The headmaster of a prestigious Tel Aviv high school questions the exemplary status of the myth of Masada.
Haaretz, 5 November 2002
Suppose a Hamas suicide bomber were to come and “officiate” with wife and children, inviting under false pretenses a few Palestinians who favor peace, then set off his explosive belt and send himself to paradise along with the whole gathering. And suppose that, later, a Palestinian teacher were to take his class to the site of the suicide attack and hold a ceremony there in memory of the terrorist. What would we say? We might say that it bears some resemblance to the story of Masada.
Last week, UNESCO granted Masada the status of an international tourist site of particular historical significance. On the eve of the festivities that will follow this news, it would be wise to ask ourselves whether we really want this already ancient chapter of History to be our calling card before the world at large, and before our children.
In the early hours of the Zionist renaissance, when we were combing the pages of History in search of Jewish warriors who might show the way to a new generation of proud Hebrews, we also found Elazar Ben-Yair, the hero of Masada. We taught his final speech, an utterly electrifying one, as reported by the Jewish historian Yossef Ben Matityahou, known as Flavius Josephus, a former commander of the revolt against Rome who later went over to the enemy camp.
Whether out of ideology or out of ignorance, we have not often examined the story of Ben-Yair and his companions. The Jewish public of Israel, which in the time of the Second Temple was occupied by Rome, was broadly divided between zealots and moderates. The former fought the Romans; the latter feared that Roman vengeance would destroy the Jewish people, and took refuge in the study of the Torah, in order to keep the flame intact. Ben-Yair’s band left the ranks of the zealots because, for them, fighting the Romans was not enough, and because they regarded their own compatriots who did not see things as they did as a “fifth column” that constituted the real danger — a phenomenon found elsewhere and in other times. And when this band saw danger, it stabbed it.
Ben-Yair’s gang of thugs murdered moderate Jews (including assimilated Jews), along with their families, using a particular dagger called a “sica” in ancient Greek, which earned the band its name: the “sicarii,” that is to say, the dagger-wielders. The Talmud called them “listim” — robbers, thugs.
According to Flavius Josephus, Ben-Yair and his band of killers went from Galilee to Jerusalem, then to the town of Ein Gedi, killed 700 Jews, including women and children, and finally climbed up to Masada with their families. After fighting the enemy, and having been defeated, each warrior killed his wife and children before taking his own life.
What education are we giving our children? That fighting the enemy absolves the fighter — even of the political assassination of Jews, and of the murder of his own children? If Flavius Josephus is not credible, then the whole story he relates must be called into doubt. But if we accept its truthfulness, then we must place the crimes committed by this band on the ethical scale.
What can we say to those who claim that the norms of the time were different from those of today? Of course they were different, but the principle “Thou shalt not kill” had already been laid down, and it is impossible for us to raise our children on this principle and, at the same time, on the example of Masada.
We must give our youth paradigms, including paradigms of struggle against foreign occupation. The fighters of Gamla, for example, were contemporaries of those of Masada, and they too fought, and they too took their own lives, but their story never involved the murder of internal rivals or of their own children.
Who can see in Ben-Yair a paragon of virtue? The outlaws of the Kach movement (the movement of the racist rabbi Kahane, banned, translator’s note)? Yigal Amir (the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin, translator’s note)? Or perhaps even Hamas, which embraces murder and suicide (and this said without drawing any analogy between our sovereignty over this land and the Roman occupation)?
We must make the ascent of Masada with our pupils, because this place is part of the land of Israel, because its history belongs to the history of the people of Israel, and because the values and achievements of both the zealots and the moderates, and the dilemmas that lay at the heart of the debate, must be presented. But, above all, Masada was an alarm signal: of Israel’s evolution into Sodom, of the transformation of Rabin’s assassination into a norm, of the slide from reasonable debate toward civil war.
Trans.: Gérard Eizenberg for La Paix Maintenant