Ratings bombshell
GIDEON LEVY
Ha'aretz, 8 September 2005
"The unit" has done it again. Another graduate of the Israeli "Harvard" is making his way to the top. In a country where there will never be a military coup, one has existed for years, with too many generals in politics and too many politicians in the General Staff, where concepts like "success," "hope" and "promise" are nearly always
measured by the number of scalps hanging from the candidate's belt. A new star is born. After Ehud Barak, Benjamin Netanyahu, Shaul Mofaz and the brothers Yatom, Avi Dichter is on his way up.
If the military establishment has been the ultimate breeding ground of Israeli politics, the elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit is the icing on the cake. Nowadays there is no list of "stars" in Israeli society, which is yearning for "the big bang," on which the name of the former head of the Shin Bet security service does not appear. But this time, it must be admitted, we are talking about someone on whose belt the dangling scalps are particularly plentiful. Perhaps that is why his outlook for success is especially bright: 55 percent of the registered members of the Labor, left and peace parties have already expressed their desire to see him as their leader. One commentator has defined him as "a ratings bombshell," one whose "potential in politics is limitless." However, more than the Dichter promise teaches about the candidate's qualifications, it teaches a great deal about us. And how we look.
True, someone "has to do the job," and we are talking about a particularly dirty job. Dichter himself has said in one of the interviews he gave on the occasion of his retirement from the Shin Bet, that "there is nowhere on earth where there is anything more disgusting than the field from which I am coming." But the stench of disgust and the blood of the victims has not stuck to him one bit. This has also been the case with his predecessors in the job: Yaakov Perry is an A-list celebrity who has already become the top examiner on the Channel 2 reality show "The Ambassador," chairman of the Habimah theater's advisory board and president of the Israel Film Fund. A cultural hero. Ami Ayalon is a fighter for peace.
Dichter is more modest, at the moment. Although he is a poet, in his spare time, who dreams of being a stage director, according to his own admission, he is meanwhile examining his path into politics - in the Labor Party, in a new party's list of stars, in Sharon's galaxy or elsewhere in the Likud. This is not yet clear.
Marginal questions
What does he think? What is he proposing? What innovation is he promising? These are marginal questions. These are always marginal questions when it comes to promises that originate in the security establishment. From Yigael Yadin to Moshe (Bogey) Ya'alon, only generals are the hope for something different. The fact that their world has been shaped in blatantly immoral, explicitly non-democratic systems; that most of them lack any trace of real intellectualism, that their cultural world is as narrow as an ant's, that even the successes that are chalked up to them are quite dubious in the test of history - all this only endows them with grace in the shallow waters of Israeli politics. In the land of limited possibilities only generals can do it, and Dichter is of course another general, even if in civilian clothes.
A number of his statements have already informed us of his cultural and moral world view, especially when he takes pride in his achievements: "When a Palestinian childdraws a sky nowadays he will not draw it without a helicopter," he once boasted. What would have happened had a Palestinian child been born who sees blue skies without
choppers? Wouldn't that have been chalked up as an even greater achievement in the fight against terror than the one that is attributed to Dichter? These are questions that nobody is asking. "Seal off all of Nablus for as long as necessary. As far as I'm concerned, they can parachute provisions in," he is quoted as saying in the excellent
book by Ofer Shelah and Aviv Drucker, "Boomerang," which again reveals the moral portrait of the father of targeted assassinations. Note how he takes pride in the dimensions of his achievements: "Its effectiveness is amazing. The accuracy is amazing. The State of Israel has brought preventive assassination to the level of a real art."
The blood of 296 people, of whom 109 were innocent bystanders, who were assassinated by his organization, this his pride. A real art.
Has there ever been an individual here who has been so proud of acts of killing? His calling is his art. Dichter very much likes to make use of Power Point displays, the latest thing in security-establishment technology. I once heard him discussing the dimensions of the success: For a very long time he talked about "the 'pie' of Palestinian dead," dividing them into organizations and cells, areas and camps, the red laser of his display stick twinkling over the sketches and the diagrams, showing murders with nauseating dryness. Not a muscle moved in his face as he detailed his American pie, the killings cake; he uttered not a syllable about the long-term damage caused by his policy of assassinations to society and to the country. With this he is now entering politics.
Somebody indeed has to do the job, but not like this. In a healthy society, a person like Dichter would be shunned, at least in its enlightened circles. But Dichter has emerged from within the State of Israel, and he comes from the security establishment.
Is there anything greater than that? Is there any more impressive achievement than this?