Decent Respect

In the Gaza campaign, children were not killed nor houses destroyed arbitrarily. Everything had a military reason. People had to be killed in order to reduce the risk to the lives of our soldiers. (Better a hundred Palestinians killed than one Israeli soldier.) People had to be terrorized to make them turn against Hamas. Neighborhoods had to be destroyed to allow our troops to advance, and also to teach the population a lesson they will remember for years, thus postponing the next war.

All this makes military sense to a general. He is fighting a war, for God's sake, and cannot be bothered with non-military considerations. Such as the impact on world public opinion. And anyway, after the Holocaust...

WHAT THE general thinks, Israel thinks.

Israel is not a military dictatorship. General al-Sisi may be Netanyahu's best friend, but Netanyahu is not a general. Israel likes doing business, especially arms business, with military dictators all around the world, but in Israel itself the military obeys the elected civilian government.

True, but...

But the State of Israel was born in the middle of a hard-fought war, the outcome of which was by no means assured at that moment. The army was then, and is now, the center of Israel's national life. It may be said that the army is the only truly unifying element in Israeli society. It is where males and females, Ashkenazi and Oriental, secular and religious (except the orthodox), wealthy and poor, old-timer and new immigrant meet and are indoctrinated in the same spirit.

Most Jewish Israelis are former soldiers. Most officers, who leave the army in their mid-40s, spread out in the administrative, economic, political and academic elite. The result is that the military mindset is dominant in Israel.

This being so, Israelis are quite unable to comprehend the turn of world public opinion. What do they want from us, these Swedes and Britons and Japanese? Do they believe that we enjoy killing children, destroying homes? (As Golda Meir memorably once declared: "We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children, but we shall never forgive them for compelling us to kill their children!")

THE FOUNDERS of Israel were very conscious of world public opinion. True, David Ben-Gurion once declared that "it is not important what the goyim are saying, what is important is what the Jews are doing!" but in real life Ben-Gurion was very conscious of the need to win over world opinion. So was his adversary, the right-wing Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky, who once told Menachem Begin that if he despairs of the conscience of the world, he should "jump into the Vistula."

World public opinion is important. More than that, it is vital. The British Parliament's resolution may be non-binding, but it expresses public opinion, which will sooner or later decide government action on arms sales, Security Council resolutions, European Union decisions and what not. As Thomas Jefferson said: "If the people lead, then eventually the leaders will follow."

The same Jefferson recommended "a decent respect for the opinion of mankind."