Col. Binyamin Gibli took his secrets with him to the next world when he died this week – unless, as historian Tom Segev forlornly hopes, the old spookmaster left instructions to publish the ghost-written manuscript of his autobiograhy, and it explains what really happened in the Dirty Business of the 1950s. The hope is forlorn because it presumes that we would have reason to trust Gibli’s version.

Gibli was the head of Military Intelligence back in 1954, when MI recruited a handful of Egyptian Jews to bomb American and British cultural centers and other places frequented by foreigners in Egypt. (Yes, you read that correctly.) The idea was that the attacks would look like Egyptian fury against the West, and would derail any improvement in relations between Western governments and Cairo. But the spy ring was caught. One member was tortured to death, another committed suicide, two were executed, others served long prison terms.

Though the military censor in Israel hushed up discussion of the Dirty Business for years, the affair shook the Israeli political and military establishment repeatedly. Gibli said that Defense Minister Pinchas Lavon had approved the operation. Lavon said he hadn’t. He wanted to dismiss Gibli and the young director-general of the ministry, a certain Shimon Peres. (Why is it, I keep wondering, that every time I pull books off the shelf to look up a Machiavellian intrigue from Israel’s past, I find Shimon’s name?) Prime Minister Sharett supported the army against Lavon, who quit.

Six years later, citing new evidence, Lavon demanded his exoneration. The evidence included possible perjury and obstruction of justice by Gibli. Lavon launched a battle that tore apart the ruling Mapai party and eventually ended Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s career. Part of what undid Ben-Gurion was defending Peres and Moshe Dayan, who’d been military chief of staff at the time of the Dirty Business.

All right, both the politics and the spookery are so tangled that only old Mapai hacks with deep gravelly voices and deeper grudges can explain the business, and they never do so coherently. Let’s get back to Gibli. A few years before the Dirty Business, during the War of Independence, he was a judge in the kangaroo court that executed a certain Meir Tobianski, who’d purportedly spied for the enemy. Tobianski was later exonerated, which I suppose was a comfort to those who knew him, even if it didn’t help Tobianski much. Segev writes of Gibli:

He belonged to a generation of officers who came of age in the time of fighting for the state’s establishment, and thereafter when they were called upon to obey the rule of law, viewed it as an unnecessary encumbrance… Gibli was never punished for his role in [the Tobianski] affair: He was allowed to continue serving in the army, and doubtless learned thereby that the law is something that restricts other people.

In other words, if Gibli had been cashiered in ’48, he wouldn’t have been head of MI in ’54. The failure to make it clear to officers that they were bound by the law would deeply damage the state’s internal and foreign relations.

Segev is right about this. Gibli isn’t the strongest example. That dishonor surely belongs to Ariel Sharon (more on him here, and see my book, The Accidental Empire, on Sharon’s role in expelling thousands of Beduin from their homes in 1972).

The problem is that the attitude didn’t change when the generation of fighters who came of age before independence took off their uniforms. As evidence, I note just one affair, out of several that has been in the news this week: The Supreme Court intervened in the case of Lt. Col. Omri Burberg, who held a bound Palestinian while a soldier shot and wounded him with a rubber-coated bullet during demonstrations in the West Bank village of Na’alin. As Ha’aretz reports:

Burberg and the soldier, L., were charged with conduct unbecoming, and Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi transferred Burberg to the armored corps training grounds at Tze’elim…

In response to the petition [by human-rights groups], Justice Ayala Procaccia issued a show-cause order giving the military advocate general, Brig. Gen. Avichai Mendelblit, three weeks to submit a detailed justification of his decision not to press more serious charges. She also issued an interim injunction delaying proceedings against the defendants until the court makes a final ruling…

[The petition] expressed outrage over statements made by [Chief of Staff Gabi] Ashkenazi regarding the likelihood that the officer would eventually resume the post from which he had been removed as a result of the incident.

Ashkenazi apparently feels that he can’t let a minor atrocity cost him a good officer. Besides the obvious disrespect for law and ethics that he is broadcasting, Ashkenazi is also wrong on practical grounds. A commander who sees no limits on his behavior is a ticking bomb. At an even higher rank, his ability to make disastrous decisions will be greater. Gibli is gone, but the business of cleaning up remains.

Haim is right that every Israeli should see “Waltz.” But so should anyone elsewhere whose country has marched thoughtlessly into war, or for that matter, anyone interested in the art of film. My article about the movie is now up at the American Prospect. Snippets:

Virtually the entire film is presented in film-noir animation. Folman thereby bends the boundaries of his genre (even more than the recent, partially animated “Chicago 10″ did). “Waltz” may be to the documentary what Art Spiegelman’s Maus was to the novel. Strangely, animation makes the film less fictional. Not restricted to old footage, Folman can portray scenes that no one photographed, just as a historian can recreate the past with the written word…

Watching Sharon on screen, I realize that after years of writing about the Israeli leader, I am unsure I know the full extent of his culpability. On the night when Ben-Yishai called, how did Sharon go to sleep? Did the commission fail by not examining whether Sharon should face criminal charges? Afterward, how did he continue his political career? I was at the demonstration of 400,000 in Tel Aviv and the march through Jerusalem after the commission report and other protests too numerous to remember. Did we settle for too little?

Read the full article here.

Waltz With Bashir directly addresses the philosophical question we’ve been discussing here. Ari Folman, the film’s director, served as an Israeli soldier on the perimeter of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut at the time of the massacre committed there by Lebanese Phalangist militiamen in mid-September 1982. Folman clearly feels guilt, and feels that he abetted an act that was comparable to the Nazis’ massacres of Jews in Europe—his parents are Holocaust survivors. To what extent is he, an individual soldier, morally culpable. Should he have acted otherwise than he did?

There can be little doubt that Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, Chief of Staff Rafael (Raful) Eitan, and the top army command knew very well what would happen if the Phalangists were given a free hand in the refugee camps. The Phalangist forces had a long history of murder, mutilation, and destruction, committed not just against Palestinians and Muslims but also against rival Christian forces in Lebanon.

Many lower IDF ranking officers and soldiers had an opportunity to see the Christian militia in action. One of Folman’s interviewees refers to the “slaughterhouse,” the field in Beirut where the Phalangists interrogated, killed, and dismembered their prisoners. These soldiers had no illusions about the militia. Most were shocked. Just as many were happy that the Phalangists were doing a lot of the house-to-house fighting in Beirut that would otherwise have fallen to the IDF (you can be, simultaneously, shocked by your allies and grateful to them for enabling you to avoid dangerous combat).

Folman asks Roni Dayag, one of his interviewees, whether he suspected anything when he saw Phalangists taking Palestinian women and children out of the camps and loading them on trucks. Dayag said that he assumed that the Christian forces were acting properly in removing civilians from a battle zone where they were liable to get hurt. Only later, when some of his soldiers saw, through their binoculars, Phalangists lining other women and children up against a wall and shooting them, did he realize a massacre was taking place. He reported the fact to his superior office and was told that the matter was being attended to. He had done what he could do, he said. (At this point, remember, he had seen a single incident. While he may have suspected that it represented what the Phalangists were doing elsewhere in the camps, he had no direct evidence to that effect.)

Assuming Dayag’s account is accurate, could he have done more? Should he have organized his squad and run into the camp to attack the attackers? Should he have abandoned his post in protest? Either act would have been foolish, ineffective, and would have placed his men in extreme danger for no practical end.

It may be disturbing, and it is certainly heartbreaking, but a low-ranking soldier caught in such an awful situation can do little at the moment. Afterwards, he can and should demand an accounting of his officers. He can and should, in civilian clothes, demand accounting of his government. He can and should talk to journalists, write letters and articles of protest, make films. The army’s top officers and civilian decision makers should be tried and convicted, but the individual soldier in Dayag’s position is not morally culpable. He is right to feel ashamed about his marginal involvement in such a crime, but his atonement will come not as a soldier who leaves his post but as a civilian who does all he can to keep that crime from being forgotten, and to prevent his government, and his army, from committing such acts in the future.

See Ari Folman’s “Waltz with Bashir” (1) – A National Nightmare on Film

Just after seeing Waltz With Bashir at the Semadar Cinema in the German Colony, Ilana and I ran into our 17-year old son, Niot, with two friends. They had been at the pool, at their twice-weekly get-in-shape-for-the-army swim class. “You’ve got to see this film,” I told them. “Every kid who is dying to be a soldier should see it. So should every Israeli who loves his country.”

In Waltz With Bashir, director Ari Folman conducts a personal journey to recover his lost time and lost memories of the first Lebanon War. He knows that in September 1982 he was an Israeli soldier in Beirut. He was there when Lebanese Christian Phalangist militiamen, outfitted in IDF uniforms, massacred Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila, two refugee camps that had become neighborhoods in the Lebanese capital. But, except for an odd vision of himself and two friends swimming naked in the sea at the time of the massacre, he can remember no details—what he was doing at the time, how he felt, who was really there with him.

At the encouragement of a high school friend who is now a psychotherapist, Folman, who has made several documentary films, set out to interview old army buddies and other Israelis who were in Beirut at the time. Little by little, the pieces come together and the memories return. Finally, Folman places himself on the rooftop of a Beirut high-rise, part of an Israeli team that sent up flares that provided light for the Phalangists to carry out their slaughter of an estimated 3,000 men, women, and children in the camps.

I wasn’t in Beirut in September 1982. I had begun basic training a month earlier. But I remember the anger, frustration, and shame I felt when news of the massacre became public. I was not the only one. Hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens massed in Tel Aviv’s central square on a Saturday night soon thereafter to demand that Prime Minister Menachem Begin establish a national commission of inquiry. Home on a weekend’s leave at Kibbutz Tirat Tzvi, I donned civilian clothes and drove with a friend to Tel Aviv to attend the demonstration.

Even before the massacre, the public had been betrayed by its leaders. Defense Minister Ariel Sharon and Chief of Staff Rafael (Raful) Eitan had concocted a grandiose plan to evict the Palestinians from Lebanon by installing the young, handsome, and merciless Phalangist chief, Bashir Gemayal as president. The plan called for sending Israeli forces deep into Lebanon, up to Beirut. Sharon and Eitan knew that even Begin’s hypernationalist cabinet would never approve such a megalomaniac operation, so the plan they submitted called for a short-scale, modest incursion into southern Lebanon to clean out the Palestinian bases from which rocket attacks were being launched against Israel’s northern settlements. Once the army had crossed the border, Sharon and Eitan sent the troops onward and northward. Gemayal became president, but was soon assassinated. His Phalangist followers demanded revenge, and Israel’s military decision makers gave them the opportunity in Sabra and Shatila.

Israeli hands did not spill this blood, but a small number of Israeli hands and voices could easily have prevented it. In not doing so, they betrayed their country and the trust of the soldiers who, like Ari Folman, became unwitting and unwilling accessories to a war crime.

As he conducts his interviews, Folman puts together a portrait in which uncaring Israeli leaders, civilian and military, used their soldiers as pawns in an ill-advised and ill-planned military adventure. The culmination of the war’s ugliness, to my mind, comes not in the scenes of exploding shells, machine guns, and death—though these are numerous and difficult to watch. It’s the scene where a paunch-bellied brigadier sits, shirt unbuttoned, on an expensive armchair in a requisitioned Beirut mansion watching a German porn movie, as he orders Folman to take his squad out to sit in ambush all night for an expected car bomb. In my time in Lebanon I served under many dedicated, morally upstanding commanders—but also under no few ones like this perverted colonel.

Folman’s chose well to use animation this documentary. Since so much of his story involves memories, true and false, and fantasies, good and bad, his characters, and his battle scenes, are more effective as drawings than they could ever be as putatively real people and events on film.

The only thing that doesn’t fit is the way he chooses to end–with live footage of Palestinian women as they bewail the destruction and death in the camps. We already know that an awful thing has happened. What we want to know is what conclusions Folman draws from his journey through his memory–what he has discovered about himself and the country for which he fought. After subjecting us to these horrors, he owes us a statement.

I told my son and his friends that they must see this film because they must know that in setting out enthusiastically to defend their country, there may well be times when their lives and their country’s moral standing will be in the hands of perverted colonels and megalomaniac politicians. Defend their country they must, but they should avoid the tendency, all too common in Israel, to over-idealize the IDF and our legitimate struggle for our survival. Fighting to defend our country, we—soldiers and civilians—must fight at the same time to ensure that the shame of Beirut, September 1982, is never repeated. That’s what you do if you love your country.

For more, see Ari Folman’s “Waltz with Bashir” (2) — War Ethics in a War Zone (3)

Nonetheless, I think that in your last post you too easily placed Michael Walzer‘s Just and Unjust Wars in the category of the theoretical.

It’s true that war is even more unpredictable than other human enterprises. Its method is destroying order. One of the fascinating tensions in Von Clausewitz’s classic On War is this: War is supposed to be policy by other means, a way to achieve political goals, rationally chosen – yet once it begins, what Von Clausewitz calls “friction” sets in, the thousand circumstances that create chaos. So how much chance is there of achieving the original ends? As you say, even national leaders don’t really know. But then, that already brings a moral consideration: As a particularly uncertain way of achieving ends, which is certain to produce suffering even beyond what can be foretold, war should be chosen only as the last resort.

Obviously, you say. But it wasn’t obvious to Ariel Sharon before he engineered the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, or to George W. Bush et al before they engineered the invasion of Iraq.

A corollary: National leaders have to employ much more than “intuition, gut feelings, and the immediate perceived requirements of the moment” in deciding whether war has a reasonable chance of achieving its ends. If Bush and Co. did expect the invasion to create democracy (and weren’t just using that as a cover), they are culpable of failing to evaluate the chances of that happening. At some point, failed evaluation becomes immoral, if not criminal. In the summer of 2006, Israel attacked Lebanon with goals that included getting back two kidnapped soldiers and forcing the Lebanese government to reign in Hizballah. The Winograd Commission of Inquiry later faulted decision-makers for failing to evaluate whether the means had any chance of achieving the ends. (Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni later suggested that some of the decision-making reflected “boy issues” – that is, feelings originating below the gut.) In recent months, on the other hand, it appears that one very good reason that Israel has not invaded Gaza has been an evaluation that an incursion has little chance of accomplishing strategic goals: stopping rocket fire, breaking Hamas.

Clearly immoral decisions – in which the harm to civilians is obvious in advance – is less rare than you suggest. Read Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland on the choices made both by Lyndon Johnson and particularly by Richard Nixon in bombing North Vietnam.

Sadly, the My Lais and Kafr Qasms are also not quite so rare. Blogger Hilzoy yesterday described a Physicians for Human Rights report on torture of detainees held by the US in Guantanamo, Iraq, and Afghanistan. I won’t quote directly here because my 13-year-old daughter sometimes reads this blog and I don’t think she’s ready for the physical descriptions. Actually, I’m not sure I’m ready for them either. Suffice it to say that for these things to have taken place, many soldiers had to take part in acts over which “a black flag of illegality” flew, to use the criterion set by an Israeli court after the Kafr Qasm massacre in 1956.

I recently read Benny Morris’s new book, 1948. Morris estimates that during the war, Jewish forces killed about 800 Arab POWs and civilians. Jews were also massacred by Arabs, though in smaller numbers – simply because the Arabs were losing the war, and had fewer chances.

I should note that in the first part of the war, while the British still ruled Palestine, both Jews and Arabs killed POWs for lack of anything else to do with them; they couldn’t build POW camps. Releasing prisoners was a mortal risk. This points to a lacuna in Walzer’s book: While he deals with guerrilla war against an occupier, he doesn’t take up the issues of communal wars: two groups of armed civilians fighting each other under a sovereign who cannot or will not impose order. That said, many of the massacres of 1948 took place after Israel became an independent state and its army was fighting other armies.

My old friend Gary Weimberg and his partner Catherine Ryan have produced a superb documentary, Soldiers of Conscience, about American soldiers who became conscientious objectors during service in Iraq. Powerful as the movie is, it also emphasized for me the difference between the Israeli and American situation. These soldiers were told they were fighting for “liberty”; any sense that they were protecting their families and country was far more abstract than it is for Israeli soldiers. The Americans could only get out by saying they were against all war. I am sure the soldiers in the movie believed that they did object to all war – but both the distance of the war from home and the army’s categories made it easier to think in those terms. Ultimately, I’d argue that this very “moral” position hides an immoral consequence: Someone unwilling to fight in any circumstance is willing to let harm come to the innocent bystander.

I find the position of Israeli objectors like those I wrote about several years ago morally more defensible and politically more problematic: They accept that fighting is a moral obligation in some situations. They argued that sometimes each individual order given them while serving in occupied territory was in the gray area, but the aggregate became indefensible. The problem is that arguing about the aggregate slips into political judgments – and brings politics into the military, a dangerous development.

That’s why the Israeli court insisted on the “black flag of illegality” as a reason to refuse orders. The black flag may be rare for individual soldiers. But i think you let leaders off too easily. Even with limited information – especially with limited information – they bear a greater weight of responsibility for just and unjust choices than you imply.