I am not sure that Sharon knows where this phrase comes
from. It was coined by the Count Honore de Mirabeau, one of the
instigators of the French revolution, in his essay about Prussia. After
stating that "war is the national industry of Prussia", Mirabeau said
that while in other countries the state has an army, in Prussia the army
has a state.
It has been said more than once that Israel is the
"Prussia of the Middle East". I have tried to analyze the origins of
this similarity.
The Prussian state came into being after a holocaust,
before which it was just another small German state, called Brandenburg
at the time. In 1618, the Thirty Years War broke out, killing a third of
the German people and devastating most of its towns and villages. It
left behind a trauma that has not yet entirely disappeared.
In the Thirty Years War almost all the major European
armies took part, and all of them fought each other on German soil.
Germany is located in the middle of Europe and has no natural
boundaries. No sea, no desert and no mountain chain defend it. After the
calamity, the leaders of Prussia drew the obvious lesson: if we have no
natural barriers to defend us, we must create an artificial barrier in
the form of a regular, big and efficient army. That’s how the Prussian
army came into being, a force that was designed to defend the
fatherland, and in the course of time became the terror of its
neighbors, until, in the end, it became the Nazi army ironically called
the Wehrmacht – the "defense force".
Israel is faced with a similar dilemma. Zionism was, in
the beginning, a small and weak movement, rejected even by the majority
of the Jews. When the first Zionists came to this country, they were
surprised to find here a population that did not agree to turn its
homeland over to another people. It resisted violently, and the Zionists
defended themselves as well as they could.
Then came the Holocaust and annihilated a third of the
Jewish people. It gave Zionism a tremendous impetus. The movement was
seen as a valiant effort by the Holocaust survivors to redeem
themselves. By the same measure, Arab resistance grew. The Zionists
needed to create an "Iron Wall" (as Ze’ev Jabotinsky phrased it) against
the resistance, a "defense force" strong enough to withstand the
onslaught of the entire Arab world. Thus the IDF was born and, in the
war of 1948 conquered some 78% of Mandate Palestine, and in the June
1967 war the remaining 22%, as well as great chunks of the neighboring
countries. Since then, the "defense force" has become an army of
occupation.
In the Second German Reich there was a popular saying,
"der Soldate / ist der beste Mann in Staate" (The soldier is the best
man in the state.) In Israel, the slogan was "The best go to the Air
Force". In the young state, the army attracted the best and the
brightest. The attitude towards the senior officers sometimes bordered
on idolatry.
From the time the state was established until today, the
generals have controlled the media, both by means of strong personal
relations with the editors and by a complex network of army spokesmen
masquerading as "our military correspondent", "our Arab affairs
correspondent" (generally former army intelligence officers) and "our
political correspondent’.
Foreign observers have frequently asked whether a
military coup could occur in Israel. That’s a silly question, because a
coup is quite unnecessary. Since its early days, the army command has
had a decisive influence on national policy, and its members have
occupied key positions in the Israeli democracy, in a way unimaginable
in any other democratic state.
A few facts may suffice: of the 15 chiefs-of-staff who
preceded Mofaz, two became prime ministers (Rabin, Barak), four others
became cabinet ministers (Yadin, Bar-Lev, Eytan, Lipkin-Shahak). Two
prime ministers were past leaders of the pre-state armed underground
organizations (Begin, Shamir), and one a former Director General of the
Defense Ministry (Peres). Two generals became Presidents of Israel
(Herzog, Weizman). In the present government there are five generals
(Sharon, Ze’evi, Vilnai, Sneh, Ben-Eliezer.)
Former generals have always been allotted the key
economic positions and have controlled almost all big corporations and
state services. Many generals became mayors. The entire
political-military-economic-administrative class in Israel is full of
generals.
The dispersal of the generals among different political
parties does not change anything. This is proved by the fact that many
generals, upon leaving the army, were offered leading positions in both
major political parties – Labor and Likud – and chose one or the other
according to the price offered. Some wandered from one party to another
(Dayan, Weizman, Sharon, Mordecai). At the beginning of the present
Knesset, four political parties were headed by generals (Likud by
Sharon, Labor by Barak, Merkaz by Modecai, Moledet by Ze’evi). The
religious camp has, until now, been bereft of generals, but with the
appearance of the far-rightist, Effi Eytam, this will be corrected.
There would have been nothing bad in all this if it
would have been only a personal and professional phenomena. But the
problem is much more serious, because all the governing generals have a
common mentality. All of them believe in the policy of force,
annexations and settlements, even if some of them are less extreme than
others. The exceptions can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and
some would say on one finger (the late Matti Peled).
In this respect, there is no difference between active
and retired officers. All of them together have always formed a kind of
super-party, directing the political establishment. Not because they are
organized and decide together, and not because of their strong social
bonds, but because of their uniform way of thinking, which leads them
almost automatically to the same conclusions in any given situation –
irrespective of their belonging to Likud, Labor, National Union or
Merkaz. Not necessarily on every detail, but in the general direction.
One of the results is the neutralization of women in the
Israeli political system. Women have no place on the upper echelons of
the army and its machoist ethos, which directs all spheres of Israeli
policy. (The only outstanding exceptions, Golda Mair, took pride in
being "the only man in the government" and surrounded herself with
generals.)
All this is being done quite democratically. In the
"Only Democracy in the Middle East", the army gets its orders from the
government and obeys. In Israeli law, the government as such is the
Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. But when the government itself
is controlled by former generals, this is meaningless.
That’s how it was in the 50s, when the Chief-of-Staff
Moshe Dayan imposed on the government a policy of "retaliatory actions"
and had it implemented by Major Ariel Sharon. And that’s how it is
today, when the same General Sharon imposes the same policy and has it
implemented by general Ben-Eliezer, the Minister of Defense, who happens
to belong to the rival party. (In democratic countries, it is extremely
rare for a Minister of Defense to be a former general.) Sharon’s
predecessor, the former Chief-of-Staff Barak, surrounded himself with a
bunch of generals, rejecting all civilians.
Lately a new and dangerous development has taken place.
Under the leadership of the Chief-of-Staff, Shaul Mofaz, a man with a
far-rightist outlook, the army has started to rebel against the
"political directives". It mobilizes the media against the government
and makes it responsible for its abject failure in the war against
"terrorism"- reminding one of the Prussian generals after World War I
who accused the politicians of "sticking a knife in the back of the
army". When Foreign Minister Peres, with the approval of Sharon,
recently started to initiate a meeting with Arafat, a "senior military
source" leaked to the media that the army strongly objects to all such
meetings.
Things reached a climax this week, when the
Chief-of-Staff decided to create across the Green Line (the pre-1967
border) "closed military areas", with detention camps and military,
Kangaroo courts for Palestinians trying to enter. This means de facto
annexation, with far-reaching political, international and national
implications.
Sharon, who heard about this while on a state visit in
Russia, seethed with anger. A game of accusations and
counter-accusations began, with the army leaking secret documents to the
media. ("I came across a document…" a TV commentator announced.)
If this gives the impression that this is a major fight
between the government and the army, it’s an illusion. Sharon himself
belongs to the military clique more than anyone else. But he has an old
grudge against the General Staff, which at the time prevented him from
becoming Chief-of-Staff. On top of that, contrary to civilian
politicians, he has no inferiority complex when dealing with the
generals.
This is a fight within the family. There are no real
differences of opinions between Sharon and Mofaz. Both believe in the
same policy of enlarging the settlements and preventing any compromise
with the Palestinian people. Both believe in the maxim "If force doesn’t
work, use more force". Both are moving towards escalation and more
escalation.
In the Weimar republic after World Wart I, there was a
saying: "The Kaiser went, the generals remained". In Israel, the
government changes hands from time to time, but the generals always
remain.