The Jewish Story: The Limits of Retaliation

I have seen everything in the days of my vanity says the wise of all kings there's a righteous man who perishes in his righteousness and there's a wicked man who lives long in his evil be not overly righteous warned Solomon and be not overly wise why should you bring desolation upon yourself well I'm not worried that I'm overly righteous and I certainly don't think I'm overly wise but I am wroth Mike Feuer and this is the Jewish story episode six kiyah and the limits of retaliation so we're kind of in the middle of a story as this story of the border wars the border wars of value and the border wars in the literal sense of how one holds up the edges of a nation-state and I want to revisit this notion of the messiness of real world morality there's a disease I see creeping through our society and it's a black and white simplicity in relationship to the use of power there is only in our world or at least in the eyes of the liberal progressive world victims and perpetrators there's no possible way once all the grand narratives that upheld our sense of rectitude collapsed in the face of the last hundred years there's no possible way that anyone with power is actually in the service of good that binary I think is one of the great challenges that we as a people face because we do believe in heroism and if you notice in our stories and I'm talking about the Bible now the heroes are always flawed because real world morality includes a willingness to wade in and sometimes use force in order to establish the boundaries of the value that you're defending even if it comes to the cost and you know we'll speak about his story a little bit more later but Professor each eye a balelo it's said it's very easy to express moral reservations about acts of violence and slaughter when one bears no responsibility for defending the community in whose cause such acts are perpetrated and this is what goes to the heart of this episode the need to defend because it may be that from today's perspective it's a little bit hard to relate to the survival of the Jewish people as an actual value but in 1953 less than 10 years after the gates of Auschwitz opened it wasn't even a question what was a question was whether use of force which the State of Israel adopted quite quickly and had deep roots and if you've listening for a while to the Jewish story you know deep roots in the Zionist movement as a whole the question was whether the use of force was a case of penny smart and pound-foolish did the method use to win the battles along Israel's borders actually themselves promote the next war and that's not just a a tactical question it's not even just a military question it's a cultural question because I also want to consider whether the methods that we use to defend our values and in this case our lives even if they succeed in the short term and they hold off the barbarians at the gate they keep our borders and our values strong and clear what if they lead to a long term erosion of the value itself because the question that we have to ask is not just how do we defend our values in our borders but who do we become when we choose the methods to do it and when I look back across the arc of time to the entire Jewish story and in particular to the books of the Bible it seems to me that from Israel our physical security has always been bound up with our spiritual purity and that's our ultimate challenge how is it that we can make our way in a messy world failing always forward defending both our values and our lives and become the people that we need to be to bring about the world of which we dream so the problem of Jewish power is nothing new to our story at this point way back in the underground days I'm talking about the pre state from the 20s to the 40s the debate centered around that notion of half laga of restraint right listen to these words the return of public security depends largely on the self control and self restraint of the Hebrew public you might have read that in the papers today but they're actually the words of marriages in golf tel aviv's mayor when he was attempting to calm his fellow Jews after the murder of 19 people in nearby Oppo at the onset of the Arab revolt in 1936 and in particular he and the other leaders of labor Zionism were truly worried about acts of retaliation against Arabs that they saw as innocent of this crime and in fact generally were but if you recall that period of our story the prolonged and intense violence of the revolt caused many to question a policy of restraint and wonder whether the case was an attempt to maintain moral superiority or whether a minority surrounded by an antagonistic majority would always have to respond and that restraint simply fed the myth that the Jews were afraid to fight because here's another side of the story do not dare to punish the innocent was superficial and hypocritical nonsense in war any war each side is innocent what crime has he committed against me that enemy soldier who fights me and is as poor as I as blind as I as much a slave as I who has been recruited against his will there is no war which is not conducted against the innocent therefore every war and the tribulations it brings is a person whether offensive or defensive and who do not wish to harm the innocent you will die and if you don't wish to die then shoot and stop prattling those are the words of Zev Jabotinsky in response diseases in Gulf and his allies so we saw another round of this question of how to rightly use Jewish power in the lead-up to Independence right that question of whether good behavior would bring international recognition and therefore statehood or whether the goal was to win our state on the battlefield and the answer at that point was no more clear to Israel's leadership even after the war of independence when we'd won or today that matter you can see this playing itself out in our public policy and in our papers when faced with the question of how to navigate the dangerous waters the 1950s ben-gurion cabinet was made up of two factions they're called the military activists and the political activists and because that split they represent indoors as said to our very day it's worth giving it some detail now political activism was inspired by the diplomatic vision and really the personality of Haim Weitzman I hope you recall that even at the height of the underground battle with the British in the 30s and early 40s why it's been held out in his belief that diplomacy was the only means to win the day he even threatened to resign from his position and perhaps betray the fighters to the British in order to force the Haganah out of their temporary alliance with the organ but this was called United resistance now at this point in our story in the early 50s Weitzman is President of Israel which would be impressive if it weren't for the fact that it was a position largely created in order to pigeonhole him in some ceremonial post where he had no threat to his arch rival ben-gurion however foreign minister Moshe Sharett had taken up Weitzman's Creed and he had a lot of supporters both in the media and in the government the essential elements of this political activist approach were number one conflict management over victory Charette and his followers were skeptical of any comprehensive solution to the arab-israeli conflict and thus they set their sights on containing it rather than winning it right and as a direct outgrowth of this management approach notice dismissing both of victory and peace they saw international legitimacy as the holy grail of security because only widespread international support would give Israel the sort of umbrella to continue to pursue his vital interests in the face of an ongoing and bloody conflict Charette therefore push for good relations with everyone with the UN with the United States with Europe he promoted outside mediation in the conflict he was always looking for some bigger power to step in and save the day and in particular he saw the Jewish Diaspora and every day more so American Jewry as a source of indispensable moral diplomatic and of course economic support now in order to achieve international legitimacy these political activists believe the Israel must show military restraint not only restraint but they had to in every possible move to reduce tension at the borders wasn't just a matter of holding back it was a matter of giving and it should come as no surprise then the cherry consistently opposed retaliatory raids as a tool for combating infiltration in fact in one cabinet meeting he remarked the question is what's the lesser of two evils to try to ease the tension while running the risk of further incidents in which we shall be the injured party meaning to weaken our military posture or to launch a large-scale vigorous military operation aimed at putting an end to the problem of terrorist raids an operation which will cause grave damage to the international standing of the country and will not achieve its direct objective notice he assumes there's no military solution for the president he finishes and I lay great stress on the words for the present the former course of action is the lesser of two evils now the political actors didn't deny that military force was sometimes necessary their point was that it often made matters worse by Fanning the flames of hatred and undermining Israel's status in the eyes of the international community force must be used only as a last resort when the national goals couldn't be achieved by diplomatic means now in the list of their principles last but certainly not least a political activist believed in integrating defense and diplomacy meaning that Moshe Sharett wanted the foreign ministry to take an active part in shaping Israeli policy just as much as the IDF rather than just explaining the action to the army to the international community which is largely what he spent his time doing he was hoping to create a policy that could strike a balance between the extreme of relying on its own strengths on the one hand and the extreme of simply yielding to international opinion on the other in which case the state never would have existed to begin with and I can tell you now whatever you think about his opinions Moshe Shari was swimming upstream in the 1950s because the opposing camp the military activist was headed by none other than ben-gurion himself and so military activism also has several characteristics first the clear sentiment that diplomacy is always subordinate to defense right there's a quote attributed to many people out there that diplomacy is simply the art of saying nice doggie while you bend over to pick up a rock and ben-gurion saw the IDF and the defense establishment as having the central role in the life of the nation as a whole and when it came to the conflict with the Arabs he's attitude that defense over diplomacy was absolute and really summed up in that famous quip it doesn't matter what the say what the Jews do it's a bit ironic considering the antagonist ik relationship that ben-gurion and Jabotinsky had but in many ways ben-gurion had adopted the stance that Zeb Jabotinsky articulated in his famous 1923 essay the iron wall if you want a good thought on it go back to season 2 episode 30 he says peace will only be possible when the Arab states have internalized the impossibility of destroying Israel and therefore in Ben Gurion eyes every provocation needed to be responded to with a swift and overwhelming force so we add to this Ben Gurion attitude that Israel was fated to be a nation that dwelt alone no matter what we did we would be unable to rely on the UN international observers or any foreign state for our security and therefore it should come as no surprise they saw diplomacy as simply a means of justifying the military moves that he made in the eyes of the world and it should also come as no surprise that this was his attitude having imbibed this notion of survival as Zionism that we talked about at the end of last season so therefore Ben Gurion believed that reprisal raids and retaliation and in particular against infiltration were a useful deterrent and furthermore not just a deterrent they were actually the policy which he saw to be most likely to create a political climate which would actually be conducive to signing a new more favorable agreements with the Arab states in other words the more it hurt the more likely they'd be to come to the table and therefore to him a failure to respond to air valence and kind was nothing less than expression of weakness and an admission that we don't belong here in the Middle East and since he was both Prime Minister and defence minister for most of us career that policy of military act ISM easily carried the cabinet all he needed was someone in the army who was able to put it effective in the field Moshe Dayan was born in May of 1915 ponky boots began yet I hope you recall that the kind of course is the famous first give us I've spent some quality time there myself and day on had the distinction of being the second child ever born there he was the second child of the kibbutz movement and not only that Moshe Dayan was the embodiment of the new Jew everything that max Nordau had ever dreamed of native Hebrew speaking born in the land to pioneer parents after he was named motion not from the giver of the Torah but after Moshe Barsky who was the first member of the ganya ever to be killed in an Arab attack actually died bringing medication to Diane's own father and young Moshe grew up in halal another collective settlement further north in the Galilee and he grew up tough and wild because as was true of most of the efforts at Jewish agriculture in those days now halal was planted in the midst of the Arab population and as a boy Moshe took the wandering through the villages that surrounded their settlement speaking with the people fighting with other tough kids in short he took the acting like a local and this in poor sense that he had that a Jew could be a native among Arabs and not just a foreign import would be deeply influential not only on his personal character but on the military and political career which lay ahead but not yet at age 14 Diane joined the Hagana right the underground army associated with labor Zionism and his natural talents quickly caught the eye of Utah Sunday the famous Red Army veteran whose spirit shaped the underground army of labor Zionism and infused it with a left-wing ideology and when orde Wingate formed his legendary special night squads he chose Moshe Dayan as his guide due to not only his military skills and toughness but also his knowledge of Arabic it was from Wingate the Dayan learned what it really meant to lead in battle from practical elements of how to select an ambush and the importance of owning the night to the seneschal principle of leadership me many 200 Lehane tasu see me and do the same it's an ethic of personal example which guides the idea to this day this the the officers lead the charge from the front in our army Wingate also taught moshe dayan the power of retaliation because he saw this as the only hope for the Jews surrounded by what he perceived to be a sea of hostile enemies and the Jews outnumbered fighting insurgents embedded in a hostile population could only rely on the fear of retaliation to keep the upper hand you may recall if you listened to it and if not you should go back back in season 2 episode 33 we spoke a little bit about Wingate's methods how they were often harsh sometimes downright cruel but in the end always immensely effective and that last piece is going to be critical in the mind of day on because he's gonna carry this notion of the power importance and effective nature of retaliation with him as he shapes Israeli military culture so with the outbreak of world war ii they an along with many the Hagana enlisted in the Allied forces he would sign to a smaller connaissance force based out of his own boots kanita not far from the Lebanese border and from there they frequently infiltrated Lebanon then controlled by the Vichy French it was actually on one of these missions the Zion was scanning the enemy positions from the rooftop that his binoculars were struck by a sniper bullet from hundreds of yards away six hours pass while he wold in his own blood and they say that if it weren't for his an iron determination and of course the friends that cared for him he certainly would have died he didn't die but died on did lose the eye and the damage was so extensive that it couldn't be fitted with a glass replacement and thus the black eye patch would became not just a hallmark of his personality but really an emblem of the Israeli spirit of the 50s became his trademark now is not the time despite the fact that it's tempting to detail most of the islands rise through the IDF during and after the war of independence in his career there will be no post of significance which he doesn't fill including of course chief of staff and ultimately defense minister during the 56 and 1967 six-day war because of that career day on wasn't just the embodiment of Sabra of native Israeli in his personal story he wasn't just the fulfillment of the new Jew in his sort of personal essence his personality dominated the IDF during the first three decades of his existence which means in many ways he really shaped the military and therefore national culture of Israel it really was Diane who brought the characteristic free spirit because he's so much valued initiative and creativity over discipline and who saw guile as a critical tool of war and he infused that notion within the army and therefore the nation the best quote really comes from Ariel Sharon who knew him well he said Diane would wake up with a hundred ideas of them 95 were dangerous three more were bad the remaining two however were brilliant and it was under the guidance of his mentor Ben Gurion that Moshe Dayan became the commander who transformed retaliation from a tool amongst others in Israel's defensive approach toward infiltration into the primary means of combating this problem and the question that I have is whether that policy was brilliant bad or just dangerous now before retaliation became the go-to move the IDF's first response to the problem of infiltration had been an open fire policy it began already during the War of Independence I mean during war you don't generally stop to see who's crossing the border but by 1956 when it was still largely the policy historian Benny Morris estimates that it claimed thousands of lives just listen to this operational order from the Gavazzi brigade to one of his battalions on the border given a couple years after the war the battle against infiltration in the border areas at all times of day and night will be carried out mainly by opening fire without giving warning on any individual or group which cannot be identified from afar by our troops as Israeli citizens and who are at the moment they are spotted infiltrating into Israeli territory it was a death sentence for anyone who stepped in to know man's land but despite that when Diane was promoted to Major General an appointed commander of the Southern Command in October of 1949 it wasn't working the infiltration was still the primary security challenge the region faced and really for the nation as a whole even the planting of mines and periodic rounding up and expelling operations were unable to stem the human tide and so Diane began to advocate a systematic policy of retaliatory strikes against the villages from which the infiltrators left or even just against those near the point of crossing and he explained his thinking to them a high faction that's the political party Ben greens political party to which Diane also belong in the Mapai faction in Knesset in 1950 he said retaliation is the only method that is proved effective not justified or moral but effective when Arabs plant mines on our side if we try to search for that Arab it has no value but if we harass the nearby village then in the population there comes out against the infiltrators and the Egyptian government and the trans Jordanian government are driven to prevent such incidents because their prestige is at stake as the Jews have opened fire and their unready to start a war the method of a collective punishment so far has proved effective there are no other effective methods did you hear how many times he used that word brutal but effective justice orde Wingate would have advocated but the question is the efficacy happens on what scale now certainly the refugees in the border villages were cowed by these raids but history also shows that the desperation remained and the underlying problems the inability of the refugees to return home the unwillingness of the Arab states to absorb them and the cultivation of a consciousness that they had a right to return to the land which was blossoming under their gaze from across the border and so that as long as that desperation remained that fear of retaliation quickly becomes anger and hatred toward those who retaliate and then infiltration and terrorism become an appealing means and as soon as you lose any concern for your life well then war on the horizon now that's just on the personal skill but the Arab refugees were a destabilizing factor in the region as a whole particularly in the Kingdom of Jordan where Diane focuses early efforts in the southern command the Arabs that had fled and been driven out of the State of Israel at its birth were more than half the population of the Kingdom of Jordan and the retaliatory strikes of Israel posed a particular problem for the King on one hand IDF retaliation hurt his prestige didn't just hurt his procedure it risked scaling up and escalating into a full-blown war in which the King might just lose control of the mountains of udonge Iran that he had seized illegally in 1948 on the other hand if he restrained the infiltrators in order to prevent these retaliatory strikes he risked toppling his kingdom altogether as King Hussein of Jordan said to an American representative in the early 50s when I wield my influence for the purpose of restraining infiltrators I am playing with fire every move that could be interpreted as cooperation with Israel could lead to my overthrow and he wasn't exaggerating Hussein took the throne in 1952 less than a year after his grandfather Abdullah was gunned down on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem by a former member of Haj Amin who Sammy's dynamite squad right that's Arab Palestinian radicalism killing Arab leaders for what for the sin of opposing Palestinian nationalist aspirations so retaliation may have been tactically effective for Israel but as we move slowly toward the next regional war only a few years away we have to keep our eyes on its strategic value and how much the policy of retaliation will actually contribute to the next war and as a side light we'll discuss further whether that was necessarily a bad thing in the eyes of ben-gurion and Moshe Dayan now of course foreign minister Moshe Sharett and the political activist Saul retaliation as a strategic nightmare sorry it was constantly warning the cabinet against Diane's method of maintaining the borders he claimed that the policy was morally indefensible and therefore that it threatened to undermine Israel's standing in the eyes of the entire world and to Charlotte that was the real threat to Israel's existence how painful the result of infiltration might be they were pinpricks compared to what would happen if the world came down on them like a hammer during one confrontation over the policy in 1950 this is what Diane said in response using the moral yardstick mentioned by charade I must ask are we justified in opening fire on the Arabs who crossed to reap the crops they planted in our territory they their women and their children will this stand up to moral scrutiny we shoot at those from among the two hundred thousand hungry Arabs who crossed the line to graze their flocks will this stand up the moral view Arabs cross to collect the grain that they left in the abandoned villages and we sent mines for them and they go back without an arm or a leg it may be that this cannot pass review but I know no other method of guarding the borders is the Arab Shepherds and harvesters are allowed to cross the borders and tomorrow the State of Israel will have no borders and that in a nutshell is this problem of embodiment any value even the decision to live necessitates a clear boundary and as we mentioned once again at the beginning maintaining those boundaries of a value is messy on the moral and practical plane that's true of a value and all the more so of a border so long as the retaliation policy remained on low flame the argument between Moshe and Moshe between the political activists and the military activists basically remained unresolved and you could even call it a mock local ashamed sham ein both were after all trying to secure the security of the state but you know if you play with fire for long enough someone's gonna get burned reading the headstones in the Tsukuba Cemetery you can encounter the same stories that mark any other burial ground peaceful passings lifes cut short lost loved ones and those who made it to lie together most of the dead in the Saguna teri are from the town of you hood and if you look closely at their names and dates the death a little bit of its story is revealed because there were 15 Turkish families that had come almost directly from Izmir Judea in 1940 moving into the stone houses that had been abandoned by the arabs who were driven out during operation danny at an early stage of the war their names the ages on the headstones it all reminds us of how hard it must have been for that generation that lived in houses they didn't build and gathered from fields that they didn't sow in a land which was theirs but so far from home and if you keep looking you'll find one grave whose epitaph exposes a story that triggered one of the most painful incidents in Israeli military history it's a story that really lies at the heart of the tragedy of a state born in war it reads as follows precious blood was spilled by the rioters they had no mercy on a mother who was embracing her little ones as they slept and beneath it live Sultana Kenya's in each thirty-nine her three-year-old daughter Shoshana and baby Benny aged one they died on the night of October 12th 1953 when a small group of terrorists crossed the Jordanian border and threw grenade into the house while Sultana and five of her children were sleeping it was a horrific tank and it shook the Israeli public it wasn't just the heinous nature of a crime a mother dying with two young children and it wasn't even the yahood lays more than ten kilometres from the Jordanian border making this a strike not at the edges but at the settled heart of Israel what it was is that forty five civilians had died in cross-border raids since that May and the people had had enough the United Nation was very observers an Israeli representative managed to follow the tracks of the infiltrators with police dogs in a rare act of cooperation the Jordanian authorities actually allowed them to cross the ceasefire line and continue eastward after 14 kilometers the tracks led to the village of runkis and there they disappeared completely the response to these murders was immediate and catastrophic but it been a long time in coming by 1953 the retaliation raids already a tried-and-true method for the IDF but the feeling had been growing for some time amongst the general staff that the regular infantry units employed and even the paratroopers who had been brought up we're not really up for this task there had been a few early failed efforts to create special forces unit dedicated to the task but it wasn't till July of that year in the wake of the murder of two Watchmen in a village close to Jerusalem that chief of operations Moshe Dayan gave his consent to forming yadam a Ahad unit 101 and in order to do so he called upon a man named major in the reserves Ariel Sharon now Sharona stories a rich one and it plays quite far out into Israeli history but I'm not gonna tell it right now maybe we get 256 or perhaps 67 we'll see but for now just know that Sharon was already well known to Diane in 1953 in fact he was well known to the entire Israeli army for many things just a year before captain Rowan at the time on his her own recognizance had made a daring raid to kidnap two jordanian legion soldiers in the beit yahoun valley in order to trade them for two israeli soldiers before being held captive by the legion there and so when her own was chosen to head unit 101 wasn't despite his well-earned reputation for aggressiveness and insubordination he was chosen for the job because of them Sharon began to gather around him a few dozen men many were hand-picked from the agricultural settlements where he had grow up and some were even veterans of the old Palma the striking arm of the Hagana he equipped them with non-standard weapons and began an intensive program of training in small unit maneuvers activation and insertion tactics their night hikes were legendary and would often take him across the Jordanian border where rumor had it that Schroeder would seek out firefights with the Legionnaires just to battle hardened his team and aside from this unique training and equipment what really set the 1:01 apart from the rest of the army was that it received its orders directly from the mouth column from the IDF General Staff meaning it was disconnected from the ordinary chain of command which characterizes military maneuver and so when Sultana Kenya and her children were murdered the government had a weapon of retaliation ready at hand only hours after the murder Prime Minister Ben Gurion defensemen defender Pincus LaVon chief of staff morning hi map clef and chief of operations Moshe Dayan gathered for an emergency meeting it was clear to all that the dance at Yahoo would demanded the firmus possible response in fact as word of the decision to retaliate spread only moshe at Charette question the wisdom of the response which was to come this is what he said in his diary from October 14th only today there was a meeting of the Israel Jordanian mixed armistice Commission at which a forceful denunciation of the Act was adopted Jordans representative also voted in favor of the resolution said that his government took it upon itself to do everything to prevent such atrocities in the future under these circumstances is it wise to retaliate even more so when we're already in conflict with the UN in the north and the south but those words had an impact only on the page the military activists ruled the cabinet and the decision had been made the Foreign Minister was not consulted he was informed the 101 was supporting troops from paratroop battalion sat out on the night of October 14th for the village of Cuba near aunty's even though there is no evidence that the terrace had actually come from there later Arielle Sturm will record in his book the warrior that his orders were clear Gibeah was to be an example for everyone and when ensued was the most devastating act of retaliation the state had yet known the troops surrounded the village blasting through its defenses with mortars and Bangalore torpedoes and once the defenders were overcome the soldiers dynamited over 50 homes but the inhabitants were still inside when the United Nations investigation team submitted its report they said that bullet riddled bodies near the doorways and multiple bullet hits on the doors of the demolished houses indicate that the inhabitants had been forced to remain inside until their homes were blown up over them the UN claimed that the invasion force must have been at least 600 soldiers and all but constituted an outright act of war shown himself would later claim that he didn't know the houses were occupied after all every previous raid had involved the destruction of a house or two but everyone who taken shelter had been safe perhaps he said that's why the villagers didn't heed his warning to flee in the end of the day it may not matter what the story was because 69 Jordanian civilians lay dead inside those houses and the scale and intensity of the destruction of the Gibeah raid was a qualitative shift in the policy of retaliation as was the international outcry that it provoked surprised by the results of the tak and suddenly on the defensive Prime Minister Ben Gurion at first tried to deny any army involvement at all he claimed that the raid had been carried out by Israeli citizens fed up with constant threat of infiltration and moved to a vigilante act Nunda pours it more than the government of Israel if innocent blood was spilled the government of Israel rejects with all vigor the absurd and fantastic allegation that six hundred men of the IDF took part in the action we've carried out a searching investigation and is clear beyond doubt that not a single Army unit was absent from its base on the night of the attack on Cuba in a later address that day he turned his anger toward the sovereign state on the other side of the border and said all the responsibility rests with the government of Transjordan that for many years tolerated and thus encouraged attacks of murder and robbery by armed powers in its country against the citizens of Israel now the second one may have been true but unwise the first one was just patently false and Moshe Sharett warmed him not to do it and no one believed him ben-gurion simply looked like a fool at best at worst like a liar like I said no one in Israel or out was going to buy that this was the work of vigilantes viewing investigation brought back enough evidence to show that this was a well-organized military attack and as the report said if Israel provided heavy reverently to its citizenry then it was also responsible for controlling them the condemnations ring down in a way that Israel had never yet experienced the US State Department European governance the UN Security Council resolution 101 expressed quote the strongest possible center of this action even many Jewish communities worldwide spoke out against the horror they held at such behavior gibeom marks a shift in Israel diaspora relations and we're gonna speak in a coming episode about its formative impact on the American Zionist movement but in the end despite Moshe Sharett sphere and all the international anger the State of Israel weathered the diplomatic storm and the dead at Cuba were certainly an example for future infiltrators you know soon after the raid David ben-gurion resigned his prime minister claiming exhaustion from two decades of national leadership and it's hard to say that Cuba had anything to do with it for sure but it certainly couldn't have helped Moshe charade became the second Prime Minister of Israel he was chosen as his successor by the map high party but don't worry ben-gurion will be back before long general Moshe Dayan became chief of staff and in reviewing the retaliation policy up to and including Cuba he decided that for quote reasons of public opinion and morale the tactical and operational objections should change that the retaliatory raids in his eyes worked visibly the enemy but they were damaging the social fabric they were meant to protect from 1953 on retaliatory raids we can take a totally different form their goal was no longer intimidation at the village level now they aimed the pressure the Jordanian and Egyptian governments to rein in the people inside their borders and therefore the objective chosen were army and police posts rather than suspected villages and that's why the raids grew actually progressively larger in scope and intensity as the 50s moved on one might even say that this tactical shift from the village level to targeting the military in response to a Dayan perceived to be the harmful nature of retaliation to the fabric of his own society started a spiral of escalation that eventually led to the Suez war in but that's a discussion that lies ahead so give me as many things and one of them is a crucible for testing our resolve to be a people and for asking the question of what type of people we wish to be on one level like I said it bespeaks the brutal reality of life in a brutal world and in a particularly tough neighborhood at that like Jabotinsky said if you don't wish to harm the innocent you will die and if you do not wish to die then shoot and stop prattling on another level it exposes the tension between the political and the military as tools of survival I wonder how ben-gurion dictum sounds to you today in a world of global politics BBS and narrative warfare it's still true that it doesn't matter what the say but what the Jews do and then there's that third question which is raised by Moshe Diane's shift in strategic thinking that what does it mean to be a Jewish state what are the tactics we use to protect our society actually gradually undermine our social and moral fabric what does it mean to return to the privilege and burden of power as the bearers of an ethical culture that had been refined by centuries of powerlessness now the political and military activists made this disagreed on tactics but their strategic goal was the same survival and I don't discount that goal not in 1953 and not in 2019 but our mission as a people is to redeem the world not just survive and in order to do that we need to make sure that we become who we need to be and not just maintain who we are and the man who most vehemently raised this question of the impact that the tactics of survival might have on those who survived was Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz professor of chemistry and neurophysiology at hebrew you Orthodox Jew writer philosopher and all-around public intellectual intellectual provocateur I might add because the professor wasn't afraid to slaughter sacred cows and deep in his heart his greatest fear was that the state would become more important than Jewish values and Gibeah was the beginning of his literary onslaught against Israeli society as he says we were bearers of a culture which for many generations derived certain spiritual benefits from the conditions of Exile our morality and conscience were conditioned by an insulated existence in which we could cultivate values and sensibilities that did not have to be tested in the crucible of reality this is what I call the luxury of exile but then he points out that we the bearers of morality that abominates the spilling of innocent blood face our acid test only now that we've become capable of defending ourselves and responsible for our own security defense and security often appear to require the spilling of innocent blood it's the question of Jewish power can we maintain Jewish morality now notice he's not saying that violence is illegitimate he's saying that the spilling of innocent blood is illegitimate so he goes on he says we can indeed justify the action of Gibeah before the world its spokesmen and leaders admonished us for having adopted the means of reprisal and we could argue that we have not behaved any differently than the Americans when they deployed the atomic bomb were a hundred thousand civilians mostly women and children were killed in one day in order to bring about the quick termination of this nightmare of world war two and so the professor points out that we're in the sixth year of a war that was forced upon us and continues to inspire constant fear of plunder and murder no wonder that border settlers and those responsible for the life and security overreacted and reciprocated with a cruel slaughter and destruction so professor Leibovitz points out and makes it very clear that we could justify this actually he said we could justify it but let us not try to do so let us he says rather recognize it's distressing nature and then he says that there's a precedent for the question of Cuba it's the story of Shem and Dina if you recall in the book of Bray sheet when Dina is taken by the man who swam by one manage him and raped the brothers Shimon and lady are unwilling to have their as it says their sister dealt with as a harlot and together with their brothers they take the revenge and slaughter the whole city now one could understand that act it was not one of as the oppressor says pure wickedness in malice but nonetheless as he points out because of their action two tribes in Israel were cursed for generations by their father Jacob and he points out that war is one of the manifestations of social reality it's inseparable part of life in the world until machetes common he actually in joins us to accept war without bitterness or protest but also without enthusiasm and admiration he says like we accept many repulsive manifestations of human biological reality so he goes on he says that the problematic issues really are the manner in which we conduct our war and it goes on every day and what's to be done after the war is over because the distinction between the justified and the blameworthy is very subtle as the professor says it's like that hands breadth between heaven and hell and so I'll finish out with this last quote although there are good reasons and ethical justifications for what he calls the Shem Kibby action the curse of Jacob when he told his children what would befall them in the end of days is an example of the frightening problematic ethical reality there may well be actions that can be vindicated and even justified and are nevertheless accursed so I just want to thank a few people want to thank all the folks who give their money their hard-earned money help make this show free make it happen keep 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