ISRAEL’S PATH NOT TAKEN
A memoir by the son of an Israeli general who took up the Palestinian cause shows what might have been
Palestinians in Gaza continue to suffer and die today, and I’ve always considered the horrors there since Hamas’s surprise attack inside Israel on October 7, 2023, to be the work of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. But he and the religious fanatics who keep him in office, were not there at the beginning.
A memoir, The General’s Son by Miko Peled, first published in 2012 and reissued in 2022, focuses on the life and times of the author’s father, Matti Peled, an Israeli general who played a key role in the country’s early conquests in the Middle East, including the famed Six-Day War of 1967, in which Israel captured the whole of the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza in a little over one hundred hours of warfare, while also occupying the West Bank and the Golan Heights. Arab casualties were fifteen thousand; Israel suffered less than eight hundred combat losses. In the fanatical Zionist view that existed then and as it does today, these were 4,000-year-old biblical lands—Eretz Yisrael—that were finally being returned to Jewish hands.
General Peled followed his warfare success by arguing that the time had come for Israel to take its foot off the throat of the Palestinian community. His son writes that his father always believed the war he was leading was to be a limited one, with the intent of punishing the Egyptians for their breach of a recent ceasefire and to assert Israeli legitimacy and military might. “Taking the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights,” Miko writes, “was never part of any official plan.”
