Get out. Not because Hezbollah is a fairer or more moral adversary than we are. It is an organization that cynically trades in the body parts of its enemies, that has no compunctions about using women and children as human shields in shooting attacks, and that does not hesitate to launch indiscriminate attacks on civilian settlements over the border. But Israel’s position against Hezbollah will be much more determined and ethical if it redeploys on the international border, ends the state of occupation, and denies every enemy the right to act against it. If, after the withdrawal, Hezbollah attacks the inhabitants of northern Israel, Israel will have every right to act against Lebanon, a sovereign country.
Get out. Because, in doing so, Israel will deny President Assad his main bargaining card — his ability to use Hezbollah as a proxy to attack Israel’s soldiers and so apply intolerable pressure on Israel during the negotiations over Israel’s withdrawl from the Golan Heights.
Get out. Not in July, which Prime Minister Barak has set as his target date. After all, July is just an arbitrary and artificial deadline set a year ago as part of Barak’s election campaign. If it can be done in July, why can’t it be done next week? Why not start the retreat today?
Get out. Evacuate the outposts, bring our soldiers home, redeploy on the border. Get out. Swallow our dubious pride. Stop feeding the miserable hubristic fire within us with ever more young soldiers. Every soldier killed now is an unnecessary victim of military arrogance. The same is true of every Lebanese civilian who is hurt. We need to state explicity: It’s not the doubts and protests being heard on Israel’s home front that are destroying the Israeli Army’s chances of success there. It’s the sense of error and pointlessness, and the feeling that the fighting will never end.
Get out. We began this war defeated, and if Barak gets us out now, it will be his first great victory as prime minister. But to achieve that, he will have to recognize that we’ve lost this war. We are defeated. We can say it out loud — and not die of it.
Of that you don’t die.
On May 22, 2002, Israel withdrew its forces back to the international border with Lebanon in a quick forty-eight hour operation — two months before the original deadline set for withdrawal by Barak.
The Pope’s Visit to Israel
March 2000
Pope John Paul II made a historic official visit to the State of Israel on March 20, 2000, as part of a wider, millennium-commemorating visit to the holy Christian sites of the region. He was accompanied by tens of thousands of pilgrims. During his weeklong stay, the Pope visited the Christian holy sites both in Israel and in the Palestinian Authority territories, as well as sacred Muslim and Jewish sites and “secular” sites like Tad Vashem and a Palestinian refugee camp. The visit elicited much attention and interest around the Christian world and among Israelis and Arabs.
Day One: The Pope Arrives
An Israeli sits in front of his television set in his home in Jerusalem and watches the Pope arrive in his country.
This person is not religious. Religious ceremonies are foreign to him, and religious institutions in particular are foreign to him. He is very Jewish, and he respects those whose religious fervor burns in their hearts, but he himself has not performed what Kierkegaard called “the leap of faith.”
For a few days he’s been telling himself that this visit, historic as it is, will certainly neither move nor impress him. He’s been explaining to himself that the Pope’s visit is of no relevance to him, to his day-to-day routine, to the immediate problems of his private life, or to the political and moral dilemmas that his country has been agonizing over for decades. But when the airplane lands in Israel and the Pope emerges atop the stairway leading down to the tarmac, something suddenly happens.
The Israeli looks at the Pope, an old man, bent and burdened with years, weighted down with experience and the vicissitudes of life. Real sorrow, personal and very human, is also evident in his everyman’s face. He gazes at the Pope and suddenly sees, as if by an epiphany, what the Pope himself sees, perhaps: the state of Israel. The reality, both symbolic and concrete, of a country born after two thousand years of exile, religious persecutions, inquisitions, blood libels, pogroms, and the Holocaust.
The man in the armchair isn’t in any way resentful about this. He does not in any way see Israel as reprisal for what the Gentiles have done to the Jews, under the leadership and inspiration of most of this current Pope’s predecessors.
The opposite is true. In the meditative, profound gaze of the Pope he sees the marvel and the opportunity of the Jewish state. He sees the Jewish people’s life force for revival and renewal, which in these difficult times is the source of the great hope that Israel can save itself from the curse of war and attain peace.
The Israeli sitting and watching television fidgets uncomfortably in his chair. He really had had no intention of being carried away by such “historic” sentiments. Nor has he had any intention of reopening old accounts with either the Christian world or the Christian religion. Keeping such score would not, in any case, repair anything, and who today has the strength to peer again into the darkness in which Jewish-Christian relations have been conducted over the last two thousand years?
But then the Pope passes before the honor guard of Israeli soldiers. Bent over, leaning on his cane, deep in his own thoughts, he moves past the strapping armed men, who embody an ironic reversal of ancient stereotypes. The man in the armchair, who is no great fan of armies of any kind, reflects to himself that had any Jews of the last forty generations seen this Jewish military honor guard — even his own father, who fled Europe only seventy years earlier — they would not have believed their eyes. Then the Israeli suddenly comprehends, more than he had allowed himself to do up to this moment, that the restrained, well-planned ceremony is a thin veneer of formality, behind which seethes an entire history. It is a cruel, primal, deep open wound, but maybe now, finally, there is a new opportunity, the first of its type, to heal it.
Then the Israeli national anthem is played. There’s no way of knowing whether its words have been translated for John Paul II. Perhaps they ought to be explained here. They speak of hope — the Jews’ two-thousand-year hope to establish a free nation in their own land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem.
Then the Pope speaks. He conveys fine and moving thoughts. This brave man, who had the courage to change the Church’s position toward Israel and Judaism. He speaks of his spiritual journey here, and a thought about what this great journey can become steals into the Israeli’s heart: a journey of elucidation and study, of identification and remorse, a religious and physical journey traversing all the terrible stations we have passed, Jews and Christians, human beings, men, women, and children; a journey to the beginning, from which will, perhaps, begin a new future, a life that is more possible and more human. This will certainly not happen in one short week. But it can begin here.
Day Two: Visit to a Refugee Camp
The Israeli and Palestinian officials were worried and tense as they sat and measured each word of the Pope’s speech. Would he depart from the text that had been prepared and agreed to by all the parties? Would he refer to the status of Jerusalem? Would he mention the Palestinian demand for a return to the 1967 borders? In the struggle between the two peoples, each gain by one side is still perceived as a defeat for the other. But beyond the words that were said, something deeper was becoming evident. The Israelis and the Palestinians look now like two inimical brothers, modern incarnations of Jacob and Esau, waiting for the blessing of their father. Each brother eyes what the other receives, and has faith in the magical power of the blessing.