Ori Hanan Weisberg: Israel’s War Cabinet

October 29, 2023

I didn’t watch the press conference live last night with the leadership of the “war cabinet”: Prime Minister Netanyahu, Defense Minister Gallant, and Benny Gantz, the leader of an opposition party who joined the government amid the crisis. But I watched it this morning. Political rubbernecking. It was as disheartening as I imagined.

Three Ashkenazi men in late middle age wearing identical black shirts in front of a row of national flags in front of a black backdrop. All three are veterans of elite combat units. Two are generals in the reserves. And Gantz served as Chief of Staff. They might be triplets. What I heard was just as empty, homogeneous, bleak, and conventional as their image, apparently meant to show decisive unanimity. But to me they seemed empty and formulaic and hopelessly outdated.

All three recited the platitudes one might expect from this image. They all stand with the military and assure us with great confidence that although it will come at a high cost of lives, we will win. They all mentioned the bereaved families and the hostages and their families. They all wore the same expression, grim and determined and authoritative. They all employed similar emphatic gestures. Netanyahu’s seemed especially studied and staged, like there were notes before him telling him when to make a fist and when to gesture with parallel open hands, and when to let them drop to his sides as he re-centered his posture. (And then there was the moment when he paused and said “continue” before picking up his remarks. Apparently whoever was operating the teleprompter was as disengaged as I was.) None of the three shared any political vision with us. They just assured us how strong we/they are. None offered meaningful words for our grief or anything approaching poetics of resilience and courage to lift us up. Just empty bombast. And no image of what lies on the other side.

Maybe they chose black shirts to express that they are stage hands, with nothing to offer beyond rearranging the sets.

Netanyahu once again likened this to a war against Nazis: “never again is now!” This is already the subject of criticism. I mean, yeah, Hamas is annihilationist. I have zero illusions regarding their goal. But they aren’t a regional power, don’t outnumber us, and don’t have nearly the military capabilities of the IDF. What they did on October 7 was horrific. But they aren’t building gas chamber or lining us up in front of pits. And we all know that for years, Netanyahu has ended every day congratulating himself for singlehandedly saving the Jewish People from another Auschwitz. It’s at the center of his delusions of personal granduer.

But Netanyahu also called this our “second War of Independence.” Of course, he didn’t mention that we are still paying the price for the mistakes of the first one and still haven’t learned the lesson that a military cannot bring us peace and security without political justice that takes into account the experiences of those with whom we share this land.

Does a second War of Independence mean a Second Nakba? We won the last War of Independence. And around 750,000 non-combatants lost their homes. Our founding Prime Minister, David ben Gurion responded to this massive ethnic cleansing and the refugees it produced with the bet that “the old will die and the young will forget.” His grasp of rudimentary biology ensured the safety of the first bet. The second? Well, Hamas Gaza Chief Yahya Sinwar was born in the Khan Younis refugee camp south of Gaza City, but his parents were 1948 refugees from Majdal al-Asqelon, the current Israeli city of Ashkelon just a few kilometers from Gaza’s northern border. Now, their son is dispatching murderers and firing missiles at it. Clearly, Ben Gurion gambled wrong on the second bit.

We will never be independent of Palestinian Arabs. And we shouldn’t be, shouldn’t wish to be, shouldn’t dream of it. And not only because it’s impractical. Rather, because it’s a genocidal wish. We shouldn’t be wishing another people out of existence, at least those of us who recognize their existence in the first place. Some members of the current government refuse to do so. There’s no talking to people who take this position.

No one gets to decide which peoples exist and which don’t. It’s not in anyone’s power to do so. Not anymore. No one gets to decide how others will respond to violence, especially if that hapless decision is framed according to one’s own convenience.

Netanyahu has assured us for years that we are making progress and celebrated accomplishments that he claimed were almost exclusively his own. And too many of us believed him. He touted progress on the economy, which grew stunningly…while benefitting fewer and fewer of us. He touted progress in international relations. He touted progress on containing Hamas and forcing them to become more moderate. And he touted progress on doing an end run around the Palestinians we live with to establish normalized relations with Arab states across the region.

PROGRESS!

And now we have progressed so far that we are…fighting a second War of Independence?

Benjamin Netanyahu is reputed to be very well read. But perhaps he never read Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History”. Especially the most famous bit:

“A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

I’m certainly no angel, in any senses of the term, nor am I nearly as interesting as Klee’s painting. But my mind keeps coming back to this passage. About fifty times a day. Early this morning, I looked at the three men who are leading this country. And I look at the pictures of the aftermath of October 7th. And I see the pictures of what we are doing again in Gaza. And I am told we are facing a second War of Independence. And I think of our history and I don’t see “one chain of events.” I see “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of [my] feet.” And I’d like to “stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.”

But I can’t.

The fallacy of progress peddled by three men of roughly the same generation and background with the same set of archaic and discredited ideas is keeping us all from the task.

Maybe a black shirt is what passes for nakedness these days. Someone ought to let our emperors know.

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Copyright 2023 Ori Hanan Weisberg, included in Vox Populi with the permission of the author.

Ori Hanan Weisberg is a novelist and digital creator who lives in Jerusalem. His writing has appeared in Times of Israel, Moment Magazine, The Forward, Haaretz, and the Washington Post.