REMEMBERING THE ‘ALTALENA’
Jerold S. Auerbach
Jerusalem Post, June 20, 2011
Israel is confronting increasingly virulent worldwide challenges to its legitimacy.
An expanding chorus of politicians, journalists and academics relentlessly denounces the Jewish state as a racist, apartheid abomination. The resemblance between their shrill diatribes and the rhetoric of anti-Semitism during the past 2,000 years is not coincidental.
Few people remember that the Jewish state was born amid its own domestic legitimacy crisis. Its echoes still reverberate through the country, and may yet determine its future. In June 1948, six weeks after declaring independence, Israel confronted internal conflict that raised the specter of civil war. Surrounded by invading Arab armies, the fledgling Jewish state seemed on the verge of reenacting the first-century tragedy of fratricide that terminated Jewish national sovereignty for nearly two millennia.
To prime minister David Ben-Gurion, the arrival of the Altalena—a ship that sailed from France with desperately needed munitions and fighters—was the spearhead of a right-wing putsch to overthrow the government. Alleging a menacing challenge to the state and to his own authority, Ben-Gurion seized the opportunity to quash his detested right-wing political opposition, led by Menachem Begin.
His order to destroy the ship ignited a two-day battle in which 19 Jews were killed by their Jewish “brothers.”
The Altalena remains a sorrowful reminder that groundless hatred—condemned in Judaism ever since the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE—tormented the Jewish people even at their wondrous moment of national rebirth.
In recent years, that doomed pariah ship has occasionally resurfaced from buried memory to roil Israeli politics. On the Left, Israelis still claim that Begin’s Irgun got what it deserved for daring to challenge the authority of the state. For those on the Right, however, Ben-Gurion acted with ruthless determination to delegitimize, if not destroy, his despised political opposition.
Israel’s internal legitimacy problem focuses on Jewish settlers in the West Bank, biblical Judea and Samaria. Some rabbinical authorities have justified military disobedience in response to settlement evacuation orders from the government—citing the precedent of conscience-stricken soldiers who disobeyed orders to fire on Altalena fighters.
Some religious soldiers have been discharged or jailed even for expressing opposition to settler expulsion. Others (following the precedent set by thousands of secular Israelis who refused military service during the first Lebanon war) have indicated their unwillingness to participate. It seems inconceivable that Israeli soldiers would—ever again—shoot fellow Jews. But the Altalena precedent hovers over the Jewish state as a perennial reminder of the tragic possibility of internecine violence.
The current crusade to delegitimize Israel as a racist, apartheid state occupying someone else’s land has become an international obsession. Pressure from the United Nations (and the Obama administration) to offer “land for peace” is unlikely to relent. Even Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, during his recent Washington visit, indicated his willingness to relinquish settlements (and remove settlers) outside the larger “blocs” closest to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
Should that happen, Israelis may confront yet again the wrenching choices of 1948: When must political decisions and military orders be obeyed? When is disobedience justified? Who decides? Secular and religious Israelis have been unable to agree upon terms of Zionist unity that will finally resolve their enduring struggle over internal legitimacy. Any attempt by their government to expel tens of thousands of Jews from their homes, effectively undermining religious Zionism by eradicating its geographical base, could be catastrophic.
It might even provoke a confrontation that would make the battle over the Altalena, which erupted 63 years ago on June 21, seem like a minor historical blip. In Israel, once again, Jews could become brothers at war.
(The writer is the author of Brothers at War: Israel and the Tragedy of the Altalena.)
REMEMBERING SIX DAYS IN 1967
Michael Oren
Foreign Policy, June 6, 2011
“We shall destroy Israel and its inhabitants,” declared Palestine Liberation Organization leader Ahmad al-Shuqayri. “As for the survivors—if there are any—the boats are ready to deport them.” A half-million Arab soldiers and more than 5,000 tanks converged on Israel from every direction, including the West Bank, then part of Jordan. Their plans called for obliterating Israel’s army, conquering the country, and killing large numbers of civilians. Iraqi President Abdul Rahman Arif said the Arab goal was to wipe Israel off the map: “We shall, God willing, meet in Tel Aviv and Haifa.”
This was the fate awaiting Israel on June 4, 1967. Many Israelis feverishly dug trenches and filled sandbags, while others secretly dug 10,000 graves for the presumed victims. Some 14,000 hospital beds were arranged and gas masks distributed to the civilian population. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) prepared to launch a pre-emptive strike to neutralize Egypt, the most powerful Arab state, but the threat of invasion by other Arab armies remained.
Israel’s borders at the time were demarcated by the armistice lines established at the end of Israel’s war of independence 18 years earlier. These lines left Israel a mere 9 miles wide at its most populous area. Israelis faced mountains to the east and the sea to their backs and, in West Jerusalem, were virtually surrounded by hostile forces. In 1948, Arab troops nearly cut the country in half at its narrow waist and laid siege to Jerusalem, depriving 100,000 Jews of food and water.
The Arabs readied to strike—but Israel did not wait. “We will suffer many losses, but we have no other choice,” explained IDF Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin. The next morning, on June 5, Israeli jets and tanks launched a surprise attack against Egypt, destroying 204 of its planes in the first half-hour. By the end of the first morning of fighting, the Israeli Air Force had destroyed 286 of Egypt’s 420 combat aircraft, 13 air bases, and 23 radar stations and anti-aircraft sites. It was the most successful single operation in aerial military history.
But, as feared, other Arab forces attacked. Enemy planes struck Israeli cities along the narrow waist, including Hadera, Netanya, Kfar Saba, and the northern suburbs of Tel Aviv; and thousands of artillery shells fired from the West Bank pummeled greater Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem. Ground forces, meanwhile, moved to encircle Jerusalem’s Jewish neighborhoods as they did in 1948.
In six days, Israel repelled these incursions and established secure boundaries. It drove the Egyptians from the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula, and the Syrians, who had also opened fire, from the Golan Heights. Most significantly, Israel replaced the indefensible armistice lines by reuniting Jerusalem and capturing the West Bank from Jordan.
The Six-Day War furnished Israel with the territory and permanence necessary for achieving peace with Egypt and Jordan. It transformed Jerusalem from a divided backwater into a thriving capital, free for the first time to adherents of all faiths. It reconnected the Jewish people to our ancestral homeland in Judea and Samaria, inspiring many thousands to move there. But it also made us aware that another people—the Palestinians—inhabited that land and that we would have to share it.
As early as the summer of 1967, Israel proposed autonomy for the Palestinians in the West Bank and later, in 2000 and 2008, full statehood. Unfortunately, Palestinian leaders rejected these offers. In 2005, Israel uprooted all 8,000 of its citizens living in Gaza, giving the Palestinians the opportunity for self-determination. Instead, they turned Gaza into a Hamas-run terrorist state that has launched thousands of rockets into Israel. Now, the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank intends to unilaterally declare statehood at the United Nationswithout making peace. It has also united with Gaza’s Hamas regime, which demands Israel’s destruction.
In spite of the Palestinians’ record of rejection and violence, Israel remains committed to the vision of two states living side by side in peace.… [But] we need defensible borders to ensure that Israel will never again pose an attractive target for attack.
For this reason, Israel appreciates U.S. President Barack Obama’s opposition to unilaterally declared Palestinian statehood and negotiations with Hamas, which refuses to recognize Israel, uphold previous peace agreements, and disavow terrorism. Similarly, we support the president’s call for the nonmilitarization of any future Palestinian state that must be capable of assuming “security responsibility.” In his recent address to a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu affirmed the president’s statement that the negotiated border will be “different than the one that existed on June 4, 1967.”
Forty-four years after Arab forces sought to exploit the vulnerable armistice lines, it remains clear that Israel cannot return to those lines. And 44 years after the United Nations, through Resolution 242, indicated that Israel would not have to forfeit all of the captured territories and must achieve “secure and recognized boundaries,” the unsecure and unrecognized armistice lines must not be revived. Israel’s insistence on defensible borders is a prerequisite for peace and a safeguard against a return to the Arab illusions and Israeli fears of June 1967.
YONATAN NETANYAHU’S ODYSSEY:
FROM HARVARD TO ENTEBBE
Charles E. Shepard
Jerusalem Post, July 6, 2011
This week marks the 35th anniversary of the operation
to rescue hijacked Air France passengers in which the heroic commander was killed.Yoni Netanyahu was only a flash in Harvard’s pan, an undergraduate for a year and a summer, a hard working student living off campus, remembered by only a handful of people in Cambridge. But for those few, Netanyahu—the sole Israeli commando to die in the July 4 assault on the airport in Entebbe, Uganda—was a man worthy of profound admiration, an extremely intelligent person who, in the words of his one-time adviser, had a “truly unique sense of dedication that you just don’t find in people very often, regardless of their age.”
Netanyahu’s Harvard friends, like Seamus P. Malin ‘62, his adviser in 1967-68 and the current director of financial aid, are wary that their eulogies be mistaken for run-of-the-mill posthumous praise, and they offer eerily similar descriptions of Netanyahu’s extraordinary qualities.
“This place does attract some pretty unusual individuals,” Malin says, “so it is not therefore a big deal to say you’ve come across somebody who is going to be a future senator or a bigwig in national or international life. But there are few people that you do meet whom you genuinely feel add to you as a person and really make being here and being associated with them in some way a fuller development of your own life.”
In that sense, Malin adds, Netanyahu’s death left an “emptiness because he was a person who lived a kind of exemplary personal life, without being schmaltzy about it, that made you kind of feel warm when you were with him. A conversation with him always made you think about your own life in a way you wouldn’t have thought about it if he hadn’t popped in to see you.…”
Although born in New York in 1946, Netanyahu was raised from age two on in Israel, and his close friends remember him as “Yoni,” a nickname derived from the Hebrew equivalent of his first name.
In the early 1960s Netanyahu returned to the United States as his Polish-born father, a Judaic studies scholar who now heads Cornell’s department of Semitic languages and literature, took a teaching position at Dropsie College in Philadelphia. But after graduating from a high school outside the city in 1964, Netanyahu returned to Israel and entered the Israeli armed forces as a paratrooper.
But Netanyahu had not decided to become an Israeli career officer. To the contrary, according to one of his closest friends at Harvard, Elliot Z. Entis ‘67, Netanyahu wanted very much to be a physicist before he came to Harvard… Netanyahu applied here, perhaps because of the presence of Entis, whom he had befriended at camp in New Hampshire during high school. Harvard accepted him enthusiastically; Kaufmann, who worked as an assistant director of admissions in 1967, describes Netanyahu as an “incredibly strong” candidate with a similarly impressive record and set of recommendations.
Netanyahu’s smooth transition from solider to academic was destroyed by the June 1967 Six Day War, an experience that “changed Yoni incredibly,” Entis says… Seeing many of his friends die set off a process of inner turmoil that ultimately would lead Netanyahu—who was himself seriously wounded in the left elbow during the fighting—to leave Harvard, to become a career officer, to “resolve that what he believed in he would have to live by,” as Entis says.…
What sticks in everyone’s mind is Netanyahu’s overwhelming concern for Israel. Repeatedly, when he dropped in to chat with Malin, Netanyahu would say, “I just shouldn’t be here. This is a luxury. I should be at home. I should be defending my country.” Thus Malin was not surprised in the spring of 1968 when Netanyahu dropped in to announce his plans to return, explaining that “Harvard is a wonderful place to be, but I just can’t justify being here.…” That fall, Netanyahu enrolled at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, but soon he was back in the army.…
On February 1, 1969, I volunteered for renewed service in the army, and I have stayed in it ever since. During this period my rank was raised from first lieutenant to captain, and will be raised again to that of major on April 1 of this year. I am presently serving as a commander of a highly selective unit in the paratroopers.”
Entis visited Netanyahu in Israel in 1972 and found that he was largely unchanged. But the job had taken its toll; while Netanyahu had managed to avoid serious injury in his frequent antiterrorist activity, his wife, Tooti, was soon to leave him. “It was really a question of a man’s job getting in the way of his marriage,” Entis says.…
Despite his return to Israel and uncommonly rapid rise in the military rank, Netanyahu never abandoned his hopes to return to Harvard. Repeatedly he wrote the College to check the procedures for re-entry, never completely accepting his friends’ assurances that he would be welcome back any time. Finally, in January, 1973, Netanyahu informed Harvard that he planned to resume his studies immediately after freeing himself from active duty the upcoming June.
[In 1973, Netanyahu] return[ed to Harvard], enrolling in three half-courses—one over the conventional load. But, for reasons unknown, Netanyahu decided in August that he would not return in the fall. Less than two months later the October war erupted, again compelling Netanyahu to postpone his Harvard education.…
“The October War wasn’t the first war I went though, though it was certainly the hardest and most bitter. I came out of this round all in one piece (this time) though I lost many good and dear friends. Things aren’t quite the same as they were before… I still look forward to returning to Harvard sometime in the future, when things quiet down here.…”
Yoni Netanyahu loved math, and half his freshman year courses were in the natural sciences—Math 1a and 1b and Physics 1b and 12a. But…there was not much he could do with math as a 30- year-old army officer. So Netanyahu hoped to concentrate on international relations when he returned.…
Signs of this shift were apparent in his studies in the summer of 1973. Netanyahu’s three courses were all in Government—a survey of the history of political theory from Machiavelli to Marx, a conference course with Karl W. Deutsch, Stanfield Professor of International Peace, and a study of governments of the Middle East. Netanyahu’s grades—two A-’s and one A—were apparently typical of his performance at Harvard. Entis, like Netanyahu’s other friends at Harvard, stresses that the Israeli was brilliant, an “incredibly good” chess player who intellectually “was a constant surprise.…”
Netanyahu’s Harvard friends knew that he often spearheaded Israeli operations against Palestinian guerillas, and when they heard of such commando raids they usually thought of the short, stocky, thin-faced, steely-eyed Netanyahu, who, Malin says, “really looked the part of a guy you don’t mess around with.” But oddly enough…when those friends read about the raid that freed over 100 hostages being held by Palestinian sympathizers, their minds focused on the liberated, not the liberators.
Entis, who now works in a District of Columbia management consulting firm, didn’t consider that Netanyahu might have been involved until he saw his friend’s name on the front page of The Washington Post, news that “hit me right between the eyes.” But Entis’s reaction—like that of Netanyahu’s other friends who eulogized him last week—didn’t stop with tears. Entis’s devotion to his work in business is far weaker than Netanyahu’s was to Israel, and his friend’s death moved him to scrutinize his own life. “One of the problems in America is that we are a nation of relatively uncommitted people. Yoni had an ideal, and when he died, it made you think about your own life,” Entis explains. “It’s also a question of relative values. Yoni was willing quite literally to put his life on the line. That’s quite unusual. And there are even fewer people who derive that devotion internally.”
