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There is always one image, one quote, one moment from a war that sticks with you, even when you are thousands of miles away from the actual fighting. In this era of being able to see and hear so much of the fighting on TV, read so much about it in the news and blogosphere and on e-mails, we who are not in the middle of the fighting can basically choose to pay as much or as little attenion to war as we choose. For me, the one line that will stick with me from this war was actually not about Lebanon at all.

There were many haunting images and feelings, of course. The scenes of destroyed Lebanese villages, the sounds of Katyushas landing in Israel, Israelis huddled in bomb shelters. The muted, purposeful silence and paralysis of the Bush Administration. Those will stay for years, but for me, I still think about what I read in an article called “For Troops, A Sense of Moral Clarity,” in which Scott Wilson of the Washington Post interviewed a number of soldiers, past and present, about Lebanon. The answers were typical of the feelings 10 days into the war, answers that may be slightly different now. But one soldier’s thoughts hit me square in the eyes, and the bruise still lingers.

Two weeks ago, [Pvt. Alex Gronov, 21], a year and a month into his military service, was firing artillery shells into Gaza to stop rocket fire along what is now Israel’s second front. Those rockets, fired by the military wing of the radical Hamas movement that won the Palestinians’ parliamentary elections in January, are smaller and less accurate than those in Hezbollah’s arsenal. But many have fallen inside southern Israel since Hamas fighters captured an Israeli soldier in Hamas’s own June 25 cross-border raid.

To Gronov, the two fronts belong in different categories.

“This is actually war, not a joke,” said Gronov, a wiry 21-year-old from the southern city of Ashdod. “Hezbollah is far more serious, more dangerous. This is not a joke.”

“This is not a joke.” Meaning, of course, that to Pvt. Gronov, Gaza is. Hard to argue with his statement on Lebanon, but a response to try to convince him otherwise about Gaza is hardly necessary or possible. Where to even begin. Or end. Probably all I could muster would be to pull out the B’tselem update about Israeli actions in Gaza in July, when the world paid even less attention than usual. Not surprisingly, with eyes diverted elsewhere, B’tselem reports it was the deadliest month for Palestinians since April 2002 (i.e. Operation Defensive Shield):

In July, the Israeli military killed 163 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, 78 of whom (48 percent) were not taking part in the hostilities when they were killed. Thirty-six of the fatalities were minors, and 20 were women. In the West Bank , 15 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces in July. The number of Palestinian fatalities in July was the highest in any month since April 2002.

Some joke. But Pvt. Gronov is not a random bad apple. Another haunting line for me is from Etgar Keret’s article that appeared as an op-ed in the New York Times 3 days before Scott Wilson’s article appeared, less than a week after the start of the war. In it, Keret, one of Israel’s most beloved writers, described the new feeling in the air in Israel. Fear and dread mixed with, as he described it, quiet elation and nostalgia. I will quote it at length here, mostly because of how amazing it is to believe that this was written just a month ago, comparing it now to the utter depression and confusion that has descended in Israel.

Keret began by describing a call he made to the cable company, hoping to have his monthly bill reduced by 50 shekels. The customer service rep., rather than obliging, rebuked him for worrying about 50 shekels when “we’re at war.” Keret then described how he used this same argument later on a taxi driver:

That afternoon I decided to test the effectiveness of the Tali argument on a stubborn taxi driver who refused to take me and my baby son in his cab because I didn’t have a car seat with me.

“Tell me, aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” I said, trying to quote Tali as precisely as I could. “We’re at war. People are getting killed. Missiles are falling on Tiberias and all you can think about is your car seat?”

The argument worked here too, and the embarrassed driver quickly apologized and told me to hop in. When we got on the highway, he said partly to me, partly to himself, “It’s a real war, eh?” And after taking a long breath, he added nostalgically, “Just like in the old days.”

Now that “just like in the old days” keeps echoing in my mind, and I suddenly see this whole conflict with Lebanon in a completely different light. Thinking back, trying to recreate my conversations with worried friends about this war with Lebanon, about the Iranian missiles, the Syrian machinations and the assumption that Hezbollah’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, has the ability to strike any place in the country, even Tel Aviv, I realize that there was a small gleam in almost everyone’s eyes, a kind of unconscious breath of relief.

One imagines that if the Soviet Union were suddenly reborn, and could somehow replace al-Qaeda and Islamic extremists, there might be a similar breath of relief for many Americans, certainly many soldiers. “A real war…just like in the old days.”

Keret continued:

And no, it’s not that we Israelis long for war or death or grief, but we do long for those “old days” the taxi driver talked about. We long for a real war to take the place of all those exhausting years of intifada when there was no black or white, only gray, when we were confronted not by armed forces, but only by resolute young people wearing explosive belts, years when the aura of bravery ceased to exist, replaced by long lines of people waiting at our checkpoints, women about to give birth and elderly people struggling to endure the stifling heat.

Suddenly, the first salvo of missiles returned us to that familiar feeling of a war fought against a ruthless enemy who attacks our borders, a truly vicious enemy, not one fighting for its freedom and self-determination, not the kind that makes us stammer and throws us into confusion. Once again we’re confident about the rightness of our cause and we return with lightning speed to the bosom of the patriotism we had almost abandoned. Once again, we’re a small country surrounded by enemies, fighting for our lives, not a strong, occupying country forced to fight daily against a civilian population.

So is it any wonder that we’re all secretly just a tiny bit relieved? Give us Iran, give us a pinch of Syria, give us a handful of Sheik Nasrallah and we’ll devour them whole. After all, we’re no better than anyone else at resolving moral ambiguities. But we always did know how to win a war.

As we now know, Israel did not know how to win this war, just like the US has not been able to win the war against the insurgency in Iraq (I know, I know, these are very different situations, but they get at similar mental states). It was not like the old days at all. Veteran Israeli commentator Meron Benvenisti got it mostly right when he predicted on July 26 in Haaretz that Israeli support for the war, for how the war was being waged, would turn around quite quickly, particularly among his fellow commentators. He was right to say that the support, the nostalgia Keret detected would shift, but it did not really happen until the cease fire came, and people saw little had been achieved.

Now the traditional Israeli response of political brinksmanship has begun, and The Head Heeb provides good analysis of the likely outcome of this political jarring. For me, though, the more important jarring has been over Dan Halutz, because it brings us back to the “joke” of Palestine, and the haunting feelings described by Pvt. Gronov and Etgar Keret. With questions both about his military strategy and now his stock sales just as the war was beginning, the call for Halutz to resign grows louder and louder.

I wrote about Halutz last year, quoting extensively his infamous interview following the Saleh Shehadeh bombing. In that interview, Halutz all but said he believed killing Palestinians, including innocent children, was a joke. Those sentiments, this approach may finally haunt the rest of Israel as it has Yesh Gvul and others for years.

Perhaps Halutz’s actions and Lebanon overall will teach everyone that “the old days” and “real wars” are gone. That Israel, the IDF cannot simply win wars the way they used to, even when the Palestinians are not the foe. Israel is stuck with its “joke,” with having to deal with “resolute young people wearing explosive belts…[and] long lines of people waiting at our checkpoints, women about to give birth and elderly people struggling to endure the stifling heat.” And if it responds to the next attack by Hizballah as it did in July, it will soon have a new “joke” on its hands.

This is a scary thought. At once, it demonstrates that a new way is needed for there to be a real future, that solutions that are entirely or even primarily military are not, in fact, solutions at all. But it also shows that Israel is perhaps in more peril than it has been in decades. Maybe the “mortal danger” scenarios laid out by the mainstream Jewish community that I described in a recent post are more realistic than any on the left would like to admit.

Hopefully we can bring these conclusions together, finally: Israel is in danger, and military force is not the solution. So now we need to take a real look at how to move forward — as a country and as a people. If not, Pvt. Gronov’s joke — and maybe others — will haunt us for a long time to come.

Brad