Free Lion's Honey by David Grossman Page B

less, his ability to apply force without any restraints or moral inhibitions, an ability which history withheld from thetrod-upon Jews for millennia, until the establishment of the State of Israel.
    In Hebrew, he is almost always referred to as ‘Samson the hero’, and elite combat units of the Israeli army have been named after him, from ‘Samson’s Foxes’ of the 1948 War of Independence to the ‘Samson’ unit created during the first Palestinian intifada in the late 1980s (not to mention a chain of body-building clubs called the ‘Samson Institute’, set up in the 1960s, by a muscle-bound rabbi named Rafael Halperin).
    Yet there is a certain problematic quality to Israeli sovereignty that is also embodied in Samson’s relationship to his own power. As in the case of Samson, it sometimes seems that Israel’s considerable military might is an asset that becomes a liability. For it would seem, without taking lightly the dangers facing Israel, that the reality of being immensely powerful has not really been internalised in the Israeli consciousness, not assimilated in a natural way, over many generations; and this, perhaps, is why the attitude to this power, whoseacquisition has often been regarded as truly miraculous, is prone to distortion.
    Such distortion may lead, for example, to ascribing an exaggerated value to the power that one has attained; to making power an end in itself; and to using it excessively; and also to a tendency to turn almost automatically to the use of force instead of weighing other means of action – these are all, in the end, characteristically ‘Samsonian’ modes of behaviour.
    To this may be added the well-known Israeli feeling, in the face of any threat that comes along, that the country’s security is crumbling – a feeling that also exists in the case of Samson, who in certain situations seems to shatter into pieces, his strength vanishing in the blink of an eye. This kind of collapse, however, does not reflect one’s actual strength, and often carries in its wake an overblown display of force, further complicating the situation. All of this attests, it would seem, to a rather feeble sense of ownership of the power that has been attained, and, of course, to a deep existential insecurity. This isconnected, without a doubt, to the very real dangers lying in wait for Israel, but also to the tragic formative experience of being a stranger in the world, the Jewish sense of not being a nation ‘like other nations’, and of the State of Israel as a country whose very existence is conditional, whose future is in doubt and steeped in jeopardy, feelings that all the nuclear bombs that Israel developed, in a program once known as the ‘Samson Option’, cannot eradicate.
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    After smiting the Philistines, Samson goes and establishes residence in the cave of the rock of Etam, which would appear to be located near the town of Etam in the territory of the tribe of Judah. 22 There he sits by himself, in apparent retirement from society after being disappointed in mankind.
    Except that now the Philistines get ready to take their revenge. They head for Judah and preparethemselves for battle. The men of Judah, frightened by the Philistine mobilisation, come to ask why on earth the Philistines are preparing to make war upon them, and the Philistines explain: ‘We have come to take Samson prisoner, and to do to him as he did to us.’
    Three thousand men of Judah proceed apace to Samson’s dwelling place in the cave of the rock of Etam. Samson, it will be recalled, is not a member of the tribe of Judah, and he is about to bring down upon them a war that does not ‘belong’ to them. ‘You knew that the Philistines rule over us’, they say to him anxiously, ‘why have you done this to us?’ Three thousand men stand around him filled with trepidation, and Samson, with simple, stubborn logic, replies: ‘As they did to me, so I did to them.’
    Three thousand men steal glances at one