There are junkies of many kinds. Heroin junkies, Hashish junkies, Nicotine junkies, Alcoholjunkies. David Levy is an honor junkie.
If he were not, he would not be Foreign Minister. Why should he? As the chief of a party whose soleplatform is social populism, he should have been keen to become Finance Minister, a positionthat would have enabled him to effect a social revolution. Even as a Minister for Work andWelfare he could have done wonders for the unemployed and downtrodden. But he wanted theForeign Ministry.
Odd, isn’t it? Not only is there no way a Foreign Minister can effect social change, but he alsohas nothing to give away – no jobs for his faithful, no fat directorships for the party hacks, nobudgets over or under the counter. Nothing. In the Foreign Ministry there is nothing buthonor. Plenty of honor. A paradise for an honor junkie, like a wine-cellar for a chronicalcoholic.
Menachem Begin, who took Levy for the building sites of Beth-Shean, did not give him theForeign Ministry. That was for Moshe Dayan. He gave Levy the Immigrant Absorption Ministry,and later the Housing Ministry. It didn’t enter his mind to give the Foreign Ministry to aperson who does not speak English, the international diplomatic language, and who is notparticularly versed in the history of the world’s nations. But Prime Ministers Shamir andNetanyahu didn’t care. They intended to conduct foreign policy themselves, leaving thehonor to David Levy.
Ehud Barak followed the same cynical path. He needed Levy in order to obtain some populistsheen himself and was ready to give him honor in return. Why not? It’s cheap. Barak wasdetermined, anyhow, to make all foreign and military affairs decisions himself, includingall decisions concerning the “peace process’. So who cares if foreign statesman visitingIsrael are compelled to waste an hour on a visit to Levy? That’s what they get their salariesfor.
Now it appears that there is a price for this. The honor of David Levy may cost a lot.
His outburst in the Knesset – “Blood for blood! A child for a child!” – has caused consternationand outrage throughout the world. Even more than his last pronouncement – “We shall put fire toLibanon” – there was something of Mussolini there.
But Levy was not mindful of recent history, but rather of the ancient one. In bad Hebrew herepeated the Biblical commandment: “Then thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth fortooth, hand for hand, foot for foot” (Ex. 21. 24). But the Talmud has long ago amended thisprimitive morality and set down the law: “Eye for eye – mammon”, meaning monetarycompensation. Otherwise we would have a lot of one-eyed Jews.
If this was only a verbal slip, a uncontrolled outburst of rage, Levy would have apologized.But he justified his horrible words, arguing that it served the purpose of deterring theHisbullah. Perhaps he is too ignorant to perceive that the very opposite has happened: Histhreats have for the first time created a united Arab backing for the Shiite guerillas. FromPresident Mubarrak to King Abdallah, all Arab leaders have now endorsed the Hisbullah. OnlyDavid Levy could achieve that. Indeed, he deserves a medal – an Arab one.
But worse than the speech itself was the reaction of our leadership. Not one single ministerdemanded to remove Levy from the Foreign Ministry. Meretz and the Labor doves were satisfiedwith weak condemnations. Worse, Ehud Barak gave his full backing to Levy. Not just anobligatory formal backing by a politician who is in dire need of every partner, but ajustification of both content and style.
Levy is a physical symbol of the continuity of the Shamir-Netanyahu-Barak governments. Oncehe belonged to the radical right-wing Likud trio that tried to prevent Shamir from movingtowards peace. Before that he was considered a moderate, because on the eve of theSabra-Shatila massacre he warned his colleagues not to send the Phalangists into thePalestinian camps. Contrary to Begin, he understood that after the killing of Bashir Jumail,the Christians would massacre the Palestinian refugees. An eye for an eye.
But that is not the expertise one demands from a Foreign Minister. Leaving him in office willshame Israel in the eyes of the Arab countries and the world at large. And in our own eyes, too.