William Mehlman

The most disquieting news out of the Middle East these days is not Iran’s graduation to the nuclear club, or Hamas’ establishment of its key training base in abandoned Morag, about 20 minutes from Tel Aviv, or even the delivery of Israel’s defense ministry portfolio, like some marked down shalach manot package, into the hands of Amir Peretz.

They are all minor league incubi compared with a report by a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces that its current crop of young soldiers may not be mentally or psychologically prepared to deal with a new round of Palestinian violence, much less full scale war. Most of today’s IDF troops are not only of a “different generation” but also of a “different breed” than those who dealt with past terrorist insurgencies, the spokesman averred. They “don’t have the same conscience that others had in the past, telling them to sacrifice themselves and risk their lives for the country,” he added.

Credence for the IDF spokesman’s claim has been bolstered by another high ranking IDF source who cites a growing demand among combat troops, shaken by the prospect of intense warfare, for psychological assistance. The commander of one IDF elite unit, the Dudevani, reported that some of his men refused to participate in a recent raid on a terrorist base in Jenin because their request for psychological counseling had been rejected.

To fully absorb the gravity of this news, one must be aware that Israel’s life literally hangs on the ability of the 18 and 19 year-olds who constitute its relatively small standing army to hold the line against an individual or combined enemy onslaught for the 48-72 hours it takes to mobilize the country’s larger reserve force. If their capacities—physical, mental, emotional—are not up to the task, the Third Jewish Commonwealth could be history.

This indication of a psychological malaise spreading through the IDF ranks is in stark contrast to the chilling clarity with which Israel’s enemies perceive their own position in the conflict. “Israel hasn’t got the stamina to withstand a protracted struggle,” trumpeted Hamas bigwig Mashaal Khaled in a recent interview with Lebanese TV. “Arabs have the tenacity needed for the long haul…We have spiritual and material resources and we will prevail.”

And just what is it that makes Mr. Khaled so confident of his end-game scenario? The answer, in a word, is “disengagement,” or as the squeamish currently call it, “convergence.” Khaled isn’t in the market for euphemisms. “Were Israel strong, it would not withdraw,” he declares. “Israel is in deep crisis.”

If Israel is in the “deep crisis” that only the victims of a self-induced coma could deny, then nothing more metaphorically defines that condition than the reported mental state of its army. Of one thing we can be certain: If the once most feared, most motivated military force in the Middle East has been transformed into a glaring question mark, it didn’t happen by itself. The “different breed” referred to by the IDF spokesman in comparing today’s Israeli soldier with his predecessors could not have been the product of other than a “different breed” of Israeli national leadership. So radical a break with precedent, if that is what Zahal is experiencing, could only have been engineered by a political leadership whose standards of integrity, courage and simple self-preservation are so at variance with Israel’s past, they have damaged the fragile psychological structure of the teenage defenders upon whom its future rests.

Of all the blows to the Israeli psyche delivered by that “different breed” of Israeli leadership over the past nine months -- beyond the destruction of 25 vibrant Jewish communities and the ruination of their 10,000 residents, beyond the transformation of Gaza into the world’s largest Arab terrorist base – none was more lethal, more unconscionable than the employment of the IDF, the army created to defend the Jewish nation, as a political weapon against the most devoted, most vulnerable segment of its citizenry.

Israel, moreover, is being warned almost daily by the new Ehud Olmert/Shimon Peres-led Kadima government that it will not hesitate to use the IDF to wreak further devastation on the Land of Israel and its people. Over the next two years, Mr.Olmert is committed to converting up to 90 percent of Judea and Samaria into a Palestinian homeland, scattering its Jewish inhabitants to the four winds.

Caught somewhere between a flat-earth political leadership hell-bent on proving that retreat is the yellow brick road to salvation, a compliant media and a constituency that has already achieved the ne plus ultra in reality escapism, a repair to the psychotherapsychotherapist’s couch hardly seems out of order for an army whose esprit de corps in the face of heavy numerical odds has always been predicated on an unassailable sense of mission. It would be tragic beyond contemplation if that sense of mission were not to be rediscovered and reaffirmed very soon.

“Moral reflection…does not characterize modern Israeli society,” Jonathan Rosenblum observed in a recent column in The Jerusalem Post. “Indeed, it is more notable by its absence. Of Jewish brain power – as reflected in the amazing number of patents, medical innovations, high-tech start ups – we still have an abundance. It is Jewish wisdom that is missing.”

Has it become extinct?

William Mehlman chairs the AFSI chapter in Israel

l