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The State of Israel was born in war, and it has lived by the sword ever since. This has given the generals and the military way of thinking … a paramount role in the Jewish state and too central a function in defining both Israel's war aims and her peace policies. Throughout, the army preached "activism" and frequently overreacted to real and sometimes imaginary threats.
It is hard to imagine such words written by an Israeli government leader even 15 years ago. To be sure, Ben-Ami spares no words when it comes to Arafat and the leadership of the PLO more generally. But this is to be expected. Ben-Ami's greatest despair, he tells us, was prompted by the failure of overtures to Arafat made during Ehud Barak's tenure, when opportunities for concession and agreement were lost thanks to arrogance on both sides. The results of this failure were catastrophic, giving the Palestinians into the hands of Hamas, destroying the Israeli peace movement, and handing the reins of Israeli politics to the far right.
But certainly Ben-Ami exhibits a new sensibility, a new willingness to acknowledge what is happening in the occupied territories. And what is happening there? Consider the case of Hamdi Aman. One Saturday afternoon in the spring of 2006, Hamdi, 28 years old, living in Gaza and proud of his new white Mitsubishi, rounded up some family members to take them for a drive. He pulled up to an intersection in the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood. An SUV approached from the rear and began to pass. Then all hell roared. A missile fired from a silent Israeli attack helicopter slammed into the SUV, destroying it. But at the same time, the explosion and its shrapnel ripped through Hamdi's car, killing his wife, Naima (27), his mother, Hanan (46), and his six-year-old son, Muhannad. Hamdi's three-year-old daughter, Maria, and his uncle, Nahed (34), remain hospitalized with severed spinal cords, unable to breathe on their own. This once proud father today is left alone with a two-year-old son, Mu'min. (I include the personal names of these victims so that I can remember that they are not mere statistics, occupying another couple of lines in the accident record.)
The Israeli response? An investigation, regret, and a promise to learn to reduce such risks in the future. According to Israeli civil rights groups the Israeli army has killed 234 Palestinians like this in the last five years—and they've killed 123 innocent bystanders. The army claims that they are assassinating "terrorists"—but they cannot be sure who is in the targeted car, nor is the person given a trial. They are simply executed from on high. And the bystanders? Collateral damage.
Now here is the shift. Israeli condemnations of Palestinian violence now share the spotlight with Israeli condemnations of Israeli violence. You can read about Hamdi's story in the newspapers (as I did), where Israelis express frustration with their own country's violence. The same is true regarding Israel's disproportionate bombing attack on Lebanon in August 2006. Not only were vast residential areas ruined, non-military targets destroyed, and 1200 civilians killed, but in the last days of the war—even as the world was calling for a stop to it all—Israel dropped 1.2 million cluster bomblets all over South Lebanon, virtually turning it into a minefield. (The American government, which supplied the cluster bombs, was oddly silent.) And for the sharper critics, this behavior on both sides deserves no finer word than "terrorism."
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