Getting to the boss
By Doron Rosenblum
Haaretz, November 26, 2004
In order to understand the meaning of "cognitive dissonance," it was enough this week to compare the situation as reported in the nightly news program on Channel 2 and the so-called reality show that was broadcast immediately thereafter.
In reality, the foreign minister was seen rejecting, in the name of the cabinet, and for the fourth or fifth time, the outstretched hand of Syrian President Bashir Assad for negotiations without preconditions; whereas in the reality show, "The Ambassador," "information" technocrats were seen dealing, with great rhetorical pathos and out of conviction, with the way in which they would "explain" to the world how Israel stretches out its hand for peace.
A contradiction that is hard to solve? A huge gap between self-image and the reality confronting it? In Israel, there's a simple solution for that: We are not responsible for our actions, but it's more important "to overcome the propaganda difficulties" caused by these actions.
This is also seen in the way in which the military system - and the entire Israeli public - dealt with "the affair of confirming the kill" of the girl, Iman al-Hamas, from Gaza. This "mishap" (in the words of the golden-tongued Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon) seems to have shocked and disturbed people not so much because of the incident itself, but because of the "embarrassment" (in the words of Israel Defense Forces spokesmen in the media).
This means a confrontation with the dissonance between our ethical self-image and the reality that was exposed in all its horror in the films and the recorded texts. And these, had they been written as a Hanoch Levin-type satire, would have been rejected as exaggerated to the point of incredibility: The military-operational jargon ("We identified; we opened fire on her; at the moment, our forces are storming her") when they are aware that the enemy is a 13-year-old girl; the military terms that envelope everything in a kind of inarticulate "correct" legitimacy ("She was running in an easterly direction," "This is the commander speaking, kill anyone moving around in the area, over"). The paranoia, the cheapening of life, the banality of evil, everything we have become in four years of mutual murder. How then do we deal with this "embarrassment," if not by means of "whitewashing"?
And, in fact, the usual mechanisms for underplaying and diversion went into action immediately. The first of them - the gibberish and cliches about "purity of arms" from officers who were sent to make speeches in the media about "the value of human life," with their real interest occasionally peering through the gaps in their pseudo-ethical mantle ("A great deal of damage has been done to the image of the IDF"). Afterward, Ya'alon set out to put things straight - and in his awkward way got caught up in an attempt to shift the discussion to an almost hallucinatory technocratic plane: As though it's more important to know whether or not "the recordings revealed any new information"; or as though the main problem is "not telling the truth," or as though the main reason for shock should be the "confirming of the kill," rather than the routine of almost-reflexive firing at anything that moves, including little girls.
We could perhaps have understood the efforts to downplay this incident and others like it, had they been made out of a true sense of shame. But is there any shame left in today's obtuse and unmerciful public atmosphere? The suppression and the downplaying are done mainly for practical reasons: for the purpose of "explaining to the world" and, worse than that, out of an attempt to evade responsibility.
After all, the behavior of the soldiers at checkpoints and military outposts did not erupt on its own from their feverish minds. It grew on a certain soil and due to a certain atmosphere. And there are people who are responsible for shaping this mentality, which is repeatedly exposed in increasingly frequent "exceptional incidents": A mentality of nervousness and obtuseness, and of being trigger happy, and of a massive erosion of humane values at the end of four years of "etching awareness" in the minds of the Palestinians, has apparently erased significant chunks of our awareness, as well.
Doesn't the responsibility for that belong to the kodkodim (army slang for higher-ups), who are far senior to the company commander? Is there no connection, for example, between the "exceptional incident" at the Girit outpost and the statements by former Israel Air Force commander, Major General Dan Halutz - at present the deputy chief of staff - regarding his marvelous or indifferent feelings during the course of bombing civilian targets? Then where does the buck stop? Only at "the level of the company commander" (the popular expression among those who are at the "level" of the General Staff or the cabinet)?
In the civilian and business words, an accusing finger is pointed at a senior engineer at the Ma'atz Public Works Authority because of a road accident; the chairmen of a board of directors are punished for letting sewage flow into the sea. This is not the case in the political, military and public arenas: Here the concept of "administrative responsibility" melts away the higher one climbs up the ladder of seniority. And evidence of that is the flourishing careers of Halutz and Ya'alon and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz (the previous chief of staff), and the pretensions of former prime ministers Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu to recycle themselves, and the popularity of public figures such as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Labor Party leader Shimon Peres, whose responsibility for Oslo and for the settlements also apparently ended "at the level of the company commander." Fortunately for these kodkodim, Israel is "only" a country and not a business. Otherwise they would have long since been decapitated.
