War Stories

By HAIM WATZMAN

When Uri Avnery reported for basic training in the newly constituted Israel Defense Forces, he saw two kinds of men waiting at the gate.

At the beginning of his classic Hebrew memoir, In Philistine Fields 1948, he distinguishes “between the soldier who has burned all his emotional bridges behind him, who aspires to be a soldier and nothing else, and the enlistee who keeps his home in his heart.”

In Avnery’s view, the first kind of soldier is the real soldier. And in fact, Avnery tells us nothing at all about his own home and family. He devotes only a handful of paragraphs to describing his infrequent furloughs—mostly to tell us how alienated he feels from the civilians he meets.

That sense of alienation is the shared experience of all combat soldiers. When I returned home from even a short stint of active duty, I felt as if I had landed on another planet. I could not help feeling that the sharp dichotomies I lived with in my unit—life and death, loyalty and betrayal, us and them—were the real world, whereas the ambiguities and compromises of civilian life were an obscuring haze.

So it is telling to read Avnery’s book, which was a wild bestseller in Israel in the country’s early years, alongside Haim Sabato’s powerful account of his service as a tank gunner in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. The entire first half of Adjusting Sights, published in 1999 in Hebrew and in a 2003 English translation by Hillel Halkin, revolves around Sabato’s first trip home after the war—24 hours, from his tank in an Israeli enclave thrust deep into Syrian territory, home to Jerusalem, and back again.

Sabato and Avnery could not be more dissimilar and still both be Israelis. Avnery grew up in Tel Aviv, Sabato in Jerusalem. Avnery is Ashkenazi, Sabato Sephardi. Avnery is entirely secular, Sabato Orthodox.

And the armies they describe sound like two different institutions. The words “Jew” and “Jewish” are entirely absent from Avnery’s book. None of the soldiers he encounters prays or even so much as observes a holiday. They speak the unadorned argot of the Sabra generation.

Sabato fights in a unit of yeshiva students. They quote psalms and engage in Talmudic disputations as they prepare their tanks for battle. After their tank has been destroyed, a member of his crew says that he plans to blow himself up with a hand grenade. Sabato quotes halachic sources to argue that suicide is forbidden, the crew member presents counterarguments, and the two engage in a learned legal debate. He and his friends believe that the Jewish state is not just a political entity, but the beginning of the messianic process that will bring redemption to the Jewish people and the world.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that the two books are as disparate as can be. Avnery’s is a fast-paced, chronological diary of front-line action of the critical battles his Givati Brigade fought in the south of the new country, written in the midst of the war. He has a eye for description and an ear for the rough and simple way that soldiers talk. Better than almost any other Israeli writer since, he succeeds in depicting the intense love, respect, and brotherhood that develop among disparate individuals when their lives are in each other’s hands. It’s the kind of book that gets kids excited about enlisting in the army.

Sabato wrote his story more than a quarter century after the experiences he describes. His narrative is convoluted. It jumps forward and back in time, and from place to place. The pictures he gives of both his neighborhood in Jerusalem and the battlefield are so spare as to be nearly useless for understanding the geography in which the events occur. His language is beautiful, poetic, and evocative, but it is hard to believe that even yeshiva students really talk this way.

Yet there is a deeper difference that speaks to what a Jewish-Israeli soldier is, and ought to be.

When I read In Philistine Fields before enlisting in 1982, I was enthralled but also disturbed. That mixed reaction returns when I reread it today. A major theme that runs through Avnery’s book is the soldiers’ disaffection from the society that sent them into battle. The people back in Tel Aviv do not appreciate the sacrifices the soldiers make, do not support them enough, do not understand them. They do not sufficiently honor the men who have given their lives in battle. And they have not allowed the army to win a victory that will prevent more soldiers from dying in the future.

The subtext is that the soldiers are the dedicated, hardened, strong few who see the world as it really is and know what to do about it. Such a sentiment is natural, but it’s a very dangerous way for soldiers to think. In Argentina, Turkey, and dozens of other countries, it has prompted armies to kick out civilian governments and take power, themselves. I don’t mean to imply that Avnery is anything but a democrat. And we Israelis are proud of our strong democracy. But more than once our country has been perilously close to being taken over by soldiers who thought they could save us from our civilian leaders.

For all the certainty of his religious faith and messianic theology, Sabato is a humbler soldier than Avnery. He and his fellow-soldiers were sent into battle with malfunctioning tanks and without maps. In his four-man crew, Sabato had one of the only two rifles, and that without a shoulder strap.

Yet, in the midst of bloody and seemingly hopeless battles, Sabato never loses his compass. He is fighting for his home, and he longs to return home. When he comes home on his 24-hour leave, he feels the same alienation that Avnery feels, that every soldier feels. Unlike him, however, Sabato knows that it’s the alienation, not the home, that is the fantasy.