The Private Mutiny of a Machine Gunner

By Nir Bar'am
Hebrew Daily Newspaper "Maariv" January 30, 2000

The conservatives, the blind, and the blockheads among our politicians and the generals led Ofer Sharon to a very human decision.


In another twenty years or more, the proportion of paranoia in our blood may already have become more reasonable. Some basketball team will have finally grabbed the championship away from Maccabi Tel Aviv. Those same generals who are bathing for their pleasure in the waters of politics and democracy, spraying jets of ice-cold water in all directions (as in the case of Mattan Vilnai) will have become like Golda Meir and Avraham Sharir, only a vague and ridiculous memory.

Many historians will certainly be busy doing research on all that has taken place in Lebanon. They will wonder how an entire nation fell asleep at some time or other at the conclusion of the Lebanese War and woke up again only in the waning years of the 1990's. The wakers were a band of energetic mothers and one bespectacled politician, who decided one fine day to ask us all whether we really need all this dying.

Shall the historians probe into the past, down into the depths of the number of fatal casualties? Shall they interrogate officers and soldiers, mothers and fathers? The extremists among them will flatly determine that it was all in vain. The moderates will say that perhaps it was all in vain. And perhaps there will still remain two or three Jews who will continue to faithfully emulate the genre of Raful-Weitzman That is, let us all be chauvinists, inarticulate, conservative, contemptuous of democracy, contempuous of intellectuals. Then people will say that we are reliable and real he-men.

Let them say, of course, that the researchers are traitors, anti-Zionists and lovers of Arabs. The evidence is clear - they have never gone into battle, never lain in ambush, never bedded down with the female company clerk, never read the books of Avner Carmeli, who has explained in detail to all his readers the real nature of the Arabs. Except that then, those people would not even be worth a spot on the Hartzufim program (an Israeli television series of satirical sketches using puppets of political leaders). It is very doubtful that anyone of the researchers would mention at all the name of Ofer Sharon, the machine gunner who remained frozen in place when his comrades stormed forward in an assault on an enemy position. Ofer Sharon was afraid to die in a war that he believed was a folly and without any justification. He was not brave enough to openly refuse to serve in Lebanon. He was also not brave enough in the turmoil of battle to pay the price of his decision to remain in Lebanon.

No person among us is capable of explaining the reflections that passed through his mind during that assault and no one is capable of feeling the sense of guilt that will certainly continue to accompany him for a long time. Perhaps it already no longer makes any difference now.

Ofer Sharon behaved as a human being and no one can deprive him of that humanity. He had already known, as he was still marching side by side with his comrades, that the story of Lebanon is over and done with, that this period in Lebanon resembles injury time in a soccer game, in which the final result is already clear. Everyone simply wants to remain alive until the final whistle is blown in July of 2000.

Most of the soldiers who have served in Lebanon and have returned home, to judge from their appearances in the media, believed that service in Lebanon is truly vital. They had heard this from generations of regimental commanders, brigade commanders, government ministers, and military analysts. The other youths had not rebelled against this convention for their benefit. We were exactly in the place at which the veteran political establishment wanted us to be, imprisoned in a small, isometric nature reserve, struggling to change the status of grass in Israel, waiting in a queue for Allenby 58 or Ouman 17, lighting candles in the Square, conducting a student rebellion for intellectuals only.

In a certain sense, Ofer Sharon remained a loner; his rebellion was personal. However, it was an event that any informed person could have foreseen, because these soldiers in Lebanon may carry weapons and wear backpacks and uniforms, and obey orders, but they are neither fools nor blind. They listen to the radio, watch television and read the newspapers. They understand by now that the region in which they are fighting is a relic of the past, as far as the State of Israel is concerned. Perhaps they are already unable to pay the ultimate price for the sake of a few politicians, most of them former generals. Through their blind, conservative and thick-headed approach, they had prodded the military into roles that border on the criminal.

One time we were prodded into acting as policemen to violently suppress a grass-roots popular uprising. If that were to happen in any other place in the world except in our own back yard, we would have regarded it as absolutely justified. Another time, we were prodded into a narrow corner of Lebanon, that same corner which froze into place a young soldier named Ofer Sharon, while his comrades at arms bravely assaulted the enemy to their deaths.