At the time, the IDF defended borders and fought wars. There was no intifada and no policing of civilian populations. We naively thought of our occupation of the West Bank, barely four years old, as enlightened compared with the surrounding Arab police states. There was still talk of tohar haneshek — “purity of arms,” or minimal violence in the defense of the community. We gave no thought to the fact that when the British handed their Palestine Mandate to the United Nations in 1948, and the United Nations voted to partition the land into a Palestinian-and-Israeli state, Palestinian Arabs still constituted the majority of the population.15 We saw the situation in simple ethnocentric terms: This was the ancient homeland of the Jews heroically resurrected as a modern state. Its existence was a condition for Jewish survival. If Israel lost one war, it would cease to exist. The country at its narrowest is twenty kilometers wide; the largest airport, Ben Gurion International, is within easy rocket range of the Palestinian West Bank. Our job was to defend the borders. The enemy was within view and furiously dedicated to “driving the Jews into the sea.” Knowing this, we competed strenuously to be chosen for the most difficult and dangerous work. But for all its nobility of purpose, the IDF remained an army, grimly committed to the business of killing, and necessarily brutalizing.
I welcomed the brutality as an inversion of my Cambridge existence and a way of bringing me back to my body and my senses. I went from a world of words, books, and ideas to a world of action and feeling. Most of the training involved running and shooting. We ran everywhere, all the time. We ran to our meals, to the training ground, during training, and then back to camp. Since the IDF specializes in night fighting, after dark we would repeat, at a run, everything we had learning during the day. We were punished with running, called kader, the acronym for kidum derech raglayim — “progress through the legs.” If you survived the training, you got to love running. We ran carrying our battle packs and our kitbags. We ran carrying one another on our backs and in stretchers, and always carrying our guns. From the day I enlisted until the day I was released, I had a weapon next to me. On our rare weekends off, we would take our rifles home and sleep with them under the mattress.
The Israeli army was one of the first modern armies to abandon water discipline,* after some terrible deaths through dehydration, but it still practiced sleep deprivation. During one particularly excruciating month in the field, we slept an average of three and a half hours a night for a week at a time. Thursday night, the night before the Sabbath, was sleepless, spent on a forced march, jogging most of the night with full battle gear, which if you carried the platoon machine gun, as I did, meant a backbreaking forty pounds of equipment. We called it kniat Shabbat, “buying the Sabbath.” Our officers pushed us till we dropped and then made those still upright carry the fallen. If we complained, officers would curtly inform us, “There is no such thing as ‘I cannot’; there is only ‘I don’t want to,’ ” and that meant the ultimate humiliation of being kicked out of the unit. Our one day of rest would be spent sleeping off muscle fever. After one such week I was traveling on a full bus back to the kibbutz, standing up, one hand holding the handrail, the other my rifle, and fast asleep. A middle-aged woman woke me up and offered her seat. I sat down gratefully and fell asleep. The very extremity of my experiences fascinated me and took the sting out of the pain. I was pushing my limits and getting to know myself in a hard, sure way. At the same time I was being welcomed into the country and treated as a hero.
As our experiences overwhelmed language, conversations contracted. I stopped reading. Like soldiers in all armies, we resorted to obscenities to express the inexpressible, so we swore constantly, but we had to use Arabic, since spoken Hebrew had only recently been revived from the Bible. One day I suddenly realized with startling clarity the philosophical gulf between concept and experience. I also saw its visceral connection. The cultural currency at Cambridge was eloquence, wit, and literacy. Now we prized the simple virtues of friendship and loyalty, courage and generosity. We defined these concepts not by words but by actions: by how many kilometers you would carry your friend; how much of a food parcel from home someone would share; how much danger another would risk for you. It was an elemental tribal existence — intensely physical, outdoors, exposed to the elements, and exposed to one another. Language lost its omnipotence.
At first I found my fellow soldiers rude and crude and the lack of privacy claustrophobic. But we were trained to recognize that survival depended on helping one another, and I quickly got over myself. One day I woke up to the fact that I was enjoying the simple bluntness that comes with close living under harsh conditions. The rough life cut through persona and culture and exposed the best and worst in us. At one time or another we all looked ridiculous and learned to laugh at ourselves. We made brutal jokes about what scared us most — killing and being killed. Since our relationships were face-to-face, and everything was on public display, we lived with a high degree of honesty, in the truth of direct experience. Trust and understanding that might have taken years in civilian life could be made and broken in seconds. At the same time, witnessing someone else’s shadow helped each of us become a little more conscious of our own. No situation could have been better constructed to turn a group of strangers into a tightly bonded band of brothers. We started growing up quickly.
One of the glories of Israeli infantry life is that one is constantly outdoors in some of the wildest, most beautiful parts of that ancient, eroded landscape. I rediscovered the power of wilderness healing. We moved through great untouched areas of sun-blasted, stony desert and mountain, some of it covered with burnt thorny vegetation, now without the desert lions of the Bible, but still roamed by jackals, ibex, and the occasional hyena. Native forests of stunted oak survive in the Galilee, where vineyards cover stony terraced hillsides; groves of olive and almond, fig and pomegranate dot the valleys. Scattered throughout the country are ruins and relics from the Israelite kingdoms of David and Solomon and the civilizations that followed — Roman, Muslim, Crusader, Turk, and British. Israeli army initiation rites are pilgrimages to two-thousand-year-old ruins — the last standing wall of the Second Temple and the desert fortress of Masada, where, as the story goes, the Jewish garrison committed suicide rather than surrender to the Romans. Our dawn patrols passed the Qumran Caves on the barren cliffs above the Dead Sea, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, written in the same language we took our orders in. We assumed an astounding continuity: that we were living in the crucible of the primary revelation that helped shape Jewish identity, an identity preserved through those ancient Hebrew texts, which after centuries of persecution in exile helped inspire a return to this battered, violently contested homeland. I saw firsthand how ideas and stories could be immense political forces shaping reality.
Months passed running, falling, and crawling over the stones and thorns, with dust and sand in nose and mouth, salty with sweat, soaked with the icy winter rain of the Judean hills, at times feverishly tired, and at others wildly exuberant. I started to understand what it meant to “live in one’s body.” I became more continually aware of sensations on my skin and in my muscles, bones, breath, and beating heart. Our animal nature represents one pole of our in-between situation; ego consciousness is the other pole. The animal is the source of the passions, instincts, and impulses — related to what Freud called Eros — the life force that ego consciousness channels, sublimates, and represses according to the norms of our culture and our quest. This is the biological and emotional foundation of our existence. For this reason the animal is also at the core of the shadow, what we have to repress and forget in order to be acceptable to ourselves and civilized society. As the animal came alive, I lost my neuroses. I was at home in my body, here, now, with my people — welcomed, accepted, connected — whole and happy.
Sometimes on our all-night “fast marches,” we were allowed to sing as we ran. We would chant as we jogged, stamping the rhythm of songs of defiance and survival in a kind of ecstasy:
Am Yisrael, Am Yisreal,
Am Yisrael, CHAI!
(The people of Israel LIVE!)
Od Avinu, Od Avinu,
Od Avinu CHAI!
(Our father still LIVES!)
Singing the old songs on that ancient landscape, under the stars of the desert night, in the charged atmosphere of warfare, became a kind of shamanic channeling. As we sang about the spirit of Kind David still