Rhetoric and War Making: Israel’s Narrative of Violence

Chelsea Cohen SIS 318 12/6/13 War Paper Rhetoric and War Making: Israel’s Narrative of Violence “It is axiomatic that those who fight have to hate—something or somebody. We had to hate, first and foremost, the horrifying, age-old, inexcusable utter defenselessness of our Jewish people, wandering through millennia, through a cruel world, to the majority of whose inhabitants the defenselessness of the Jews was a standing invitation to massacre them. We had to hate the humiliating disgrace of the homelessness of our people. We had to hate—as any nation worthy of the name must and always will hate—the rule of the foreigner—rule, unjust and unjustifiable per se—foreign rule in the land of our ancestors, in our own country. We had to hate the barring of the gates of our own country to our own brethren, trampled and bleeding and crying out for help in a world morally deaf.” Menachim Begin, The Revolt National narratives have the ability to construct and direct populations towards violence in seemingly contradictory ways. As a country founded in response to genocide, the State of Israel has a complex creation myth as well as conflicting voices regarding this genocide’s importance in the collective national identity. How these stories and ideologies influence both state leaders and populations is important in understanding the apparently overwhelmingly violent response of the Israeli state to the incongruent threat of the Palestinian refugee population in surrounding countries. This is a case of intractable conflict and national mythos inherently rooted in national security, traumatic survival, and self-preservation. Attempting to understand the mythos of another country helps to explain otherwise confusing or counterintuitive policy behaviors and reasoning. This paper will examine the role of national myths, narratives, and rhetoric in war making, specifically in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Historical Background and Literature Review Studying military tactics in conjunction with the normative and legal restrictions that govern them will reveal where, how, and why rhetoric can distort social perceptions of war crimes. Israeli nationalism creates a strong sense of exceptionalism and heightens all Israeli-Arab conflicts to zero-sum games; any loss to the Arab states is a traumatic blow to the Jews in a post-Holocaust world. The collective narrative of trauma surrounding the Holocaust created rhetorical (and perhaps direct) comparisons of the Palestinian Liberation Organization to Hitler and Nazism, which rhetorically strengthened the desire to strike back unrelentingly against a disproportionately smaller guerilla organization. A commonly held belief in Israel is that her founding was miraculous or exceptional because of the extraordinary threats it faced. The Holocaust is woven into the very creation of the modern State of Israel and the consciousness of Jews and Israelis. From a historically Jewish perspective, the threat of extermination and perpetual exile stretches back thousands of years to the first expulsion from Israel and the subsequent persecution endured by the Jewish diaspora globally. This contributed to the Zionist idea of the necessity of a home state in order to ensure survival. Following World War II, the opinion heavily pervaded amongst Israelis that the European Jew was the antithesis of the Israeli: weak victims who willingly went to the slaughter, unlike the fighting Israeli. This idea was transformed in 1961 with the Eichmann trial where hundreds of Holocaust survivors testified and broke two decades of silence surrounding the tragedy. This allowed it to be part of the Israeli national consciousness and indicated that Jews who experienced the Holocaust whether as victims or survivors demonstrated great strength and courage beyond the perceived weakness that had previously held precedence. A primary argument for the founding of the State of Israel is that Jews in the Diaspora will never be safe and the Holocaust happened because of the lack of Jewish homeland. At the same time, Israel was and is not a completely safe place for Jews. Although new Israeli immigrants had originally wanted to identify with the New Hebrew ideal of readiness to fight, the fact was that it was difficult to distance themselves from feeling hopeless while surrounded by enemies who threatened to drive them into the sea. The seemingly endless cycle of war also helped to erode the sense of distance between Israelis and Holocaust survivors. Yechiel Klar, Noa Schori-Eyal, and Yonat Klar, “The ‘Never Again’ State of Israel: The Emergence of the Holocaust as a Core Feature of Israeli Identity and its Four Incongruent Voices”, Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 69, No. 1 (2013): 129-132 Holocaust education disseminated with the increased visibility of survivors and now pervades the national consciousness to such a strong degree that 70% of Israelis in the 1990’s felt emotionally overwhelmed at the thought of it, nearly 55% worried about repeated Holocaust-like events, and nearly 50% worried about the future of their children and their security because of the Holocaust. Ibidem, Historian Yehuda Bauer suggested the creation of three additional commandments to the Ten Commandments regarding genocide: “Thou shalt not be a victim, thou shalt not be a perpetrator, but above all, thou shalt not be a bystander”. The result of the first is readily apparent in the rapid and robust military build up. The third reflects the sense of betrayal and contempt Israelis associate with the nations that did not immediately come to the aid of the Jews, and it is manifested in a sense of needing to have greater humanitarian values than other countries. It accepted refugees from Asian and African countries and provided them aid; this, however, begins to become a subject of tension with regard to the ever-increasing flow of North and East African refugees. The perpetrator commandment faces the most internal tension and cognitive dissonance, as many Israelis perceive their actions to be legitimate self-defense. The difficulty of recognizing the wrongdoing of one’s in-group is compounded in this situation by the salience of the Holocaust in Israeli consciousness. While some Israelis openly recognize the parallels between Israel’s state-enacted violence and the Holocaust, in general, referring to Nazi Germany in a manner critical of Israel leads to a largely negative public reaction; Israeli-critical responses tend to use more vague language such as “darker periods” rather than direct analogies, while Israeli policy-makers post-1961 show few qualms with drawing direct comparisons. Ibidem Critical to understanding the ideas evoked in Israeli war rhetoric is an understanding of the historical and societal context of the Israeli military and its primary actors. Its earliest predecessor operated in Mandate Palestine as paramilitary organization known as the Haganah, which later split into another more militant group, known as the Irgun, made up of fighters who believed the best defense is a good offense and whose attacks on the British occupation were rhetorical attacks on the “prestige” of the Empire rather than an attempt to induce military defeat. Menachim Begin served as a commander in the early days of the Irgun and broadcast electrifying persuasive anti-occupation campaigns via its clandestine radio station and newspapers, cementing his connection to war rhetoric and the careful need to frame the fight for Israel as an us-them conflict and constant battle for survival; this practice continued through his tenure as prime minister. Scholars have noted the curious cognitive dissonance between Begin’s rhetoric and political behavior, and the overwhelming conclusion has been that his worldview is characteristic of myth, which runs rampant in the logos and policy practices of the Israeli state and army. His specific background narrative illustrated his devastation and lack of trust of the non-Jewish world following his discovery of the true extent of the Holocaust. Robert Rowland, The Rhetoric of Menachim Begin: The Myth of Redemption Through Return, 1985: 1-17 Begin’s mythic journey begins with his release from a Soviet work camp and subsequent relocation to Israel at the behest of an unidentified and disembodied voice. Once there, he joins the underground movement to expel the British from Mandate Palestine world known as the Irgun. In his detailed account of his time as an underground fighter, Begin recounts the struggle between the local Jewish community, who embodied the Jewish passivity that he sought to root out, and the Irgun, as an institution of the “Fighting Jew”. One of the most infamous cases of this tension is the Dir Yassin massacre of 1948 wherein the Irgun attacked the Arab village of Dir Yassin in order to secure land for the Jews in Palestine outside of Jerusalem; it resulted in the killing of more than two hundred civilians and caused many Arabs to flee preemptively. In Begin and the Irgun’s perspective, this is an indicator of many decisive victories to come, but the Haganah and the Jewish Agency reacted negatively to such violence, as it would damage the international perspective of the fledgling Jewish state. This tension further cemented Begin’s opinion that passivity will only serve to weaken the Jewish people and would undo all that they had worked for to secure a state of their own. Ibidem, 90-96 The following is a quote from the introduction of Begin’s book The Revolt, in which he documents the history of the Irgun and its pivotal role in securing Palestine and ousting the British from the territory. “I have written this book primarily for my own people, lest the Jew forget again—as he so disastrously forgot in the past—this simple truth: that there are things more precious than life, and more horrible than death…But I have written this book also for Gentiles, lest they be unwilling to realize or all too ready to overlook the fact that out of blood and strife and tears and ashes a new specimen of human being was born, a specimen completely unknown to the world for over eighteen hundred years: ‘The Fighting Jew’. That Jew, whom the world considered dead and buried never to rise again, has arisen. For he has learned that ‘simple truth’ of life and death, and he will never again go down to the sides of the pit and vanish from the earth”. Menachim Begin, The Revolt, Introduction, 1951 As Prime Minister for two terms from 1977 to 1983, Menachim Begin led two very different governments. The first had enough strong personalities and oppositional political party coalitions, namely the Labor Party, to check Begin’s own ambitions and goals; during the first half of his career, his most notable achievement was the signing of a peace treaty in 1979 with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, leading to the two of them sharing a Nobel Peace Prize. However, his second government is considered the most hawkish in Israeli history. The 1980 bombing campaign on Iraqi nuclear reactors indicated the amplification of Israeli aggression against the Arab world. Most critically, the appointment of Ariel Sharon to Defense Minister gave Begin an outlet of action for his fearful, violent rhetoric. Sharon’s settlement policy was very much in line with Begin’s vision of maintaining control of all of “Judea and Samaria”. Sharon was the tool of policy, completing the dirty work of Begin’s word, laying the course for the decision to invade Southern Lebanon. Operation Peace in Galilee was a search and destroy mission of PLO infrastructure in order to secure Israeli border settlements. The assassination attempt of the Israeli Ambassador to London by a splinter Palestinian military group in gave Sharon and Begin the necessary prerequisite to invade Southern Lebanon in the name of security and paved the way for limitless violence against the Palestinians along the Israeli border. Gil Merom, “Israel’s National Security and the Myth of Exceptionalism”, Political Science Quarterly Vol. 114No. 3 (1999): 70-75 Jack Snyder’s Myths of Empire helps to explain the national security paradigm of the State of Israel. Israel’s state behavior reflects the basic tenets of his argument, namely the beliefs that expansion will bring further security, which can be seen in the multitude of land acquisitions that Israel is involved in throughout its modern history, and the existence of Arab “paper tigers” (weak adversaries are easily defeated by threats of violence) and their influence on logrolling and bandwagon behavior (adversaries would rather ally with each other than attempt to balance against each other). Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambitions, 1991: 1-6 Myths of Israeli exceptionalism are rooted in Biblical and early historical tensions between Jews and Gentiles, which produced a strong sense of isolation and inter-Jewish solidarity, and were further reinforced by the apathy of the West in the face of Nazi war crimes against the Jews. This helps to explain the resistance movements in Mandate Palestine and the reluctance to align with the West. The Israeli perception of acute and persistent threat is reinforced by extreme terms that stem from the collective trauma of its people; “never again” and “Masada shall not fall a second time” are both code phrases that indicate that the defeat of the historically passive Jew will never come to fruition in the modern state of Israel. This paper will primarily examine Menachim Begin and his reliance on the myth of exceptionalism to mobilize Israeli society into supporting its more hawkish policy actions in contrast with David Ben-Gurion’s more moderate views. Gil Merom, Roxanne Doty’s discourse analysis techniques as outlined in “Foreign Policy as Social Construction” will situate the analysis for this paper. The Discursive Practices Approach explains how language shapes realities. Linguistic practices construct agents and are given power; language itself has power. This approach grants autonomy to language and explains how it creates discursive spaces—metaphors, concepts, and analogies—that trap subjects within one specific context. The example she uses is that a discursive space that defines what is “male” and “female” is self-referential and how these two categories create a discursive space that excludes any sort of deviation (such as lesbian or gay families or single mothers by choice). How language creates reality is then applied to policymaking and how policymakers’ individual discursive space informs their understanding of the world and creates their reality. This way of looking at policy places the decision secondary to the actual discourse that creates that reality. Roxanne Doty, “Foreign Policy as Social Construction: A Post-Positivist Analysis of U.S. Counterinsurgency Policy in the Philippines”, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 37 No. 3, (Sept 1993), 302-303 In the case of Israeli policymaking, the language used in Menachim Begin’s speeches and writings are used to return his listeners to crisis mentality in order to garner sympathy and outrage for his tactics. Post-Zionists and New Historians, whose movement began to emerge in the 1980’s following the Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1982, hotly contest the issue of nationalism and Zionism in Israel. The foundation of Zionism rests on the establishment of a Jewish state on the territory of “the Land of Israel”. It purports the mythos of “a land with no people to a people with no land”, paints Arabs, notably Palestinians, as resistant to peace efforts, and that the state only fights defensive wars that they have no choice but to participate in for the good of the state. However, the case of Operation Peace for Galilee marks the first time that state and society had dissenting opinions on a war, namely a war of “choice” rather than “no choice”. Protest movements surfaced and the post-Zionist movement emerged, arguing the founding of the State should indicate reduced exclusivity vis-à-vis the Israeli identity in order to reduce conflict. This tension between Israeli society and its military (which are not easily separable due to mandatory service requirements) causes significant cognitive dissonance when large portions of the population are forced to perform reanalysis of assumed truths. The widespread application of exclusivist historical analogies using Jewish tragedies and ignoring the possibility of parallels between Israel and Palestinian histories led to retrospective studies of Israeli-Palestinian policies and practices and paved the way for rewriting more inclusive histories that incorporate both sides of the conflict in contrast to the Israel-only narrative of survival. Uri Ram, “Postnationalist pasts: The Case of Israel”, Social Science History Vol 22, No.4 Special Issue: Memory and the Nation (Winter 1998): 519-528 Rhetoric is a political action intended to persuade. It is made up of three distinct components based on how they are intended to appeal to people: appeals to logic (logos), emotions (pathos), and character (ethos). Analyzing political discourse through the lens of rhetoric prevents speech acts from appearing disparate from the intentions of its speakers; words are chosen for the specialized meanings that they convey and the emotion that they evoke. Richard Shorten, “Towards a political rhetoric of wrongdoing: the case of moral equivalence”, Journal of Political Ideologies, Vol. 16 No. 2 (June 2011), 197-198 Rhetoric, often considered a “tool of the weak”, is a strong weapon in the hands of political leaders who understand how to persuade their people based on their shared understandings. In this case, the internalized understanding of constant threat and collective trauma serve as critical tools in mobilizing the IDF and Israeli society towards war at any cost. Rhetorical arguments “work” if they are considered socially sustainable; that is, certain rhetorical ideas presented by leaders are deemed permissible by their populations, even if they are not in accordance with prior norms or commitments such as the cases of violence against noncombatant Palestinians which violates the Israeli purity of arms code (which soldiers swear upon that they will maintain their humanity even in combat and place supreme value on human life above all else). Ronald R. Krebs and Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, “Twisting Tongues and Twisting Arms: The Power of Political Rhetoric”, European Journal of International Relations Vol. 13 (1): 39-47 Rhetoric can be used as a legitimation strategy as it presents the claims of actors as objectively correct and is reinforced by social institutions and the position of the actor within those institutions. In the case of Israel, this can be seen in the close relationship between society, politics, and the military and the legitimacy granted to prime ministers who served in leadership positions in the military, especially the Minister of Defense position. A critical legitimation strategy that specifically focuses on rhetoric is Stacie Goddard’s yoking, or actor creation, which occurs under the conditions that the actor involved is an “identity bridge”—that is, able to unite seemingly disparate cultural aspects—and that they must effectively combine the multiple symbols, histories, and memories of these separate cultures in a culturally inventive way. A second strategy is that of coalition mobilization, which occurs when a dense network of culturally harmonious symbolism exists between a central actor and their target audience (or coalition). The interplay of the rhetorical claim and the cultural network is what decides how legitimate a strategy is considered. The actor must successfully navigate these communications in order to convey a salient message, which further credits their actions as legitimate; if it fails, it can sever coalition ties and miscommunicate the intended message. Stacie E. Goddard, “Uncommon Ground: Indivisible Territory and the Politics of Legitimacy”, International Organization, Vol. 60, No. 1 (Winter 2006), 48 Understanding this creation of in-groups and out-groups via rhetoric will be critical in analyzing how the writings and speeches of Menachim Begin and David Ben-Gurion affect military action. Tactical Goals of Each Campaign Israel’s reprisal operations of the 50’s and 60’s were specifically intended to demonstrate the ability of Israel’s forces to withstand attacks and increase the costs of Arab attacks on its citizens. Terror attacks on its diplomatic missions and airlines led to defensive measures, including roadblocks and border patrols, to intercept potential attackers. These proved less effective than offensive invasions of Arab states providing base to anti-Israel terrorists; these primarily focused on civilian targets in the early stages before an escalatory spiral towards attacking military and state targets, causing an increase in the size of the IDF and a proportionate response in the use of force by the Arab states. Eventually, it became too costly for Arab nations to host and defend Palestinians, and they stopped receiving support from Jordan and Syria. Lebanon became a contested space starting in the 70’s and was no longer responsive to the limited strikes. A qualitative study of the operations indicates that the number of fatalities caused by Arab attacks determined the scope and scale of future Israeli attacks, as did domestic criticism. The limited strikes served an important domestic purpose in that it demonstrated that the Israeli government had the means and the initiative to deal with infiltrations by Palestinian militants; the government intentionally framed the infiltrations in the context of a blood feud, allowing the government to take on the role of “avenger” for the Jewish casualties. They also served to bolster the militaristic spirit amongst the youth, instilling a sense of resourcefulness and willingness to fight. As Israel was still a nascent state at this point, state identity building was a salient and effective means of garnering support for military initiatives. Zeev Maoz, “Evaluating Israel’s Strategy of Low-Intensity Warfare: 1949-2006”, Security Studies Vol. 13 No. 3 (2007): 324-332, 340 The tactical choices made in the execution of the 1982 invasion centered on the destruction of Palestinian life in Lebanon, a choice deemed acceptable by the majority of Israelis as part of their “moral economy of violence”. The destruction of infrastructure and the relentless pursuit of Palestinian militants fell under an acceptable definition of violence in order to ensure security. The technological advancement of “smart bombs” and “surgical strikes” even lent a rhetorical element that allowed soldiers to separate themselves from the act of killing and allowed political leaders to legitimate their actions with the assumption that such selective warfare can distinguish between combatants and non-combatants. However, dissent reached an all time high after the public discovered the Sabra and Shatila massacres of September 18, 1982, primarily because it did not match what had been established as acceptable collateral damage in the Israeli war on Palestinian terror, notably because of its use of massacre as a tool of war. While attacks on the infrastructure were seen as legitimate anti-terror techniques, once awareness spread about the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, dissent began to spread en masse and an extensive discussion on the legitimacy of such warfare swept the Israeli populace. There is an enormous parallel between how the rhetoric used to address the Palestinians is and how the Nazis viewed and spoke about the Jews, thus highlighting the tension between the Israeli holocaust mythos and how its lessons are selectively applied. This incongruence is used in order to justify the violence enacted against civilian targets, creating a monolith of evil, faceless Palestinians rather than a human parallel, effectively negating the lesson of not being a perpetrator. Karine Hamilton, “The moral economy of violence: Israel’s first Lebanon War, 1982”, Critical Studies of Terrorism Vol. 4 No. 2, August 2011, 129-131 Argument My argument is that with strengthening of rhetoric (marked by more violent language) comes more violent action against adversaries because of these in/out group manifestations. The specific rhetoric I will be analyzing is that of survival rhetoric, which paints the adversary as a monolith and notes ones own exceptionalism and the miraculous nature of one’s survival and persistence; in order to find this, I will examine the frequency of Holocaust references made in Menachim Begin’s speeches and writings during the decision making period. I will apply the same criteria to David Ben Gurion’s speeches regarding the reprisal actions. The expected value condition is that OPG will have noticeably stronger and more prevalent survival rhetoric (denoted by references to the Holocaust/Nazism/Hitler), which caused the disproportionately violent practices of the IDF against civilians (rather than military or terrorist actors) in Southern Lebanon. This will be contrasted against the reprisal policy rhetoric which I anticipate will be marked by survival rhetoric but be distanced from Holocaust specific language because of the narrative division between Diaspora and Holy Land Jews. Data and Findings If an increase in Holocaust-centric rhetoric is seen, I hypothesize that then a higher degree of violence will be seen in the case of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 as indicated by higher degree of violence against civilians (targeted killings of civilians and refugee camp invasions). This will be contrasted with the reprisal raids of the 50’s and 60’s to counter that the coercive signaling implicit in territorial raids is not necessarily indicative of greater violence. As a primary resource, I will look at speeches made by former prime ministers Menachim Begin (and his Defense Minister Ariel Sharon) and David Ben-Gurion regarding the military campaigns in question in order to calculate the frequency of indicative words via NVivo. I will observe how frequently terms referring to the Holocaust and violence appear, their context, and how they are applied or misapplied based on the incongruent voices of the Holocaust covered earlier. Secondary sources will include other scholarly analysis on the rhetoric used by these leaders. In a statistical analysis of eighteen speeches and writings on record with the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs made by Menachim Begin and Ariel Sharon during a six-month period in the year 1982 (from the beginning of Operation Peace in Galilee to the end of the year), the most commonly used word was “terrorist”, which appeared 303 times. The words “Holocaust” and “Auschwitz” appeared once and twice respectively; references to “Nazis” or “Nazism” appeared eight times; “hate” and its permutations appeared 100 times; “murder” and its relatives, 179. Speeches analyzed taken from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs Historical Documents Archive http://mfa.gov.il/MFA/ForeignPolicy/MFADocuments/Pages/Documents_Foreign_Policy_Israel.aspx Because of his harsh and personal connection to the Holocaust and the fight for Israel’s independence and survival, Menachim Begin expresses his views of the P.L.O. as a direct threat to the security and stability of Israel as part of his destruction/salvation dichotomy. While he may personally hate war, Begin was always dedicated to the fight for freedom whether or not he garnered criticism for his methods. In his mythic perspective, all slights against Israel are reminiscent of the slights against the Diaspora Jews that led up to the Holocaust. His decisions to retaliate against the raids of the P.L.O. indicated his unwillingness to take any chances with Israel’s security. His speeches and writing invoke hatred, murder, and Nazism so frequently in order to express his deeply rooted fear and commitment towards the elimination of all threats to Israeli security; only the Israeli Defense Forces can protect Israel against the unique threats of total annihilation and foreign help is not to be trusted, as it has failed the Jews in the past. The myth of return, of establishing and protecting the homeland with all of his might is what is behind Begin’s often-violent rhetoric. No Jewish casualty is considered acceptable, and no passivity is accepted; retaliation is always necessary and always the only effective means of defense after 2000 years of suffering. The invasion of Southern Lebanon to root out the P.L.O. is Begin’s opportunity to destroy his new Nazis and demonstrate a total absence of weakness. “Never Again” is a code phrase that indicates a Jewish rejection of that weakness, and Begin is unafraid to invoke this in defense of his military decision making: “Not one [rocket] will ever fall on our people. Never again. We don’t ask for more than other people, but we will never accept a situation in which the Jewish people have less [sic] rights than other nations.” Ibidem, 210. Emphasis added by me. Begin even invokes the myth of return in response to international criticism of his war decisions, rebuking sanctions with the claim that “Jews do not kneel but to God”. It does not help that Ariel Sharon as his Minister of Defense enabled Begin to amp up the vicious rhetoric against the P.L.O. Scholars have noted that Sharon was not afraid to use Begin’s rhetoric to give greater flexibility to his tactics. Sharon had already made agreements with the Phalangist Christians in Lebanon and had planned to advance onto Beirut prior to Begin’s authorization for “limited” strikes in the region, and he took the go-ahead for the operation to mean unlimited flexibility in his plans. This expansion of intent led to American President Ronald Reagan cabling Begin for a cease-fire, which led to further damage on the relationship between Israel and the United States. With Menachim Begin’s rhetoric as a vessel, Ariel Sharon was able to enact greater violence than the campaign had originally called for. Amos Perlmutter, “Begin’s Rhetoric and Sharon’s Tactics”, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 61 No. 1 (Fall 1982), 70-75 A statistical analysis of ten writings and speeches in the Israeli MFA made by David Ben-Gurion during the period of reprisal actions show that “Hitler” and “Nazi” appear twenty and six times respectively, but “Holocaust” and “Auschwitz” do not appear at all; “murder” and similar words appeared twenty eight times; Ben-Gurion never used the word “terrorist” or “hate” and its permutations in this sample. Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs Historical Document Archive http://mfa.gov.il/MFA/ForeignPolicy/MFADocuments/Pages/Documents_Foreign_Policy_Israel.aspx The references to Nazism in Ben-Gurion’s speeches centered more on the need for Jewish survival rather than the total extermination of threat seen in Begin’s writings. In a statement to the K’Nesset on November 2, 1955, David Ben-Gurion sought to remind those who would be listening the inherent risk that a Jewish state surrounded by enemies faces: “Our problem is not simply the security of our independence, our territory, our borders, our regime, but the security of our simple physical survival. Our enemies are scheming not only against our territory and independence. Their plan, as many of them state frankly, is to throw us all into the sea. Let us not forget that during World War Two the majority of Arab rulers admired Hitler and looked forward to his victory… Our aim is peace - but not suicide. We wholeheartedly want peace and goodneighbourliness, and we are willing to cooperage with all our neighbours for the prosperity and well being of the Middle East and for the strengthening of peace in the world. We do not covet a single inch of foreign soil, just as we will not permit anyone to deprive us of a single inch of our territory as long as we live.” Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, “The Failure of the Armistice”, Statement to the K’Nesset, November 2, 1955, http://mfa.gov.il/MFA/ForeignPolicy/MFADocuments/Yearbook1/Pages/22%20Statement%20to%20the%20Knesset%20by%20Prime%20Minister%20Ben-.aspx For Ben-Gurion, finding the means to make peace with the surrounding countries without threatening the survival of Israel was critical to his mission. The reprisal actions were not intended to be a destructive series of missions, but rather a demonstration of strength and equality by raising the cost of fighting to an insufferable level. He also keeps open the option for negotiation by not referring to his adversaries as terrorists; this may have been because of the young age of the Israeli state and its lack of bargaining space to write off its adversaries as irreparably damaged and evil. Yet this did not mean that he did not subscribe to the ideas of Israeli exceptionalism in his quest for a solution to the regional problems. Indeed, he believed that dealing with the challenges that Israel faced: “will not [be solved] by means of simple answers, drawn from our past or adopted from other people. What- ever [solution] was adequate in the past, and for others-will not be adequate for us, since our security problem is one of a kind.... We will not withstand the [trying hour] unless we perceive our situation and needs in their geographic and historical singularity, and construct a security method adequate for that uniqueness.” Merom, 416-417 The actions of the IDF under Menachim Begin resulted in greater civilian casualties because they invoked more violent mythos and also relied on the salience of the Holocaust in Israeli memory. This was a rhetorical “luxury” of sorts that was not available to David Ben-Gurion when he was Prime Minister; the Holocaust had yet to enter Israeli consciousness as a response of strength and withstanding tragedy at the time that Ben-Gurion was making policy decisions. Begin also defined his target as terrorists more frequently than Ben-Gurion did, even though the causes of Fedayeen assaults from within Arab infrastructure could be considered terrorism. Ben-Gurion had wanted to extend the opportunity for economic growth under Zionism to his Arab neighbors and attempted to broker peace treaties on the basis of this belief. His statement that Israel wants peace but will not commit suicide best sums up his position on dealing with his neighbors and the need for military might. The example set by these two leaders indicates how culturally salient and powerful rhetoric can empower both soldiers and leaders to act more violently in a case of war because of the creation of zero-sum scenarios and perpetuation of national exceptionalism.  Bibliography Ben-Gurion, David. “The Failure of the Armistice”. Statement to the K’Nesset, November 2, 1955 http://mfa.gov.il/MFA/ForeignPolicy/MFADocuments/Yearbook1/Pages/22%20Statement%20to%20the%20Knesset%20by%20Prime%20Minister%20Ben-.aspx Doty, Roxanne. “Foreign Policy as Social Construction: A Post-Positivist Analysis of U.S. Counterinsurgency Policy in the Philippines”. International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 37 No. 3 (Sept 1993) Goddard, Stacie. E. “Uncommon Ground: Indivisible Territory and the Politics of Legitimacy”. International Organization, Vol. 60, No. 1 (Winter 2006) http://www.jstor.org/stable/3877867 Hamilton, Karine. “The moral economy of violence: Israel’s first Lebanon War, 1982”. Critical Studies of Terrorism Vol. 4 No. 2, August 2011 accessed October 16, 2013. Klar, Yechiel, Noa Schori-Eyal, and Yonat Klar. “The ‘Never Again’ State of Israel: The Emergence of the Holocaust as a Core Feature of Israeli Identity and Its Four Incongruent Voices”. Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 69, No. 1, 2013 accessed October 14, 2013 Krebs, Ronald R. and Patrick Thaddeus Jackson. “Twisting Tongues and Twisting Arms: The Power of Political Rhetoric”. European Journal of International Relations Vol. 13 (1) 2007, DOI: 10.1177/1354066107074284 Maoz, Zeev. “Evaluating Israel’s Strategy of Low-Intensity Warfare: 1949-2006”, Security Studies Vol 13. No.3 (2007) accessed October 22, 2013 http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fsst20 Merom, Gil. “Israel’s National Security and the Myth of Exceptionalism”. Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 114, No. 3 (Autumn 1999) accessed October 14, 2013 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2658204 Perlmutter, Amos. “Begin’s Rhetoric and Sharon’s Tactics”. Foreign Affairs. Vol. 61, No. 1, Fall 1982 Ram, Uri. “Postnationalist pasts: The Case of Israel”. Social Science History, Vol. 22, No. 4 Special Issue: Memory and the Nation (Winter 1998) accessed October 15, 2013 http://www.jstor.org/stable/1171574 Rokach, Livia. “Israel’s Sacred Terrorism”, Third Edition, http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/essays/rokach.html Rowland, Robert C. The Rhetoric of Menachem Begin: The Myth of Redemption Through Return. University Press of America, Inc.: 1985. Snyder, Jack. Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition. Cornell University Press: 1991 accessed via Google Books Oct 23, 2013 Speeches analyzed taken from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs Historical Archives. http://mfa.gov.il/MFA/ForeignPolicy/MFADocuments/Pages/Documents_Foreign_Policy_Israel.aspx Weizfeld, Abraham. Sabra & Shatila. Jerusalem International Publishing House, Inc.: 1984.