Jewish World Review July
3, 2006 / 7 Tamuz, 5766
However much I loathe Steven Spielberg — now, there's a hook — his "Saving
Private Ryan" comes to mind on hearing that the Israeli army has launched
a major offensive into Gaza to secure the release of 19-year-old Cpl. Gilad
Shalit, recently seized by the Palestinian group Hamas.
"Private Ryan," of course, is only a movie and tells a very kind of
different story. It's about a made-up mission, not to rescue a soldier
from the all-too-likely savage depredations of Islamic jihadists, but to
remove him from combat in Normandy. Viewers are supposed to buy the notion
that the War Department, in the chaotic midst of the momentous Allied invasion
of Europe, ordered up a platoon to save Private Ryan as an act of mercy
for the soldier's mother, whose other sons have died as soldiers in battle.
Which is a preposterous notion. Incidentally, most of the rescuers are
killed in the course of the mercy mission. Clearly, saving Private Ryan
is hell.
But there's more to it than a historical derring-do. For me, the 1998
epic lives on not for its famous 35-minute recreation of the landing at
Omaha Beach, but for its odious message. As one GI puts it, saving Private
Ryan may well be the only worthwhile thing to come out of this whole, awful
"mess."
The "mess" in question, of course, is World War II. Defeating Hitler,
for example, ending fascism in Europe, even liberating the remnant of European
Jewry from Nazi death camps — all fail to garner for the U.S. Army the
mega-director's cinematic approval. The fantasy rescue of a single GI from
combat, however, becomes not just a cause celebre, but the Spielbergian
causus belli.
Such '60s-infused revisionism in a movie that has been weirdly and wildly
revered as The Real Thing drove my late father into what are quite accurately
described as paroxysms of rage — the memory of which I cherish as a particularly
vibrant part of his legacy. As a veteran of the Normandy campaign (D-Day
plus two), he realized that, through Spielberg's lens, the climactic invasion
of Europe had been sundered from its historical context, serving instead
as an arbitrary backdrop for a panoply of behaviors and attitudes more
common to the Vietnam generation than to the men with whom he fought across
Europe. No wonder my Dad also rejected what he once acidly described in
a letter as "the peculiar beam of celestial light suddenly conferred on
Spielberg" for the "great service ... in revealing to the world that there
was actually a real-life event called World War II."
But from Spielberg's ersatz vision of the past emerges a disturbing
clarity about the present. In divorcing the climactic events of D-Day from
their grand goals and significant accomplishments, Spielberg staged a fictional
war story without a historical point — seemingly without any conception
of military victory. In the context of World War II, such a vision of war
is blind. But in our own time, this same vision of war, seemingly without
any conception of military victory, has become a grim reality. Which is
where Cpl. Shalit, unfortunately, comes back in.
Israeli soldiers (and also, given the beheading, mutilation and booby-trapping
of two soldiers in Iraq, American soldiers) do not fare well in the hands
of Islamic jihadists.
Who, for example, can forget the 2000 lynchings of two Israeli reservists
— truck drivers, as it happened — who were beaten beyond recognition, their
eyes gouged out and their bodies dismembered by a Ramallah mob? No wonder
the Israeli army is on the march to try to save Cpl. Shalit from, yes,
a fate worse than death that may well be followed by death. But this military
mission, even with the destruction of Palestinian arms caches, has an extremely
limited objective.
Just as the fictional story of saving Private Ryan had nothing to do
with the effort to win the war for the Allies, the real-life invasion of
Gaza to save Cpl. Shalit has nothing to do with the effort to win the war
for the Israelis. Indeed, such an objective has long been out of the question.
Having effectively rendered Total War beyond the pale, the Western world,
of which Israel, by shared tradition, is a part, has also placed Total
Victory beyond grasp. That means that even if, G-d willing, the Israelis
save Cpl. Shalit, it doesn't augur a happy ending — or, indeed, any ending
at all.
JWR contributor Diana West is a columnist and editorial writer for the
Washington Times.
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