Moshe Arens’ life is an education in how and why Israel succeeded.
The Lithuanian-born and American-raised Israeli political icon, who died at the age of 93 on Jan. 7, was a veteran of both the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Irgun. Despite waiting until his 30s to settle in Israel, he became one of the Jewish state’s leading aeronautical scientists, as well as an ambassador, defense minister, and foreign minister. He also wrote a history of the right-wing Zionist Beitar youth movement’s role in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
The only conceivable advantage that this small nation with almost no natural resources has over the enemies that encircle it is its people and an ability to get the most out of the potential engineers-turned-statesmen-turned-historians in its midst. Perhaps Arens had this in mind when, as Israel’s ambassador to the United States, he made a 32-year-old director of marketing for a furniture company named Benjamin Netanyahu his deputy chief of mission in 1982. Bibi eventually defeated his mentor in an election for the leadership of the right-wing Likud Party in 1999 and is now the second-longest-tenured prime minister in Israel’s history.
Arens served as defense minister three times, including during the grim aftermath of the Sabra and Shatila massacre amid Israel’s doomed occupation of the southern half of Lebanon in the mid-’80s. Aluf Benn wrote that Arens implemented “the most far-reaching organizational changes ever made by the IDF,” including the creation of a ground force command and the integration of missile defense into the military’s broader strategy. Arens spearheaded efforts to develop an indigenous fighter jet, an undertaking which floundered and was eventually discontinued as the result of political and commercial pressure from Washington. Still, the abortive Lavi project set the ambitions of the modern-day Israeli defense industry. Game-changers such as the Iron Dome missile interceptor are now entirely developed in-country and there is little high-end conventional defense technology that Israel is incapable of making on its own, thanks partly to Arens.
He was a hawk and stood against the land-for-peace formulation, sometimes to a fault. He refused the Defense portfolio in 1980 because he opposed aspects of the landmark agreement between Israel and Egypt, which remains a cornerstone of regional stability. His skepticism of the Oslo process, and of Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, has aged far better. Arens represented the revisionist right at its most gentlemanly and sober. Arens, who was a leader in Beitar who met Ze’ev Jabotinsky as a teenager, came from a branch of Jewish nationalism that was pragmatic, relatively secular, and tolerant of Israel’s Arab minority, especially compared to the pseudo-messianic strands of religious Zionism that have emerged as a political force in recent decades.
Like Shimon Peres, Arens was one of the few remaining Israelis who connected the state’s creation to its present realities, a living bridge between Menachem Begin’s Herut Party, of which he was a founding member, and Benjamin Netanyahu, whose political career Arens helped make and who was the first prime minister born in Israel. For those who believe Netanyahu recklessly undermined Israel’s relationship with Washington during the Clinton and Obama presidencies, Arens influence is not seen in a positive light. Netanyahu introduced a more divisive American-style politics and surrounded himself with American conservatives, which has not worked to Israel’s advantage in dealing with Democratic U.S. presidents. Arens himself might agree. In later years, he joked that Netanyahu “was never one to listen to anyone.”
Arens didn’t enter politics until his late-40s, when he was already a highly accomplished engineer. Anshel Pfeffer noted in Ha’aretz that Arens never mastered the unique Israeli art of pushiness, which could explain why he never came close to reaching the prime minister’s office. Arens lacked Netanyahu’s rhetorical gifts, as well as his craving for the political and media spotlight. Almost no Israeli leader has grasped or, less generously, manipulated the psyche of both the electorate and his political opponents as effectively as the man they call “Bibi.”
But perhaps both personality types, and both skill-sets, were needed for Israel to reach its current position of strength and security. Israel’s founding generation understood the stakes of the Zionist enterprise and their nation’s inevitably slim margin for error. The next wave of leaders consolidated their predecessors’ achievements and turned Israel into a functioning and normal-enough country as the potential for total destruction waned. The death of Arens, one of the last major Israeli figures who was forged during the creation of the state, might prompt the second generation of leaders, of Netanyahu’s vintage, to think what they would like to leave behind.
Armin Rosen is a New York-based reporter-at-large for Tablet Magazine.
