The Spring issue of Azure is out. It includes an adaptation of Lieutenant-General (res.) Moshe Yaalon’s Salman C. Bernstein Memorial Lecture in Jewish Political Thought, delivered at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem on January 19, 2006.
Yaalon served as chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces from 2002-2005. His article is entitled “The IDF and the Israeli Spirit” and it is worth reading in its entirety. Here are some excerpts:
The key to Israel’s strength lies in its human resources. Human capital is the key, first of all, to the country’s strength in the humanities, culture, poetry, music, and theater; but also to its scientific and technological strength, especially evident in high-tech, medicine, physics, and aviation. In each of these areas, economic power derives not from natural resources but from human ones.
The same can be said for Israel’s military strength. Israel has developed a sophisticated military force, which rests on state-of-the art weapons that are themselves put at the disposal of top-flight soldiers and commanders. . . . Both the development of weapons and the ability to put them to use can be based only on a high level of human capital. . .
[T]he different threats that Israel and the IDF have confronted during the last few years have a single common denominator: Each attempts to avoid a head-on confrontation with the IDF, and each is aimed directly at Israel’s civilian population. . . . They see Israelis as a war-weary “society of plenty,” seeking only a life of comfort and luxury, uncertain of themselves and of their inner convictions, led by people who do not believe in the nation’s willingness to fight. . . .
The battles that Israel must now engage in, and will face for the foreseeable future, test not Israel’s military power but its civic resilience. The Arab nations began raising the question of Israel’s societal strength in the 1980s [with the withdrawal from Lebanon].
The discussion gathered strength after the May 1985 prisoner exchange in which three Israeli POWs were returned in exchange for the release of 1,150 terrorists. Later, our enemies were able to adduce further examples of Israeli weakness: In their telling, the Oslo accords were the result of the first Intifada (1987-1991); the Hebron withdrawal agreement was signed as a result of the 1996 “Temple Mount tunnel” riots; and Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip followed unbearable Palestinian pressure in the so-called “second Intifada” . . .
To complicate matters, the Israeli public debate, including the core of the decision-making elites, has been permeated by post-Zionist claims which are aimed at undermining the Zionist narrative. Some of these claims reflect an ideology that repudiates the belief in a Jewish state; some are a product of historical ignorance; some reflect a kind of wishful thinking; some a reflexive self-incrimination as a response to perceived helplessness; and some simply reflect the poll-driven considerations of political manipulation. Both in Israel and in universities around the world, there is a great deal of ignorance on this question. . . .
In one of his last poems, Natan Alterman wrote:
Then the devil said:
This besieged one–
How shall I defeat him?
He has courage and skill to act
He has weapons and wisdom on his side.
And he said: I will not take away his strength
Neither bridle nor bit will I put on him
Nor will I make him fainthearted
Nor will I weaken his hand as in days of old.
Only this shall I do:
I shall dull his mind,
And he will forget that his cause is just.
Thus said the devil,
And the heavens paled with fear
As they watched him rise
To carry out his plan.
. . . Our enemies draw encouragement from Israeli self-doubt. The greatest challenge facing the State of Israel, therefore, is to restore to Israeli society its faith in the righteousness of its path.
Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, Natan Sharansky has a similar message for George W. Bush.