WITHIN a short time after the founding of Israel, a persecuted people who had never warred became “a nation of soldiers”. As historians Edward Luttwak and Dan Horowitz write in their book, The Israeli Army,“two ex-generals drove garbage trucks in Tel Aviv and famed scientists sorted the mail in [occupied] Jerusalem” during the 1973 Ramazan war.
I am, of course, wrong when I say that the Jews had “never warred”. Over the course of 2,000 years of life in Europe, it was impossible for the Jewish people not to serve in their countries’ armed forces. They were in the German army too — even in the Wehrmacht — and earned the coveted Iron Cross, though their Nazi detractors claimed they served only for the record and withdrew from the army quickly on one pretext or another. There were Jewish officers in Luftwaffe, including air marshal Erhard Milch, Hermann Goering’s deputy, who rebuilt the German air force after World War I. Goering, like Hitler ignored the fact that Milch was of Jewish heritage and once remarked: “I decide who is a Jew!”
As history shows, ‘nations of soldiers’ pillaged their neighbours but ultimately destroyed themselves. Can any Arab country follow Israel and become a nation of........