Israel's Moral Nightmare

By LANCE MORROW

The photographs are becoming a sort of genre of the late 20th century: the massacre shots. We see the crumpled litter of bodies, the familiar, companionably mounded flesh reposing on the bare dirt in the sun in a stunned fatal sprawl. The inarticulate carrion aftermath. We have seen them in Viet Nam and El Salvador and Uganda and Rhodesia and God knows where. My Lai is the primordial scene of the type. The same evil black bats burst flapping out of the pictures, into the brain, and each time the mind flinches and contracts and sickens and grieves for a moment. And yet, unless the slaughter has some especially lunatic human interest, as Jonestown did, we move on soon enough to other business. All of that death dissolves by and by into a form of abstraction.

Such killing has become a kind of unofficial policy in the world. The statistics of mass murder in the past decade or so (at least 100,000 Hutus killed by Tutsis in Burundi, for example, or the million or three Cambodians dead under Pol Pot) somehow should make the deaths in the Palestinian camps seem less cataclysmic, less imposingly significant. Horrible, of course. But Lebanese Christians and Muslims have been trafficking in such mutual slaughter forever. Their blood feud in the past seven years has taken more than 60,000 lives.

But the killings in the camps of West Beirut assumed a profound significance in the moral thinking and rhetoric of the world. Why? Because of the Israelis. In part, they were being judged by the old double standard. But there was more: the Israelis were actually parked there, just outside the camps, with all of their tradition, with all the edifice of Jewish morality. The Christians blasted away for a night and a day and a night, and the Jews with the guns averted their gaze.

It was unjust that the blame for the atrocity hailed down upon Israelis alone. The Christian militiamen who actually did the evil work were rarely mentioned. Presumably, that kind of Hobbesian savagery comes so naturally to them that it hardly bears remarking. There was a strange compliment concealed here. The world accused Israel so violently in part because the massacre profoundly violated Israel's own moral standards. Some of the vitriol, too, was just anti-Semitism dressed up to look like righteous indignation.

Nevertheless, for Israel, for Jews around the world, the massacre was a moral nightmare. It penetrated to the deepest questions of the Jewish character and identity, to the core of the Jewish idea.

In his memoirs, Menachem Begin wrote fiercely of the emergence of "the Fighting Jew." For much of Jewish history, through the long centuries of the Diaspora, that phrase was an oxymoron, a kind of contradiction in terms. Israel was the creation of fighting Jews, of course, but at least until the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel was the heroic and democratic underdog struggling for its very existence in the vast and hostile Arab wilderness. For a couple of thousand years, Jewish morality presupposed a kind of victim's righteousness, the special blamelessness of those without great collective power. Now Israel ranks fourth among the military powers of the world. The deepest question framed by the massacre in West Beirut was this: Has Israel yet managed to formulate a morality that squares its worldly power with the individual consciences of its people?

The unthinkable tragedies of Jewish history conspire with the radical vulnerability of Israel to enforce sometimes an aggressive and absolutist approach to life. In a warrior like Ariel Sharon, that morality hardens into a brute logic: the end justifies the means. It is a complicated and dangerous business when the People of the Book become also a People of the Gun.

Menachem Begin refuses to struggle with this dilemma. He still likes to carry the blank check of Jewish history; he finds it useful in the conduct of government and war. "No one," Begin's government repeats with a baleful glare, "will preach to us ethics and respect for human life." Why not? Because of the record, because of pogroms and the 6 million dead in the Holocaust. There are many centuries in that line. Begin claims that as the Israeli dispensation. That is the moral capital of world Jewry, cataclysmically acquired. Do not presume to discuss suffering and death with a people that has passed through Auschwitz. Yes. On the other hand, the Begin government's statement suggests clearly that 1) it has nothing left to learn on the subject of ethics and respect for human life, which is demonstrably not true, and 2) it is certainly not for the rest of the world, meaning, implicitly, the historical tormentors of Jews, to presume to give moral instruction to the Jewish people. Begin in his combative mode strikes ugly notes. Last week his government even used the dark phrase "blood libel" to dismiss condemnations of the Israeli army's behavior at the camps. The phrase invidiously linked the critics to the medieval anti-Semites who accused Jews of crucifying Christian children and drinking their blood at Passover.

The Jewish conscience is often a splendid moral instrument, one of the most highly developed in the world. The internal anguish in Israel last week, with half the country calling for the resignation of Begin and Sharon, demonstrated that that conscience is obviously in good working order. Israel seemed to plunge abruptly into mortal fallibility, into the ambiguous mess in which most history occurs.

Given the customary alertness of the Jewish conscience, the Israeli behavior in West Beirut is nearly inexplicable. It seems almost impossible to absolve the Israel Defense Forces of something a good deal uglier than incompetence there. In any case, the civilized do not make contracts with beasts and give them guns and send them out to do a little messy surrogate killing. The beasts will eventually come to inhabit the soul of their sponsor.

Begin and his government have squandered Israel's moral capital. His greatest disservice has been to invite and very nearly to legitimize the intense criticism of Israel all over the world. A deep, sharp apprehension has passed through the world's Jewish community: Will Begin make anti-Semitism popular again? Think of Israel's image in the world after Entebbe. Think of it now. Any fair judgment of Israel's long-run morality, however, should follow what might be called the Doctrine of Characteristic Acts. Was the behavior of the Israeli forces at these camps characteristic of Israeli society, of Israeli morals? The Christian militiamen, who do not seem to have read the teachings of Christ, were thoroughly and catastrophically in character. The Israelis were not. --By Lance Morrow

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