Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [72]
The hillside scar, mentioned on return to Jerusalem, aroused no excitement. “It could be a road,” they said. Israel so desperately needs peace—to divert taxes from the crushing defense budget to other vital needs, to rejoin the continent of which it is a part, to live with neighbors on reasonably neighborly terms, above all to breathe normally—that it has usually leaned over backward to avoid cause for quarrel. It tries to remain suave and, for as long as possible, unprovoked, in the effort to leave room for whatever tiny chance of negotiation might appear. Israel too has its hotheads of irredentism, the “adventurists” who clamor to “take the west bank,” but this is largely lip-service to old slogans. They know, or if not, the country’s leaders know, that to swallow western Jordan with nearly a million Arab inhabitants (or equally the Gaza Strip), thus increasing Israel’s existing Arab minority of twelve percent who already outbreed the Jews, would be to court disaster. What Israel needs is not more land populated by Arabs but more people to populate its own empty Negev, a problem which in turn depends on water to make the desert habitable.
Even the wound of the Old City’s loss is not so fresh anymore. For Jews its essence was the Wailing Wall for bewailing lost Zion, but since restoration of the state, who needs to wail? From long association, many still yearn for the Wall, but the native-born generation are not wailers. On their own land the Jews have successfully become what they were never allowed to be in the ghetto—farmers and soldiers. The transformation has literally changed the Jewish face. Complexion and lighter hair-color can no doubt be explained by sun and climate; blue eyes one must leave to the geneticists, but the fundamental change is one of expression. The new face has an outdoor look and, more noteworthy, it is cheerful. This is not of course true of the immigrant settlements, where the look among the adults is compounded of bewilderment, strangeness, difficulties, and resentments, nor of Tel Aviv, which has been unkindly (if not inaccurately) described as a mixture, on a smaller scale, of New York and West Berlin. The Tel Aviv look, compounded of traffic, shops, business deals, and culture, with a sprinkling of beatniks, is no different from Urban the world over.
The new face is elsewhere, notably in the army. At the officers’ training school outside Tel Aviv it was visible in students, instructors, and in the commandant, Colonel Meier Paeel, a tall, vigorous, smiling man. Colonel Paeel had smile crinkles at the corners of his eyes, a characteristic I noticed among many of the other officers, although someone else might say it came from squinting at the sun.
The school had pleasant tree-lined quarters inherited from the British Army, which was always accustomed to do itself well. The tradition continues in one respect, for the secretaries, all girl soldiers in khaki, were so invariably pretty, without makeup, that it was hard to believe they had been chosen at random. Because of its essential role in the creation of the state, the army’s prestige is high, and it attracts the best. It has a noticeably breezy air. The open shirt collar—spotless and correctly starched—prevails. Saluting is casual, but there is an underlying seriousness and sense of tension. At the general-staff school, where virtually all the students wore the two campaign ribbons of 1948 and 1956, there was once again the outdoor face, and a commandant, Colonel Mordecai Goor, no less handsome and confident. “You are making a new breed,” I said to one officer. He looked around thoughtfully at his colleagues and searching for the right English words, replied deliberately, “Yes. Jewish sorrow has gone out of their eyes.”
Reclamation of the land,