Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [104]
Israel’s Staff is exceedingly security-conscious, and nothing is to be learned of its intelligence methods. All that Yariv will say is that whatever means exist, “you can be sure we used all of them.” Meanwhile he has created a legend that has crossed the border. The Arab caretaker of an American institute in the Old City assured me that a knife-grinder of Bethany, living for seven years on a few piasters a day and posing as a kind of village jester dressed all in green, who told funny stories while turning his wheel outside the church door, was in reality an Intelligence agent and high officer of the Israeli Army. From this fairy tale he drew the not inappropriate moral, “It shows what they can do, and we have to learn.”
In action the Israeli soldier demonstrated the basic precepts on which the IDF was formed: the ability of the individual commander to see what in a situation could be exploited, and the flexibility to take advantage of the opportunity without referring to higher authority or sending for additional help—“to see and to solve,” as General Rabin puts it. Next, physical leadership by officers and in all ranks the spirit to carry out a given mission no matter what. In the desert a battalion, ordered to break through an Egyptian fortified position protected by a field solid with mines, failed and fell back, was ordered forward again, and with advance guards on hands and knees probing for the mines with steel wires, cleared a path and took the position. In the desperate rush to take the Syrian heights before cease-fire, men of one company flung their bodies on a barrier of barbed wire to let their fellows advance. In the unexpected battle for the heights outside Jerusalem when an artillery commander, lacking the necessary equipment, found himself unable to clear space for a gun emplacement, two reservists of his company who were residents of the city in the construction business offered to bring their own bulldozers and do the job, which they successfully accomplished. In Jerusalem, too, Colonel Motte Gur, commander of the paratroopers, personally led his troops in a charge through St. Stephen’s Gate against a barrier of an overturned Jordanian bus roaring in flames.
In initiative, persistence, and refusal of self-deception the Israeli is the opposite of the Arab. The IDF, it must be remembered, does not exist in a vacuum; it is the obverse of its opponent, and any analysis of its performance must take the opponent into account. Where the Jew questions, the Arab dreams. To quote General Narkis, “The Arabs build castles in the air, and then become prisoners of their castles.” Where the Jew fights facts, the Arabs accept: It is the will of Allah.
Essentially the war was a conflict of societies whose terms can be seen any day on a road between Syria and Israel, literally brown on one side and green on the other. The Jews who made the state belong to the activist West, and through the Zionist experience of return, of colonizing and reviving the neglected land, of making it flourish and capable of supporting a modern nation, they have undergone a mental and emotional revolution. They have become masters of their fate instead of sufferers. Egypt and Syria, despite all the verbal socialism, have made no revolution, none that has reached down into the lives of the people. The Syrian peasant in a hovel on a miserable patch of ground, the Egyptian fellaheen of the delta with seven diseases per capita have no society so precious as to fight and die for.
Militarily the victory of two and a half million against fifty million was one of professionalism. The Egyptian officers, according to the Israelis, are not professionals at their job. They have