“The good guys don’t always win”
JVL Introduction
Comments under this Ha’aretz article point out the incongruities in the author’s argument. True as Chaim Levinson says, Israel’s international standing has been dealt a beating since October 7, its leadership’s weakness revealed. True also: “for years we managed to fool them into thinking we were a strong country, a wise people and a powerful army. In truth, we’re a shtetl with an air force, and that’s on the condition that it’s awakened in time.” You can feel his pain as he confesses that Israel has lost the war and “The inability to admit it encapsulates everything you need to know about Israel’s individual and mass psychology.”
But how should we respond to the idea that Israel has “found its soul after Netanyahu”? That the IDF “fought, demonstrated skill as soldiers and chalked up impressive tactical achievements” as a result of which “Hamas is severely wounded”? Or that Israel’s failure only goes to show: “The good guys don’t always win.”
In the words of one commenter: “’The good guys’. The ones who slaughter tens of thousands of civilians after 76 years of massacring, chasing out, stealing the property of and dehumanizing their cousins are the good guys.”
Another says: “No, it’s not Netanyahu’s fault. Israel’s conduct, since its inception, has not changed: expropriate, displace, kill, dissemble. That is what produced October 7. The only difference is that since October 7 the displacement and killing has accelerated and the mask has been ripped off.”
Levinson regrets that Israel security “won’t be restored”, but when did Palestinians ever have it?
Some commenters suggest Levinson himself is reflecting what is wrong with “Israel’s individual and mass psychology.” Read the piece and decide for yourself.
NWI
This article was originally published by Ha'aretz on Thu 11 Apr 2024. Read the original here.
Saying What Can't Be Said: Israel Has Been Defeated – a Total Defeat
The war’s aims won’t be achieved, the hostages won’t be returned through military pressure, security won’t be restored and Israel’s international ostracism won’t end
We’ve lost. Truth must be told. The inability to admit it encapsulates everything you need to know about Israel’s individual and mass psychology. There’s a clear, sharp, predictable reality that we should begin to fathom, to process, to understand and to draw conclusions from for the future. It’s no fun to admit that we’ve lost, so we lie to ourselves.
Some of us maliciously lie. Others innocently. It would be better to find solace in some airy carb with a total-victory crust. But it might just be a bagel. When the solace ends, the hole remains. There’s no way around it. The good guys don’t always win.
My favorite book is “Love in the Time of Cholera.” It feels good all over to think that even after 51 years, nine months and four days, Florentino Ariza will consummate his love with Fermina Daza. Gabriel García Márquez was a fabulous writer, but letters don’t always reach their destination. Sometimes beautiful love is cut short, painful and bleeding until death arrives. That’s life. Sometimes there’s a good ending, but quite often there isn’t. Wars are like that, too.
After half a year, we could have been in a totally different place, but we’re being held hostage by the worst leadership in the country’s history – and a decent contender for the title of worst leadership anywhere, ever. Every military undertaking is supposed to have a diplomatic exit – the military action should lead to a better diplomatic reality. Israel has no diplomatic exit.
It has a scoundrel for a leader, someone with no capacity for leadership or decision-making, a person who loses his sense of good judgment over a free cigar. Yet the electorate put its faith in the current prime minister to the tune of 32 Knesset seats.
Theoretically, we could have been in a better place. The shock of the outbreak of the war could have been a starting point for a swift, powerful, aggressive, eminently justified campaign to quickly root out Hamas wherever that was possible. It could have then been replaced by a coalition of countries with money and good intentions to carry out reconstruction, with global and Arab backing, along with the Palestinian Authority. We could have created a viable alternative to Hamas in Gaza. After six months, there already might have been the first signs of independent government there. Every day and every minute, better decisions could have been made. But that’s whom we elected – a suit with a person attached.
We can’t say it, but we’ve lost. People have an inclination to believe in the best and be optimistic, hoping that tomorrow will be okay, that we are in a process that in the end will be more successful. That’s the most fundamental failure of human thought: the notion that the direction we are taking is a good one, that we just need to get there already – that in just a little more time, with a little more effort, the hostages will be returned, Hamas will surrender and Yahya Sinwar will be killed. After all, we’re the good guys, and good will triumph.
It’s the same mentality that leads to the notion that “the Iranian regime will soon implode” and other notions that have more to do with Hollywood scripts than life itself. They’re not the truth and it relates to something that’s uncomfortable. After all, it’s uncomfortable telling the public the truth.
It’s unpleasant to say, but we may not be able to safely return to Israel’s northern border.
My conclusion from October 7 as a journalist is that what’s “uncomfortable” is the most dangerous thing for our security and our future here, that being addicted to feeling good is itself what’s dangerous. We need to tell the truth, even when it is uncomfortable, even when it hurts, even if some people deplore it, even if it lowers morale.
We need to stand up to the Bibi-ist propaganda machines even if attack dogs are sniffing at our crotch. If on October 1, someone had said that the chief of military intelligence was incompetent, that military intelligence could plan successful operations but was incapable of providing a warning about a coming war, that the Shin Bet was dozing and that we were about to get the whooping of our lives, such a person would have been perceived as crazy, defeatist and out of touch. Certain politicians would have called for such a person to be charged with spreading false news. There were so many signs that the military was in bad shape, but we wouldn’t see them – because we believe things are all right.
It’s unpleasant to say, but we may not be able to safety return to Israel’s northern border, to what had been before. Hezbollah has changed that equation, to its own benefit. That’s the situation.
We constantly tell ourselves about an imaginary deadline – April, May, September 1 – and if Hezbollah keeps it up until then, we’ll give it a thorough shellacking. The deadline keeps being pushed back. The border region remains empty. The deceit continues. There now seems to be a high probability that for years, anyone driving along the border will be a target. Tel Hai will fall again.
And that’s true on every front: Not all hostages will return, either alive or dead. The whereabouts of some are lost, and their fate will remain unknown. They’ll be like the downed airforce navigator Ron Arad. Their relatives will go around sick with worry, fear and apprehension. From time to time, we’ll launch balloons in their memory.
No cabinet minister will restore our sense of personal security. Every Iranian threat will make us tremble. Our international standing was dealt a beating. Our leadership’s weakness was revealed to the outside. For years we managed to fool them into thinking we were a strong country, a wise people and a powerful army. In truth, we’re a shtetl with an air force, and that’s on the condition that its awakened in time.
In part it’s the military’s sacred place in Israel that makes it so hard to admit defeat. You can’t say anything bad about the military. Only when it comes to October 7 are you specifically allowed to talk about a disgrace. Since then, we’ve been lions.
Granted that many combat soldiers are indeed lions. They got up and left home. They fought, demonstrated skill as soldiers and chalked up impressive tactical achievements. Our defeat doesn’t mean they’re not good soldiers, that they didn’t make an effort, that they didn’t deliver or risk their lives, that they weren’t prepared to do whatever was required. It means that the combination of military capabilities and the politicians’ conduct produced an unfavorable outcome. The spin doctors keep jumping up yelling that “you’re hurting soldiers’ morale.” In truth, that’s easy to put across because who wants to come out in opposition to the soldiers?
So we keep fooling ourselves.
Along with natural psychology, there are the machines plying lies and deceit. There’s a political camp the very survival of which pretty much depends on a “victory.” That camp has long since lost all touch with truth and reality. We’ve gotten to know its leader, that human Pinocchio. For months, he’s been talking of “total victory” and of being “a step away from victory.” And for a couple of months, he’s been saying that we’re going to enter Rafah “right away,” tomorrow, tomorrow, here I go. I would believe TV reality figure Ohad Buzaglo telling me I’m his one true love before I would believe one word from Netanyahu.
The system is to procrastinate for as long as possible, and in the meantime – lie. The army of spokespeople is hollering. And in recent months, right-wing Channel 14 has been giving rise to a new mouthpiece, a “shababnik,” as the ultra-Orthodox community calls people on the community’s margins, by the name of Motty Castel. If Yinon Magal and Erel Segal are submissive slaves to the father-king, Castel is a serf to the king’s son Yair Netanyahu. I’ve seen freer people at the Dungeon club.
This week Castel broke through Channel 14 screens to promise the people that victory is at hand: “I’m being contacted by a lot of citizens [who ask]: ‘Have we given up on Rafah?’ I’m saying with all due responsibility that we will enter Rafah. The prime minister has said too many times himself that we will enter Rafah and he can’t forgo entering Rafah. Furthermore, he also said in one interview that we’re going to have to do it on our own, contrary to the position of the United States. We will do it. You can calm down. It will happen.”
Rafah is the newest bluff that the mouthpieces are plying to fool us and make us think that victory is just moments away. By the time they enter Rafah, the actual event will have lost its significance. There may be an incursion, perhaps a tiny one, sometime – say in May. After that, they’ll peddle the next lie, that all we have to do is ________ (fill in the blank), and victory will be on its way. The reality is that the war’s aims will not be achieved. Hamas will not be eradicated. The hostages will not be returned through military pressure. Security will not be reestablished.
The more the mouthpieces shout that “we’re winning,” the clearer it is that we’re losing. Lying is their craft. We need to get used to that. Life is less secure than before October 7. The beating we took will sting for years to come. The international ostracism won’t go away. And, of course, the dead won’t be coming back. Nor will many of the hostages.
For some of us, life will get back on track, with the petrifying fear of an imminent repeat. And for some of us, life won’t get back on track. Those people will walk among us like the living dead. That’s what we voted for. That’s how it is. We need to get used to the sad reality in our homeland.
If only we didn’t have Netanyahu, if only we could get rid of Hamas, if only our brave and noble soldiers were allowed to do their job, if only someone else (“a coalition of countries with money and good intentions”!!!) would come and sort it all out at their expense, then we could all go back to the way it was and forget about Gaza again and hope that the Palestinians will just fade away.
This article exemplifies how Liberal Zionism is a contradiction in terms.
Levinson might have adopted the “slowly, slowly catchee monkey” approach of telling uncomfortable facts as the best way of getting Israelis to listen to ANY of them.
I’m left wondering whether there’s enough time left for such a gradualist approach. Israel may well have to deal within a few months with legal, diplomatic and economic events that put its survival as a state at risk. The Israeli public and government seem barely aware of the dangers they may well face. They seem to be courting more harm rather than doing anything to ward it away.
Nothing to say about the 34+ thousand Palestinians who have died in the hopeless quest to save Israel’s face and Netanyahu’s career.
Israel lost the minute Netanyahu said they were going to eliminate Hamas. As long as there is occupation, the Palestine resistance, whether they are called Hamas or something else, will NEVER be eliminated.
This article should be a source of some optimism, but, strangely, I can’t help but feel pessimistic because of the – so many – ‘what ifs’ it throws up.
What if – Israelis continue to believe the lies they’re being told, on a daily basis?
What if – they vote Netanyahu out, but retain – and strengthen – Ben-Gvir and Smotrich?
What if – the settlers are left to run amok in the West Bank, burning and looting – assaulting and murdering Palestinians?
What if – the US, UK and the EU continue to support these Israeli crimes without equivocation?
Yesterday, Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah was refused entry to Germany, to speak at a Palestinian Conference, in Berlin. He was detained, then deported.
What if – German bureaucrats continue to apply their twisted logic to Israel/Palestine?
David: “Nothing to say about the 34+ thousand Palestinians who have died in the hopeless quest to save Israel’s face and Netanyahu’s career.”
Just what I thought on reading the blubbing of a disillusioned hawk brought down to earth. Every word was concerned with Israel alone, as if the Gazans, and West Bank inhabitants were not there, not where they had been for generations, living in peace alongside peoples of numerous nationalities and religions including Jews. What, I wonder, changed all that? The article was riddled with expressions of the belief that Israel had sole rights to determine the future for Palestinians, just as if Palestinians were inanimate objects, incapable of, or entitled to a say in their existence: totally under the jurisdiction of a failing, flailing regime. BDS NOW.
Chris Romberg eloquently puts his finger on the liberal Zionist contradiction at the heart of this piece.
Indeed its principal interest lies in its exposure of the author’s psychological trauma which appears similar to that of a lifelong member of a quasi-religious cult when the cult is brutally confronted by the incompatibility of its beliefs with reality. Cognitive dissonance abounds. Here the cult’s intrinsic colonial mentality remains intact, yet the recognition of the cult’s existential failure is profound. So the latter is unconvincingly attributed to the cult’s mistaken trust in its present leader. In many places Levinson acknowledges reality. e.g.:
“The reality is that the war’s aims will not be achieved. Hamas will not be eradicated. The hostages will not be returned through military pressure. Security will not be reestablished”
Yet earlier he simply cannot admit that it is the foundational colonial beliefs of the cult which have failed:
“The shock of the outbreak of the war could have been a starting point for a swift, powerful, aggressive, eminently justified campaign to quickly root out Hamas wherever that was possible. ….. We [sic!]could have created a viable alternative to Hamas in Gaza. After six months, there already might have been the first signs of independent government there.”
The anachronistic Zionist cult has been mortally wounded by its confrontation with reality. Yet given the criminal complicity or indifference of the world’s oligarchs, only determined actions by the planet’s masses can curtail the murderous madness of the its death throes.
“and Yahya Sinwar will be killed”. Check the kill ratio. You’re still not out the rabbit hole mate. The only reason Israeli rulers and their pathologically lying shills that operate on telepathic auto fib are not getting reciprocally assassinated is the collective punishment policy. Such a gift to the world. At the supposedly intellectual heart of the ‘liberal’ pretence is a Escher drawing of a worm.
What if the UK and the US continue to support…. Well we have nothing left but corrupt and incompetent bought and paid for politics and one functional and efficient thing – a highly developed system for trashing anyone who doesn’t comply. Whilst everything else turns to s***. Including the water supply. Our ‘leaders’ have one qualification only. Anyone care to guess? Nice work bibi boy.