The history this desire feeds on is one of repeated failures by the ‘Arab world’ to knuckle under to the acceptance of the security of Israel. It is a history that affirms, on the one hand, the military power of Israel, its ingenuity, its independence – and on the other its weakness, its incapacity to use its power to protect its citizens. And it always returns to the desire for the the decisive gesture, generating a pathology that is a hugely dangerous one to fall prey to in politics, and indeed in war. History always continues: slights, real or imagined, are suffered and remembered. The parents of dead children and the children of dead parents nurse their grief, their rage and their shame. No single gesture settles all accounts. But a pathology of desire wants to repeat, above all.
The history that forms the backdrop to the rhetoric of decisive gestures is also, never forget, the history of Israel’s failures – under Shamir, Netanyahu, Sharon – to cease provocations in the name of security, to avoid adding to existing tensions, to escape the temptation to return to open war from out of a state of hidden war. The reliance on the idea of the final strike, the ultimate defeat of all the enemies, is a fantasy that gives birth to the strangest efflorescences: an underground wall to keep out the tunnellers of Hamas; an invasion of Lebanon to destroy ‘terrorist infrastructure’ and ‘remodel’ the politics of the country.
That particular stab at the ‘decisive gesture’ was tried before in 1982, when the enemy was the PLO rather than Hizbollah. Following Israel’s decision to annex the Golan Heights in 1981 and the resulting increase in tension, in 1982 the Israeli ambassador to London was shot and wounded by terrorists led by Abu Nidal, an ememy of the PLO leadership. Blaming this attack on the PLO gave the Israeli government the perfect opportunity to seek to ‘destroy’ the PLO and install a friendly government in Lebanon. This particular ‘release of tension’ took in. amongst other things, Lebanon reduced to political chaos, 600 Israeli troops killed, the massacres at the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, and the birth of Hizbollah – a movement founded to drive out the Israeli invasion. Another intervention that produced only further chaos, more hatred, more injustice, and more insecurity for Israel.
The conclusion is inescapable. Behind the ceaselessly failing logic of the decisive gesture, there is the desire to maintain that state of tension, of enervating deadlock that Grossman describes. A militarised society, secure in its bomb shelters, suffused with the constant fear of being blown apart in a bar, a nightclub, on a bus.
What Israel wants is to repeat.