For families of the fallen and for modern veterans, there is a reality that often deepens our grief. Our wars since World War II have often been inconclusive, at best. Battlefield victories have been squandered, a nation that we defended — South Vietnam — is now extinct, and in Iraq thousands of men are right back where Americans were ten years ago, fighting the same enemy. Against that backdrop, I’ve heard people say that American sacrifices have been in vain, even that lives were “wasted.”
.. But I also know that courage is never truly wasted. It returns incalculable value to brothers-in-arms, to the military, and to the nation. We’ve seen throughout history that cowardice is contagious — but so are honor and courage, even (and sometimes especially) honor and courage displayed in a “losing” cause.
.. Yet that bond of shared sacrifice, of the willingness to die for your brother, sustains our nation and our culture.
How Israel Lost its Latest Chance for a Peace Process
Lieberman made his career with coarse talk: Israel, he said, should “cut off the head” of a disloyal Arab citizen, or take “a lesson from Putin” on how to deal with terror.
.. Moshe (Bogie) Ya’alon, the minister whom Netanyahu fired to make room for Lieberman, spoke bluntly at a press briefing on Friday. “To my great sorrow, extremist and dangerous elements have taken over Israel and the Likud Party,” he said. Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who was Ya’alon’s predecessor as defense minister under Netanyahu, angrily reinforced Ya’alon’s message on television later that night. Israel “has been infected by the seeds of fascism,” Barak said.
.. Ya’alon was the I.D.F.’s chief of staff when it crushed the Al-Aqsa intifada, in the early aughts. He ran the last Gaza war, advocated early on for a military strike against Iran’s nuclear program, and mocked Secretary of State John Kerry’s recent peace shuttles as “obsessive.” So his words of warning about Lieberman’s appointment carry particular weight
.. The first is ideological: neo-Zionist, religiously inflected zealotry for the Land of Israel, representing at most a fifth of Israel’s Jews and valorizing the settlement project as messianic. The second is reactionary: the conviction that Israel has no partner for peace, that an Arab leader’s motivation to destroy Israel will correspond directly with his capability—reinforced with references to the pathos of Jewish history.
.. Naftali Bennett, another far-right leader, demanded an end to the “festival of self-flagellation.” Herzog said, “This is what morality and responsibility sound like.” Ya’alon, for his part, who had dismissed veterans of the group Breaking the Silence as “traitors” for exposing routine violations of the I.D.F. code of conduct, could hardly permit attacks on the code itself.
.. Then things fell apart. Herzog told Ravid that he had asked Netanyahu to put their understanding of the peace process in writing, and that Netanyahu had refused to do so. Livni did not tell me precisely what that understanding was, but in last year’s election Herzog all but endorsed the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, which Blair said on Wednesday would unlock “some steps of normalization.” A written commitment might well cause Bennett’s right-wing faction to bolt from the government, which would be, from Herzog’s perspective, all to the good.
.. For all his bombast, the former prime minister Ehud Olmert once told me, Lieberman is actually a pragmatist, one who supported the two-state solution when he was foreign minister (although, revealingly, his vision called for redrawing the border to place hundreds of thousands of Israeli Arabs on the other side).
.. The real question is whether, by making common cause with the settler right against the I.D.F., Netanyahu is taking on forces that may finally be too big for him to manipulate. The settlers already control education, justice, and rural development
.. Lieberman will bring the defense ministry into this orbit, and will likely try to advance the careers of officers sensitive to the settler agenda. (The political analyst Yoram Peri told me that as many as half of the rising officers in the I.D.F. today wear the settlers’ knitted yarmulkes.)
.. But the senior command, in both the military and intelligence services, remains hostile to Netanyahu. He has not only challenged their authority; he is challenging the prestige of Army service, and is threatening to debase the values with which they claim authority.
Debate Over Role of ‘People’s Army’ in Israel Reflects Wider Fissures
His immediate predecessor, Moshe Yaalon, a conservative and former military chief of staff who was pushed out, had staunchly backed the generals, who have spoken out against manifestations of extremism in the ranks and in broader society.
“Generally, the image of an army is that it wants to push forward and it has to be restrained sometimes by the politicians, statesmen who think in a wider context and know that they need to make compromises,” said Shlomo Avineri, a professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “In Israel, the present situation is almost the opposite.”
.. The fissure is not between the traditional Israeli right and left, he said, but between “strategic hawks,” or pragmatists who put Israel’s security first, and “ideological hawks” who are more concerned with historical rights and Jewish nationalism.
.. Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, the chief of staff of the Israeli military, recently caused a stir when he told an audience of high school students that he would not want a soldier to empty a magazine on a Palestinian girl of 13 holding a pair of scissors. He was attacked by rightist politicians who advocate a policy based on the Talmudic lesson “Whoever comes to slay you, slay him first.”
.. Then Maj. Gen. Yair Golan, the deputy chief of the military, caused an uproar in a speech for Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day this month, when he said he discerned disturbing trends in Israeli society that reminded him of processes that led to the rise of Nazi Germany.
Mr. Netanyahu rebuked General Golan, criticizing his remarks as outrageous
.. Military-civilian lines are further blurred in Israel by the number of retired generals who try to capitalize on their army prestige by entering politics.
The Citizen-Soldier: Moral Risk and the Modern Military
When he got to me, down at the end, he unloaded one of his more involved hypotheticals. “All right candidate. Say you think there’s an insurgent in a house and you call in air support, but then when you walk through the rubble there’s no insurgents, just this dead Iraqi civilian with his brains spilling out of his head, his legs still twitching and a little Iraqi kid at his side asking you why his father won’t get up. So. What are you going to tell that Iraqi kid?”
Amid all the playacting of OCS—screaming “Kill!” with every movement during training exercises, singing cadences about how tough we are, about how much we relish violence—this felt like a valuable corrective. In his own way, that Sergeant Instructor was trying to clue us in to something few people give enough thought to when they sign up: joining the Marine Corps isn’t just about exposing yourself to the trials and risks of combat—it’s also about exposing yourself to moral risk.