A Durable Peace (54 page)

Yet once the Jews were driven into exile and became a collection of dispersed communities in the medieval world, they were
gradually deprived of all the conditions necessary for self-defense. Although in the cities of the Middle Ages the Jews lived
in their own fortified quarters, they slowly lost the power necessary to sustain such defenses. Most notably in the states
of medieval Germany, the Jews were stripped of the right that others had to carry weapons for self-defense, despite the fact
that (or perhaps because) it was the Jews who often faced the most wanton assaults. If you cannot carry a sword, you soon
forget how to use one altogether; both the physical and psychological preparedness to resist eventually atrophy. Step by step,
the Jews were consigned to the status of a minority dependent on the protection of its hosts—that is, if the hosts were inclined
to protect it in the first place. In some cases it took many centuries for the Jews to be reduced to a level of such perfect
powerlessness. As late as fourteenth-century Spain, for example, there are records of Jewish armed resistance against attacks.
But by then, such resistance had become an aberration. The Jewish people had effectively lost control over its destiny.

A condition of inherent defenselessness necessarily invites aggression. This was especially true in the case of the Jews,
who uniquely combined economic success and endemic weakness, making them an irresistible target and producing an escalating
cycle of pogrom and displacement. Tossed out from one land, the Jews would find a haven in another, usually striking an arrangement
with the sovereign and the nobility only to be brutally attacked when their allies and protectors were toppled or weakened.
The Jewish people became a people that other people killed, often with relish, generally with impunity. A direct line leads
from the massacres of Jews in the Crusades in the eleventh century, to the mass killing in Spain in 1391, to the great bloodletting
in the Ukraine in the seventeenth century, to the pogroms in Russia in the nineteenth century, to the Holocaust in Europe
in our own time. And as the technology of destruction improved, the horrors became even more horrible.

The first result of the atrophy of Jewish resistance was physical destruction on an unimaginable scale. No other people has
paid such a price for being defenseless. But there was a second fateful consequence: Slowly and surely, through the centuries
of exile, the image and character of the Jew began to change. For non-Jews, the glorious Jewish past faded into dim memory
and irrelevance. The word
Jew
became an object of contempt, derision, at best pity. It became synonymous with the word
coward
in a hundred different tongues. The adjective
wandering
was affixed to it, signifying the rootlessness and precariousness of Jewish existence. Not a trace could be found of the
grudging admiration that the peoples of antiquity had harbored for Jewish courage and tenacity.

Worse, a substantial segment of Jewish opinion assimilated this disparaging image of the Jew, and many Jews came to view themselves
as others had come to view them. This took on a particularly pernicious twist in the modern era. As the doctrines of modern
pacifism emerged, many Jews rushed to embrace them, pretending they could transform into a universal virtue what had always
been a unique vulnerability of the Jews. That the Jews “would not” (could not) resort to arms, that they would not “demean”
themselves by “stooping to violence,” was taken to be a clear sign of their moral superiority over other peoples who were
not similarly constrained. Once leading segments of Jewish opinion in Europe had transformed Jewish weakness into a positive
good, the Jewish people’s chances of escaping its fate reached a new low.

Of all Zionist leaders, Jabotinsky was virtually alone in seeing where all this was leading. Throughout the 1930s, he sounded
the alarm of impending danger. In Warsaw in 1938, on the Jewish fast day of Tisha B’av (marking the destruction of the Second
Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans), he said to Poland’s three million Jews, almost none of whom were to survive the war:

For three years I have been imploring you, Jews of Poland, the crown of world Jewry, appealing to you, warning you unceasingly
that the catastrophe is nigh. My hair has turned white and I have grown old over these years, for my heart is bleeding that
you, dear brothers and sisters, do not see the volcano which will soon begin to spew forth its fires of destruction. I see
a horrible vision. Time is growing short for you to be spared. I know you cannot see it, for you are troubled and confused
by everyday concerns… Listen to my words at this, the twelfth hour. For God’s sake: let everyone save himself, so long as
there is time to do so, for time is running short.

But Jabotinsky also saw a glimmer of light in the blackness:

And I want to say something else to you on this day, the Ninth of Av: Those who will succeed in escaping this catastrophe
will live to experience a festive moment of great Jewish joy: the rebirth and establishment of the Jewish State! I do not
know whether I myself will live to see it—but my son will! I am certain of this, just as I am certain that the sun will rise
tomorrow morning. I believe in it with all my heart.
²

Even a year before the outbreak of the war, few could see the catastrophe coming, and fewer still could share in Jabotinsky’s
note of hope. For those who could see the danger clearly, the Jewish people was approaching the end.

A scene at the close of Claude Lanzmann’s haunting documentary,
Shoah,
captures this hopelessness.
Shoah
ends with the testimony of one of the survivors from the Warsaw ghetto. He describes how in the last desperate days of the
fighting, when the ghetto was being pulverized by the German forces, he was sent to seek help from the Polish Resistance.
Lowering himself into a sewer, he made his way through the German lines to the “Aryan” section of Warsaw. The Poles refused
his request, and after doing what he could, he decided to go back. He reentered the sewer and surfaced in the midst of darkness
in the heart of the Warsaw ghetto. He was greeted by utter silence. Everyone was dead. The survivor remembers saying to himself:
“I’m the last Jew. I’ll wait for morning, and for the Germans.”
³

His assessment about being the last Jew was not so far off the mark. In 1942, the rulers of Nazi Germany had met in a villa
in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to design the Final Solution. As was later learned from the Wannsee Conference documents,
the Nazis planned to annihilate every Jew in Europe, from Britain to the Soviet Union. They drew up detailed lists for the
liquidation of eleven million human beings, down to the two hundred Jews of Albania scheduled for destruction.
⁴
The original German plan dealt only with European Jewry, but when the Nazi armies reached North Africa, they began deporting
the Jews of these lands to the death camps as well. They, like the Jews of Russia, were saved only by Hitler’s defeat.

It seemed this was to be the inevitable consequence of the long, horrible transformation of the Jews: The sons of the Maccabees
had become the ultimate victims, destined to vanish from the earth.

Yet at this lowest of lows in Jewish history, the Jews were beginning to experience a second great transformation: They were
rediscovering the capacity to resist, a rediscovery that had begun slowly in the previous century. The huge citizen-armies
of Europe
after Napoleon had begun to train a Jewish soldiery, and by World War I hundreds of thousands of Jews were under arms and
fighting with distinction on both sides. In World War II such Jewish strength was committed to the Allied cause. But the most
telling sign of a transformation was occurring at the very bottom of the abyss itself. In the Warsaw ghetto, as in Treblinka
and in Sobibor, Jews were undertaking the most heroic resistance in the annals of man. In rising up against the Nazis in the
most desperate and impossible of circumstances, they were showing that the ancient thread that ran through the fabric of their
character had not been severed after all.

This resurrection of the Jewish capacity to resist had been fashioned as a deliberate policy only within the Zionist movement.
As early as World War I, the Zionists had set out to reconstruct, after many centuries of neglect, the elements of Jewish
military power, starting with Jabotinsky’s Jewish Legion during World War I, through the makeshift Hashomer units in the 1920s,
Orde Wingate’s Special Night Squads in the 1930s, and the Jewish Brigade in the British Army during World War II. From these
sprang the various underground forces, the Hagana, Irgun, and Lehi, which in turn paved the way for the establishment of the
Israel Defense Force on the eve of Israel’s independence.

With the founding of the State of Israel, the majority of Jews quickly came to understand the critical importance of military
power—a change far more abrupt and spectacular than the gradual loss of this understanding had been. For if the rendering
of the Jews from a militant to a docile people had taken place over many centuries, here in the space of only a few years
a reborn Jewish sovereignty rediscovered the art of soldiering. Israel devoted an enormous part of its economy and the finest
of its youth to the task of militarily defending the state. Much to the amazement of the world, the Jewish state was soon
producing fighters second to none and an army that proved itself capable of routing far larger and better-equipped fighting
machines again and again. Furthermore, in the war against terrorism Israel’s soldiers showed a demoralized
and paralyzed world that civilized societies could fight this scourge: In countless raids and special operations culminating
in the rescue mission at Entebbe, Israel proved that terrorism could be fought and beaten.

All this not only changed the condition of the Jews of Israel, enabling the Jewish people to successfully resist assaults
aimed at its annihilation for the first time in centuries. It also changed the image of the Jew in the eyes of non-Jews. The
respect for Israel’s military prowess against overwhelming odds did not necessarily mean that the anti-Semitic stereotypes
of the Jews were replaced everywhere and in every way; in some cases, the anti-Semites, encouraged by the Arabs, created a
strange amalgam of the cowardly, mercenary Jew bedecked in a storm trooper’s uniform. But notwithstanding these grotesque
distortions, most of the world was keenly aware that the Jewish people was experiencing in Israel a great transformation.
As in antiquity, many marveled at the resolve, resourcefulness, and audacity shown by the Jewish army, changing for millions
their conception of the Jews, or at least of some of them.

But the change in the way the Jews viewed themselves was even more dramatic. It had begun as early as the 1890s. Visitors
to Palestine at the time noted a change in the first generation of Jewish youngsters who had been raised on the land outside
the enclosed ancient Jewish quarters of Safed and Jerusalem. Unlike their Orthodox brethren, these young Jews, mostly sons
and daughters of recent immigrants, cultivated the land, rode horses, learned to shoot, spoke a revived Hebrew, and were capable
of befriending or confronting the Arabs, earning their respect if not their love.

A quintessential example of this new breed was the Aaronsohn family of Zichron Ya’akov, which gained renown both in Palestine
and abroad after the turn of the century. Well-to-do farmers, they received international acclaim through the achievements
of the family’s eldest son, the strong-willed Aaron Aaronsohn. Aaronsohn was a multifaceted personality: a talented agronomist
whose
experimental work was crucial in convincing many that the barren land could indeed be brought back to life and successfully
cultivated, a political thinker of great sagacity, a hard-headed organizer and leader of men. As such, he was totally committed
to driving out the Turks by helping the British liberate Palestine. He, his equally strong-willed sister Sarah, and a band
of young Palestinian Jews that included the colorful adventurer Yosef Lishansky and the sensitive romantic Avshalom Feinberg
organized an espionage ring that transmitted signals to British ships from the family’s estate on the cliffs overlooking the
Mediterranean. Each of these extraordinary figures of the “Nili” group, as it was later known, was to die tragically: Sarah,
by her own hand while being tortured during interrogation by the Turks; Avshalom, murdered by Bedouins in the sands near Rafah
while he was en route to British lines in Egypt; Lishansky, hanged by the Turks in Damascus after he was caught in the north
of the country; and Aaron, lost at the age of thirty-nine when his plane mysteriously disappeared over the English Channel
after the war. Nonetheless, the audacity and courage shown by these young Jews, the special spirit they exuded, combining
worldliness with fierce pride and an equally fierce determination to overthrow the Ottoman occupation of the Jewish land,
shaped the ethos of generations of young Palestinian (and later Israeli) Jews. It also influenced the non-Jews who came into
contact with them, most notably the remarkable Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen (described in
Chapter 2
), who as General Allenby’s
intelligence officer worked with Aaronsohn’s group and as a result reversed his previous opinion of the Jews.

This essential transformation of the Jew occurred with great rapidity on the soil of Palestine over the first half of the
century. By the eve of Israel’s independence, a distinctly different Jewish character had emerged, ready to take up the struggle
to deliver the nation. Fifty or sixty years may be like the blink of an eye in the collective life of an ancient people, but
in the lives of individuals it can seem like an eternity: What is true in a person’s own life and in his or her parents’ lives
comes to seem as though it has been
true forever. By the time the second or third generation born and bred into the change reached adulthood, the Jews of Israel
had begun to lose their awareness of what it meant to be a Jew in the ghettos of Europe or Yemen. Sometimes it would take
an unexpected event to awaken this understanding anew.