Tomer Benito

It seems that there has been a shift in the political power somewhere in the dungeons of the White House. Nobody wants to slay dragons anymore. The “war on terrorism” is now a question: “what are we doing there?” The withdrawal from Iraq is just a matter of time.  

This month Jewish people around the world are celebrating Passover in observance of their ancestral exodus from Egypt a few millennia ago. If you have ever wondered why the Jewish people still celebrate something that happened during biblical times, you are not alone. The answer is in this article title.

Let’s talk about exoduses:

The tools we have for documenting history today are much more advanced then those available in Egypt some 3000 years ago (papyrus paper and ink were the hottest stuff back then). Despite this, our problem today lies not in the type of medium we document history lessons with, but rather the way in which we disseminate these history lessons and morals.

The Vietnam War is something that almost nobody in America wants to remember, and we do a good job of not talking about the lessons learned from this experience. The justification our Government gave for going to war with the Viet Cong was to save the Vietnamese people from Communism. The objective was good, the method was violent, and the outcome was devastating. The exodus we do remember is the last American helicopter leaving the American embassy in Saigon (immediately thereafter renamed Ho Chi Minh City in honor of the eponymous Communist leader of North Vietnam). Ask the average American who Ho Chi Minh is and see whether the lesson from our exodus was integrated into the collective memory.

A few years later, one of the world’s Oil Empires changed its regime. After a swift revolution in Iran, The Shah was dethroned and replaced by Ayatollah Khomeini. The dictator took over and changed the geopolitical order in the Middle East. Fundamental Islam raised its head and ordered the exodus of infidels from Tehran. The exodus we speak of from Iran in 1979 is the American Embassy hostage situation. Ask the average American what happened there and how long this exodus lasted (444 days the Americans were under siege).

Four years later, still in the Middle East, a civil war aimed to shatter Lebanon, a small, fragile country that has recently been in the headlines again. A war between Muslims, Christians, and Druze escalated in this small area. The United States sent Marines to protect the minorities. The Lebanon southern border with Israel became hot and Israel invaded Lebanon. The world screamed for a cease fire. Not the entire world, though. An Iranian militant guerrilla force, named Hezbollah (sound familiar?), is created and intervenes. Hezbollah attempts to remove the infidels from Lebanon in order to force a win for the Shiite party amongst the bloodshed. 241 American Marines were killed in a suicide bombing attack in Beirut (the first one in the region). The U.S. ordered an immediate and complete withdrawal of its forces from Lebanon. From this exodus, the terrorists learned that suicide bombings are the best and cheapest method available for battle.  The terrorists also recognized that the West has not learned from the lessons of the past.

The moves the U.S. took against Afghanistan and Iraq were justified after 9/11. Diplomacy may have been a good tool to deal with rational sovereignties, but not with fundamental terrorists. Yet the objectives were unclear: “to wipe out terrorists and to make the world a safer place” sounded more like a mission statement than an objective.

So what do we do now? Our exoduses in the last few decades have not been associated with great victories, and perhaps that’s the reason these history lessons are not taught and disseminated to all. There is a reason why the Jewish people are obligated to tell the exodus story every week (during Shabbat prayers) and especially during Passover. This is the only way we can instill in the next generation the morals, lessons, and wisdom gleaned from mistakes (the difference between smart and wise is that a smart guy knows how to get into trouble and how to get out of it, while the wise guy knows how not to get into trouble).

There is a saying that “life is too short for us to learn everything from our own mistakes, so we should learn from others.”

History is a tool we should use as our best strategy, simply because history repeats. One of the leaders who fought for Israeli independence in 1948 said (I didn’t hear him, but I was told that he said that): “People who forget their past, their present is weak, and their future is dim in the fog.”

Socrates told us that “the only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance”. (469 BC - 399 BC).

How long will it take us to finally learn our lessons? 

Mr. Benito is the author of Rain for the Wicked, a new novel that thrills from start to finish.  Click here if you are ready to engage with sophistication, innovative solutions, and practical aspects of counter-terror measures in a unique way that would stay in your head. [click here for more information]