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PDF FormatA new Israeli government is to take office in the coming weeks, one which is, like its predecessor, committed to pushing on with negotiations over the final status of ancient Jewish cities such as Hebron, Bethlehem and Shiloh, as well as of Jerusalem itself. The administration’s positions are certain to constitute a change from the last three years of Labor government, with the new prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, promising a tougher bargaining position regarding all those material assets which he believes the Labor government had been too hasty in abandoning: Military installations, strategic terrain, water.
But whether the policies of the new government represent a change in kind or merely a change in degree depends not on its positions on arms and land and water, but on its sensitivity to existence of the vital cultural assets left on the table by the previous administration: Assets which cannot so easily be quantified by negotiators and military men; assets whose very existence many in the previous administration had simply denied, yet whose attenuation and even disappearance have come to be recognized as the most painful ramifications of the deal cut in Oslo in 1993 with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat.
Witness, for example, a recent exchange between two prominent columnists, both identified with the left, in the prestigious Israeli daily Ha’aretz.
“In their worst nightmares,” wrote Yoel Marcus, perhaps Israel’s most respected columnist and a long-time Labor supporter, “neither Yitzhak Rabin nor Shimon Peres could have imagined himself twenty-five years ago as the architect of a government that would take Israel back to its pre-1967 borders. But this is exactly what they are doing.…” Marcus asked Israelis to “leave for a moment the preoccupation with the headlines of the hour” and consider “the really dramatic revolution taking place.” The reason that the Golan Heights, Bethlehem and Jerusalem could be put on the negotiating block without pandemonium in the streets is the nearly total collapse of the Jewish nationalist ideology which built the state.
“Our people has long since tired of bearing Zionism on its shoulders generation after generation,” Marcus observed bitterly. “While the Arabs have remained faithful to their ideology of the holiness of the land … Israel is ready to withdraw lightly from the lands that were the cradle of Judaism” in exchange for “personal safety and a ‘normal’ life.”1
Marcus’ piece was gleefully parried by his colleague at Ha’aretz, Gidon Samet. “Thanks be to God,” he cheered. The agreement with Arafat “has broken down the ingredient that was the cement in the wall of our old national identity.” According to Samet, the disintegration of the cultural wall which had kept the conflict with the PLO alive signals a new Israeli openness to world culture, from pubs to pasta: “Madonna and Big Macs are only the most peripheral of examples of … a ‘normalness’ which means, among other things, the end of the terrible fear of everything that is foreign and strange.… Only those trapped in the old way of thinking will not recognize the benefits.…”2
It is not coincidental that both articles focused on “normalness” (normaliut in Hebrew), an old Jewish codeword meaning “like the gentiles.” “Normal” people, so the argument goes, do not live in fear of being blown up on buses. They do not hold grudges over crimes committed years ago, and they do not spend their time fighting over real or imagined burial places of real or imagined ancestors. They just go to pubs and eat pasta.
The debate over the normaliut supposedly ushered in by Oslo underscores what has become evident to Israelis of all persuasions in recent months: That Oslo was not, like the peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan, a strictly political achievement whose desirability can be judged in terms of guns and butter. For “the handshake,” as the deal with Arafat is known, sought to achieve the heart’s desire of “normal” Israelis by renouncing precisely those emotional assets which allow “Jewish” Israelis to lead meaningful lives.
And on the heels of this realization has come a second: The recognition that the Jewish state is sliding headlong into a bitter cultural civil war. Israel is realigning into two camps: Those for whom forgetting about Arafat’s murderous past and giving him what he wants means achieving an exhilarating liberation; and those for whom these concessions mean abandoning the struggle to return to Jewish history which was the entire purpose of the Jewish state in the first place—a calamity of unfathomable proportions.
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Zionism is Jewish nationalism—the belief that there should be a Jewish nation-state in the land of Israel. Few people today recognize what an abomination this idea was to Jewish intellectuals when it was formally constituted as a political organization in 1897. Of the great Jewish thinkers of all denominations, virtually none could stomach the idea: Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Haim Soloveitchik, the Hasidic rebbes of both Lubavitch and Satmar, all rejected the Jewish state for much the same reason: They believed the Jewish people was essentially a thing of the spirit, and that the creation of the state—which perforce meant a Judaism of tanks and explosives, of politics and intrigue, of bureaucracy and capital, in short the empowerment of Judaism—would mean the end of Judaism as a philosophy, an ideal, a faith.
What took the teeth out of the anti-Zionism of the Jewish left and right was the Holocaust. In the wake of the most fearsome possible demonstration of the evil of Jewish powerlessness, the anti-Zionism of all camps became an embarrassment. The pugnacious little fighters of Palestine lashing out at the British enemy and Arab marauders became the heroes of the Jewish people. By the time Jewish toughs such as David Ben-Gurion and Menachem Begin had managed to bomb the British off their backs, their state, Israel, had really become the state of virtually the entire Jewish people. After the gas chambers, almost every Jew everywhere had become a Zionist, a believer in the necessity and obligation of Jewish power.
Yet Jewish and even Israeli intellectuals never became reconciled to the empowerment entailed in the creation of a Jewish nation-state. The very desirability of the Israeli War of Independence in 1948 was caustically challenged in the writings of S. Yizhar, perhaps the most prominent writer of the postwar years. And by the 1960s, Israeli academia, itself founded by anti-nationalists such as Buber and Yehuda Magnes, had begun to spawn an entire generation of literary figures whose point of departure was the rejection of Jewish nationalism. Thus Amos Oz’s most famous novel, My Michael, portrays Jerusalem, the very symbol of the Jewish national revival as a city of brooding insanity and illness. Similarly, A.B. Yehoshua’s story, “Before the Forest,” has the young Jew joining forces with an Arab to burn down the “Zionist” forest planted on the ruins of an Arab village. In Yehoshua’s best-known novel, The Lover, the hero deserts his unit in mid-battle, and a high-school girl from a well-to-do family finds comfort in the arms of an Arab.
Other common themes of Israeli literature are much the same: the escape from Israel; the destruction of Israel; death (by decay, rather than struggle); the Israel Defense Forces as concentration camp, pigsty, whorehouse; and the ideal of disempowerment represented by the Holocaust—which, as novelist Moshe Shamir has observed, “is becoming the common homeland of the Jews, their promised land.”3
While literary figures have long led the effort to create a post-Zionist consciousness in Israel, recent years have seen an even more pronounced effort on the part of academics. The 1967 Six Day War immediately inspired attacks by opponents of nationalism such as Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who claimed that Israel was undergoing nazification, that Israel’s soldiers had become “Judeo-Nazis,” and that Israel would soon be setting up concentration camps4—a leitmotif soon mimicked and elaborated upon by other prominent intellectuals such as Amos Funkenstein (winner of the Israel prize) and the historian Moshe Zimmermann. In the last two decades, these seemingly far-out expressions of hatred for Zionist power have paved the way for a more “scientific” delegitimization of the Jewish state by historians, sociologists and journalists offering more acceptable versions of the same themes: Zionism was a colonialist movement, said Ilan Pappe. It forcibly expelled the Arab refugees from their homes in 1948, said Benny Morris. It fabricated a false connection between the Jews and the land, said Boas Evron. It used the Holocaust to advance its political ends, said Tom Segev. And so on.
