Olmert's own Holocaust heritage is no excuse

August 5, 2007

2315 hours

Somewhere in the North of Israel

I am trying to write this first post stretched out on a camp bed beneath the stars, resting my tired limbs after a short but sharp night pack-march, meant to knock the rust off an infantry company that has gone over four years without anything resembling serious military training, and debating with myself whether to take up the medic's offer of an alcohol pad to treat a chafed spot on a rather intimate part of my anatomy.

Yes, you guessed right, I'm kicking off my long-awaited blog (at least by myself) with a post from my miluim (reserve) service, no one is going to believe that I was simply eager for technical and professional reasons to get the blog up and running and I had no choice but to start this week.

For some reason, editors always buy this, they think writing a miluim column (in these days of course it's a blog) is wonderfully original. Is it because in Tel Aviv basically nobody does miluim anymore? Practically everyone I know in Jerusalem still does his thirty days a year, but let's not get into that right now.

For all the editors' excitement, you would almost think there's something glamorous about my current setting, as if I was blogging from Ari Onassis' yacht somewhere in the Caribbean or at the end of a climb up K2. But ninety percent of training time in miluim is wasted waiting. For some distant headquarters to give the all-clear to open fire, for the command-car that got stuck somewhere with the targets and bullets, for the temperature to dip a little beneath forty degrees that forbids soldiers exerting themselves out of the shade, and when we are actually going about the business of soldiering, the extent to which reservists go to get out of actually breaking a sweat, walking up to the targets instead of charging them, searching for a spot without any stones or thorns before supposedly taking cover from enemy fire and discarding just about every possible piece of heavy equipment, including rifle and ammunition, before setting off for a march, all just about make the exercise pointless.

Don't get me wrong, for the last 57 years, time and again the IDF's miluimnikim (reservists) have torn themselves away from hearth and home, instantaneously transforming themselves from civilians into fighters prepared to give their lives away to defend this country, but active duty is one thing and training is another. There just doesn't seem to be any realistic way you can cram a serious refresher course in the martial arts into four days a year. Ultimately we'll always be falling back on the real training we did as 18- and 19-year-olds. No amount of commissions of enquiry after military setbacks will ever change that.

And to judge by this first underutilized day, Miluim 2007 is no exception. At the entrance to the base we were greeted by a new sign set in stone: "We will train as we fight in battle." Hardly reassuring. Besides all the ritual delays and time-wasting, the most disconcerting thing about this exercise in male-bonding is the depths of pettiness and small-mindedness that grown men can descend to in a military environment.

The arguments and underhand tactics that go into trivial matters such as who will get a short M-16 with an adjustable handle rather than the long and awkward version, who goes first on the firing range and gets more downtime in the shade and who sleeps under the camouflage netting, with less chance of being devoured alive by the insects of the night. This is not the whole picture, most of the time there is a great atmosphere and selfless acts of kindness are not rare, but there is something about the stripping away of almost all creature comforts that the Israeli man is accustomed to and normally productive breadwinners being forced to spend long hours in mind-numbing boredom that reduces you as a human being.

But enough carping about miluim, it's really not as bad as all that, and there are four more days in which to do that. Let's go on to another kind of little-minded pettiness. On the way up north this morning, I heard Amram Olmert, the PM's elder brother being interviewed on Army Radio.

Olmert Senior rarely talks in public, but this time he felt compelled to do so by the attacks on his brother Ehud over the Holocaust survivors' pensions. He doesn't deserve to be criticized in such a way because he also had parents. Well, the Olmerts, he admitted, weren't exactly Holocaust survivors, the grandparents had fled Russia for Harbin in China decades before the Second World War broke out, but apparently Aliza Olmert (Ehud's wife) was from a family of bona fide survivors, so that means we should let the PM off.

This pathetic line of reasoning reminded me of a stupid argument I sometimes have with a friend of mine over which one of us is more of a third-generationer. All Yuval's four grandparents survived Auschwitz, or as he likes to say, "I'm 100 percent Auschwitz."

I on the other hand have "only" one grandparent who went through the camps, but I argue that since he survived ten months in Gusen 2, also known as the "hell of hells" and "the forgotten camp," it's worth as much as four spells in Auschwitz. I know, it's a silly adolescent game of whose got a bigger one, but we only indulge in it between ourselves and usually after we've had one drink too many. We wouldn't dream of going on national radio and trying to use our Holocaust lineage to excuse us of any wrongdoing.

The complete autistic fiasco last week of Olmert's offer to the survivors of NIS 83 a month, would not be mitigated in any way even if his father had been the commander of the Warsaw Ghetto and his mother one of Mengele?s twins.

Those of us whose predecessors survived the fire and succeeded in rebuilding their lives and families have every right to proud of our grandparents, and those who are not second or third generation should be glad their parents were spared. The heritage of Holocaust belongs to no family more than others and should be shared by all Jews - and beyond that by all mankind. This should also be true also for those claiming to act on the survivors' behalf, and even to a certain degree for the survivors themselves.

At the start of today's cabinet meeting, Olmert criticized a picture shown in Friday's Yedioth Ahronoth of an elderly survivor who burst out crying when together with a group of students in Be'er Sheva she tried out a pair of concentration camp uniforms in a local theatre changing room.

Preparing a feature for Sunday's paper on the survivor's protest march, I asked one of those students if he didn't feel they were crossing a line by donning the uniforms. "I might have thought that in the past," he answered, "but when I saw the Gush Katif settlers two years ago doing the same, I decided that if they can do it, then surely we can also in the campaign for the survivors' livelihood." But how one reprehensible act of using and abusing the symbols of a nation's deepest trauma can excuse another escapes me.

The urgent need to alleviate the hardships of a rapidly dwindling group of elderly Israelis who have been through and ordeal we can never imagine has, at the hands of a few spin-doctors and politicians, evolved into a cynical power-play in which the survivors are mere pawns to be used to score points. The hysterical way this crisis has been portrayed in the media and the public just shows that, 57 years after liberation, we are still emotionally crippled as individuals and a nation by the Holocaust.

We will probably not succeed in dealing with this properly in the next few years while the last survivors are still alive, maybe only the fourth generation will have the necessary perspective. Meanwhile, instead of looking for excuses, the government should just do all it can to make the end of their lives a bit easier. It will also be making things much easier for ourselves.