Martin Van Creveld writes: Last week a female Israeli soldier, Hadar (meaning, roughly, “Splendor,” or “Glory,”) Cohen, was killed in the course of duty. Two months into the Israel Defense Force, just two days after she had completed her basic training and taken the military oath of allegiance, she found herself standing guard at Old Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate. With her were another female soldier and some male comrades. Three terrorists (some would call them Palestinian freedom fighters) armed with knives, submachine guns which they concealed under their coats emerged. One terrorist stabbed and was able to wound the other female soldier before Hadar gunned him down, probably saving her comrade’s life. Thereupon a second terrorist turned on her and stabbed her to death before he and the third terrorist present were “wasted”—this is standard language—by her fellow soldiers. She was nineteen years old.
I did not know Hadar personally. Ere she was killed, I had never heard of her. By all accounts. she was what her name proclaimed her to be: namely, a splendid young woman with her entire future in front of her. Idealistic and determined to prove herself by serving her country as best she could, she volunteered to do a man’s job; i.e was trained to become what both the IDF and the media call a lohemet, meaning either “fighter” or “warrior.”
But do not allow yourself to be misled. The term does not mean she went through anything like a full infantryman’s course. No Israeli woman does, and of those who tried to do so on a more or less experimental basis many have been injured, some of them very badly. All it means is that she was taught how to use her weapon, apparently a shortened version of the M-16 rifle (the real thing would have been too long for her to operate efficiently), and put into a bulletproof vest. So equipped, she was made to stand guard at what is currently one of the most dangerous spots in Israel; dangerous in the sense that, over the last few weeks, it has been the scene of several more or less similar attacks.
Even in Israel, the only country in history which (to its shame, some would say) has conscripted women into its military, a dead or injured female soldier is no ordinary event. That explains the media circus that has been going on around the deceased girl. Hadar’s own funeral was attended by the minister of home security. Accompanied by his retinue, the Chief of Staff, Lieutenant General Eisenkot, came to visit the female injured soldier in hospital and saluted her in front of the cameras. Not to be outdone Prime Minister Netanyahu, normally not the most sensitive of men, did the same. Had the dead and injured soldiers been male, almost certainly none of them would have bothered. All three may have felt that there was something deeply wrong, morally speaking, in making Hadar stand guard as she did. Or else, which in Netanyahu’s case seems more likely, that doing so would provide yet another photo-op.
Ultimately the reason why there is something deeply wrong with having women guard men and sacrifice themselves for them, instead of the other way around, is rooted in our mammalian biology. As everyone knows, the mammalian female’s investment in conceiving the young, bearing them, and bringing them into the world is huge. Not so that of the male who takes just a few minutes to do what has to be done and withdraws. Females can only have so and so many offspring during their lifetime; for males, so large is the number as to be practically unlimited.
The mathematics of reproduction explain why, among many mammalian species, the lives of males count for much less than those of females. When there is a threat it is the males which defend the females, never the other way around. Among us humans, the dangers surrounding delivery—at one time, one woman in four used to die in or soon after childbirth—provide another reason why women should not be heedlessly sacrificed. Briefly, nature itself has made women the indispensable sex. Compared with men, in any society they are a biological treasure and must be preserved. Even if doing so costs the lives of men.
Elementary, my dear Watson, Sherlock Holmes would have said. Yet the members of that peculiar species, modern feminists, seem unable to grasp even the most elementary biological facts. Half a century after Betty Friedan raised the standard of revolt, their real motives in claiming the kind of equality that cost Hadar her life remain no less mysterious than the famous feminist mystique itself. Unless, of course, Freud was right and penis envy makes the world go round.
Poor Hadar. I am aware that some people on the other side would say that she got just what she deserved. Be that as it may, and putting politics aside, all she herself wanted was to “contribute” to her country. But apparently she could find no better way to do so than to do what men normally do and what nature, by giving them stronger bodies, has made them more fit to do. Now she is dead, and my heart goes out to her and her family. Yet I cannot help wondering whether, by getting married, giving birth to a couple of children, and raising them properly as a mother should her contribution would not have been greater than it was.
May her soul rest in peace.
