[Peace-discuss] Haaretz: Death to Yuppiestan, or, Nasrallah was right

[Robert Naiman]

Despite having "compulsory" military service, it would seem that, as
in the US,  there is debate in Israeli society over whether the
domestic burden of war is distributed fairly. A caveat, perhaps, to
those who argue for bringing back the draft in the US to discourage
military adventurism.

"A week ago, with the war still at full horror, the north crippled by
more than 200 Katyusha rockets a day, Maariv [a large circulation
daily] devoted a full 10 pages to the question of why so many of its
readers would like to see Hassan Nasrallah make good on his threat to
launch a Hezbollah rocket that would strike Tel Aviv."

Death to Yuppiestan, or, Nasrallah was right
By Bradley Burston
Haaretz
Last update - 11:54 18/08/2006  	 		
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/752138.html

The largest city in Israel is under attack. And not a moment too soon.

The target of these attacks is the tony metroplex that became, in the
boom years of the 1990s, Yuppiestan. It is collectively and culturally
the garden-gated ghettos of Tel Aviv and the surrounding center of the
country, the long-envied and newly-despised upper middle class Comfort
Zone of the Jewish state.

Why the anger? Because of the sense that Yuppiestan sat out this war.

Not a strictly geographical Yuppiestan, but a certain sector of the
Israeli population. It is the sense that the youth of the largely
secular, largely leftist, largely well-educated, largely well-heeled
sections of the center, have for some time been all too happy to let
the youth of the rest of the country do their fighting - and their
dying - for them.

It is the sense that many of the young and smug and, dare we say,
spoiled children of Yuppiestan have dodged more than the draft,
however convincing their arguments for why they should be allowed to
avoid serving in combat units, or allowed to avoid serving their
country altogether.

These are not conscientious objectors, who are few in number, serious
of purpose, have a lot to lose by sincerely refusing to serve, and do
lose a lot, beginning with prison.

These are the young who duck the draft by buying their way out,
sleazing their way out, lying their way out using parents'
connections, any connections, anything not to serve, and not to pay
the price.

But it doesn't stop there.

There is also anger over Kirya Syndrome, the sense that a large
percentage of the youth of greater Tel Aviv sees out its army service
partly as nine-to-five bureaucrats in the IDF's Kirya headquarters,
and partly as nine-to-five mall rats in the adjacent Azrieli Towers
shopping/dining/coffee and cake complex.

There is anger over the idea that life went on remarkably smoothly in
the Kirya, despite the Home Front Command's disastrous
ill-preparedness for wholesale rocket attacks on civilian populations
in the north, who were forced to live underground, often in states of
distress and want, for weeks on end.

There is anger, no less, over the army's signal failures in adequately
equipping and even feeding the tens of thousands it sent over the line
into Lebanon. This, as life in the Kirya spun along, well-fed,
well-clothed, air-conditioned, close to home.

The anger became stronger this week, as reservists came back and begun
to spill their experiences. There was the ambulance medic who took a
wounded reservist from a medivac helicopter to the trauma room at
Rambam hospital in Haifa, and heard only these words from the soldier:

"Do you maybe have some food? I haven't eaten in three days."

There was another reservist, barely a year out of his compulsory three
years of service, whose company was so hungry that they all crowded
into the house of an elderly Lebanese couple, to search for food.

"The couple were sitting there," the soldier recalled Thursday. "They
could have been my grandparents. It was a horrible scene." Other
units, left without supplies for days, broke into grocery stores,
searching for water and food.

The war was the catalyst for this week's unprecedented outpouring of
resentment toward Tel Aviv, but it has clearly been building for
years.

A week ago, with the war still at full horror, the north crippled by
more than 200 Katyusha rockets a day, Maariv devoted a full 10 pages
to the question of why so many of its readers would like to see Hassan
Nasrallah make good on his threat to launch a Hezbollah rocket that
would strike Tel Aviv.

We got the letters as well. "I don't want to see anyone in Tel Aviv
get hurt," one reader wrote to Haaretz from the Upper Galilee. "But I
want the people there to wake up and notice that there's a war going
on here."

What exactly is this Yuppiestan, and why does anyone have a beef with
it? One hint came on Wednesday, when IDF Major General Elazar Stern,
commander of the Human Resources Branch, allowed himself a moment of
extraordinary candor in a nationally-broadcast live Army Radio
interview.

Asked in a roundabout way whether the military burden of the war had
fallen equally on various sectors of the public, Stern replied in a
way that appeared roundabout, but between the lines was clearly aimed
at Tel Aviv.

"I see the homes that I go to for condolence visits. And then there
are the homes that I am not going to, the homes that do not know
bereavement, and will not.

"I go much more to kibbutzim, and I hardly go to Tel Aviv at all,"
Stern said, in an allusion to the high number of war dead who were
from kibbutzim, and the remarkably low number from the nation's
biggest city.

He also noted the high number of casualties among Ethiopian and
Russian immigrants.

"There are things that we know and the public doesn't," he went on.
"It could be that there are statistics that we have not released to
date, that perhaps we should. Which schools combat soldiers come out
of, and which schools officers come out of," Stern said.

"I am a high priest of Tz'va Ha-Am," the old concept of the IDF as
"the army of the people."

Stern touched a number of nerves in his remarks, not least the mayor
of Tel Aviv, who saw in the recruits from his city "the same level of
obligation, of dedication, of fire" as those from elsewhere.

Even if Stern's remarks were misdirected and statistically
questionable, the main nerve they touched was the right one.

The war showed that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had been right -
if for the wrong reasons - in describing Israeli society as weak and
vulnerable.

Everyone here knows what's wrong. We've known it all along.

For years, we have gone along with a system we all know to be
untenable. The hallmarks of the system were a grotesque caricature of
what Israelis took to be America - bankers who take home a million
shekels a year, while milking a burgeoning underclass sinking deeper
by the day - combined with a government mired at all levels and in all
ministries with apparatchiks who spent most of their time protecting
their positions and finding new angles to pad their monthly wage
slips.

The war showed, first of all, that the American video-gaming model of
bomb from the air, bomb from the air, bomb from the air warfare is as
inappropriate, morally disastrous, and ultimately self-defeating in
Lebanon as it was in Iraq.

Closer to home, the doctrine of slash and burn economics which managed
to deny both the army and the poor needed funds over the last several
years, managed to make this a do-it-yourself war.

Soldiers were forced to supply themselves and, in some case, order
themselves. On the home front, volunteers of all stripes, secular,
ultra-Orthodox, Jewish and Arab, stepping in to help people in the
north, sheltering them, feeding them, rescuing them.

There's a clue in this for all of us.

If we can't seem to kill Nasrallah, it's time we learned something
from him. It's time we looked inside ourselves and tapped into the
inner guerrilla, the caustic and generous and improvisational and
entirely unpredictable national personality that created this country
and which kicks in when all else fails.

We've tolerated corruption for too long. For too long, we've allowed
incompetence to go unaddressed, even rewarded. We've learned to
countenance mediocrity, to let failure ride.

We have to rekindle the inner guerrilla that makes this place work.
That gives us the strength and the smarts and the edge to keep this
place vibrant. To keep us alive.

We know our time is limited. There may not be kibbutzim after the
present generation, nor hundreds of thousands of immigrants.

Yuppiestan may still be a bubble. But the country's wake up call to
the bubble suggests that it's time its residents rejoined the people
outside. To reclaim their guerrilla roots as well.

Nasrallah has shown us the alternative. If we fail to return integrity
to this society, if we fail to address the needs of our disadvantaged,
if we continue to pretend this can go on for good, you can bet that
Yuppiestan's days are numbered, no less than ours.

------------------------

Robert Naiman
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org