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A victory remembered as a defeat Like a massive lake whose water fills countless rivers and streams that shape the terrain through which they flow, so too the Yom Kippur War has carved away at Israeli society. The war, whose 25th Hebrew anniversary will be marked on Wednesday, was a war of startling paradox: It was won on the battlefield, but perceived as a colossal failure in the collective memory. It was a war that spawned Gush Emunim, but also Peace Now; two conflicting utopian/messianic movements that have defined the country’s debate ever since. It was a war fought with Egypt and Syria, but which placed the Palestinians at the center of the internal domestic agenda. The impact of this war is felt keenly, even 25 years later, and not only in the sense that it paved the way for Camp David and peace with Egypt, or that it turned the US into the central player in the region, or that it brought Menachem Begin to power. The war’s echoes are felt in the cynical and, some would argue, hypercritical eye with which we view our leaders; in the tremendous polarization between Left and Right; in the lack of certitude in the rightness of our cause. The war, argues reserve colonel Ya’acov Hisdai, a military investigator for the Agranat Commission that investigated the Yom Kippur War, put an end to the ’Israeli-ness’ that was so dominant up to that time. ’The Israeli self-confidence, the optimism, the feeling of the justice of the cause, all that fell apart on Yom Kippur,’ he says. Hebrew University psychology professor Amia Lieblich, whose book Tin Soldiers on Jerusalem Beach dealt to a large extent with the effects of the war on soldiers, says the war ’made us more vulnerable, more believing that something bad could happen here. ’Something very basic in society broke down,’ she says, ’our view that our strength can prevent all bad.’ LIEBLICH says the war was traumatic in that more and more people started to fear that the country could be destroyed, and that it was not the safe haven it was designed, and purported, to be. From 1948, the country — like a graph charting a bull stock market — was on an upward curve: the War of Independence, the Sinai Campaign, massive immigrant absorption, the Six Day War, a booming economy. And then came October 6, 1973, and the line on the chart took a nosedive. The bottom fell out — or so it has been perceived. Perception here is very important. Bar-Ilan University political science professor Charles Liebman, who wrote a paper on the war entitled ’The Myth of Defeat,’ says that the war — which ended with Israel having battled back its enemies and on the offensive - could have been just as easily portrayed in the collective memory as a great victory. ’The fact that society insisted on calling it a defeat is because it shattered a lot of the dreams and fantasies Israelis had about their own society following the Six Day War, as well as the notion that somehow Jews were safe here,’ Liebman says. Wars — even defeats — are generally later portrayed as victories, Liebman argues. ’It is the myth of victory. People die, and you never want to say they died for nothing, so you begin to fantasize and mythologize that there was a victory. That is the story of Masada, and of Tel Hai. These are defeats that were turned into victories. ’What was so unusual about the Yom Kippur War is that it potentially could have been viewed as a great victory, and instead society insisted on seeing it as a defeat.’ The reason, he posits, is because the Yom Kippur War led to a tremendous sense of despair that the dreams of 1967 had been destroyed — dreams that somehow Israel was different, that Jews were now safe, that they could defend themselves without outside intervention. ’We were totally unprepared,’ he says, ’The visions we had following the Six Day War of being a major regional power, forever secure, all this was shattered. ’The war’s scars are not the fresh scars they were, but they did leave marked changes in Israeli society. The war reminded the Jews of Israel of the precariousness of their position.’ Among the deepest scars, says Hisdai, who wrote a book on the war entitled Emet B’tzel Milhama (’Truth in the Shadow of War’), was the self-doubt. ’Up until 1973, there was a synthesis between rightness and strength. There was a feeling that we must be right since we win the wars, and winning the wars shows that we are just and right. ’The Yom Kippur War gave this notion a blow, because we suffered some military defeats. It raised the question that maybe our cause is not completely right. People began asking questions such as whether it was moral and right being in the territories.’ The debate over the morality of holding the territories only began in earnest after the 1973 war, says Hisdai. In the years between 1967 and 1973, he says, only a few people on the extreme Left — such as Yeshayahu Leibowitz — questioned the morality of holding on to the territories. ’In 1972, Golda Meir said there is no such thing as Palestinians. These questions were not raised at all. After ’73 they were raised with a passion.’ WHILE the war ended the dreams and fantasies many Jews had held beforehand, it bred new ones to replace the old. Thus, maintains Hisdai, Gush Emunim and Peace Now were born. ’Even before the war there was debate about the territories, but it was primarily a security debate: whether we need the territories for security, if there is a need to control the Arab population there, if we can control the Arab population there. ’The crisis of the war was so great that Gush Emunim and Peace Now not only looked for answers to the security question, but also looked for answers that were essentially an attempt to regain the Israeli optimism and self- confidence. They wanted to create a new hope and a new dream, to replace the hopes and dreams that burst.’ As a result, Hisdai says, Gush Emunim spoke of the territories in ideological terms, and of a messianic era. ’And Peace Now did not only speak of peace in terms of treaties that would prevent war, but in utopian terms of a new era, a new moral spirit, a new, more moral society,’ he says. Hisdai, who deals extensively with the changes the war wrought on Israeli society in a new book called Yisrael B’saf Hayovel (’Israel on the Threshold of the Jubilee’), says ’There is no doubt in my eyes that both Gush Emunim and Peace Now were attempts to infuse society, a society mired after the war in deep depression, with an optimistic new hope.’ The end result, he maintains, has been negative, because society ’became addicted’ to dealing with the solutions proffered by these two utopian movements, and failed to deal with the true problems facing the country: building a healthy, strong, value-infused society that can weather the immense challenges that it will continuously face. The two movements, Gush Emunim and Peace Now, were instrumental in setting into motion two conflicting processes — the settlement enterprise and the Oslo process — that are on a collision course and have caused deep societal divisions. ’The country’s polarization, its deep fissures, are a result of the conflicting ideologies that developed after the Yom Kippur War,’ Hisdai says. Bar-Ilan’s Liebman, however, has a slightly different take on the rise of Gush Emunim after the war. Rather than an attempt to provide the country with new dreams and hopes, Liebman maintains it was a theological explanation for the failures of the war. Following the Six Day War, he says, referring to the national-religious, ’it was clear that God was on our side. So now comes the Yom Kippur War, and what are you going to say, that God is not on our side? ’Instead, the answer has to be that somehow we failed God. For some, the failure was in not settling the West Bank, for others for not blowing up al-Aska Mosque and building the Third Temple.’ By the same token, one could argue, those in the ’peace camp’ looked at the results of the war, and concluded that war would not bring a solution to Israel’s problems, that holding on to tracts of land does not buy security, and that compromise is necessary. BEYOND sending people in search of sweeping theological or political conclusions, Liebman says, the war ’questioned the authority of people in charge. The feeling was that the government and the army were inept. ’It gave an impetus for volunteeristic activity, the feeling being that if you want something done, you’d better do it yourself. The feeling was that we can no longer have the same confidence in authority that we had before, but have to do things ourselves.’ This sentiment led to the massive demonstrations against the political and military establishment that followed the war, and the establishment of the Democratic Movement for Change, Yigael Yadin’s party, which helped pave the way for Menachem Begin’s stunning victory in 1977. The trust in authority that was lost in 1973 has never been regained, Liebman says, and the cynicism became even greater after the Lebanon War, when the country watched the limited action it supported in Lebanon turn into an incursion that was not limited at all. Edna Lomsky-Feder, a Hebrew University sociologist who recently wrote a book on how the Yom Kippur War affected 75 soldiers, argues that the war was a watershed because it caused ’immense disappointment of the sons toward the collective fathers.’ The book, Ke’ilu Lo Hayta Milhama, (’As if There Was No War’), argues that soldiers between the ages of 18 and 21 did not suffer as much trauma in their day-to-day lives from the Yom Kippur War as is generally depicted. But this is not true of the collective, she says, for whom the war symbolized a crumbling of the old order, and the beginning of the construction of a new one. ’Part of the war’s trauma for society was a growing up, a maturity, a distancing from collective fathers — a distancing that resembled adolescent trauma,’ she says. ’All of a sudden people came to realize that the fathers could not do everything, that the nation could not do everything, that their leaders could not do everything. It is a difficult maturation process.’ A process, indeed, that is still very much going on.
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