While Europe slept: Israel suffers for West’s quasi-pacifism
An ongoing tragedy of Israel is that so small a country (with no more than seven million citizens) must remain a major military power in order to survive. It pays a high price to do so, with most Israeli men spending three years of their youth as regular conscripts and then one month of each
year until their early 40s in active reserve units and subject to emergency call-ups.
Anti-Israel critics like to minimize Israel’s urgent security needs by referring to it, rather abstractly and without real analysis, as the fourth greatest military power in the world. I’m guessing that the three countries thought of as more powerful are the United States, China, and Russia. Does this mean that Britain, France, and Germany (to name but the most obvious) are less powerful than Israel? Each have eight to 10 times the population, comparable technological know-how, greater economic capacity, as large or larger standing armed forces, and great military traditions that go back centuries.
And what about the two Koreas — with the South possessing about 700,000 and the North one million or more men, armed to the teeth? Or what of India, a vast country, also with about a million men under arms, veterans of as many wars and struggles against guerrillas/terrorists as Israel? Even Taiwan, the Nationalist Republic of China, has more than twice Israel’s population, is technologically advanced, and has standing and well-equipped armed forces that are larger than Israel’s. Getting closer to Israel’s neighborhood, Turkey, Pakistan, and Iran each have larger military establishments than Israel.
Both Israel and its critics need to see Israel for what it is — a small country, forced into an unnatural situation of being the region’s most potent military power. The Jewish people have tried it the other way, with the de facto pacifism of living as a defenseless minority. The Israeli habit of perhaps over-relying upon force is a reaction to those long centuries of oppression and humiliation.
Yet at bottom, Israel has limited military capacities. It must attempt innovative means — including diplomacy and international assistance — to augment its odds for security. This may involve, at times, swallowing instances of hurt pride, or even injustice — a lesson the Arab world would also do well to learn — in the interest of avoiding unnecessary escalations of violence.
It should not surprise us that a guerrilla enemy, fighting on its own soil and glorifying the “martyrdom” of its men, along with the civilians among whom they are embedded, has placed Israel in strategic difficulty in Lebanon for a second time. The Romans confronted an equally determined foe in the Jewish people of 2,000 years ago, who were equipped with some of the same advantages. But Rome had the will and capacity of the world’s greatest empire — immune from the pressures of a well-informed public and democratic opposition (with the complete absence of such a thing as international opinion), and facing no simultaneous strategic threat elsewhere — to systematically crush the heroic Judean rebellions in the first and second centuries. As a small country, modern Israel almost certainly lacks the capability to do something similar to Hizbullah.
In readily agreeing to an international intervention, Israel has finally acknowledged its limitations as a military power. Still, just as Israel has realized its need for outside help, the Western world continues in a quasi-pacifist direction. The enhanced United Nations force has been denigrated — with France dodging and weaving on its commitment and the United Nations still shying away from any effort to disarm Hizbullah.
It’s not that pacifism has become rooted as a majority philosophy in Europe, but rather that nations no longer have a hold on the individual that they once had. This is mostly a good thing — a mark of greater political democracy and individual freedom than existed a century ago. But this reality contributes to the triumph of narrow self-interest over the values of social solidarity and humanitarian internationalism.
Western Europe has transformed itself from the bubbling caldron of blind militaristic nationalism that stoked the killing fields of two world wars into a bland mix that resists deploying soldiers even in missions to end mass slaughter. Hence the total European lack of resolve in ending the slaughters in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the early 1990s and in Darfur today. Millions were sacrificed to the war machines of the first half of the 20th century, but Israel has had to virtually beg Europe to lead an effective peacekeeping mission along the Lebanon border — not to march off to near-certain death as in World War I, but to risk a relatively few lives to prevent new spasms of killing.
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