The Logic of Machismo

August 16th, 2006

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Posted by ChrisG at 11:35 am

Among all the post-mortems littering the web after Israel’s failure – again – to solve its perceived problems by the exercise of what the IDF brass think constitutes ‘overwhelming’ force, this caught my eye. Dan Rabinowitz, a professor of sociology and anthropology at Tel Aviv, shows a rare will to accommodate the possibility that the internal logic of Israeli policy aims ultimately at nothing other than Israel’s own repeated defeat:

However, this reality has not yet sunk into the consciousness of our generals, men of the old school who were educated in the spirit of the slogan that what cannot be done with force can be done with more force. The arrogant idee fixe of 1973, which held that the Arabs’ defeat in 1967 had destroyed their desire to fight, did not disappear with the Agranat Report. It is still here, wrapped in modern phrases such as “searing their consciousness” and “restoring deterrence.” Its prophets stubbornly ignore the fact that if anything has been seared into the Arabs’ consciousness in any of these cases, it is only hatred for Israel and its addiction to force.

The solution to violence needs a readiness to understand the motivation and the interests of those with whom Israel must share the Middle East: in other words, it demands the approach that lay beneath the best efforts of Israeli politicians like Moshe Sharett and Levi Eshkol, not the rejection of the humanity of the Arabs that drove the failures of the likes of Yitzhak Shamir and Binyamin Netanyahu.