A Thriving Israel Grows Weary of Paying the High Price of War

Increasingly, Israelis are referring to the current outbreak of violence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as a war of attrition, designed to weaken their nation’s resolve to hold on to pieces of the territories by inflicting a steady toll of casualties.

And as the Israeli death toll rose to 35 last week, more citizens publicly wondered just how many deaths their nation can tolerate. Hawks were calling for a quick military solution. Doves pleaded for a speedy return to negotiations. Both agreed that the conflict cannot be allowed to drag on.

Why has the fighting with the Palestinians, who are mostly throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails but sometimes shooting bullets and setting off bombs, so unnerved a nation that has fought six wars and withstood Iraq’s Scud missiles?

The answer, Israeli analysts say, lies both in the Jewish state’s bloody history and in its recent economic boom. In a small nation defended by a people’s army, every death in the seemingly unending Israeli-Arab conflict has always hit people hard. But decades of warfare have made Israelis grow weary of death, and recent economic prosperity has made them regard peaceful existence as a right.

“Israeli society is more sensitive now to when it is worth it to sacrifice for the sake of security,” said Yaacov Bar Siman Tov, professor at Hebrew University’s Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations.

Israelis see their death toll as “very high in terms of what kind of war this is,” he said. “They think that we are the stronger party and we should put an end to this.”

Bar Siman Tov wrote a book about the real War of Attrition, an 18-month blood bath that broke out between Egypt and Israel in 1969. About 260 Israeli soldiers and several thousand Egyptians were killed in trench warfare then.

Israelis Inflict High Casualties

In the current fighting, more than 250 Palestinians have been killed and several thousand wounded. If anything, it is Israel that could be said to be waging a war of attrition, Bar Siman Tov said. It is inflicting high casualties on the Palestinians and bleeding them economically by blockading their cities and outlets to the world.

But it is Israelis who are complaining of paying too high a price. Indeed, the army’s determination to minimize its own casualties is one reason so many Palestinians have died. Routinely, the army sends small numbers of soldiers to confront large groups of rioters. The soldiers are backed by snipers, placed far away from the violence to pick off gunmen or demonstrators armed with Molotov cocktails. The tactic puts few Israeli soldiers in harm’s way but exacts high tolls of dead and wounded from the Palestinians.

The fact that Israelis think of this war as costly for them speaks volumes about the evolution of their nation.

In its 1948 War of Independence, Israel lost about 6,000 soldiers and civilians, about 1% of its population at the time. The nation lost several hundred soldiers in the 1956 Sinai campaign, 776 during the 1967 Middle East War and about 2,700 in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The 1982 invasion of Lebanon and subsequent occupation of that Arab nation’s southern border region took the lives of more than 900 Israeli soldiers.

It was, in fact, the relentless loss of soldiers in southern Lebanon over two decades that turned public opinion here against that occupation and, some believe, exhausted Israeli tolerance for war casualties.

David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, dreamed of building a nation of Jews that would be like any other country. In recent years, Israelis thought that they had made that dream a reality.

Just two months ago, they were living in a modern, Westernized nation. The red-hot high-tech sector fueled an economic boom, and tourists filled hotels and crowded the holy sites in record numbers. Pundits portrayed negotiations with the Palestinians as an irreversible process, and it seemed that peace was at hand.

But the facade of normalcy and the belief that coexistence was achievable shattered overnight under the impact of the Palestinian uprising that began Sept. 28 in Jerusalem’s Old City and spread quickly across the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Now, nightly news broadcasts routinely begin with footage of funerals: those of Israeli soldiers and civilians and those of Palestinians, most of them young men, who died hurling themselves against Israeli military positions. Jerusalem residents go to bed to the sound of tanks shelling the nearby Palestinian village of Beit Jala and Israeli attack helicopters whirring overhead. Bus drivers warn passengers to watch out for suspicious objects or persons, and the army complains that it doesn’t have enough money to bulletproof all its vehicles.

“I believe that people’s nerves are wrecked,” said Meir Tourjeman, director of the community center at Gilo, a neighborhood of 45,000. Gilo was built on territory captured from Jordan in the 1967 war, but most Israelis forgot long ago that it lies in disputed territory and almost none regard it as a settlement.

Palestinians, however, consider the stone apartment towers of the sprawling bedroom community a legitimate target. They have been firing on it almost nightly for weeks from Beit Jala. Only one Israeli, a border police officer, has been wounded in the shooting attacks, but Gilo residents are fed up, Tourjeman said.

“People are simply in a very difficult mental state,” he said. “I wrote a letter to the prime minister telling him that we cannot go on like this, we cannot suffer. . . . They should make Beit Jala stop the shooting. I don’t care how.”

The Israeli revulsion at the fighting is a typical response from a developed nation, according to sociologist Yohanan Peres.

“Western countries, with their high standards of living and individualism, are not prepared to take casualties, to take hardships, to change their regular way of life,” said Peres, a professor at Tel Aviv University. “The American or British or European or Israeli way of life involves a lot of self-indulgence, the pursuit of individual goals. For a society with a high standard of living, a war of attrition is psychologically harder than [for] a society that hasn’t made this transition.”

Dr. Mahmoud Zahar, a spokesman for the militant Islamic group Hamas, put it more bluntly.

“The Israelis now are facing people who are ready to sacrifice and enjoy sacrifice and encourage sacrifice,” Zahar said in a telephone interview from his clinic in Gaza. “You find that the mother and father of the Palestinian martyr are distributing sweets when their son dies fighting the Israelis. The Israeli mothers are weeping when their sons die.”

Palestinians do not love their children less than Israelis do, Zahar said, but they are bolstered both by a religion that tells them a martyr will reside eternally in paradise and by the temporal goal of securing a Palestinian state.

“We are Muslims. We believe 100%. We are ready to sacrifice everything to reach our cause,” Zahar said. Hamas, he said, has analyzed Israeli society and believes that the group has found a sensitivity that it can exploit.

“The Israelis are living to enjoy. Enjoying this world is everything for them, but we are concentrating on the next life,” he said. “We understand Israeli society very well, what are their strong points and their weak points. We are pressing on their weakest point, their big desire to live a long time.”

Palestinians See a Vulnerable Attitude

If there is a Palestinian strategy, Zahar said, it is this: “that the killing of the Israelis will convince the government to leave the occupied territories. It will have to take into consideration the attitude of Israeli society that is unable to tolerate the deaths of their sons, whether in Lebanon or in the occupied territories.”

At the confrontation points outside West Bank and Gaza towns and villages, Palestinian youths, again and again, bring up the example of the troop withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May as proof that Israelis cannot absorb high casualties and can be forced to relinquish territory. The flags of Hezbollah, a militant Muslim group, figure prominently in funeral processions and marches.

But Peres argues that the Palestinian analysis is flawed.

“The territories are viewed very differently, even by secular and left-wing Israelis, than Lebanon was,” he said. “Israel never claimed Lebanese territory, while there are claims in historic Palestine. There were no Jewish settlements in Lebanon; nobody was abandoned there.”

Although Peace Now and other left-wing organizations are urging a withdrawal to the June 1967 borders and an uprooting of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, there is no Israeli consensus on such a move, analysts here agree.

“Instead, people are saying that it is ridiculous that the Palestinians are killing these numbers of Israelis,” said Bar Siman Tov, the professor. “People do not realize what are the political repercussions of a massive escalation. They say: Just finish it as soon as possible.”