The
Wall Street Journal
By BRET STEPHENS
In 2012 a former New York Times reporter
named Patrick
Tyler published an invidious book called
“Fortress Israel,” the point of which was that the Jewish state is a modern-day
Sparta whose “sabra military elite” is addicted to war.
“Six decades after its founding,” Mr. Tyler wrote, Israel
“remains in thrall to an original martial impulse, the depth of which has given
rise to succeeding generations of leaders who are stunted in their capacity to
wield or sustain diplomacy as a rival to military strategy.” Worse, these
leaders do this “reflexively and instinctively, in order to perpetuate a system
of governance where national policy is dominated by the military.”
Israel’s reflexive militarists are at it again, though
probably not as Mr. Tyler imagined. Last week, Moshe
Ya’alon, a
former army chief of staff and a member of the ruling Likud party, resigned as
defense minister following ructions regarding the appropriate role of the
military in political life. In his place, the prime minister intends to appoint Avigdor
Lieberman, a
right-wing political brawler whose military career never went higher than
corporal rank.
The spat between the prime minister and Mr. Ya’alon began
in late March, after an Israeli soldier named Elor Azariah shot
and killed a Palestinian man who was lying wounded and motionless on the ground
after trying to stab another soldier. Sgt. Azariah is now standing trial for
manslaughter and faces up to 20 years in prison. Video of the killing suggests
the wounded Palestinian was no threat to the soldiers when the sergeant put a
bullet in his head.
The killing has been emphatically—and rightly—condemned by
Israel’s military brass. But Israelis also have little sympathy for
Palestinians trying to stick knives into their sons and daughters, and Messrs.
Netanyahu and Lieberman have offered expressions of support for Sgt. Azariah
and his family, to the applause of the Israeli right and the infuriation of
senior generals. As often as not in Israel, military leaders and security
officials are to the left of the public and their civilian leadership.
If that were the end of the story, you might have a morality tale about Mr.
Netanyahu’s political instincts. Or you might have a story about the high
ethical standards to which Israel holds itself. What you don’t have is anything
resembling a mindlessly belligerent “sabra military elite” that wants to kill
helpless (though not innocent) Palestinians to protect its own.
But that isn’t the end of the story. At a ceremony
marking Holocaust Remembrance Day earlier this month, Yair
Golan, Israel’s
deputy chief of staff, compared trends in Israeli society to Germany in the 1930s.
When Mr. Netanyahu rebuked him—correctly—for defaming Israel and cheapening the
memory of the Holocaust, Mr. Ya’alon leapt to the general’s defense and told
officers that they should feel free to speak their minds in public. Hence his
ouster.
At stake here is no longer the small question about Sgt.
Azariah, where the military establishment is in the right. It’s the greater
question of civilian-military relations, where Israel’s military leaders are
dead wrong. A security establishment that feels no compunction about publicly
telling off its civilian masters is on the road to becoming a law unto
itself—the Sparta of Mr. Tyler’s imagination, albeit in the service of leftist
goals.
In an op-ed in Sunday’s New York Times, Israeli writer Ronen
Bergman paints the military in flattering colors, insisting that Israel’s
“defense agencies are motivated only by national interest, rather than
ideology, religion or electoral considerations.” He went on to suggest that
talk of a coup was in the air, though “it remains unlikely.”
The idea of a military coup in today’s Israel is
preposterous. But it says something about the arrogance of Mr. Bergman and his
military sources that they should think of themselves as impartial guardians of
the national interest—as they see it—or that they should so brazenly dismiss
the ideological, religious or electoral considerations that are the stuff of
democracy. It was Israel’s security establishment, led by talented former
officers such asYitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak, that
led Israelis down the bloody cul-de-sac formerly called the peace process. If
their views are no longer regarded as sacrosanct, it’s a sign of Israel’s
political maturity, not decline.
There’s a larger point here, relevant not only to Israel,
about the danger those who believe themselves to be virtuous pose to those who
merely wish to be free. In the Middle East, the virtuous are often the sheikhs
and ayatollahs, exhorting the faithful to murder for the sake of God. In the
West, the virtuous are secular elites imposing what Thomas
Sowell once
called “the vision of the anointed” on the benighted masses.
Mr. Lieberman is nobody’s idea of an ideal defense
minister. And both he and his boss are wrong when it comes to the shameful case
of Sgt. Azariah. But those who believe that Israel must remain a democracy have
no choice but to take Mr. Netanyahu’s side.
