Lior Dayan is a grandson of Moshe Dayan (1915-1981), the mythic
Israeli soldier-kibbutznik who rose to the ranks of chief of staff,
defense minister, and foreign minister. Lior is a far cry from his
granddad: he got out of the army after a few months in a PR unit
and is now a showbiz heartthrob, “treated,” as Jerusalem
Post columnist Sarah Honig puts it, “with affectionate indulgence.”
And Lior is part of a larger trend: in 2006, as Honig notes, “6
percent of all service-eligible males enlisted helpful shrinks to
avoid conscription altogether. Among those who did join up, another
11% managed subsequently to secure early psychiatric discharge.”
This is a change from older days when such shirking was considered
shameful, and the army is alarmed enough that it’s now moving to
curb the trend.
“Yet the incontrovertible sad fact,” Honig continues, “is that
Israel’s most privileged and influential tolerate draft-evasion to
a degree that erases disgrace.” Another way of saying this is that
an Israeli chattering class has emerged that is growing more
similar to its left-liberal, war-averse American counterpart and
more distant from the tough sabra ethos of the likes of Moshe
Dayan.
People of this kind think war is either totally unnecessary or a
primitive squabble between archaic nationalisms and religions in
which they have no part. They also have small families and don’t
feel that they’ve raised their son (they rarely have more than one)
for the state or to serve in the army of the state.
Until the 1990s Israel was a democracy whose chattering class
had not become ascendant. The seeds of the mentality can be seen,
in retrospect, in the old Left-Labor establishment with its themes
of antireligiosity and extreme loathing of the political right. But
that establishment retained enough connection to Jewish history and
to Middle Eastern reality that it ran Israel’s politico-military
affairs (or in the 1980s, copiloted them in unity governments with
the Right) reasonably well.
By the 1990s, though, the approved-and-certified establishment
Israeli was less likely to be an earthy farmer and more often a
postmodern city-dweller sensitive to global trends and eager to
extricate Israel from what by now seemed a tiresome and retrograde
conflict. The shift was personified in Yitzhak Rabin, also an
old-style tough sabra who morphed as prime minister into the
shepherd of the Oslo process.
The problem is that its results were catastrophic: over two
thousand Israelis murdered in terrorist attacks since the Oslo era
began in 1993, compared to 250 in the previous fifteen years.
To say that the draft-dodging trend has, nonetheless, kept
advancing even in this period is not to say the situation is all
bad, far from it: overall rates of volunteering for combat units,
especially top-notch field units, remain high. But the fact that
the phenomenon represented by the likes of Lior Dayan continues
apace even in an era of suicide bombings and rocket barrages may
indicate that the growth of such a detached, elitist, blase sector
is intrinsic to democracy and an inevitable part of it.
My own experience of the chattering classes both in the United
States and Israel makes we worry about the long-term viability even
of the world’s last two fighting democracies. With eerie
similarity, in both countries this sector makes up for its
smallness in size by taking control of the media, academic, and
judiciary spheres and so wielding disproportionate power. They do
so partly out of a similar ruthless disdain for the country’s
traditional ethos and alternative sociocultural sectors.
Among the results, Americans are encouraged to believe that the
War on Terror is so much pointless sound and fury and the real
threat to civilization is not nukes in the hands of Al Qaeda or
Iran, but global warming; Israelis are encouraged to believe that
territorial withdrawals will win them a reprieve from the
surrounding aggression. Both delusions have great destructive
potential, and non-elitist intellectuals have a crucial task of
projecting a countermessage.
