egyptian President Nasser last summer, at the current level for many years more. Each day brings mote deaths on the battlefronts and more funerals in cities, hamlets, and collective-farm settlements around the country.
But contrary to what might be expected, the morale of the teen-age boys and the middle-aged reservists who man the border outposts seems not to have flagged. A man who accompanied General Dayan on a recent inspection tour of Jordan Valley outposts tells of a visit to one infantry unit made up entirely ol reservists, most of them married with small children. Dayan, questioning each man on his background, asked how their families managed while they put in their annual reserve duty. One North African immigrant who now lives in Lydda and is selfemployed said he would take an I8oo ($229) loss during his forty days’ service. “But don’t worry,” he assured the Defense Minister, “well manage.”
The reservists—who serve a full stint until the age of forty and two weeks from forty to forty-nine—are a valuable adjunct to the hard core of professional officers and noncoms and the teen-age draftees, top military men point out, for most of them are battle veterans. During an Arab guerrilla attack across the Jordan River last summer, the machine gunner who killed most of the twelve guerrillas was an official of the Discount Bank.
There are virtually no draft-dodgers here, and college deferments are unknown. Only students at yeshivas (religious schools) are exempt from serving, lessening the available manpower by about 39,000. “Our youngsters want to go into the Army,” said a Public Health Service doctor, “so much so that sometimes it represents a problem. They often conceal physical defects or medical problems which they think might keep them out.”
Thus at any given time about 20 percent of the 2.4 million Jews are available for duty. And a growing number of Israeli Muslims, primarily Bedouins, and Druze citizens are also volunteering for service.
Given this spirit, engendered by the universal Israeli conviction that they are fighting what is literally a war of survival, the sabra (nativeborn Israeli) generals who now command the defense forces see no possibility that a war of attrition can succeed. One youthful commander remarked that “the Fatah don’t know what a favor they do us with their occasional successful bombings. They make us know that we must stand and fight, that we have no place to go.” General Dayan told me that he thinks soldier and civilian morale will stand up under the pressure. “We have been living like that for 4000 years, living like that most of the time with some hardships here and there, always some Jewish communities who are subject to discrimination and to massacres and pogroms and what not, exile. . . . We always had to struggle.”
With the security situation under a kind of control and relations with the United States somewhat improved, Israelis are going about their business as usual. The hum of Tel Aviv’s steady traffic is only occasionally disturbed by a bomb explosion. Jerusalemites, however, have reason to be a bit jumpy. Explosions are more frequent in the capital—recently about one a week—for there the barbed-wire barriers which once separated the Arab and Jewish sections are down, and passage between the two sections is free for ordinary citizens and the Arabs and the rare terrorist alike.
The political frenzy that seizes Israel s political parties every four years, which culminated this time in the October 28 elections, seems not to affect the man in the street. Many Israelis have equal contempt for politicians of all parties. The present government, a “national unity” coalition forged after the 1967 war, lost five parliamentary seats to the opposition, as well as its absolute majority. But the coalition is expected ter remain in power for the indefinite future, for its parties dominate the parliament, and have enough stray allies to maintain at least a governing majority.
The parties’ pronounced diversity, however, belies the coalition’s name; they are far from united on most issues. The story is told of a Palestinian Arab who during the palmier days following the 1967 war suggested to a group of Israelis that Jewish leaders had four separate opinions on Lhe Palestine question. The Arab was corrected by one of the Israelis who insisted there were forty-two opinions in the Cabinet— two for each of the twenty-one ministers.
A similar diversity of viewpoint exists on solely internal problems. The “wall-to-wall” Cabinet includes representatives of groups ranging from all-out soc ialists to free-enterprise supporters.
Old Golda
The nation’s largest party since its birth has been Mapai, the Labor Party. It is the party of Israel’s legendary leaders, including David BenGurion, Moshe Sharett, Levi Eshkol, and now Golda Meir. It numbers most of the country’s top political personalities, including Dayan and his principal rival for Golda Meir’s crown, Deputy Premier Yigal Allon.
Summer-long internal disputes within the Labor Party, primarily over Dayan’s threat to split and run a list of his own in the election, damaged the Labor Alignment’s prestige. But the tendency to stick with known quantities is strong among Israelis. “People here don’t like change,” said one member of the Knesset. The politician, an influential Labor moderate, added that “David Beu-Gurion [who resigned as Premier in 1963] could have stayed to the end it he wanted. Levi Eshkol [B-G’s successor] did. Golda probably will.”
But the ranks of the old guard that has ruled Israel for so long are thinning—“Golda Shelanu,” Hebrew for “Our Golda,” is one of the last. At seventy-one, an age when many people are well into retirement, she heads a country with three of every five citizens under thirty.
The emphasis now is on eventual change in leadership over the next four years. Deputy Premier Allon— who dropped from public view iti the months after Mrs. Meir won the battle to succeed Eshkol—has reentered the lists as Dayan’s major opponent. Both men are native-born Israelis, in contrast to the earlier leaders, most of them immigrants born in the ghettos of Eastern Europe and Russia. The two younger men—Dayan is fifty-four, Allon, fiftyone—share certain altitudes, particularly toward the Arabs, and both favor increased Israeli settlement in certain strategic parts of the occupied Arab lands.
But Dayan is a lone wolf who, even his own partisans say, invites attacks. Allon is more of a link between the older generation and the country’s younger people, and is more willing to compromise with the bureaucracy and political powers that he. During Mrs. Meir’s first six months in office, Allon, long a favorite of hers, quietly reinforced his position as a loyal party man. Dayan’s position has also improved, and his relationship with the Prime Minister is far better than it was with Eslikol, her predecessor.
The éminence grise behind the party, and a dark horse as successor to Golda Meir, is Pinhas Sapir, the Labor Party boss and a highly successful former Finance Minister. Sapir, who was Mrs. Meir’s “queenmaker,” reportedly was Eshkol’s choice for the top job. In spite of his acknowledged ability, Sapir’s reputation as a behind-the-scenes manipulator of people and power has damaged his public image.
“He makes me feel naked,” said one veteran of Tel Aviv’s political infighting. “Sapir knows the weaknesses of each man or woman—if you owe money on your house, if you want to buy a new car, if you want to make a trip abroad but can’t allot d it. And if you play the game, he often can fix it up for you . . . say, send you to a country you want to visit on a month-long official mission that doesn’t involve much work, or something like that. Like all Israeli politicians, Sapir is scrupulously honest. He lives in the same modest house he’s always lived in. You see him play with his grandchildren and you find yourself wondering if it’s the same guy you see playing chess with real people in the Knesset as the pawns. But he’s fighting for his life. He knows that Dayan is out to break his power, to remove him from the party leadership. So Golda must stay on as Premier while Sapir gets party support.”
Israelis seem to he growing indifferent to politics. One sign of this was the result of the Histadrut election in early September, when the voting turnout dropped to its lowest percentage in fifty years. Some voters switched allegiance to the smaller parties, particularly to the extreme right and extreme left, hut many simply didn’t vote. And labor’s vote share, although still 60 percent, was down almost 15 percent.
Party leaders fear that many of the non voters were young people, the new voters below twenty-five who find themselves governed by grandmothers and grandfathers with whom they share little except Jewishness and the same small country. The gap between the politicians and the restless younger generation is so apparent that even the “ins”—the Labor Alignment—now insist it is time for a change. One of Labor’s press ads pointed out the number of “new faces” which the parties spotted in their lists of “safe” Knesset seats, showing that more new candidates appear in Labor’s lists than in the other political groups’.
In the unusual electoral system employed here, each party presents a slate of up to 120 candidates in the order in which individuals will be seated. This year about 11,200 votes are needed to win one seat. Labor had 63 seats in the 1965-1969 Knesset, so the first 63 names on the list under Mrs. Meir are considered sure for election. After party wrangling that went down to the wire, 24 of Labor’s “safe” seats were given to newcomers and a number of veteran Knesset members ousted.
The system confers a great deal of power on the party, since the officeholder owes his seat to the party leaders rather than the voters. Several popular but independent Labor MP’s were ousted because they proved too independent and mettlesome on some matters. Only the oneor two-man parties actually hold the independence of vote that a U.S. congressman—beholden mainly to his constituents—can command.
One result has been a political leadership that fails to represent the people. “It s true,” says Hebrew University sociologist Rivka Bar Joseph, “that the Oriental Jewish groups are underrepresented in the Knesset as a whole. But that is also true for the entire younger group in Israel. The sabras are grossly underrepresented. And as for people from Western Europe and America—a population sector increasingly important in Israel—I can think of only one Knesset member coming from that group. Most of the Knesset membership is still from the old East European Zionist pioneers.”
Sweat
One of the overrepresented sectors is the kibbutzniks, the inhabitants of Israel’s unique communal agricultural settlements. Because of ideological conviction—all kibbutzim belong to a movement affiliated with a particular party—the kibbutzim have exercised influence far beyond the number of their members. The population of the kibbutzim is about 3 percent of the total population. After several years of standstill in their growth, kibbutz movements are again increasing, largely because new kibbutzim and settlements are being established in isolated areas and in the occupied territories.
There exists a certain amount of antagonism between the city dwellers and the haverim, “comrades,” of the kibbutz, who feel—perhaps rightly—that the kibbutzim created the new Israel with their sweat and energy and courage. Meanwhile the kibbutzim themselves are facing the new phenomenon of their sons and daughters leaving their homes to join the parade of Israelis from the land to the burgeoning cities.
The combined phenomena are bringing about another wave of examinations of the society and life of the kibbutz, rightly termed “the best known and least understood” aspect of Israeli life. An American educator, Bruno Bettelheim, is the latest social scientist to put kibbutz life, or rather the lives of the kibbutz children, under the microscope.
In his new study, The Children of the Dream, Dr. Bettelheim draws a number of conclusions about the effect on the child’s eventual development of the early communal upbringing. Bettelheim believes that the unusual educational method of the kibbutz—where children of each age group sleep, eat, play, study, and work together in their own houses, seeing their parents only at certain hours—has created a personality type far different from the children’s grandparents.
This conclusion would go virtually unchallenged. But many of his other judgments—for example, that kibbutz children are incapable of really deep attachment to their parents or even to friends—have aroused ridicule. One particular judgment—about the unthinking responses of kibbutz-raised boys during battle—aroused anger as well. The kibbutzniks consider themselves in the front rank of Israel’s defenders, both on their often isolated and exposed settlements and in their youth in the full-time service. Bettelheim quoted Israeli officers as saying that kibbutz sons “make wonderful soldiers in the sense of the Roman sentry at Pompeii who would rather die than desert bis post until ordered to. But modern war needs soldiers who try to survive the battle in order to fight the next one.”
Bettelheim believes that the fact that kibbutz-bred soldiers suffered an inordinately high number of casualties in the Six-Day War— 25 percent of the killed—bears out this judgment that kibbutznik soldiers are lacking “in that immediate and flexible evaluation, a spontaneous adjustment to ever-changing situations that make for the most useful soldier today.” These views are challenged by other officers, one of whom says, “Each soldier thinks he knows best how to do something. It is characteristic of the Israeli Army that improvements are not imposed from above, but by pressure from the bottom. Everyone has his own ideas; the kibbutzniks are no different.”
ELIAV SIMON