Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [99]
When the war of independence of 1948 was halted by armistice without a treaty, the battered defenders, taking stock, realized that they had won a state but not peace. Across an elongated unnatural border, curving in haphazard knobs and bulges that marked positions on the day of the truce, they faced frustrated, embittered neighbors subjected to a constant propaganda of revenge. Geography was against the Israelis: They had no natural obstacles on which to base a defense, no territory to yield, and no room to retreat. Unlike larger countries, they could not afford mistakes like that of France in 1914 or rebound from an initial disaster like Dunkirk or Pearl Harbor. This fact dictated a strategy, should it become necessary, of carrying war to the enemy, and the initial strike could not be allowed to fail. Other countries can face the possibility of defeat or invasion and expect to survive, with limited or lost independence. For Israel, its people believed, defeat would mean annihilation. Once inside Israel, said General Amos Horev, Deputy Chief Scientist of the IDF, the Arabs “would have cut us to ribbons.” As commander of a battalion in the fighting for Jerusalem in 1948, General Horev, who looks more like a Yale oarsman than a general officer, had had to leave his dead on the field and had come back next day to bury them. He found the bodies hacked into pieces, and with the help of another officer, matched up limbs and heads with torsos, knowing each of the dead personally, before burial. Many others knew from experience like that of the Hebron massacre of 1929 what it would mean if the Arabs were ever to gain the upper hand.
Limited manpower and money precluded a standing army adequate to the task of defense. The solution arrived at was dependence on a small professional career force which, together with each class of draftees serving their two and a half years of military duty, would constitute a standing nucleus. The rest, amounting in the June war to about eighty percent of the total, must be drawn in emergency from a national reserve in civil life. The problem was how to organize, train, and keep up to date this reserve so that it would be mobilizable in twenty-four hours and able to take the field in forty-eight. This required an “Israeli answer,” since no other country had the same problem under the same conditions. The United States counts on three weeks to put the Reserve into action. An adaptation of the Swiss system was worked out by which each locality formed its own brigade—except for special volunteer units like the paratroopers or the Air Force—thus saving time in assembly. Depots for the equipment of each unit are set up, with maintenance taken care of by the draftees and regulars.
Reservists are kept to the necessary degree of readiness and fitness, with one foot in the army, by annual training periods of a month for enlisted men and five or six weeks for officers, plus shorter call-ups of up to three days every three months, depending on type of unit and the need.
The IDF is the nation, not a section of it. Bus drivers became tank drivers and are now back on their local routes. A supermarket manager who commanded a battalion in Sinai and captured an Egyptian general has returned to his groceries. Even one divisional commander was a reservist—General Avram Yoffe, who is Parks Commissioner in civil life. The kibbutzim, representing six to seven percent of the population, with their long commitment to the land and strong ideological tradition, provided fifty percent of the officers and twenty-five percent of casualties. Virtually every family had a connection with someone in the war. “My niece’s husband who captured Government House,” or “Jaacov’s brother on the PT boat,” is part of every conversation.
The surprise was the performance of the “espresso” generation in their twenties, mistrusted by their elders,