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Let me show you a few pictures. Imagine them spread out across a table in the design department of Life magazine, circa 1950, with the art director, in a black turtleneck, studying them through an eyepiece as Robert Capa leans against a wall smoking a cigarette.
“Were these shot in Jerusalem?”
“Ashdod.”
“These men here, are these Jews?”
“Sure, why not?”
“Marvelous, just marvelous.”
The photos were taken soon after the 1948 War and were published in a book with an essay by Irwin Shaw. They were said to depict the “New Jew” who had come of age in the new Israel. Some showed men smiling in the sun. Some showed men patrolling beneath walls, packs on their backs. Some showed scouts in the bush, as free as Red Indians. Some showed men resting between missions—“most were very large, with bold, tanned faces and clear eyes, and gave the impression of a group of good-humored athletes whose faces had been stamped by profound experiences,” writes Shaw; some showed men hiking up a road; some showed airplanes; some showed tanks; some showed infantrymen, who, according to Shaw, “had the tough confident look of victorious troops.”
In the forties and fifties, a golden age for Israel—because the country was still humble, and truculent, and small—the spirit of the nation, personified by this normalized new Jew, was being forged in the army, which was seen as a kind of lab, where officers were not merely training soldiers for war, but curing Jewish recruits of being Jewish, or inventing a new way of being Jewish altogether.
The ethos of the army was the ethos of the state.
First there was the physical appearance of the soldiers, many of whom grew bushy mustaches and went everywhere without a hat, tanned to a deep olive. They were reclaiming the land and the land was reclaiming them, turning them into desert rats, the wandering tribe of Joshua. They changed their names—shed the steins and bergs of Europe, which were exile names, slave names, and took Hebrew names that suggested power, nature, or the land itself. The most popular included Peled (steel), Tzur (rock), Avni (another kind of rock), and Allon (oak), as in, This New Jew is as solid as an oak! When Shmuel Goldfein—it means something like Sam the Moneygrubber (in Europe, Jews were given surnames by their Christian neighbors)—made Aliyah from Plotsk, he changed his last name to Barak (lightning), and named his son Ehud, which means something like “popular.” Sam the Moneygrubber begat Popular Lightning.
Then there was the fighting style of the Israelis, how Jewish soldiers were taught to comport themselves in battle. If fired on, for example, they were told to return fire immediately, before taking cover. If ambushed, a common tactic in the region, they were told to charge into the source of fire. Israeli commanders were reeducating the Jews, who had been taught, by history, to cower and hide. The New Jew would behave less like his grandfather the ghetto Jew, than like his ancestor the Zealot, who went out at sundown, when the sentries blew their horns and the archers darkened the sky with arrows.
The Israelis believed they were creating a soldier different from any other kind of soldier in history. Because these were Jews, they would be smart as well as strong, creative, humane, decent, compassionate. Officers spoke of “the purity of arms.” It meant disobeying an order if it was immoral. It meant wars without war crimes. The army was egalitarian—no service academy, no ruling class; everyone went in as a grunt. To make the point, commanders led not from a tent or a hut in the rear, but from the front, first into the ambush, first to die. “After me” was their slogan. As in, “Come on, come on!” As in, “Here I go, here I go!” Some spoke of retiring the word Jew altogether. A Jew is in the Diaspora. A Jew is cowering and weak. “We are not Jews,” said Shimon Peres. “We are Israelis.”
Recruits trained in the desert, ran, shot, jumped from planes. The standouts were tapped to serve as officers. Those who accepted were taken into the wilderness blindfolded, turned around, and left to find their way home. They picked a service: paratroopers, infantry, scouts, commandos. You saw them in the city squares on leave, with insignia on their chests and berets pinned to their shoulders. Or at intersections on the main road, hitching a ride back to their base, the fiery sun dropping into the sea, the stars coming out.
The paratroopers were inducted on Masada. This was Yigael Yadin’s idea. He wanted to connect modern Israeli soldiers with the ancient warriors who had made the peak their last redoubt. As in, “What died here is born again!” Soldiers followed the Snake Path in the dark, the desert yawning below. When the sun came up, it pressed on their backs like a warm hand. Cloud shadows crossed the valley. The sea shone in the distance like an amethyst, the flat eye of a lusterless God. The paratroopers were encouraged to think of themselves as the first Jews to retake the mountain from Rome. Everything that had happened was happening again. As the men stood in rank—the sun high now, the wastes bleak and going away—there was the thwump, thwump of a helicopter descending through the dust. Then a man climbed out: General Yadin. He stood on a platform, speaking of antiquity, return. One at a time, the soldiers came forward to have a pin stuck on their chests.
After the ’48 War, Israel demobilized its army and returned its soldiers to civilian life. The barracks were empty, the borders sparsely defended. In these months, the Arab militias resumed the guerrilla war by which they tried to erode the Jewish state, erode and erode until the last Yehud stood with his wife on a pier in Haifa, waiting for a ship to take them to some merchant house in Antwerp or New York. These militias, known as fedayeen—Arabic for “freedom fighters”—ambushed Israeli convoys, shot up Israeli markets, planted bombs in Israeli hotels, stabbed and killed Israeli civilians.* Casualties mounted: 137 killed in terrorist attacks in 1951; 163 killed in terrorist attacks in 1952. There were more than 1,000 attacks in 1953, in which 162 died. The Israeli soldiers who responded were ill equipped, not properly trained. They were tricked, ambushed, and routed. Fearing such losses would demoralize citizens, Ben-Gurion decided to form an elite unit trained specifically to hunt the fedayeen. He asked Ariel Sharon to devise a strategy, recruit and train the men.
To many, Sharon is the fat old kosher butcher, with blood on his apron and a sly grin on his face—and his fingers are missiles and his teeth are bullets—but in the 1950s he was the fit young Sabra† who had been wounded in battle and was beloved by his men and superiors, especially David Ben-Gurion, who saw in Sharon a personification of the strong, inarticulate new Jew. Israel was still small that way: the leader of the nation could spot a recruit going up the rope and over the wall and say, “Bring him to me.” Ben-Gurion would sit Sharon beside him at dinner, give him advice, tell him what books to read. The Iliad and the Odyssey. The Peloponnesian War. According to Moshe Dayan, Ben-Gurion loved Sharon because Sharon was “a daring fighter with confidence in himself, who was unapologetic about his Jewishness, at home in the terrain, knew the Arabs and knew his profession.”
In 2001 David Grossman called Sharon “one of the last living Sabra heroes, the native-born Israeli who is daring, rooted in the land, and prepared to fight for it to the death, in both his appearance and character he reminds many of a Biblical figure*—a man of great physical prowess and primal urges, cunning, shrewd, and brave.”
Sharon called the unit 101. Composed of only the best of the best, it would be a kind of distillation of the national ethos. He began searching for members in 1952. He recruited in the manner of the Samurai in the Japanese film: this one because he can shoot, that one because he knows the enemy, this one because he can vanish in the tall grass, that one because he can stick the blade. He invited twenty men to a base in the Negev. These men were short, tall, handsome, homely, as Jewy as can be, or Aryan in a way Goebbels might have admired.† Sharon trained them not only for marksmanship, obedience, and discipline, but also for endurance and creativity. How will a man perform when he is alone and hungry, has had no sleep, and feels the world has forgotten him? He wanted men who could fight without support, for weeks. He drilled them inside Egypt and Jordan so that they became accustomed to going back and forth across the border. Israel is too small to play defense, he explained. We must attack. His strategy echoed that of Orde Wingate: if you have to fight among civilians, make it their civilians.
He led the first operations. The unit set off at dusk, a truck dropping the soldiers near the frontier, the men cutting the border fence, scrambling on their bellies under the wire, vanishing into the shadowy hills across the Dead Sea. There were several missions. Some were reconnaissance, some led to firefights, some were manhunts, but most were retaliation—Israelis attacking because Israel had been attacked.
Here’s what Sharon told his men: It’s simple economics. Because of the Holocaust, the number of Jews, the supply, has been greatly diminished; we are short on inventory. As a result, the price has gone up. If they want to kill Jews, okay, but it’s going to cost them. “I came to view the objective not simply as retaliation or even deterrence in the usual sense,” he wrote. “It was to create in the Arabs a psychology of defeat, to beat them every time and beat them so decisively they would develop the conviction they could never win.”
Unit 101 existed for just five months—here, then gone. As a strategy, it turned out that hitting back twice as hard had perils. In short, all that training led to a disaster. In the winter of 1953, Arab militiamen infiltrated Yehud, a dusty Israeli town near Tel Aviv. Some of these men threw a grenade into a house, killing a family in their sleep: mother, daughter, baby. Within days, Israeli intelligence had determined the whereabouts of the militia: they were living in Jordan, in a town called Kibbya.
In February 1953, Israeli paratroopers attacked the town, driving its people from their houses, then searching for members of the militia. At the same time, Unit 101 attacked a Jordanian army base a few miles away. This was a diversion, meant to draw away soldiers who might otherwise come to the aid of the militia in Kibbya. Sharon wanted to inflict heavy casualties on the Jordanians, making them pay for sheltering the fedayeen.
At first light, the commander of the paratroopers radioed Sharon.
The mission is a success, he said. We’re withdrawing.
Sharon asked about Kibbya.
Where are its people? What’s it like on the street?
Deserted, said the paratrooper. The people ran away.
Members of 101 then entered Kibbya. They set bombs in the foundations of forty-five houses. The wires came out in a tangle and led to the detonator a soldier carried on his belt. He counted to three—aleph, bet, gimmel—then pressed the button. Debris went into the air and came down in a shower. Smoke lingered over the town.
Ariel Sharon, Warrior:
Kibbya was to be a lesson. I was to inflict as many casualties as I could on the Arab Home Guard and on whatever Jordanian army reinforcements showed up. I was also to blow up every major building in town. A political decision had been made at the highest level. The Jordanians were to understand that Jewish blood could no longer be shed with impunity. From this point on, there would be a heavy price to pay.
The members of 101 celebrated on their base: successful missions often ended with a party. The phone rang. Sharon took it in the back. When he came out, his expression was grim. There were people in those houses, he explained. Women and children, in the basements, hiding, probably waiting for us to leave. Sixty-three of them died.
Sharon said the fault lay not with his men, or his plan, but with the previous Israeli policy of limited response, from which, according to him, the Arabs took the wrong lesson: that the Israelis were not serious, that if you hid and waited they would just go away. The Arabs, in other words, were not victims of Israeli strength or aggression; they were victims of Israeli weakness, which had been provocative.
Kibbya made headlines around the world. This is what the incident seemed to suggest: the Jews are as bad as everyone else. Sharon’s policy actually seemed to echo the Nazi policy of collective punishment, in which the masses suffer for the crimes of the few. There was an investigation. The Israeli government promised to be more careful in the future. Unit 101 was disbanded. Its members became paratroopers, but its legend lived on.
Here is the real lesson Israelis took from Kibbya: it was a terrible accident, but it worked. “While the civilian deaths were a tragedy, the Kibbya raid was also a turning point,” Sharon wrote. “After so many defeats and demoralizing failures it was now clear that Israeli forces were capable of finding and hitting targets far behind enemy lines. What this meant to army morale can hardly be exaggerated. The past years had been a time of impotence and frustration, again and again IDF units had been chased off by Arab militia. But with Kibbya a new sense of confidence began to take root.”
Sharon met Ben-Gurion in Tel Aviv. “It doesn’t make any difference what will be said about Kibbya around the world,” Ben-Gurion told him. “The important thing is how it will be looked at in this region. This is going to give us the possibility of living here.”
In a sense, all this—training, fighting, raids—was not just a means to an end (secure borders, safe towns) but an end in itself. Through this struggle a new Jew would be born. “We are not Yeshiva students debating the finer points,” Ben-Gurion wrote in 1922. “We are conquerors of the land facing an iron wall.” It seemed thus to people everywhere: Israel was bringing a new type into the world, a ruddy, sandy-haired Jew, in the jet, on the tank, at the post, a kind of peasant, everything the Galut Jew was not: strong, simple, decisive, brave. He turned up again and again in the literature of the fifties, sixties, and seventies:
Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back: “The young men wear skullcaps but their frames are big and their forearms thick with muscle.”
Irwin Shaw, The New Yorker: “The housewives of Tel Aviv get up practically at dawn and seem to go, almost as one woman, immediately to the radio, which, with peasantlike delight in mechanical noise, they turn on full blast.”
Edmund Wilson, The Dead Sea Scrolls: “The visitors at the King David Hotel present an unattractive contrast . . . to Israelis, who are active, industrious people, with skins that have been darkened by the Eastern sun.”
In a letter to Lyndon Johnson, Henry McPherson, the president’s special counsel, wrote: “Israel at war destroys the prototype of the pale scrawny Jew. The soldiers I saw were tough, muscular and sunburned.”
The new Jew would look unlike any Jew the world had ever seen. Yes, it all seems superficial. Achingly so. What nation has ever been so concerned with the appearance of its citizens? (Well, Nazi Germany.) But there is a reason. In Europe, the appearance of the Jew—as caricatured—was said to mirror his inner nature: his foreignness, his forsakenness. The Jew is pale and narrow because he killed Christ. As if, in his anger, God smudged the Jew as you might smudge a wet painting. In the modern age, when people stopped attributing everything to God, the old caricature was kept, with its reasons rewritten. The Jew was still bent and pale, only now it was because of his inferior genes. Christ killers in the age of Christ; parasites in the age of Darwin. The modern Israeli was stronger and straighter because he had been redeemed.
What strikes me about the idea of the new Jew, which is at the core of the national project, is how Zionists seemed to accept the old stereotypes, seemed to believe, in their hearts, that the racists were at least partly right. Dreams of creating a new Jewish character were premised on the belief that the old Jewish character was diseased. In wanting to build a state to cure the Jew of his condition, early Zionists were in fact displaying a ghetto mentality. They were the slaves who had internalized the prejudice of their masters. For all his talk of autonomy, Theodor Herzl was mostly interested in creating a Jew the world could love—a Jew who wasn’t Jewish.
No one hates a Jew like a Zionist.
*It was said the fedayeen took inspiration from Algeria, where, beginning in the early 1950s, Muslim irregulars waged an insurgency that finally, in 1962, drove the French out of the country, which they had occupied for more than a hundred years.
†A term used to describe native-born Jewish Israelis. It’s Hebrew for cactus, and so said to describe the sons and daughters of the new nation: prickly on the outside, tender within.
*Which figure from the Bible? Is Sharon David, as many of his supporters believed? Wherever he went, crowds chanted, “Arik Melech Yisrael!” “Ariel, King of Israel!” Or is he Jeroboam, David’s strongman, his Luca Brazzi—the story of Michael Corleone is the story of King David. (“I’ll try, but even Sonny can’t call off Luca Brazzi.”) Jeroboam fights the battles and secures the throne but kills with a little more zeal than is necessary, so, in the end, must himself be killed on the altar of God.
†Several years ago, I met a dozen or so men who served in Unit 101 and its successor, Sayeret Matkal (“General Staff Reconnaissance Unit”), the counterterrorism force responsible for, among other things, the rescue at Entebbe. They showed me a video that members of Sayeret Matkal had made for their commander, Uzi Yairi, who was leaving to head the paratroopers. It was a parody of a James Bond film, handsome young men in razor-sharp suits, smoking and laughing; in fatigues, at the stick of a helicopter, ascending, jumping from planes, smiling as their parachutes bloomed open behind them; in drag, scuba gear, space suits, having fun, being silly in the way of young men with no sense of consequences or cost.