About Us Israelis - The Concept of Peace

The accusation that Israelis are war mongers is usually made either by our foes or by peace-loving pacifists around the world who are usually fed by the former with vicious disinformation. The problem with these sometimes moral and very intelligent people is that they take that information at face value and don't bother to check the facts. If they did, they would find some very disturbing truths about their convictions.

They would find an ancient people living in a small and fragile country which is constantly busy defending its mere existence, always reacting to provocations and never initiating them.

They would find out that in 1948, a day-old Israeli state had to defend itself against a combination of five Arab countries, attacking it on the eve of its independence.

They would find out that in 1956, Israel join the English-French Musketeer Operation in the Sinai Peninsula in order to put an end, once and for all, to the Egyptian sponsored "Fadayeen" infiltrations to Israel from the Gaza strip, which claimed the lives of dozens of innocent Israeli civilians. It also came in response to Nasser's never-ending threats to annihilate the Zionist state.

They would find that the preemptive operation by Israel in June 1967 was initiated only after Nasser kicked UN truce-keeping forces out of the Sinai Peninsula, closed all water routes leading from and to Israel, and moved 100,000 of his troops toward the Israeli border, boosting war rhetoric to new levels.

They would find a coordinated attack during October 1973 against Israel by the armies of Egypt and Syria with reinforcements of Iraqi and Jordanian troops, with no provocation whatsoever.

They would find Israel's 1982 "Peace for Galilee" operation, which escalated to a full-scale war in Lebanon, a result of continues shelling of the north of Israel and horrific terrorist actions against innocent Israeli civilians carried out by the PLO, which occupied and ruled south of Lebanon.

They would find Israel absorbing, without any provocation or retaliation, dozens of Iraqi missiles during the 1991 Gulf war.

They would find Israel's reaction in 2006 to the border infiltration by the Hezbollah terrorist organization, which shelled the northern part of Israel, attacked and killed Israeli soldiers during a patrol mission on Israelis soil, and kidnapped two soldiers who later died of their lethal wounds. That situation quickly escalated to the second Lebanon war.

They would also find that Israel always reacted to Palestinian Terror, to both Intifadas and to Hamas’ continues shelling of the south of Israel in what is known as the Gaza War of 2008.

To all those truly moral people who are interested in the truth, I say that we love our children no less than you love yours. The only difference is that we have to live with the devastating acknowledgement that our children might lose their lives defending us on Israel's different fronts. 
Are there any parents, anywhere on the face of the earth, who would want that?

The Children of Israel

(Photo Courtesy of Israel's Ministry of Tourism)

Peace for us is not some idea to be so easily thrown to the air as part of a popular package of some universal values for those looking for a cause to follow: it is our life-long dream.

Peace is most appreciated by people who have experienced the devastation of war. Israelis has seen enough of that. We desire peace wholeheartedly, we long for it, we sing about it – we dream about it. And guess what: we have even proved it, twice actually. Israel maintains a stable and sustainable state of peace with both Egypt and Jordan, once fierce enemies.

Israelis all over sings "I was born for peace"

We greet each other using the word "Shalom", which, in Hebrew, means peace. We do that because it is our greatest aspiration and our utmost desire. We do that because, in our unusual reality, Shalom is the best thing you can ever wish for your fellow Israeli – for your fellow human being.

So, whenever you hear someone label us as war mongrels, don't forget to bear all the above mentioned in mind before forming your conclusions about us Israelis. 

About Us Israelis - The Shrinking of the Jewish People

The diminishing number of the Jewish People is a dark cloud always looming over our heads.

The most troubling example is the low birthrate (just above 1 child per family) and the high intermarriage rate (more than 50%) that have caused the largest Jewish community outside Israel – that of the United States – to shrink by approximately 1 million during the last generation. Since the 1980s, US American Jewry shrunk from about 6 million strong to barely 5.

For more than a decade, Jewish population growth worldwide has been steady at around 0.3% percent, compared to a worldwide population growth of more than 1%. This is due largely to the compensation in birthrate of Jews inside Israel (an average of 3 children per family). Birthrates among the Jews of the Diaspora are in negative percentages, and they keep on dropping. In short, our demography as a people is in dire straits: we bring fewer children into the world and marry more and more outside the boundaries of our faith.

For us Jews, this means deep trouble, but for us Israelis, looking at the distant future, this could mean calamity. If we put the fate of the Jewish people aside, for a moment, and consider the fate of Israel as the only Jewish country in the world, we quickly realize that the shrinking of the Jewish People living in the Diaspora would leave Israel's fate in great danger.  

Facing an automatic majority, working against us in almost any international organization or forum, regardless of the issue on the agenda (21 Arab countries plus another 26 countries with Muslim majorities) Israelis feel alone and singled out in a complicated and uneven international environment. In fact, if it weren't for the decency and kindness of the American people and the might of the great United States of America, who knows what would have become of us by now.

We need our brothers and sisters in the Diaspora to help us explain our positions and actions to their own governments, to help us expose the Israeli narrative to them, to force them to look beyond their economic interests, which are usually deeply rooted in Arab oil or in the huge markets of the Muslim world. The shrinking of the Jewish People of the Diaspora could mean leaving the task of influencing the international community exclusively in the hands of our foes.   

Jewish and Israeli leaders, acknowledging this strategic problem, conceived two programs intended to strengthen the connection between young Jews and their heritage. The first of those programs is "Taglit - Birthright Israel" ("Taglit" in Hebrew means discovery), in which young Jews arrive for a 10-day tour of Israel. The second is "Masa" (voyage in Hebrew) in which thousands of young Jews spend a semester or a whole school year in Israel, helping them build a long-lasting relationship with Israel and Israelis. The goal of both programs is to try and keep these young men and women of the Jewish faith linked to our people.

Successful and innovative as they are, those programs are a drop in the ocean. The Jewish People is shrinking at a troubling rate and, although we will endlessly keep on trying, it seems there is nothing we can do to stop this disturbing inclination.

So, please consider this before forming your opinion about us Israelis. 

About Us Israelis - Morality and Innocent Civilians

Israelis are used to their immoral foes accusing them for acting immorally. These foes, unfamiliar with universal terms like "Civil Liberties" or "Human Rights", go even further to claim that the Israeli defense forces are targeting innocent civilians. When you repeat such outrageous accusation too many times, even good and honest people start to believe it.

The latest such claim was done by no less than the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict. That initiative was chaired by Justice Richard Goldstone, acting on behalf of the UN Human Rights Council. The outcome of that initiative was a report based only on the testimonies of the Palestinians side of the equation. Israel would not cooperate. Appointing a judge known mainly for investigating war crimes by the UN Human Rights Committee which is notorious for its biased attitude towards Israel was a clear enough indication as for the outcome of the initiative. 

The claim that Israel has targeted intentionally innocent Palestinian civilians was later refuted and retracted by Justice Goldstone himself in an article he published in the Washington Post. But the damage to Israelis and to Israel's international standing and reputation was devastating. "But Goldstone is beside the point — a symptom of something larger," wrote a few days later Washington Post's columnist Richard Cohen. "That his report was accepted in much of the world testified to how much Israel’s moral standing has plummeted. (It has also led countless Israelis and others to conclude that they are damned when they do the wrong thing and equally damned when they do the right thing.) Much of the world believed Israel would purposely kill civilians." (Richard Cohen, WP, April 4, 2011).

While Palestinians terror is specifically aimed at killing civilians, us, Israelis, would never seek an eye for an eye. It has to do with morality. We carry inside of each and every one of us tons of it and it does not really matter what the world think of us or how many Goldstone's Reports would be thrown at our face – this would never change! 

Claiming that the IDF's soldiers are educated and trained to keep high moral standards at all times, and even proved it time and again throughout Israel's history, might sound biased and unauthentic coming from an Israeli. So, I decided to present you with excerpts from my second novel, Fate's Perfect Justice, written long before the Goldstone's Report saw the light of day. It describes a true chain of events leading an Israeli officer to make a moral decision. I came across this testimony while conducting the research for the book: 

“I was still a young officer stationed inside the buffer zone in south Lebanon,” he began as I parted from his embrace and stared at him attentively, “when shots were fired at us from one of the buildings. It hit my radio operator. We took cover and returned fire while my paramedic tried to save his life. He couldn’t.” I held my hand over my mouth in horror. “The bullet had hit his neck and he was dead within minutes.”

A lump suddenly formed in my throat which months ago would have choked me completely.

He took a deep breath. “Any other army would have taken the building down in seconds without even blinking – the Americans, the Brits, certainly anyone less… moral,” he nearly spat out the word. “You know international law better than I do. It allows a proportional degree of civilian casualties in combat zones. But this does not apply to the IDF. Our orders are strict and they oblige us to make sure there are no innocent civilians around.” He placed his hands on mine and fondled them looking at me with pain in his eyes. “I held fire and ordered my subordinates to check if there were civilians in the building. Someone thought he heard a child crying. We urged the civilians in Arabic to get out promising we won’t shoot if they did,” he continued. “Meanwhile we located the fire source. It came from a room on the second floor. I had a choice to fire a missile into the window and destroy whatever was shooting at us or try to surround the place and wait for their surrender. My soldiers wanted revenge for the loss of Rami. They were all for firing the missile and storming the place. I decided not to and called out in Arabic for the child to come out. He didn’t. By now we could see someone small standing by a window. Eventually, we outflanked the building and had a storm of bullets raining on us. One of my sergeants was hit in the head. He died instantly,” he said with a cracked voice. My mouth had petrified into the shape of a huge “O” comprehending a mere fraction of what this sensitive soul of a man was implying and what he had been through during his lifetime. He looked at me helplessly, his hands shivering. “Even then I didn’t agree to take the house down. There was an innocent child inside,” he continued with a harsh facial expression. “Suddenly we saw the child, a boy of about eight or nine, fleeing the place. Only then did I give the order to destroy the house. An Israeli air force fighter dropped a bomb on it. Among the rubble we found the bodies of five heavily armed terrorists. They had been using the child as one of those human shields you hear about but never believe.” (Ofer Mazar, Fate's Perfect Justice, Strategic Books Group, New York, NY, 2011, pp. 345-346).

So, please keep this in mind before forming an opinion about us Israelis.

About Us Israelis - No Black and White

Dressing them in uniform and exposing our innocent sons and daughters, young 18 year old high-school graduates, to one of the world's most complex conflicts, has a price beyond comprehension for both parents and children. It is a difficult thing to explain to those around the world, as they sit in the comfort of their homes and watch international news coverage from Israel. Most people have never had to experience the dread Israeli parents feel when they send their children to serve in the Israeli Defense Forces, or the physical strain and the moral dilemmas our children face on a daily basis as soldiers.

Some years ago, attending a lecture in Oslo given to Norwegian journalists by Amos Oz – one of Israel's leading authors and intellectuals – I heard him say something that left a big mark on me: "In the conflict with the people sharing the land of our fathers with us," he said, "there is no black or white, no wrong or right, no good or bad, and no villains. There are only good and innocent people on both sides, which circumstances have led to claim the right to the same piece of land. These people have the same feelings, desires, hopes and dreams that you have here among the beautiful fjords of Norway. So don’t be quick to judge them harshly."

As a young IDF soldier during the first Intifada, I, as many of my soldier friends, experienced some very complicated situations. I described some of them in one of my novels, titled Fate's Open Arms. To give you some sense, in a nut shell, of some of the dilemmas, I offer you relevant excerpts:

The first days of the first Palestinian “intifada” caught me as a young squad commander. A year later, after completing a service period of seven months in the Gaza strip and another five in several other Palestinian towns and villages in the West Bank, my innocent view of the world was not so innocent anymore.

The Palestinian animosity toward us in our everyday police work was beyond my capacity to comprehend. Here was one of the strongest and most sophisticated armies in the world standing helpless against hundreds of small children and teenagers, who threw stones, metal objects, and Molotov cocktails at its young soldiers. And this world-renown and respected army did not know how to effectively respond to it. This scenario was never fully anticipated. The IDF was not equipped or trained, for that matter, to execute police work. We were trained to win wars using tanks, battleships, and jet fighter planes. The international media documented this fact with its cameras every single day and screened it, to our embarrassment, twenty-four hours a day for the whole world to see.

The worst parts of it were the morality aspects. There we stood, fully equipped to overrun any army in the Middle East, any terrorist group, or any other enemy who endangered our civilian population; and in front of us, most of the time, small children and young teenagers were throwing stones and other objects at us. We did not want to be there. We all had brothers and sisters that age back home. It was an impossible and unfair situation for us, the young foot soldiers. Circumstances and past mistakes of our country’s leadership were affecting us, the innocent children of Israel, with the worst consequences.

It was a time of great despair for me, a young officer doing dirty jobs in the refugee camps and in the streets of the Palestinian towns and villages. Our commanders were no less at a loss. Time passed, and we grasped that our actions did not calm the situation and maybe even made it worse. Like the mythological Greek monster Hydra, who grew two heads for every one it lost, the intifada intensified regardless of our actions or reactions, and nothing we did could bring it to a halt. (Ofer Mazar, Fate's Open Arms, Eloquent Books, New York, NY, 2010, pp. 19-20)

Consider all of that, if you will, when forming your opinion about us Israelis.

About Us Israelis - Security and the Rule of Law

In a land where existential threats are a daily reality, our legal system is one of the most important barriers against tyranny. The first Israeli biblical leaders after the conquest of the land by Joshua were judges. For us Israelis, a judge is tantamount to being a leader.

Israelis are forced by circumstance to continuously carry with them an uneasy tension between the rule of law and the need to secure life and their country's survival. Finding ourselves at war with our neighbors from day one, and living ever since under a Damoclean threat to our lives, Israelis have forced their leaders to come up with a security apparatus that allows us a certain degree of protection. On the other hand, as a modern nation that evolved from a combination of ancient traditions and a modern Zionist philosophy – which holds dear to its heart values such as self-determination, democracy and pluralism – we have also forced our leaders to establish a modern, sustainable, pluralistic and democratic state.

Immediately upon the declaration of their State by Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, Israelis found themselves being stormed by the armies of five Arab states, openly declaring their intention to completely destroy the newly-born Jewish state. Ever since, we've been through six additional wars, two bloody intifadas, countless border infiltrations, countless horrific terrorist attacks – at home and abroad – periods of continuous shelling from Lebanon and from the Gaza Strip, car bombs, suicide bombers on busses, in cafés, in market places, at hangout places for Israeli teenagers, at hotels etc. Alongside all that, always hanging above our heads, were threats from one neighbor or another (and some further off geographically) to annihilate us.

The ongoing effort to secure the lives of Israelis against all external and internal threats is a great challenge, first and foremost to Democracy and to the rule of law. This is especially reinforced when countries in a constant state of danger are placed under a partial or complete state of emergency. Israel has been in danger since the day it was created, and it is still under a state of emergency. This fact poses a massive challenge to the rule of law, to civic freedoms and sometimes to basic human rights.

The fact that Israel is still very much democratic, even if at a very high cost in terms of human life, is proof that it is succeeding in meeting that challenge. The fact that it meets the challenge is an undeniable proof that Israelis regards these freedoms and human rights as no less important than their security. One has only to examine Israel's High Court decisions, which sometimes overrule the army's or the government's actions or intentions, to realize how much Democracy is a crucial component of Israeli civic identity. 

Prof. Menachem Hofnung, of the Hebrew University, who is a specialist on the matter, claims that Israel is a particular phenomenon. It is the only democratic country which has managed to maintain its Democracy intact for such a long time, while being under a constant state of emergency. The Israeli case is also unique in light of the fact that, modern democracies are rarely faced with an inner or external threat to the lives of their citizens or to the character of their regime. They rarely go to war and usually enjoy long periods of peace and stable international relations.

Well, not in democratic Israel. Our democracy has survived not only external threats, which usually bear the affect of uniting the different political and social groups in order to eliminate the threat, but also internal, which can bring about the end of democracy.

Israel's democracy is still very much alive and kicking, despite external and internal threats. This can be attributed to us Israelis, the voters who decide the character and direction of the only real democracy in our region, and the cadre that supplies the much-appreciated and enlightened judges for our judicial system, which stands tall, guarding the tower of our Democracy.

So, bear this in mind when forming your conclusion about us Israelis. 

About Us Israelis - The Burden of History

Before trying to really understand Israelis, one must comprehend the heavy load of history they consciously carry on their shoulders … wherever they go.

As a Jew, you are born with the burden of thousands of years of Jewish complexes and sometimes devastating events of the past. From that moment on, you are your people's protector, caretaker and advocate. If, by chance, you're also an Israeli, then you are also born with the burden of those decades of your embattled country's history. You are its soldier, the promoter of its interests and its shield from all those years of atrocities, terror and hate, with which both Jewish and Israeli history are so densely packed.  

You don't plan for it to happen or spend a lot of time thinking about it. It's just there, everywhere you go, at home, in school, at your workplace, on the sports field, at the movie theatre, etc. It's in everything you do, in everything you read, in everything you write about or create. It doesn't matter if you're religious or secular, left, right or center on the political affiliation map, a man or a woman, living in Tel Aviv or in Los Angeles. If you are Israeli, the historical burden you carry with you, day in and day out, is embedded in your DNA.

It's not indoctrination. It's not a sense of superiority as the "Chosen People" or an abnormal subjective sensitivity. Experiencing millennia of atrocities, pogroms, holocaust, terrorist actions and the constant threat of annihilation, leaves you with no other choice but to remember history, learning from it, being super-careful about anything and everything around you, trusting only the peoples or countries who have proven themselves to be trustworthy, and staying alert at all times.

Learning from history, the burden we carry with us is translated into sheer concern for our lives, for our children's future, for the existence of our people and for the wellbeing of our country. It is genuine fear from the possibility, or probability, that history might actually repeat itself in light of ongoing threats to our mere existence, hitting us in different shapes and forms from the dawn of history until this very day.

It is the acknowledgment, and we even sing about it while sitting around one of our many holiday dinner tables, that in every generation, there are people who wish to annihilate us.

In our generation, it is nuclear Iran, despotic Syria, Lebanese Hezbollah, Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, the Az-Adin-El-Kasam regiments, El-Qaida, extremist Muslim groups around the globe, rising anti-Semitism in Europe…should I go on? If we add to all of that other factors endangering our existence as a people, like the low birth rate and the high rate of intermarriage amongst Jews of the Diaspora, the historical burden just gets heavier and heavier.

It seems like we never get a break, never get a chance to relax, to live in comfort and in a state of tranquility in our beautiful country, just like most people living in other democratic countries around the world.

American singer and song-writer Tom Lehrer sang once "Oh the Protestants hate the Catholics and the Catholics hate the Protestants and the Hindus hate the Moslems and everybody hates the Jews." Now…add this widespread conviction embedded in our national psyche to all the above mentioned, before deciding to form a conclusion about us Israelis. 

About Us Isrealis - Facts Vs. Slander

Our voyage into the process of understanding Israelis, beyond the labels and stigmas, must make as its first stop at the "statistics, facts and figures" station. With these in mind, we can then stop at the other stations along the way equipped with the information needed to form adequate conclusions. 

According to the last official registry, conducted in 2010, the number of Israelis living within the boundaries of the country that covers 22,072 square kilometers (8,522 Square Miles) called Israel is 7,465,500. Out of them, 5,634,300 are Jewish, 1,513,200 are Arabs, 140,000 are Christians, 102,000 are Druze and the rest are other minorities.

What is evident from these figures is that, even before we consider internal ethnic, political, social and economic differences, Israelis are far from being a homogenous group; so, any use of generalization to describe them is futile from the start.

And yet, I'm far from being naïve. It is obvious that generalizations leading to the labeling of Israelis negatively are aimed specifically at Israelis of the Jewish faith. The connection to the darker eras of humanity's long history, when Jews were pinpointed and differentiated from other ethnic populations, is quite obvious, isn't it? But we will dive into that in future articles.

Instead, let's dig deeper into the facts. Israel is a state that, by definition, and from its creation, has constantly absorbed Jewish immigrants. It is a key principle in its essence, deriving from centuries of atrocities committed against stateless Jews, almost everywhere around the world – culminating in the Holocaust. Us Israelis, bearing on our shoulders the burden of Jewish history, see this as a crucial component in our national identity and our country's purpose. No amount of international criticism thrown our way for our immigration policy will move us an inch on the matter.

With time, this policy had brought millions of Jews into Israel from all over the globe. These immigrants came from different cultures and brought with them different traditions and customs, having only one thing in common with their fellow senior Israelis – being Jewish. The direct result was social diversity that often enough translated into diverse political affiliations.

This was clearly the case during the state election of 1977, when the Likud party won political power and took control of the country from the hands of the historic Labor party. This manifestation of political change in Israeli politics based on an ethnic vote, was the first of several since, adding complexity to an already multifaceted political scene comprised of political parties from the right, the center, the left, the Zionist-religious, the ultra-religious, the communist, the socialist, senior-citizens, Gays, Arabs etc.

In summation, using generalizations to describe Israelis is futile. Israelis are very diverse. They are comprised of a Jewish majority, but include other considerable minorities. The Jewish majority is very diverse, ethnically, socially, economically and religiously. This translates into diverse political views.

So, when you encounter some nasty generalizations about the people of Israel, let the facts, not the slander, affect your judgment about us Israelis