On January 30th, three IDF soldiers were killed in an ambush in South Lebanon. Labor MK Yossi Beilin suggested that the time had come for arrangements to be made for "a unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon." From the Right, Internal Security Minister Avigdor Kahalani echoed Beilin's sentiments. Both were harshly rebuked by military and political leaders and accused of damaging the morale of Israel's soldiers. Five days later, seventy-three of the top combat soldiers in the Israeli army were on board transport helicopters headed for the security zone to deliver Hizbullah a painful response to the ambush. In the skies above the sleepy moshav of Sha'ar Yishuv in northern Israel the two massive aircraft collided and the heavy munitions payload each was carrying exploded. It was the worst military accident in the history of Israel. The death toll was seventy-three.
For the grieving families and friends of those who fell, there was no enemy to blame. But the situation itself was highly unnatural: 73 twenty-year old Israelis flying into Lebanon with their lights off. This situation was but a small part of the war in Lebanon, a struggle that has continued unabated for the last decade and a half. Coming so close on the heels of the IDF's protests against questioning Israel's involvement in Lebanon, this tragedy has had the opposite effect as the debate intensifies at an unprecedented rate.
While United States military tank divisions pursued Iraqi irregulars through sandy gulches on behalf of Kuwaiti oil sheiks whose tranquil garden of democracy and human rights had been raked over by Saddam Hussein, Syria was given permission to invade its neighbor, Lebanon, in exchange for its helpful participation in the US-led coalition. After installing a puppet government under the leadership of Rafik al-Hariri, the Damascus regime pimped Lebanon as its free-market enterprise while on the home front the Cuban-North Korean school of isolationism reigned. Now Lebanese farmers grow opium poppies on Syrian heroin plantations in the Bekaa Valley. Meanwhile, Hizbullah, an Iranian-supplied Shi'ite militia, was co-opted and sent into a proxy war with Israel.
While no one can accurately predict how the neurons will fire deep inside Hafez al-Assad's bulbous cranium, I have a hunch. Assad and his clerical toady Sheikh Hassan Fadlallah (leader of Hizbullah) will deduce (correctly) that the helicopter disaster will increase Israeli ambivalence over the war in Lebanon. Because Assad could use more pressure on Israel to get off the Golan Heights and is in no particular hurry to begin peace talks, fighting in South Lebanon will intensify rapidly. Following the tired steps of the same old Arab-Israeli war dance, Hizbullah will try to inflict as many casualties on Israel as it can, assuming that the brink is near and one more push will send the Zionist occupiers packing. IDF deaths will have the reverse effect in Jerusalem, producing demands for a full-scale invasion of Lebanon to root out Hizbullah and wreak havoc on the Syrian colonial economy. I hope I am wrong but the signs are clear.
While the helicopter disaster will certainly play a major part in the geopolitical issues surrounding the state of Israel's tangled presence in Lebanon, the human cost is what was on Israeli's minds after the crash. The Prime Minister declared a national day of mourning but that day stretched on to a week and the mourning will continue for a long time to come. For me and for many Israelis, the human cost was not truly fathomable until the Ma'ariv daily came out Wednesday morning, showing a photo of each of the fallen under the headline "The Best Of Our Sons." They truly were. Small windows into the lives of each of the young men who died were shared with the nation by their families in the form of home video clips.
Israel is a country with a low tolerance for military casualties. Despite the staggering losses suffered in war after war, the helicopter crash was a terrible blow. Seventy-three is such a high number that it becomes a fatality statistic. It is already too large to engage the specifics. But in the videos which the grieving families released, real people emerged, young people from every walk of life. In a sense, the victims were an Israel in miniature: an accurate representation of the best Israeli society had. As Abraham Rabinovitch put it. "In their death they had shown us, as a nation, who we are, or at least who we could be."
One of the men who lost his life in the helicopter disaster was Eitan Maman, a 25 year old Moroccan Jew from Be'er Sheva in the Negev. We saw him dancing with his bride at their wedding. Gal Meisels, a toothy 23 year old orthodox man, looked a bit frightened as he put his signature on the ketubbah (marriage contract) at his wedding. Asaf Sivoni was filmed splashing around a mud puddle in his shorts, exuberant after finishing the twelfth grade.
Then there were the funerals. Hussein Bashir and Kamal Rahal, Bedouin from the Galilee village of Zarzir, were laid to rest next to each other. Kamal, 26, left behind two young children and Hussein, 34, had four. Fadi Kazamel, 19, was buried in a quiet ceremony in his home town of Bet Jan. This Druse community has lost more of its sons in Israel's wars than any other place in the country. As Wladislav Michaelov, 22, was buried, his father, a recent immigrant from the former Soviet Union, struggled to pronounce the Aramaic phrases of the Mourner's Kaddish. Tom Kita'in, 21, the first army-age child from the experimental Jewish-Arab community Neve Shalom, was buried there on Wednesday. The Molto family, who had lost many of their children during the long and arduous journey from Ethiopia to Israel, buried their eldest son.
No image brought home the immediacy of loss more than seeing Betty Cohen, an elderly member of Kibbutz Deganya, bury her grandson Eran Chai, aged 21. She buried him next to her son and his namesake, Eran Cohen, who died in the Yom Kippur War and whose body was only recently returned to Israel from Egypt.
Mark Wagner is currently studying at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.