|
BRET STEPHENS:
-------------------------------------------------------
Giving the war its name
Giving wars and battles their name used to be a fairly simple procedure. Consider the exchange between the victorious English king and the French herald Montjoy in Shakespeare's "Henry V."
HENRY V
Praised be God, and not our strength, for it!
What is this castle call'd that stands hard by?
MONTJOY
They call it Agincourt.
HENRY V
Then call we this the field of Agincourt,
Fought on the day of Crispin Crispianus.
 With the hindsight of centuries, Agincourt appears as just a chapter in what is now called the Hundred Years War, though its actual dates, 1337 to 1453, run somewhat longer than that. Yet "Hundred Years" offers rough definition to what historian Norman Davies calls an "orgy... of endless killings, witless superstition, faithless chivalry, and countless particular interests pursued without regard to the common weal."
SINCE then, wars have acquired their names in several ways. In addition to wars classed according to their duration - the Seven Years War, Thirty Years War, and Six Day War - we have wars defined by location - Crimea, Sinai, Vietnam, the Gulf War - by what they were about - the wars of Spanish, Polish and Austrian Succession - by the names of the combatants - the Franco-Dutch War, the Mexican-American War - by sequence - the First and Second World Wars - and by the men principally responsible for causing them - the Napoleonic Wars.
In many of these cases, at least the name of the conflict goes uncontested. Not so in others. What Americans now call the Civil War was once commonly spoken of in the South as "The War Between the States." Even the names of battles are disputed, with Southerners naming battles after nearest town, Northerners after the nearest river. Thus the terrible battle of Antietam (after Antietam creek) also went by the name of Sharpsburg (after Sharpsburg, Maryland), while the two battles at Bull Run (after a nearby stream) are known too as the first and second battles of Manassas (after the plains of Manassas).
Then there are wars whose given names are avowedly polemical, and often tendentious. In the wake of his disastrous reverses in 1941, Joseph Stalin abandoned the rhetoric of class warfare for nationalism, calling Russia's struggle against the Nazis "The Great Patriotic War." Former president Bush codenamed his invasion of Panama "Operation Just Cause." And last fall's demolition of the Taliban went by the emphatically affirmative moniker "Enduring Freedom."
THE present war between Israel and the Palestinians, now approaching its second anniversary, presents a different sort of dilemma. On the Palestinian side, the name of the war is the "al-Aqsa Intifada." There is a convenience in this. It specifies a locus to the conflict, a starting point, a purpose and a method. It makes seamless the current wave of violence with the previous wave of protest, and emboldens the first with the memory of the success of the second. Finally, it gives the conflict a language: not just of "uprising" or "shaking off" (which is what intifada literally means), but the language of Arabic itself. This is a fight that, through its very name, joins a few million Palestinians with 250 million of their ethnic and linguistic kin, and one billion of their co-religionists abroad.
So naming the war the "Al-Aqsa Intifada" has proved a Palestinian stroke of genius, with its adoption by much of the Western press helping to cast the conflict internationally on Yasser Arafat's terms while hampering Israel's efforts to conduct its side of the war.
More remarkable, however, is the failure by Israelis and Diaspora Jews to offer an alternative vocabulary. In the past, our words have defined our wars: the War of Independence, affirming the existence of a Jewish state; the Six Day War, a victory as swiftly accomplished as all God's creation; the Yom Kippur War, reminding us of the perfidy of our enemies. As for the other two major wars, Sinai and Lebanon, these at least are cast in the neutral terms of geography.
Today, by contrast, we have widely come to adopt the term "intifada," notwithstanding the manifest differences between yesteryear's stone-throwers and this year's suicide bombers. Or we speak of the matzav, "the situation," which loudly bespeaks the lack of any shared clarity about the meaning and purpose of this war. It's as if this is one question Israelis do not have the energy, the imagination perhaps even the courage to address.
True, there have been exceptions, most notably Ha'aretz columnist Ari Shavit. Surveying the wreckage of the Moment Cafe minutes after its destruction, he wrote: "This war needs a name. If you don't give your war a name you can't fight it. If you don't give your war a name you can't win it. You will lose. And in losing, die." Shavit rejected several possibilities, including "intifada," the "End of the Occupation War," and the "Peace for the Settlements War." Then he offered some suggestions of his own: The War of the Life of the Jews. The War of the Jews' Last Chance. The War of Sovereignty. The War of Israeli Sovereignty. The War of Jewish Sovereignty.
"One thing is clear," he wrote. "If we do not get up now, we will never get up. If we allow ourselves to go on wallowing in this helplessness and this factionalism and this self-hatred, we will never get on our feet again. And if we do not make it clear to ourselves immediately that this war is the War of Israeli Sovereignty, that sovereignty will fall apart."
WHAT follows picks up on Shavit's theme. What is this war all about for Israel, and for the Jews? Two years into it, at least some of us can agree that it must be called a "war," and not go by such weak euphemisms as "the violence," "the conflict," or "the situation." Beyond that, as these short essays from prominent Jews (and one Palestinian) in Israel and abroad show, there is scant agreement. It's a telling indication of the predicament from which we have yet to emerge.
Bret Stephens
Editor-in-Chief
The Jerusalem Post
Jerusalem, Israel
Succot 5763
|
 |
|
