-Caveat Lector-
Uri Avnery
September 8, 2001
Military Democracy
"The Israeli army does not have a state!" Ariel Sharon declared
this week, after the Chief-of-Staff tried to create a fait accompli
behind his back.
I am not sure that Sharon knows where this phrase comes from. It
was coined by the Count Honore de Mirabeau, one of the instigators of
the French revolution, in his essay about Prussia. After stating that
"war is the national industry of Prussia", Mirabeau said that while
in other countries the state has an army, in Prussia the army has a
state.
It has been said more than once that Israel is the "Prussia of
the Middle East". I have tried to analyze the origins of this
similarity.
The Prussian state came into being after a holocaust, before
which it was just another small German state, called Brandenburg at
the time. In 1618, the Thirty Years War broke out, killing a third of
the German people and devastating most of its towns and villages. It
left behind a trauma that has not yet entirely disappeared.
In the Thirty Years War almost all the major European armies
took part, and all of them fought each other on German soil. Germany
is located in the middle of Europe and has no natural boundaries. No
sea, no desert and no mountain chain defend it. After the calamity,
the leaders of Prussia drew the obvious lesson: if we have no natural
barriers to defend us, we must create an artificial barrier in the
form of a regular, big and efficient army. That's how the Prussian
army came into being, a force that was designed to defend the
fatherland, and in the course of time became the terror of its
neighbors, until, in the end, it became the Nazi army ironically
called the Wehrmacht - the "defense force".
Israel is faced with a similar dilemma. Zionism was, in the
beginning, a small and weak movement, rejected even by the majority
of the Jews. When the first Zionists came to this country, they were
surprised to find here a population that did not agree to turn its
homeland over to another people. It resisted violently, and the
Zionists defended themselves as well as they could.
Then came the Holocaust and annihilated a third of the Jewish
people. It gave Zionism a tremendous impetus. The movement was seen
as a valiant effort by the Holocaust survivors to redeem themselves.
By the same measure, Arab resistance grew. The Zionists needed to
create an "Iron Wall" (as Ze'ev Jabotinsky phrased it) against the
resistance, a "defense force" strong enough to withstand the
onslaught of the entire Arab world. Thus the IDF was born and, in the
war of 1948 conquered some 78% of Mandate Palestine, and in the June
1967 war the remaining 22%, as well as great chunks of the
neighboring countries. Since then, the "defense force" has become an
army of occupation.
In the Second German Reich there was a popular saying, "der
Soldate / ist der beste Mann in Staate" (The soldier is the best man
in the state.) In Israel, the slogan was "The best go to the Air
Force". In the young state, the army attracted the best and the
brightest. The attitude towards the senior officers sometimes
bordered on idolatry.
From the time the state was established until today, the
generals have controlled the media, both by means of strong personal
relations with the editors and by a complex network of army spokesmen
masquerading as "our military correspondent", "our Arab affairs
correspondent" (generally former army intelligence officers) and "our
political correspondent'.
Foreign observers have frequently asked whether a military coup
could occur in Israel. That's a silly question, because a coup is
quite unnecessary. Since its early days, the army command has had a
decisive influence on national policy, and its members have occupied
key positions in the Israeli democracy, in a way unimaginable in any
other democratic state.
A few facts may suffice: of the 15 chiefs-of-staff who preceded
Mofaz, two became prime ministers (Rabin, Barak), four others became
cabinet ministers (Yadin, Bar-Lev, Eytan, Lipkin-Shahak). Two prime
ministers were past leaders of the pre-state armed underground
organizations (Begin, Shamir), and one a former Director General of
the Defense Ministry (Peres). Two generals became Presidents of
Israel (Herzog, Weizman). In the present government there are five
generals (Sharon, Ze'evi, Vilnai, Sneh, Ben-Eliezer.)
Former generals have always been allotted the key economic
positions and have controlled almost all big corporations and state
services. Many generals became mayors. The entire
political-military-economic-administrative class in Israel is full of
generals.
The dispersal of the generals among different political parties
does not change anything. This is proved by the fact that many
generals, upon leaving the army, were offered leading positions in
both major political parties - Labor and Likud - and chose one or the
other according to the price offered. Some wandered from one party to
another (Dayan, Weizman, Sharon, Mordecai). At the beginning of the
present Knesset, four political parties were headed by generals
(Likud by Sharon, Labor by Barak, Merkaz by Modecai, Moledet by
Ze'evi). The religious camp has, until now, been bereft of generals,
but with the appearance of the far-rightist, Effi Eytam, this will be
corrected.
There would have been nothing bad in all this if it would have
been only a personal and professional phenomena. But the problem is
much more serious, because all the governing generals have a common
mentality. All of them believe in the policy of force, annexations
and settlements, even if some of them are less extreme than others.
The exceptions can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and some
would say on one finger (the late Matti Peled).
In this respect, there is no difference between active and
retired officers. All of them together have always formed a kind of
super-party, directing the political establishment. Not because they
are organized and decide together, and not because of their strong
social bonds, but because of their uniform way of thinking, which
leads them almost automatically to the same conclusions in any given
situation - irrespective of their belonging to Likud, Labor, National
Union or Merkaz. Not necessarily on every detail, but in the general
direction.
One of the results is the neutralization of women in the Israeli
political system. Women have no place on the upper echelons of the
army and its machoist ethos, which directs all spheres of Israeli
policy. (The only outstanding exceptions, Golda Mair, took pride in
being "the only man in the government" and surrounded herself with
generals.)
All this is being done quite democratically. In the "Only
Democracy in the Middle East", the army gets its orders from the
government and obeys. In Israeli law, the government as such is the
Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. But when the government
itself is controlled by former generals, this is meaningless.
That's how it was in the 50s, when the Chief-of-Staff Moshe
Dayan imposed on the government a policy of "retaliatory actions" and
had it implemented by Major Ariel Sharon. And that's how it is today,
when the same General Sharon imposes the same policy and has it
implemented by general Ben-Eliezer, the Minister of Defense, who
happens to belong to the rival party. (In democratic countries, it is
extremely rare for a Minister of Defense to be a former general.)
Sharon's predecessor, the former Chief-of-Staff Barak, surrounded
himself with a bunch of generals, rejecting all civilians.
Lately a new and dangerous development has taken place.
Under the leadership of the Chief-of-Staff, Shaul Mofaz, a man with a
far-rightist outlook, the army has started to rebel against the
"political directives". It mobilizes the media against the government
and makes it responsible for its abject failure in the war against
"terrorism"- reminding one of the Prussian generals after World War
I who accused the politicians of "sticking a knife in the back of the
army". When Foreign Minister Peres, with the approval of Sharon,
recently started to initiate a meeting with Arafat, a "senior
military source" leaked to the media that the army strongly objects
to all such meetings.
Things reached a climax this week, when the Chief-of-Staff
decided to create across the Green Line (the pre-1967 border) "closed
military areas", with detention camps and military, Kangaroo courts
for Palestinians trying to enter. This means de facto annexation,
with far-reaching political, international and national implications.
Sharon, who heard about this while on a state visit in
Russia, seethed with anger. A game of accusations and
counter-accusations began, with the army leaking secret documents to
the media. ("I came across a document " a TV commentator announced.)
If this gives the impression that this is a major fight between
the government and the army, it's an illusion. Sharon himself belongs
to the military clique more than anyone else. But he has an old
grudge against the General Staff, which at the time prevented him
from becoming Chief-of-Staff. On top of that, contrary to civilian
politicians, he has no inferiority complex when dealing with the
generals.
This is a fight within the family. There are no real differences
of opinions between Sharon and Mofaz. Both believe in the same policy
of enlarging the settlements and preventing any compromise with the
Palestinian people. Both believe in the maxim "If force doesn't work,
use more force". Both are moving towards escalation and more
escalation.
In the Weimar republic after World Wart I, there was a saying:
"The Kaiser went, the generals remained". In Israel, the government
changes hands from time to time, but the generals always remain.
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