HOWARD EPSTEIN: THE MIND AS THE ENEMY
The human mind is infinitely fascinating: certainly those of the giants of history who invented everything from fire and the wheel down to the electron-microscope and Iron Dome. No less impressive are the thinkers: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle – the Rambam, the Baal Shem Tov and Gersonides – whose influence over our understanding of today’s world is still discernible. Reason and logic were deployed to explain the seemingly unfathomable complexities of nature, the universe and, perhaps most challenging of all, the convolutions of human morality.
Whilst successive generations of giants stand on the shoulders of their predecessors – which ought to be how progress is achieved – there are, sadly, concomitant problems: Among the thinkers are those who bend their mentalities to nihilism and destruction: Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein and, head of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar.
Then there are the tragic figures, whose constructive work led to abject horror. Take Fritz Haber who won the 1918 Nobel Prize in chemistry for inventing a method for the large-scale synthesizing of fertilisers, thus vastly accelerating food production in the twentieth century. Haber, as you will know or might have guessed, was Jewish. Perhaps unintentionally, he became known as the father of chemical warfare, that blighted the soldiers of both sides in WWI. That is not, however, the tragi-irony of Haber. From his work came Zyklon B gas, which exterminated some five of the six millions of our people in the Shoah.
Apart from observing how the human mind can be exploited for good or evil or, unintentionally, both, we must recognise how the mind plays tricks on itself. Our capacity for self-deception appears timeless and the old dictum about those who fail to learn from the mistakes of history are condemned, bitterly, to repeat them never seemed more relevant than at this writing.
First the history, then the bitterness.
One of the most common mistakes is to underestimate the enemy. How could America be attacked by Japan, in response to years of US sanctions to deter Japanese expansionism all over the Pacific? The destruction of the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor? Unthinkable! The six thousand kilometres wide moat could surely not be crossed by the “inferior yellow race”? On December 7, 1941, it was.
Eighteen months earlier, the French Army’s C-in-C, Maurice Gamelin, had surveyed the French masterpiece, the Maginot Line. The fortified wall ran along the Franco-German border and stopped its northward march just short of the Ardennes, with its forests and hills and gullies and rocks and more forests. “The best tank trap in Europe!” Gamelin declared, not long before Rommel’s Panzers cut through it and reached Sedan in a week. “France died at Sedan”, historians had said after Emperor Napoleon III was taken prisoner there with 100,000 French soldiers by Bismark’s Prussian army in September 1870. France died again at Sedan 70 years later. The culprit on the second occasion: delusion. You have a wall; you are safe? The worst is yet to come.
In June 1967, the IDF, in a war of six days, not only pushed up the Golan Heights and defeated the larger Syrian Army, but also drove the more numerous Egyptian forces across the Sinai desert to, and across, the Suez Canal. Dazzling victories, indeed. Israel was surely impregnable. Not quite.
To feel impervious to attack, some permanent structure would have to be built. The Jewish population was then around two million and every soldier was required for work. A general was tasked to build a defensive wall along the eastern bank of the Canal. The eponymous Bar Lev line was constructed as a wall of sand berms with a series of fortifications and manned watch towers.
To the hero of the Six-Day War, Moshe Dayan, it appeared as “one of the best anti-tank ditches in the world”. (Had he never heard of Gamelin? What did they teach at staff college?) In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king – and spake: the Egyptians would need at least 24 hours, probably 48, to breach the berms and establish a bridge across the Canal. Again, the classic mistake: is self-delusion and underestimating the enemy. It took the Egyptians three hours.
On Yom Kippur 1973, the Egyptians used fire hoses and the nearest available water supply – the Canal, of course – to blast away Bar Lev’s masterpiece and kill the lookouts, largely the IDF’s raw recruits, just out of basic training. (Dayan veered towards suicide.)
Surely no country would repeat a mistake like that in (ooh, what) a hundred years?
Having neutralised its neighbours boasting strong armies, Israel, having decisively won the Yom Kippur War, confidently believed fifty years later, it had a much more manageable foe to deal with. Hamas, an unruly gang that set fields on fire and sent over admittedly large numbers of rockets, easily checked by the world-leading Iron Dome interceptors, was containable. A fence – hi-tech of course (this being Israel) – with serial watch towers “manned” by teenage boys and girls, just out of training, would keep the simpletons of Hamas at bay, wouldn’t they?
These poor kids were the first to die in the early morning of Simchat Torah 5784, either picked off by snipers or destroyed by kami-kazi drones. (You can buy drones in petrol stations all over Israel and convert them for a few hundred shekels.) The flower of our youth was just the first to be sacrificed by self-delusion about the capabilities of the enemy – and hubris. Still not yet the worst.
These brave, conscientious and intelligent youngsters had been doing their jobs as lookouts in the weeks and days before the start of the pogrom. They had dutifully reported what they had seen.
Last weekend, Israeli TV channel 12 reported that IDF lookouts had been warning their commanders about the situation along the Gaza border before the October 7 attack: unusual training and other activities close to the border, increasing numbers approaching the fence. They were told to stop mithering. Ignored and bullied, one of them decided to go directly to a senior commander in the area and was told, “I don’t want to hear again about this nonsense. If you continue to bother us with these things, you’ll be court-martialled.” Another lookout said, in proof positive of all set out above, her commanders told her, “Hamas is just a bunch of punks, they won’t do anything.”
Cry? Wail? Don sackcloth and ashes? Call for heads to roll? How far up and down will the cull have to be administered? Dark days indeed for Israel – and for the human mind.
© November 2023 – Howard Epstein www.howard-epstein.com
