Mobilizing Emotions

The last couple of years have been emotionally grueling for Israelis, to say the least, but it’s hard to remember any time when war, or the threat of war, didn’t make extraordinary emotional demands on them. There have been respites, but they have never been long and rarely occured during the country’s first two decades, as Tel Aviv University historian Orit Rozin reminds us in her new book. Emotions of Conflict focuses on the first generation of Israeli citizens’ reactions to the security challenges they faced as well as the way in which their government and other forces sought to shape and, as she puts it, “manage” their feelings about their situation.

The story Rozin tells is not one of hegemonic control of a malleable population but one of highly successful morale and nation building on the part of the government as well as other powerful institutions. But it is not an untarnished tale, nor, for that matter, is it an entirely complete one.

At the conclusion of its War of Independence, Israel’s borders were just temporary, largely unprotected armistice lines. Palestinian infiltrators regularly crossed these lines into areas wherethey had recently lived to maraud, terrorize, and sometimes to murder. Benny Morris and others have already written blow-by-blow accounts of the resultant border wars between these intruders and the citizens and army of Israel. Rozin focuses on their impact on the psyche of Israelis.

Veterans of life in the Yishuv were accustomed to such conflict. But for many of the new immigrants, especially those from less than fully modernized Muslim countries, it was different. They had been quickly and summarily dispatched to points along the periphery to fortify the Israeli position, and their experience of “theft, robbery and murder by Palestinians” frightened and demoralized them. Many fled, and those who remained had to undergo “toughening.” They had to be trained to use weapons, placed in paramilitary squads, and put to work.

“Guard duty was a practical need,” Rozin writes, “but it was also meant, at the same time, to give the immigrants self-assurance in their ability to defend themselves.” When they resisted this transformation, they were often derided, which only increased their suffering. The overriding goal “was to create a match between the emotional characteristics of the population and the role citizens needed to play, so the leadership believed, if the state were to survive the threats to its security.” The immigrants had to be turned into “Israeli men.”

Becoming an Israeli meant not only being fearless and strong but maintaining moral self-control. Israel’s leaders understood that acts of revenge against Arab infiltrators and the communities that harbored them were not only unethical but “unsuited to the Western, modern, moral image that Israel sought to acquire.” But they also knew that a large part of their public craved them.

One direct way that they knew this was thatgovernment censors read soldiers’ letters home. In one such letter, a soldier involved in retaliatory raids wrote that “sometimes even my little soul is enraged, which elicits vengeance and sends me along a particular line of thought that tells me all the time to respond to every blow with another blow, a tooth for a tooth.” In another letter, a woman serving in the IDF asked: “What is the purpose of talking so much? After all, the entire nation is shouting for immediate revenge.”

“As Arab infiltrators attacked Israeli Jewish property, took lives, and shook the citizenry’s sense of personal security,” Rozin writes, “decision makers listened carefully to the emotions being expressed by the public.” By and large, they recognized a need for reprisal operations, since “such a response fortifies the spirits of the citizens and demonstrates that the state is on their side.” As Prime Minister Moshe Sharett wrote in his personal diary after one such reprisal, “pent-up public wrath must be discharged.” Sharett himself didn’t think such action would do any good but saw it as a necessary evil. And even those like Moshe Dayan, who were more convinced of the tactical utility of reprisals, stressed that they constituted measures of just recompense and deterrence, not revenge.

To what extent did Israel’s leaders manage to tame their citizens’ ferocity? They only succeeded, Rozin concludes, with some, but they did induce others to channel their emotional need for revenge into something milder, if not exactly laudable: “feeling Schadenfreude when the enemy suffered defeat and humiliation.”

In the summer of 1955, Palestinian guerillas joined infiltrators from Jordan, Lebanon, and Gaza in attacking Israeli border towns and kibbutzim. But the colossal arms deal between the Soviet satellite state Czechoslovakia and Nasser’s Egypt was even more alarming. Egypt received “advanced arms that the IDF had no match for” and threatened to put Israel at a severe strategic disadvantage. At a cabinet meeting that October, Minister of Labor Golda Meir argued that “the new situation demanded the emotional mobilization of the Israeli public.”

The point was not to frighten Israeli citizens but to instill them with, in Rozin’s words, “a different consciousness and a different palette of emotions . . . and to rouse the Jewish public in Israel and the United States to action.” Sharett and other ministers agreed. Israeli citizens must feel neither hopeless nor complacent, but determined and energized.

Calming Jewish nerves has never been easy, and it certainly wasn’t in Israel in the winter of 1955–1956. “Foreign and strategic security policy challenges were augmented by border incidents and Israeli reprisals,” Rozin writes. In response to the worsening situation, the Ministry of Defense inaugurated Keren Hamagen, a special defense fund to which citizens could make voluntary contributions:

As part of the campaign, 300,000 postcards were sent to families all over the country and tens of thousands of posters were put up. There was a film, Peace, Peace, and There Is No Peace, produced by Herzliya Studios, as well as newsreels, radio plays, lectures, and radio broadcasts on the Voice of Israel and Galei Tzahal, the IDF radio station. Dozens of public meetings were held, and performing artists gave benefit concerts free of charge. The press donated considerable advertising space to the Keren Hamagen campaign, not just advertisements but also articles about it.

Writing to a woman who contributed a diamond pin to the Keren Hamagen fund, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion wrote, “The spirit of heroism that beats in the hearts of the Israel Defense Forces is the gift of the Hebrew mother, thanks to whom we have persevered.” Rozin acknowledges that the prime minister’s rhetoric may seem overwrought now but adds that “it indeed empowered” people.

In view of the threat now posed by Egypt, Ben-Gurion put the budget on a war footing. This meant that the frontier settlements that still needed fortification had to rely on volunteers, whom Ben-Gurion proceeded to summon, in the hope that they would not only respond but “return to their home as ‘different people.’” Rozin writes:

In April and early May, at the height of a wave of bloody fidayun attacks and high tensions, the volunteer project expanded even more. By mid-April, 120,000 work days had been volunteered to fortify settlements. At a meeting of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Ben-Gurion remarked with satisfaction that the burgeoning of the public’s fatigue had been blocked and that the mass volunteer project had proved that morale was excellent.

Volunteers “spoke about the camaraderie, partnership, and heartfelt closeness that they developed with the locals.” In other words, as Ben-Gurion had predicted, they emerged from the experience as “different people.”

From the fall of 1955 into 1956, Israelis lived in the shadow of an upcoming war. The war soon came but not as widely anticipated. The aggressive, preemptive, and victorious (militarily, if not politically) Israeli assault on Egypt, in concert with Great Britain and France, led Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, briefly, into a state of irrational exuberance. He dreamed aloud about the permanent southward extension of Israel’s territory. What he actually obtained, in the end, was much less but far from insubstantial: the demolition of the Egyptian army, the opening of the Straits of Tiran, the demilitarization of the Sinai, and the establishment of a United Nations force that prevented incursions across the border with Egypt for more than a decade.

And then there was the boost of national self-confidence, about which Rozin has surprisingly little to say after her detailed account of the country’s prewar anxieties. If nothing else, an account of the lionization of Moshe Dayan as the war’s chief hero would have enabled readers better to understand how profoundly relieved Israelis felt, as she later reports, when he was appointed to be defense minister during the famous Waiting Period in the spring of 1967.

In discussing the tortuous weeks before the Six-Day War, Rozin stresses that what Israelis felt “was not a static experience of fear and anxiety.” Rather, a public resolve seemed to overtake the national anxiety:

As the crisis took shape, and especially as it grew more acute following Nasser’s blockade of the Tiran Straits, reports of negative emotions increased, but as the war approached, the civilian mood improved and Israelis displayed determination and fortitude.

This revival of spirits was not the work of the Israeli government, however, but a reflection of the durability of what Rozin calls the Israeli “emotional regime” that had solidified over the previous two decades.

In describing Israel’s psychological ups and downs during the Waiting Period, Rozin relies primarily on samples of private mail intercepted and analyzed by the government, especially the letters sent by private citizens to friends and relatives overseas. At the lowest points, these letters were full of expressions of fear and frustration at the impotence of Israel’s government, a sense of abandonment by the rest of the world, fear of another Holocaust and the “destruction of the Third Temple,” even the outbreak of a third world war.

But “Israelis wrote not only of their feelings of fear and panic during the Waiting Period. They also frequently voiced a sense of resolve and tenacity.” Significantly, “seventy-six of the 533 letters the chief censor’s office in Tel Aviv opened on May 28 stated that the situation was serious but that the populace’s morale was high and that there was hope that the situation would improve.”

It was on that same day that Levi Eshkol attempted to rally the nation with a famously unnerving radio address. The prime minister’s “failure to provide the nation with the emotional leadership it required” was momentarily devastating. But it quickly resulted in popular demands for a change that culminated in the inclusion of Moshe Dayan in the government four days later. As one soldier quoted by Rozin recounted, this appointment was greeted by his comrades with “hugs, kisses, and sobs of happiness.”

In her description of Israel’s exhilaration in the aftermath of the 1967 victory, Rozin tells a familiar story. She does not neglect to note, however, the existence of a certain uneasiness in some circles. Avraham Shapira, the editor of the kibbutz journal Shdemot, and the novelist Amos Oz published an anthology of interviews with veterans of the war in which elation was mixed with sorrow, moral qualms, and a rejection of the prevalent triumphalism.

Further outside the Israeli mainstream, where joy was at the time virtually unalloyed, stood the people who were at the time usually called Israeli Arabs (and not Palestinians living in Israel). During the Waiting Period, many of them had voiced their support for Israel or even volunteered for emergency service. “How can these demonstrations of patriotism on the eve of war be explained?” Rozin asks, in view of the two decades of discrimination that they had just experienced as members of a minority community the government regarded as dangerous. “Given the close surveillance of the Arab population,” Rozin concludes, “it seems likely that these . . . were not so much expressions of authentic concern for Israel’s fate but rather an effort to meet the majority’s expectations of the minority, and of fear of Jewish retribution.”

“The emotional regime” that Rozin describes “was fashioned and inculcated by a political and social elite. But in a democratic society, the public, as we have seen, also makes its imprint from below.” Emotions of Conflict cannot help but stir reflection on the current Israeli emotional regime. It does not explicitly lead up to such thoughts, but it does begin with them, in its preface. Rozin writes:

Israel of the 1950s and 1960s, the period that is the subject of this book, was more unlike than like today’s Israel. Despite its flaws and social and political divisions, the country then constituted an optimistic Jewish majority.

Today, Rozin sadly observes:

[The old] consensus and sense of purpose have deteriorated. The recent elections of 2023 exposed the rifts within Jewish society. Hamas’s atrocities united most Israelis, and even as the state apparatus is falling behind, Israeli protest organizations, formed since January 2023 and civil society organizations more broadly, are attending to their fellow citizens and to the soldiers’ needs.

This positive description of what is taking place “from below” suggests that, in some ways, at least, today’s Israel may after all be more like than unlike it was during its early years.

The deterioration of which Rozin speaks seems to be, in her opinion, one that has taken place in the political and social elite. Precisely what the old elite said and did that the new elite fails to say and do is a question her research may inspire others to address.