Pumpkinflowers (13 page)

39

W
E ARRIVED BACK
in a country no longer sure if the soldiers in Lebanon were heroes or victims. By this time you couldn't avoid the stickers saying
GET OUT OF LEBANON IN PEACE.
Support for an immediate pullout, recently a fringe opinion, was now common. The security zone had been crucial not long before, the lives expended there necessary. Now we started to hear that it might be a mistake. This was the thinking of many in the peace movement, which was to be expected, but there were even voices from the right who said so too. When a new government of the left was elected in 1999 it promised not only to try to make peace with the Palestinians and Syrians but also to pull the army out of Lebanon no matter what. This was supposed to happen within a year of the election, by the summer of 2000.

Now that it seemed a withdrawal was not only possible but imminent, the arguments became fiercer. Bruria's fax machine consumed and spit a constant stream of paper—letters, op-eds, hate mail, charts, plans for protests. Orna was outside the prime minister's official residence with another gimmick, a mock security zone outpost that the women had built. The mothers were getting so much attention that they looked like a mass movement. In fact, Bruria believes that at the biggest protest the Four Mothers ever held, one said by reporters to have included fifteen hundred people, there were not more than three hundred. She put the number of dependable activists in the dozens. It turned out not to matter, because if the photographers and TV cameramen liked you, they framed the image to show the people and not the empty spaces, so it seemed like more.

The mothers were driving across the country in convoys of bikes and jeeps, honking and waving signs, trying to convince people that soldiers were being sacrificed in Lebanon for no reason. But they often didn't say “soldiers”; they said “children.” The idea that soldiers are children, everyone's children, the joint custody of all Israeli adults, caught on then and has never really gone away. This explains why a soldier's death here can be considered more tragic than the death of a civilian. The other guys, who were the same age, remained “terrorists.”

It was around this time that Bruria's youngest son, Ofer, got out of the army and walked into an ambush.

Ofer thought his mother was right about the folly of the military's presence in Lebanon. He was vocal about it even during his service, which involved sleeping in bushes and trekking through riverbeds in pursuit of guerrillas, like everyone else. He had been an excellent soldier in one of the army's best reconnaissance outfits and was now a civilian again. At the height of his mother's campaign to get the army out of Lebanon, he sat down with a reporter and told him a story about something that happened northeast of the Pumpkin earlier that same year, 1999.

A detachment from Ofer's company set out from Outpost Basil one night for a three-day ambush on a path used by guerrillas. When they reached the site, on the slopes of a hill called Qalat Jabur, two officers went ahead in the darkness to make sure the bushes were clear. The bushes were not clear, and the guerrillas waiting there opened fire and killed them both. A soldier charged in to help and was shot several times. His friends got him out breathing, but the guerrillas took his rifle; I mention this because I encountered the rifle later on.

Another officer, David, ran in and called for help, and Ofer heard. But he hesitated, or so he told the reporter.

“I didn't dare go down,” he said. “I knew that whoever went would not come back. I knew that charging now meant dying in a stupid war.” David died in the bushes. The headline of the interview with Ofer was “Why I Didn't Get Up.”

Ofer didn't hide or run away. He fired his machine gun until it was hit by a bullet and put out of commission. At least some of the soldiers who were there don't remember him hesitating at all, they remember him fighting, and everyone knew the officer hadn't called Ofer by name. He called everyone, and no one went, and it might not have made a difference if they had. But in the interview Ofer seemed to be taking responsibility for everything. He was being honest about his politics because he was taught to be honest and because he thought the right thing to do was say it: This is a stupid war and dying in it is stupid. Had he kept quiet he would have been remembered by his friends as one of the unit's best soldiers and no one else would ever have known his name. Instead, in the popular imagination the entire mess at Qalat Jabur—and, by extension, the army's perceived failure of will in the security zone—became Ofer's fault. He became known as the “machine gunner who didn't get up.”

There were many in those years who believed that peace was coming, but there were also many who thought that peace was a dangerous fantasy that was eroding the country's will to fight. The kibbutz movement was part of the first camp, and the settlements were part of the second. Ofer was from a kibbutz, and worse, he was the son of a Four Mothers activist. The officer who called for help was from a settlement in the West Bank. Some on the right decided that one of their number had died a martyr, not just at the hands of Hezbollah but at the hands of the left. A rightist politician, a former general in the security zone, went on a lecture tour making that point, using Ofer as a symbol of rot among the general's ideological opponents, until one of the other soldiers present at the battle, who was from a settlement himself, happened to attend one of the lectures and was so incensed by the caricature of his friend that he wrote the politician a furious letter in which he only barely stopped short of calling him a liar.

The army's Education Corps turned the incident into a morality tale that became part of the curriculum for soldiers and officer trainees—a warning about letting your political beliefs interfere with your duty. In this version the vacillation of the machine gunner in Lebanon was contrasted with the bravery of another famous machine gunner, one from the battle of Ammunition Hill in Jerusalem in 1967. This gunner's name was Eitan, and there is a line about him in the popular song “Ammunition Hill”: “Eitan didn't hesitate for a moment.” Eitan ran ahead with his machine gun and died.

Someone from one of the settlements decided this still wasn't enough and appealed to the Supreme Court demanding that Ofer be tried for treason. Bruria and Ofer's father had to get their son a lawyer. After the court threw out the case Ofer went to India and stayed for years, and when he came back he went to live quietly on his kibbutz and today he won't talk about any of this at all.

40

T
H
ERE WAS, AND
probably still is, a lovely restaurant on the banks of the Litani River near the Khardale Bridge in Lebanon—just a shack and a few tables set up along the water. The Pumpkin convoys went right past it. The existence of the restaurant never seemed reasonable, because we were in battle gear, with loaded guns, and believed ourselves to be in a war, and yet this restaurant was unwilling to acknowledge that. We gazed at it with puzzlement and longing every time we passed. We joked that one day when peace came we would sit there and watch the river run by.

The next time I took a convoy up to the Pumpkin I was a year older. Now I was a sergeant, second-in-command of a platoon, which meant that someone else carried the radio and I walked at the back of the line, keeping track of everyone, making sure they were drinking enough water, passing messages up to the officer in front.

I landed in the convoy yard next to two young soldiers who were looking around and waiting for an order. I grabbed one by the shoulder, aimed him toward the outpost, and said
Run
.

It was the spring of 1999, the beginning of the Pumpkin's last year. The army was trying to keep casualties down, and we saw the outpost had been fortified further: it was now covered entirely with a thick concrete ceiling, turning what had been the open courtyard into an indoor room. The space had been furnished with exercise equipment and an old couch hauled up on one of the convoys from the living room of someone's grandmother. We sent four of our soldiers to replace the guards from the outgoing garrison. I found a dirty kid seated on one of the bunks, holding his helmet like a bowl of soup he didn't feel like eating. He cursed when he saw me, but he wasn't angry, he was relieved, and he grabbed his rifle and pack and ran out toward the convoy and home. I was surprised to feel that I was home.

A day or two later I was patrolling the trench during Readiness with Dawn with a plastic cup of black coffee, dropping in on the sentries. The young ones were skittish and needed to be reassured. The sky was gray and the air cool, the hills around us quiet, the town below asleep. I rested my cup on a sandbag. Lebanon whispered something to me, but I was slow to react, and the shell exploded before I reached the floor of the trench. I felt the blast in my nose and caught a sour whiff of the powder. I ran in a crouch for the stairs leading down to safety.

Most of the soldiers had been dozing in their gear in the bunkers and were awake now, cursing the mothers and sisters of the Hezbollah gunners and their own officers and the army. “Launch, launch,” said the loudspeakers, and a shell hit the new roof. It held. Assiag, one of the lieutenants, was demonstrating with a grin how he had run down from the trench without spilling any of his coffee. This was the nonchalance to which we all aspired. It helped to see this as a game won by the person who appeared least concerned.

41

NOW THAT WE
were older and more experienced we laughed more, and our laughter was harsher. For the first time the argument among civilians about Lebanon was present in our conversations up on the line. Everyone knew about the Four Mothers by now. Most of us laughed at them—this wasn't a matter for mothers. But a few were willing to say they didn't understand what we were doing on the hill. Were we protecting civilians from infiltrations across the border? The guerrillas weren't attacking across the border anymore. When they wanted to strike Israel they simply fired rockets from deeper in Lebanon, outside the zone, and the rockets flew over the outposts and landed in Israel. Were we just protecting ourselves? And if that was the case maybe we shouldn't be there, and then we wouldn't have to protect ourselves? But if we left the border was exposed, and a whole new problem might be created, and it was hard to understand—you got to the point where you just wanted something to happen, anything, so you could blow off steam by shooting.

The sign that read
THE MISSION: DEFENDING THE NORTHERN COMMUNITIES
, which hung in every outpost in the security zone, was to remind the soldiers that in Lebanon were people who wanted to hurt our people and that we were here to stop them. It was a good idea to believe that, and it wasn't untrue—of course the northern communities did need defending. But the maze of our true situation was impossible to grasp then. It is hard to grasp even now.

Israel had gone into Lebanon all those years ago because of Palestinian guerrillas attacking across the border, but the Palestinian groups were long gone. The enemy had changed, and now it was Hezbollah. This group was Lebanese but created by Iran, the rising regional power, with the help of Syria, which controlled Lebanon. Hezbollah took orders from the dictatorship in Syria and from the clerics running Iran. Hezbollah was supposedly fighting to get us out of Lebanon, but Hezbollah leaders made clear later that they had rebuffed Israeli offers for a negotiated withdrawal. They didn't want us to leave; they wanted to push us out, which is not the same thing. By killing soldiers in the security zone they didn't convince Israelis to leave but rather that the security zone was necessary, and we dug in deeper and deeper to justify what we had already lost. This changed only with the helicopter crash, which had nothing to do with Hezbollah. Subsequent events show that they hoped to use their war against us to become the dominant power in Lebanon, which they went on to do with considerable skill. Their war seems to have always been as much for their country as it was against ours.

But even talk of goals like these is just a way that Western observers, with their disdain for religion and the power of the tribe and their unwillingness to take seriously the people involved in the conflicts they are observing, make sense of things to themselves. It's old-fashioned. In this new Middle East war was not just the means to an end, something terminated once a limited goal had been achieved. Hezbollah's deputy secretary-general made this clear in a book he published in English, which is valuable reading. The idea, he wrote, was not to end the conflict on advantageous terms: Hezbollah is “not merely an armed group that wishes to liberate a piece of land, nor is it a circumstantial tool whose role will end when the pretext for using it comes to an end. It is a vision and an approach, not only a military reaction.” When Hezbollah spoke of religious war against Israel and the West journalists interpreted it as rhetoric masking practical considerations. This, everyone was assured, would become obvious once the Israelis were out of Lebanon, which all could agree was a reasonable demand. But it turns out that Hezbollah and its many ideological cousins and imitators generally mean what they say.

What of the group's patrons in Syria? They wanted us not out of Lebanon but deep inside, because that way they could hit us through their pawns without risking their own army, which had been minding its own business on the Israel-Syria border since being bloodied there in 1973. That was why when Israel finally started talking about withdrawing from Lebanon, which would deny Syria the conveniences of the current arrangement, Syria's foreign minister declared that doing so without Syria's consent would be an act of war; it was a mental contortion memorable even by local standards. So by holding this hill and providing easy targets we served the interests of our enemies.

All of this makes you appreciate the simple genius of the copywriter who came up with “The Mission: Defending the Northern Communities.”

By this time the army had ceased to be dismissive of the Four Mothers and was instead incensed. The commander of the Ali Taher sector, our part of the security zone, like most of his peers, thought the activists were meddling in affairs they didn't understand. (Much later this same officer became a teacher and a school principal, and today he uses the Four Mothers in class as an example of how civilians should behave in a democracy.) One general called them the “four rags” and had to apologize. The most famous of the Lebanon commanders, Gerstein, beloved of the troops and known for bravery, impolitic comment, and for stalking around the security zone bareheaded because he was too tough for a helmet, told a newspaper in that summer of 1999 that the protests were endangering the lives of our soldiers. If residents of south Lebanon thought we were leaving, he warned, they would switch their allegiance to Hezbollah. He also said the guerrillas were being weakened by our operations, that they had lost forty fighters since the beginning of the year. We were always winning and they were always being weakened, but somehow we never won and they never got any weaker, and a few months later they killed Gerstein with a roadside bomb.