Here is an extract from the moving, honest book ‘Israel – what went wrong?’by Omer Bartov

When the first intifada, or uprising, broke out, in late 1987, I was teaching at Tel Aviv University. I was appalled by Minister of Defense Yitzhak Rabin’s instruction to the IDF to “break the arms and legs” of Palestinian youths who were throwing rocks at heavily armed troops. I wrote a letter to him warning that, based on my research on the indoctrination of the armed forces of Nazi Germany, I feared that under his leadership the IDF was heading down a similarly slippery slope. As my research had shown, young German men, even before their conscription, had internalized core elements of Nazi ideology, especially the view that the “subhuman” Slav masses, led by insidious Bolshevik Jews, were threatening Germany and the rest of the civilized world with destruction, and that therefore Germany had the right and duty to create for itself a “living space” in the East and to decimate or enslave that region’s population. This worldview was then further inculcated into the troops, so that by the time they marched into the Soviet Union, they perceived their enemies through that prism. The fierce resistance put up by the Red Army only confirmed the need to utterly destroy Soviet soldiers and civilians alike, most especially the Jews, who were seen as the main instigators of Bolshevism. The more destruction the German troops wrought, the more fearful they became of the revenge they could expect if their enemies prevailed. The result was the killing of up to twenty-seven million Soviet soldiers and citizens.

To my astonishment, a few days after writing to Rabin, I received a one-line response from him, chiding me for daring to compare the IDF to the German military. This gave me the opportunity to write him a more detailed letter, explaining my research and my anxiety about using the IDF as a tool of oppression against unarmed occupied civilians. Rabin responded again, with the same statement: “How dare you compare the IDF to the Wehrmacht.” In retrospect, I believe this exchange reveals something about his subsequent intellectual journey. For as we know from his later engagement in the Oslo peace process, however flawed, he did eventually recognize that in the long run Israel could not sustain the military, political, and moral price of the occupation.