On Excusing Mistakes

David Landau writes in Haaretz about the debasement of Zionism reflected in Israel’s exchange of Lebanese and Palestinian terrorists for dead and mutilated bodies of Jewish soldiers:

The fathers of this country swore:  Never again.  That is the essence of Zionism, which meant — or once meant — that Jews would never again be hapless murder victims with no one to defend them and avenge their deaths.

Now it seems the oath has been revised:  Never again will Jews be killed without doing everything to ensure that their remains are buried in sacred soil.

Daniel Gordis argues Israel did the right thing.  He admits the exchange was likely a strategic mistake — giving Hezbollah and its patron state a huge victory, invigorating the most extremist Islamist enemies of Israel, providing incentives for more attacks and kidnappings in the future, decreasing the incentives to keep future hostages alive, increasing the price that will now have to be paid for Gilad Shalit, resulting in the release of still more terrorists, etc.  But he writes that “sometimes mistakes are worth making.”  

Take the Disengagement.  It is now clear that the Disengagement from Gaza was a horrifying, costly and still painful mistake.  But — and I realize that this is not a popular position— it was a mistake that Israel needed to make.  It was the mistake that proved, once and for all, that the enemies we face have no interest in a state of their own.  They just want to destroy ours. . . .

The benefits of that lesson are understandably of no consolation to the families who paid so dearly in the summer of 2005, who are still living in temporary housing, whose marriages didn’t survive, whose livelihoods have never been restored, whose children hate the country that did that to their parents — but despite all that, the Disengagement was probably a horrifying mistake that Israel needed to make. 

For now we know, even those of us (and I include myself) who were naïve enough to imagine something else.  Peace is not around the corner. . . . Not a year from now.  Not a decade from now.  Because their issue isn’t a Palestinian State; it’s the end of the Jewish one. 

We learned that through the mistake we made in 2005, a mistake that we probably needed to make.

And that’s why we had to make the trade this week. . . .

To call the Disengagement “horrifying” — but a mistake that Israel “needed to make” — is to render it beyond moral responsibility.  You obviously can’t blame someone for doing what “had” to be done.  You cannot even blame someone for negotiating with Hezbollah (after promising not to), agreeing to a humiliating deal, and leaving an avowed enemy of Israel in a stronger position:  it is just another “strategic mistake” that Israel “had to make.”

David Landau came closer with his caustic comment to describing what was involved. Anne Lieberman, using Ruth Wisse’s words for her title and text, did as well.  Moshe Arens notes that a country can only make so many strategic mistakes and survive, and that Israel may have reached its limit with the two above and the lengthening list he describes.