Practicing History: Selected Essays

  Finally, the manpower of the nation, which up to the age of forty-nine constitutes the active reserve, was kept prepared through constant and rigorous exercises that were not always merely for training. A young reserve officer returning home after a brief call-up and asked by his parents what he had been doing replied succinctly, “Shooting infiltrators.” What forged the Israeli armed forces was that the state had never known peace.

  Three conditions at the time the state came into being determined the kind of army it would have to create: absence of peace, limitations of geography, and limitations of manpower and money. A fourth, which was an advantage, was foreknowledge of a specific enemy, familiar and contiguous.

  When the war of independence of 1948 was halted by armistice without a treaty, the battered defenders, taking stock, realized that they had won a state but not peace. Across an elongated unnatural border, curving in haphazard knobs and bulges that marked positions on the day of the truce, they faced frustrated, embittered neighbors subjected to a constant propaganda of revenge. Geography was against the Israelis: They had no natural obstacles on which to base a defense, no territory to yield, and no room to retreat. Unlike larger countries, they could not afford mistakes like that of France in 1914 or rebound from an initial disaster like Dunkirk or Pearl Harbor. This fact dictated a strategy, should it become necessary, of carrying war to the enemy, and the initial strike could not be allowed to fail. Other countries can face the possibility of defeat or invasion and expect to survive, with limited or lost independence. For Israel, its people believed, defeat would mean annihilation. Once inside Israel, said General Amos Horev, Deputy Chief Scientist of the IDF, the Arabs “would have cut us to ribbons.” As commander of a battalion in the fighting for Jerusalem in 1948, General Horev, who looks more like a Yale oarsman than a general officer, had had to leave his dead on the field and had come back next day to bury them. He found the bodies hacked into pieces, and with the help of another officer, matched up limbs and heads with torsos, knowing each of the dead personally, before burial. Many others knew from experience like that of the Hebron massacre of 1929 what it would mean if the Arabs were ever to gain the upper hand.

  Limited manpower and money precluded a standing army adequate to the task of defense. The solution arrived at was dependence on a small professional career force which, together with each class of draftees serving their two and a half years of military duty, would constitute a standing nucleus. The rest, amounting in the June war to about eighty percent of the total, must be drawn in emergency from a national reserve in civil life. The problem was how to organize, train, and keep up to date this reserve so that it would be mobilizable in twenty-four hours and able to take the field in forty-eight. This required an “Israeli answer,” since no other country had the same problem under the same conditions. The United States counts on three weeks to put the Reserve into action. An adaptation of the Swiss system was worked out by which each locality formed its own brigade—except for special volunteer units like the paratroopers or the Air Force—thus saving time in assembly. Depots for the equipment of each unit are set up, with maintenance taken care of by the draftees and regulars.

  Reservists are kept to the necessary degree of readiness and fitness, with one foot in the army, by annual training periods of a month for enlisted men and five or six weeks for officers, plus shorter call-ups of up to three days every three months, depending on type of unit and the need.

  The IDF is the nation, not a section of it. Bus drivers became tank drivers and are now back on their local routes. A supermarket manager who commanded a battalion in Sinai and captured an Egyptian general has returned to his groceries. Even one divisional commander was a reservist—General Avram Yoffe, who is Parks Commissioner in civil life. The kibbutzim, representing six to seven percent of the population, with their long commitment to the land and strong ideological tradition, provided fifty percent of the officers and twenty-five percent of casualties. Virtually every family had a connection with someone in the war. “My niece’s husband who captured Government House,” or “Jaacov’s brother on the PT boat,” is part of every conversation.

  The surprise was the performance of the “espresso” generation in their twenties, mistrusted by their elders, who considered that they had discarded the old ideals and sat around in the cafés over espresso, long on apathy and short on dedication. In the test it was these young men who carried the bulk of the combat with a fierce commitment that was as important to the nation as the victory itself.

  Regional organization of units gave added incentive in battle, as in the Northern Command, when men fighting the Syrians were defending or avenging their own frequently shelled villages. Wherever they came from, said one officer, “whether from the Galilee, Tel Aviv, or the Negev, each man fought as if everything depended on him.” In the general mobilization for the crisis, units often found themselves with twenty percent surplus. Men over-age or not called for some other reason appeared anyway, including a father in one brigade who joined his son, and were accepted as familiar faces by the company commander without too much question. He does not care who is surplus, General Chaim Barlev, Deputy Chief of Staff, explained: “Only the computer knows later.”

  Units trained for years in terms of a particular terrain. All the relevant information that could be obtained before war was assembled and learned. The IDF allotted a higher percentage of ammunition—up to fifty percent of total training ammunition—to actual tactical problems with fire rather than to range marksmanship as in other countries.

  The IDF does not believe in officers’ starting as officers, but selects candidates for officer training from the draftees who show promise, after they have learned how it feels to serve as a private. Candidates must survive rigorous testing and pass through NCO school and service first. Reserve officers of company level and up are required to take three-month courses every two or three years or else give up their commissions.

  Because of stringent budgets, officers’ training in Israel is more condensed than in any other country, lasting no more than six months for the ground forces. When they leave, according to General Uzi Narkis, chief of the Central Command, “they feel the gap between what they have learned and what they ought to know and so they try to learn more on their own.” A small, compact, bright-eyed, serious man who established his headquarters in the Old City of Jerusalem after hostilities and drives there in his car unescorted, he talked sitting with one leg tucked under him, sipping the bottled orange drink on which the IDF fought the war. The Jews’ intellectual curiosity, he said, was an important military asset. “They want to know why: why this hill, not the other, why this way rather than that. They are skeptical and critical. Israelis are critical of everything, all the time, of the government, the army, of themselves. It is important for an officer to be self-critical—and obstinate. He must be obstinate about sticking to his mission until it is carried out.” The three essentials for an officer, he said, are a spirit of inquiry, execution of mission, and orientation—to the terrain and the task. “And of course leadership and audacity, that is understood.” An officer is one who leads, and to lead he has to be ahead, “ahead too of what occurs.” Evidence that officers led their units during the six days of June was a casualty rate of thirty percent compared with less than ten percent for the whole.

  The officer class is young; youth is a fetish of the IDF. Yigael Yadin, now professor of archeology and director of the historic Massada dig, was thirty-three as Chief of Operations in the war of 1948. The present Chief of Staff, General Itzhaak Rabin, now forty-six, was appointed at forty-three, and his staff on average is probably the youngest in the world. This is deliberate policy reflecting the military leaders’ tense consciousness that on them may depend at any moment the country’s continued existence. They are determined to maintain the IDF primed to the last minute, never satisfied, constantly improving.

  For the General Staff and virtually all higher-grade officers now over the age of forty, as
well as many of the enlisted men, this is their fourth war. They fought in World War II as part of the British Army, in their own war of independence against the Arabs in 1948, and in the Sinai campaign against Egypt in 1956. In 1941 when Palestine seemed in danger of invasion by Rommel’s forces in North Africa, its young Jewish citizens joined either the British Army or the Palmach, the professional nucleus of the Haganah, whose members were intensively trained for resistance to the expected invasion. It was then that their attention was first turned to the Sinai peninsula, for that would have been Rommel’s route. After 1945 the Palmach gained another kind of military experience in the illegal struggle to bring in the refugees. Its seagoing and coastal operations in that effort provided the early experience of Israel’s Navy. Facing the coming showdown with the Arabs upon the end of the Mandate, the Palmach began that systematic study of the enemy which was to give the IDF of 1967 the most thorough and accurate information ever provided by any Intelligence to Operations.

  The present Chief of Staff, the Deputy Chief, the Chiefs of Intelligence, of Operations, of the Air Force, and Armored Corps, as well as the three area commanders, are all veterans either of the British Army or the Palmach, and all but three are Palestine-born.

  Most of the high command have studied briefly at the command and staff colleges in France, Britain, and the United States, but this is nothing they boast of; it has to be pried out of them. One theme they notably and unanimously maintain is refusal to acknowledge any debt to foreign methods or doctrines and insistence on their independent development. There are no foreign experts or advisers in the IDF.

  The Israelis want to leave no doubt that they have grounded their armed forces on their own experience from the Palmach on. This effort too has been deliberate because, new to military endeavor and small in size, they have had to resist any temptation to follow some military father figure represented by one or another of the major powers. A deeper reason is the sense of uniqueness that has characterized the Jews since Abraham made his covenant with God. Recognizing both tendencies, General Ezer Weizman, Chief of Operations of the IDF, said, “We had to guard against the extremes of being either too arrogant or too humble, saying, ‘Oh, we are so tiny, tell us what to do.’ ” What influenced him at the Ecole de l’Etat Major, said General Aharon Yariv, Chief of Intelligence, was la méthode, a way of thinking and analyzing a problem, not the problem itself. He and his colleagues, when setting up their own General Staff school, “copied nothing.” Doctrine and methods had to be of practical value for local circumstances, not just repetitions of accepted principle, however classic.

  These officers have in common a self-assurance so confident that it can afford to be quiet, if not exactly modest. There is no reluctance whatever to acknowledge, in the most charming and friendly way, that “we’re good.” General Rabin, a subdued, thoughtful, intensely self-contained man and a chain smoker, conveying an impression of inner tension rigidly suppressed, is almost shy in company, but when talking on his subject, becomes magisterial. In all the staff and command officers an evident knowledge of their subject finds expression in readiness, even eagerness, to talk of it. They spill over with ideas. Because of the challenge and the need, the military profession in Israel can attract the finest energy of the country.

  These are the officers and men who sprang into battle on June 5; who fought their way across Sinai almost without stopping for seventy-two hours except for refueling and one or two hours’ sleep; who in the case of one company of paratroopers fought on all three fronts, Sinai, Jerusalem, and Syria; who in the case of another unit continued to advance after all its officers one after the other were put out of action; who in the last two days plunged and scrambled up the Syrian heights against a position that even now, to anyone seeing its gun emplacements, lines of fire, cement bunkers, barbed wire, and stone-lined trenches, seems impossible to have been taken by human assault.

  The impetus and force that carried the Israelis forward through the six days cannot be understood separately from the period of crisis that preceded. The “tension,” as they call it, was the worst time, everyone agrees. The people at large, not sharing the high command’s exact knowledge of its own capacity, felt the enemy closing in. With Egyptian armor massing, the radios of Cairo, Damascus, and Amman bellowing annihilation, they saw the specter of genocide again. They knew they would have to fight alone if they fought at all. One by one the nations had dropped away from the proposed maritime armada to force the Gulf of Aqaba. The experience was familiar. Britain had closed the doors of Palestine to Jews seeking escape from Hitler. The U.N. after voting partition had left them to Arab attack, embargoing arms. The assurances of 1956 had not been honored. World indifference, they felt, was now repeating itself, leaving them to another “final solution.” The Nazi program to wipe out the Jews is never out of mind in Israel, and they lived with the knowledge that the Arabs who have adapted it to their purposes were now gathering for the attempt.

  Alongside the fear and depression of some, a more resolute mood possessed others, a feeling that they had had enough of Arab belligerence, threats, sabotage, terrorists, and diversion of water, that this time they must make a thorough job of it. They had reached, in General Rabin’s words, “an accumulated frustration, because everybody felt that we had tried every way to avoid war but that now it was forced on us.”

  For the high command the period of waiting was “agony,” for with each day that it was prolonged their war casualties would be that much greater. As compared with 1956, so they believed, they would be entering war at a greater disadvantage: This time the bulk of Egyptian force was already east of the Canal zone, with an enormous quantity of modern weapons and ten years of Soviet training they had lacked before. Israel would be advancing against them alone with no allies to pin down enemy planes; in addition it would be fighting on two, possibly three fronts instead of only in Sinai. Yet the alternative—acceptance of the blockade—would have been intolerable: “We would have been buried alive,” as one officer said. The decision had to be taken, for the choice, as summed up by the same man, was clear: “Not to be strong was to be smashed like a worm.” Held in restless waiting for three weeks, the IDF shot forward as if released by a spring.

  Its spearhead was the Air Force, which established the conditions of victory—Air Chief General Mordecai Hod prefers to say “won the war,” but that seems unfair to the ground forces—in eighty minutes. “We planned and trained eighteen years for those eighty minutes,” he says, sparkling with pride. As commander of a performance of spectacular brilliance and sensational success, he cannot hold in his delight. A smile quivers in his eyes and on his mouth as he talks, and breaks easily into a grin. He is brimming with happiness. Before succeeding to the command, Hod was for five years deputy commander under his no less exuberant predecessor, Ezer Weizman, and they are much alike in style. Weizman, nephew of Israel’s first President, was born in Tel Aviv and Hod in Israel’s oldest kibbutz, Degania A in the Galilee. At forty, he still flies every week with one of his squadrons, feeling that he must be able to do himself whatever he demands of them. It gives confidence in their orders to the fighter pilots, who start training at eighteen and whose average age is twenty-two to twenty-three.

  The Air Force convinced its colleagues that though Israel might stand off the enemy, it could not win without air superiority. To create the perfect and infallible instrument for this purpose was the goal of Hod and Weizman. Appointed to command the Air Force at thirty-four in 1958, Weizman describes the following eight years until shifted to his present post as Chief of Operations as “the happiest of my life.” He was working on the frontiers of the jet age with knowledge of a vital task on which his country’s life depended.

  Tall, slender, and voluble, with a small mustache and English-accented speech, Weizman moves restlessly, flinging himself back in his chair, twisting his long legs over the arm, leaning forward to make a point, or striding up and down while rapid sentences tumble over each other in a los
ing race to keep up with his thoughts. He has a gift of distilled phrase. Speaking of the meaning of Jerusalem to a Jewish state, “I could not raise my children on the history of Tel Aviv.” Or on the incompatibility of national character as a factor in Russia’s imperfect success in training the Arabs, “What Ivan has in common with Muhamed, kill me if I know.” Because of the extraordinary record of the Air Force, he says, foreigners think it had some electronic, super-sophisticated secret weapon, “something that whistles and sings the Hatikvah,” but the answer was simpler than that: perfect command of the machine as redesigned and adapted to suit both the short distances of air war in the Middle East and Israel’s narrow means. In negotiating with the French, for instance, for purchase of Mirages in 1958–9, the Israelis insisted on the plane’s having two cannon built into it although it was designed to carry only missiles. The French argued that with new sophisticated developments only missiles were needed in air-to-air combat, but the Israelis had a dual purpose in mind. They wanted to use the planes not only to intercept bombers and fight Mig 21s, which carried missiles plus one cannon, but also to destroy planes on the ground, the essence of their strategy. Weizman stuck to his guns and got them. “I wouldn’t have bought the planes without them.”

  “We were fanatics in the Air Force,” he says. “We knew exactly what we wanted. We meant to rely on our own ideas and not be prisoners of computers.” This was the secret of their ultimate supreme confidence that “we could clobber the enemy,” even though the enemy represented the combined air forces of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. Why? “Because the military world has become a victim of its own sophistication in weaponry, bewildered by the technology of the atom age. It has forgotten that brains, nerve, heart, and imagination are all beyond the capacity of the computer. No computer can go ‘beyond the call of duty,’ but that is what medals are given for.”