On armies, war and an aging Israel

As the country turns 60, a novelist reconsiders Zionism amid revealing encounters with the Israeli military.

By Arnon Grunberg

Read more: War, Palestine, Israel, Afghanistan, Opinion

May 15, 2008 | Not long ago, in preparation for an upcoming trip to embed with the U.S. military in Iraq, I met a war correspondent at a bar in Brooklyn, N.Y. Before I could even get in a word, he asked: "You're Jewish, aren't you? In Iraq, your head's worth even more than mine is."

Long before that encounter, however, I had begun asking myself whether Jewish-Dutch author Abel Herzberg's famous maxim still applied: "A Jew without Israel is like a loan without collateral." An idea perhaps worth reconsidering with Israel's reaching the age of 60 -- and assuming Herzberg's maxim ever applied at all.

Wasn't Israel actually more of an albatross around one's neck, especially since the second intifada in 2000, and perhaps even since the first Lebanon war in 1982? Something for which, once unmasked as a Jew, you had to offer an explanation? Something for which you should perhaps even be ashamed? (I have no trouble with being ashamed, but then preferably on my own personal behalf.) When it came to Herzberg's maxim, I decided to stick to neutral ground. Whether I was a loan with or without collateral I was not sure, but the gray zone I actually found quite pleasant. Without a conclusion either way came an essential element of freedom.

In the summer of 2006 I traveled to Afghanistan with the Dutch army. I had become interested in armies and war -- in the army because, at least in theaters of war, conscientious and absolute solitude is ruled out. And in war because the chasm between reality on the ground and accounts from news reports and editorials is so enormous. Like most people, I was raised with the idea that war, above all, is something abject. But once one has accepted that certainty, all that remains is a discussion of war in terms of morality. And that is like trying to talk about sex purely in terms of producing children, which, with all due respect, misses the quintessence of the act itself.

Outside the usual discourse on war and masculinity there exists a world in which the willingness to kill and to die is a crucial aspect of those things. Highly distasteful and even extremely immoral, but no less realistic for all that. And as I began to realize -- first in Afghanistan and later during time I spent with Israel's military -- war held something else that remained unmentioned in the official discourse: a sense of heroism with unmistakable sexual connotations.

As military historian Martin van Creveld wrote in "Men, Women and War": "If war is a man's glory, then assuredly the best antidote ought to be a woman's ridicule." Obviously this antidote does not work (and often is altogether unavailable). Equally obvious is that economic reasons are not the only ones leading men to volunteer for military service -- and to volunteer not for administrative or support duties but, rather, for that which has been the purpose of armies throughout history: fighting. I am talking about men here, because women in armies only rarely if ever take part in combat.

I would come to discover more about armies and war when, shortly after returning from Afghanistan, I decided to pay a visit to the Israeli army. If Abel Herzberg was still right and I was a loan without collateral, then to my mind it was not Israel's land or language or politics that might secure my debts, but rather its army. It seemed only logical to me, then, to observe the Israel Defense Forces from up close.

As it turned out, however, the IDF had little desire to have people like me snooping around. The status of "embedded journalist" was out of the question. Later, I was told that military operations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip were almost always accompanied by operatives from Shin Beth, the Israeli intelligence service. And Shin Beth does not cotton to journalists. But after lengthy negotiations and mediation on the part of various go-betweens, an alternative program proved possible.

I would be allowed to attend training sessions and conduct interviews with a number of service members -- a good number of them female. The role of female soldiers makes the Israeli army unique. Israel is one of the only countries in the world with compulsory military service for women. There are other ways in which that appears to be unique; although I noticed little evidence of it during my visit, the army is considered by many Israelis to be a paradise for promiscuity. After my visit to Afghanistan, that did not come as a surprise. I even dare to say that this is one of the auxiliary functions of any army: to serve as a haven for dabblers in promiscuity.

Even after all the negotiating, my time with the Israeli military was postponed twice. And some training sessions that had been accessible to me at first would turn out at the last minute to be top secret after all. Improvisation was the forte, if not the very essence, of the Israeli army, it seemed. But by early March 2008 I was finally able to leave from my home in New York for Israel.

My first meeting was with Amira Hass, an award-winning journalist. Because I wanted to know more about the army's political context, and because I suspected that not all military personnel would be in a position to speak freely, I also wanted to talk to people on the outside who were nonetheless knowledgeable about Israel's army. (On this trip, I intentionally did not speak with Palestinians or Israeli Arabs; next year I hope to pay a visit to the Palestinian territories.)

Hass writes for the liberal Israeli daily Ha'aretz and has written a book titled "Drinking From the Gaza Sea," about the years she spent in Gaza. These days she works from Ramallah. On a Sunday evening, when we meet in an almost deserted cafeteria in Jerusalem, Hass is sitting at a table with a plate of salad in front of her. "I bet you're hungry," she says. "Here, take my salad. I've had enough." A large shawl is draped over her right shoulder. "You can't talk about 60 years of Israel without talking about the naqba, the Palestinian disaster," she says. "Neither Israel nor the Palestinian elite, with their vested interests in maintaining the status quo, are interested in peace," she continues. "One of the Palestinian negotiators has a son whose company supplies materials for building the border wall. The wall is making him rich. Both [Mahmoud] Abbas and [Ismail] Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, are playing Israel's game. The only purpose of the negotiations is to lead to more negotiations. What it's all about is a people refusing to give up its privileges."

The cafeteria is closing. We go outside and sit beneath a parasol as a gentle rain begins to fall. "Gaza is undergoing a process of 'Talibanization,'" Hass says. "Liquor stores being attacked, et cetera. That's new -- we've never had that before. Ramallah, on the other hand, is fine. Ramallah is a five-star prison." A moral change would have to take place in Israel, she says, for the situation really to change. "I don't believe that's going to happen. I'm quite pessimistic. Sometimes I'm afraid that Israel will prove to be just a passing phase."

"But how could a nuclear power simply disappear?" I ask.

It's the only time during our conversation that Amira Hass becomes slightly irritated. "I don't know," she says. "I'm not a fortuneteller who can look into a crystal ball."

Next page: An armed cabdriver says he can shoot both right- and left-handed. I feel as if I've been dropped into a fictional world