Massada No More?

By YARON PELEG

BEAUFORT
By Ron Leshem
Translated by Evan Fallenberg
368 pages. Delacorte Press. $24.

To anyone familiar with the history and culture of modern Israel, the following fact may sound surprising, even paradoxical—relatively little Israeli fiction is devoted to Israel's many wars or to its military, the IDF. There are few exceptions to this peculiar phenomena, the great S. Yizhar being one of them, especially his 1958 masterpiece, The Days of Tziklag (Yemey Tziklag), about the battle of a small army unit in the 1948 War over a strategic hill in the Negev. Yet even this opus, over 1,000 pages in length, is ironically limited in scope, narrowly focused on a small group of soldiers and on one short and ostensibly insignificant battle. Ron Leshem's recent novel, Beaufort (Hebew: Im yesh gan eden, 2005), is another such oddity.

Leshem's Beaufort is a gritty military action novel that follows closely an infantry combat unit in Lebanon on the eve of Israel's withdrawal from that country in 2000. Leshem based the novel on real events, although not on personal experience. In a postscript, he relates how he got the idea for the novel after meeting an exhausted and disappointed IDF officer, who served a few harrowing years facing the Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, and after the army's withdrawal from that country was reassigned to police the Gaza strip. Leshem is a prominent journalist and his novel is one of the first serious works that deals with Israel's 18-year stay in Lebanon (1982-2000). The aftermath of Israel's first war in Lebanon and the media's engagement with it are interrelated in the novel as a comment on the changing perception and role of the IDF in Israeli society.

The cover of the novel tells readers that  Beaufort “echoes the voice of a generation of soldiers who fought in the name of camaraderie and dreamt about distant shores.” Camaraderie in this context–known in Israel as re'ut—refers to the mythological friendships that Israel's many wars fostered between its fighting men. The "distant shores" refer to the extended post army trips many young Israelis take to the Far East, in order to distance and disconnect themselves for a while from the pressure cooker at home. The dissonance between the two has to do with the genesis of Israeli military camaraderie, which originated in the 1948 War of Independence and was mythologized in poetry, prose, and popular culture—one of the definitive songs of that war is a ballad called "Hare'ut," "The Friendship," that celebrates the camaraderie of fallen soldiers. It is widely played on the airwaves every memorial day. The power of the myth came from the prize that the fighting men, dead or alive, were awarded—an independent state. Ironically, Leshem's soldiers dream of something very different—the distant shores of India and Thailand.

The novel strikingly records a paradigmatic shift that reflects many of the changes that Israeli culture underwent in the last 20 years, especially after the first Intifada in 1987. The soldiers' extraordinary courage in Beaufort is not motivated by patriotism and by their devotion to their comrades alone but also by a “selfish” desire to excel. They view their ability to survive in the deadly war zone as a form of extreme sport.This may not take away from their worth as soldiers nor from the worthiness of their service. But it does point to a dangerous gap that opened up shortly after the first Lebanon war between the army and the Israeli people in the name of which it serves. As the media continued to criticize the government's Lebanon policy by lambasting the army that carried it out, soldiers like the ones depicted in Beaufort found themselves increasingly conflicted and alienated from the civilian population they served and protected.Volunteering for service in what they initially thought was a just cause, they eventually found the value of that cause disputed and devalued. In a novel that closely records an increasingly fragmenting society,  Beaufort draws attention to the dangers of this split and warns that a small and beleaguered country like Israel whose army is truly civilian cannot afford to send its soldiers to fight in the name of deeply controversial causes.

This is where a comparison to Yizhar's Yemey Tziklag becomes useful again. In 1958, when the novel was published, the 10-year-old IDF was fast becoming one of the most proud achievements of the new Jewish State, an institution that was placed high above politics and enjoyed full national consensus. Perhaps this was the reason why the novel, which, like most of Yizhar's works, questioned the legacy of the military in Israeli life, was not so well received and was never widely read. The dauntingly high Hebrew register of Yemey Tziklag did not make reading it any easier either.Although in this, Yizhar was not different from his literary contemporaries. The revival of Hebrew as a living language depended on poets and writers like him whose linguistic innovations constantly stretched and expanded a developing language.

On both these legacies of Zionism, militarism and the Hebrew language, Beaufort is strikingly different. It has enjoyed tremendous popularity—it sold more than 130,000 copies and stayed on newspapers' best sellers lists for well over a year—precisely because it questions the role of the military in Israeli life at a time when the army has been mired in politics and has increasingly been loosing the consensus of the nation. It also does so in remarkably innovative Hebrew, but a Hebrew that is not the invention of its author but rather the recreation of an extant military argot whose dazzling richness and inventiveness is only partially captured in the book. One hundred years after the birth of Zionism, it's still too early to tell whether the Israeli army will ever resume the marginal role it had in early, mainstream Zionist thought. Far more reassuring, however, is the permanency of the Hebrew cultural revolution, which Beaufort amply attests to.