Israel’s Prophetic War A forgotten war in Lebanon anticipated America’s battles in Iraq and Afghanistan.By Bret Stephens
http://www.wsj.com/articles/israels-prophetic-war-1462564312
From 1985 to 2000, the Israeli military occupied an 11-mile-deep “security zone” in southern Lebanon, in an effort to prevent the area from becoming a staging ground for attacks by Hezbollah into Israel itself. Some 250 Israeli soldiers were killed fighting in the zone and another 840 were injured—numbers that, for a country of Israel’s size, proportionately exceed America’s casualties in Iraq. Yet the campaign was never given a proper name, and the soldiers who fought in it never received a ribbon for wartime service.
This was the Jewish state’s forgotten war. Yet as Matti Friedman notes in “Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story,” the fighting anticipated the kind of conflicts the U.S. would soon find itself waging in the Middle East—conflicts in which a modern army, technologically sophisticated but weakly supported by public opinion at home, gets bogged down in a failed state trying to hold the line against primitive but cunning adversaries motivated by religious zeal and determined to sustain the fight for decades, even generations. It’s the kind of war the West has yet to figure out a way of winning.
Pumpkinflowers
By Matti Friedman
Algonquin, 256 pages, $25.95
Mr. Friedman, a Canadian-born Israeli writer, served in Lebanon in the late 1990s at an exposed Israeli outpost called “the Pumpkin.” (His title comes from Israeli military jargon, where “flowers” mean wounded soldiers and “oleander” means a dead one.) This superb book is partly a history of the war, partly a personal memoir, and partly a work of political analysis. But mainly it is an effort to tell the story of the young men who fought to defend something “the size of a basketball court”—not all of whom survived.
“At the outpost were several dozen young men isolated to a degree exceptional in the modern world,” Mr. Friedman recalls. “Mail arrived in the same way the soldiers did, on convoys rendered unpredictable by the threat of bombs. There were no women. There was nothing feminine, nothing unnecessary to the purposes of allowing you to kill, preventing you from being killed, and keeping you from losing your mind in the meantime. Nothing was soft or smelled sweet.” CONTINUE AT SITE
The first third of the book tells the story of a young soldier named Avi Ofner, “shorter than most, more solid than most, a combative black-eyed flash suggesting he was less obedient than most.” Avi is the quintessential sabra: His disdain for “the system” masks an earnest and sensitive soul fighting to keep a piece of his innocence safe from the ugliness of war. He reads novels by Romain Gary and writes moving letters to a friend from home named Smadar, a young woman who “had a look that suggested she could fathom all kinds of things and that these things might include you.”
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