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PDF FormatThere are certainly elements of truth in some of the allegations raised. The reality of power—and especially power wielded in desperation, as Zionist power was—is that it inevitably has its seamier side. But instead of contributing to a new balance in Israeli historiography, the new academics have waged what amounts to a scorched earth campaign against the past, joining authors and artists in a wholesale effort to wreck the basic faith of the Israeli public in its own history. As the novelist Aharon Meged, a veteran member of the Labor movement, described the rise of post-Zionism among Israeli intellectuals: “For two or three decades now, several hundred of our society’s ‘best,’ men of the pen and of the spirit … have been working single-mindedly and without respite to preach and prove that our cause is not just: Not only that it has been unjust since the Six Day War and the ‘occupation’ … and not only since the founding of the state in 1948 … but since the beginnings of Zionist settlement at the end of the last century.”5
In light of this assault, every value invoked in building the Jewish state—the ingathering of the exiles, the redemption of a neglected land, the purity of arms used in self-defense—is repainted as the product of ignorance, hypocrisy and cynicism, as is the Jewish state itself. “Post-Zionism” becomes the only belief acceptable to an “enlightened” individual.
By now post-Zionist truths have become so self-evident as to constitute an Israeli “political correctness” justifying—let no one be surprised—the censorship of opposing views. The most celebrated example is that of Maya Kaganskaya, a razor-witted literary critic and a well-known personality in the Israeli Russian-language press. After her immigration to Israel, Kaganskaya was for a brief while a prominent figure in Hebrew literary circles. But her career as an Israeli intellectual came to an end on July 24, 1992, when a translator named Nili Mirski accused her in Ha’aretz of harboring hitherto concealed nationalist views.
Mirski quoted from a piece of Kaganskaya’s in Russian which compared Israeli socialism to Soviet communism, ridiculed the farmer-proletarianism of Israeli fashion, bristled against the social control methods of kibbutz society, and argued that the Israeli left can no longer be considered Zionist. Having thus “discovered” Kaganskaya’s views, Mirski went on to accuse her of “complete inability to understand the Israeli reality” and “capricious and burning hatred” of the left-cultural clique, which had showered her with honors “she will probably be sorry to give up.”6
In the three years since the appearance of Mirski’s handiwork, Kaganskaya has been erased from the Israeli literary establishment. Virtually none of her essays have appeared in Hebrew. She has been blacklisted by the cultural media and salons. She has returned to the land of her forefathers—there to become a despised Jewish dissident.
III
As for Israeli politicians, few would openly admit to being post-Zionists. You could still lose a lot of votes that way. But this does not mean Israeli policy-making has remained immune to the assault on Zionism taking place in intellectual circles.
With the disappearance from public life of the state’s founding fathers—Labor’s Ben-Gurion died in 1973, and Likud’s Begin ceased all public activity in 1983—both of the major political parties began to drift. In the absence of a countervailing nationalist intellectual movement, Labor’s nationalist agenda has been rapidly eviscerated, in its place a deck of post-Zionist concepts resembling the worldview of the European “New Left” (think of John Lennon). A less pronounced shift in the same direction has been taking place in the Likud.
The victory of the Labor party in June 1992 therefore marked no return to the Labor Zionism of twenty years ago. Indeed, the “Labor” half of the formula had been recanted de facto at a party convention that year which had discarded the red banner and the socialist anthem, the Internationale. And as the policies of the Rabin government unfolded over the next four years, it became clear that the “Zionist” half had fared no better: Virtually every area of government policy was quietly redirected to dismantling the Jewish national character of the state.
For example, Israel’s schools have been subjected to two decades of progressive dilution of Jewish subjects such as Bible, Talmud and Jewish history. But the new Labor government outdid its predecessors by installing Shulamit Aloni, its most radical anti-Jewish fringe, as Minister of Education. In this post, Aloni declared traditional Jewish dietary laws unnecessary, attacked school trips to Auschwitz for stirring up “nationalist” sentiment among the students, and insisted that references to God be eliminated from IDF memorial services.7 The educational activities of Labor’s Deputy Education Minister, Micha Goldman, included calling for a change in the text of Hatikva, the national anthem, “in order to give expression to citizens who are not Jews”; advocating that the poetry of Tewfik Ziyad, an Arab nationalist and anti-Zionist, be taught “next to the poetry of Bialik”;8 and ordering a purge of religious teachers in the ministry’s school system in Russia.9 Amnon Rubenstein, taking up the post of Minister of Education later in the term, continued in the same vein, calling for revision of the directives governing Israel’s schools so as to remove “archaic” references to “Jewish values and culture,” “love of the homeland” and “loyalty to the Jewish people”; instead, students in the public schools are to learn “the language, culture, and unique heritage of the various population groups in the country.”10
The ministry’s appointment as Chairman of the Committee for History Curriculum Reform was Prof. Moshe Zimmermann, known for using media interviews to compare Orthodox Jewish children to Hitler Youth, the Bible to Mein Kampf, and the Israel Defense Forces to the SS.11 According to Zimmermann, “Learning about the Jewish people and the State of Israel appears in the [new educational] program, but certainly not as a subject of primary importance.”12
A similar trend is in evidence in the Defense Ministry, which has recently approved a new code of ethics for the armed forces called The Spirit of the IDF— “the moral and normative identity card of the Israel Defense Forces … according to which every soldier … educates himself and his fellows.” The new code is a showcase of post-Zionist virtue, touting the importance of defending “democracy” against all possible menace. Yet nowhere in its eleven “values” and thirty-four “basic principles” does it refer to the Jewish state, the Jewish people, the Jewish tradition or the land of Israel.
So ubiquitous have been the efforts to dejudaize the Israeli government that it is often hard to read the papers without thinking it is all a joke. Shortly after the 1992 elections, in which Labor had pledged to stop spending money building highways in the territories “for the benefit of the settlers,” Housing Ministry Director-General Aryeh Mizrahi announced a new plan in which highways would be built in the territories anyway—so products from Syria, Saudi Arabia and Jordan would be able to come to port in Haifa and Ashdod once peace is at hand.13 The new Ministry of Tourism likewise determined its new focus to be developing Islamic tourism. The Ministry of Religious Affairs recently promulgated new guidelines for the disbursement of funds; the guidelines give preference to groups encouraging meetings between Jewish and Moslem youth, “secular” groups using “multimedia and games” to promote Judaism, and organizations promoting Moslem pilgrimage to Mecca.14 Even as seemingly benign a government agency as the Parks Authority has called for cutting the nation’s birth rate to zero, and, if necessary, amending the Law of Return to prevent immigration of foreign Jews—all to protect the national parks, of course.15
The Jewish Agency, a quasi-governmental body ostensibly responsible for Jewish immigration, has begun testing foreign Jews to determine whether they are “fit” to immigrate to Israel.16 Its new head, Avraham Burg, has been one of the leading advocates of revising Israeli law to “separate religion and state.” He has insisted that efforts to find “lost” Jewish tribes and bring them to Israel “must be frustrated every step of the way,”17 and declared Yeshayahu Leibowitz (of “Judeo-Nazis” fame) to be his “moral compass.” Burg’s advisers Haim Ben-Shachar and Arik Carmon have developed a plan whereby the Zionist movement would drop its focus on Jewish immigration and concern itself with distributing “pluralistic” Jewish material over the Internet.18 The National Insurance Institute is likewise phasing out its long-standing system of family benefits for citizens who have served in the armed forces—in order to prevent discrimination against the majority of Arabs who choose not to serve. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court’s new Chief Justice Aharon Barak has articulated a doctrine under which, not Jewish or Zionist values, but the beliefs of “the enlightened public in Israel” will be the benchmark against which Israeli law is interpreted.
But nowhere has the strange fruit of post-Zionist policy been more apparent than in the Foreign Ministry, which has come to be a kind of foreign ministry not for the Jewish state but for the entire Middle East. Among the consequences is that a chief responsibility of Israeli diplomats has become fundraising for Arab regimes—which are asserted to become more peaceable when plied with ever-higher levels of aid. Thus, in the judgment of then-Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin, Israel is “a wealthy country” needing no donations from abroad;19 but Jewish philanthropic organizations have an “obligation” to provide assistance to the PLO and Jordan.20 Ministry Director-General Uri Savir claimed that “Anyone who objects to American aid to the PLO has no right to be called a friend of Israel.”21 Aid for Syria, too, has become an aim of Israeli policy.
As for more traditional foreign policy goals, like explaining the needs and interests of the Jewish state abroad, then-Foreign Minister Shimon Peres ordered the closing of the Ministry’s Information Department, because “if you have good policy, you do not need public relations.”22 Sites such as the Golan Heights and Masada which connote Israeli nationalism and strength have been removed from the schedules of visiting dignitaries (while the Holocaust memorial remains sacrosanct).23 For ambassadors, the Foreign Ministry selected post-nationalists such as Gad Ya’acobi at the United Nations (“There is no such thing as Jewish land”)24 and Prof. Shimon Shamir in Amman (“When we celebrate our Independence Day, it is always incumbent upon us to remember that our holiday is a day of destruction for another people”).25
The strategic aims of Israeli foreign policy? Again, Beilin: Israel should become “a country involved in resolving other people’s conflicts, [and] providing officials for the UN, including UN Secretary-Generals.”26 Peres: “There can be no doubt that Israel’s next goal should be to become a member of the Arab League.”27
Thus have the United Nations and the Arab League become the highest concerns of a post-Zionist foreign policy. The existence and welfare of the Jewish state has become too parochial an aim for Israeli leaders.
IV
Zionism was predicated on the idea that the land of Israel is the historic inheritance of only one people, the Jews; that this right was recognized under international law by the League of Nations in 1920; and that the Arabs, having secured self-expression in twenty Arab national states, do not need one more. It was such a Jewish-nationalist view which guided Ben-Gurion, who insisted that: “No Jew has the right to relinquish the right of the Jewish nation to the land of Israel.… Even the whole Jewish people alive today has no authority to relinquish any part whatsoever of the land. This is a right of the Jewish nation in all its generations—a right which may not be forfeited under any condition.”28
Nothing could be further from these original Zionist premises than the Oslo agreement, in which the government of Israel and the PLO agreed to recognize “their mutual legitimate and political rights”—a phrase usually glossed over as though it merely sets up Israeli concessions in the West Bank and Gaza. But considering that all previous Israeli governments had claimed the land as the legitimate right of the Jewish people alone, conceding the “mutual legitimate rights” of Jews and Arabs to the land is a step pregnant with meaning not only for Hebron and Jerusalem, but for Haifa and Tel Aviv as well. To claim that the United States and Mexico have “mutual legitimate and political rights” to Texas is a way of saying that no part of Texas belongs rightfully and solely to America. Similarly, in creating an equivalence between Jewish and Arab rights, Oslo proposes that the Jews give up some of the land to the PLO—but on the strength of equivalent Arab “rights” to all of it.
Which cuts to the heart of why Oslo has created such a sandstorm of opprobrium and horror in Israel: the recognition of such an Arab national right to the land of Israel is a flagrantly post-Zionist proposition. It means that the PLO’s carnival of carnage spanning three decades was a perhaps distasteful, but nevertheless justified war of resistance. By the same token, all the lives lost in pursuing Zionism—from the draining of the malarial swamps to the raid on Entebbe—all were in the service of a morally questionable and perhaps even illegitimate enterprise. For under this rendering of history, the land never really belonged to the Jews.
One would like to believe these implications of the Oslo agreement were unintended, the product of diplomatic expedience. Unfortunately for this supposition, Shimon Peres has written a book explaining the ideological underpinnings of the agreement in detail. In The New Middle East, Peres rejects the entire concept of the national state, arguing that wherever “particularist nationalism … has staked a claim, the social order has been subverted and hostility and violence have taken root.”29 It was Jewish and Arab nationalism, says Peres, that caused the Arab-Israeli wars, and the only solution is to leave these nationalisms behind, forging what he calls an “ultranational” entity encompassing the entire Middle East, with a common Arab-Jewish government, army and economy.
If Arabs and Jews are to give up their respective nationalisms and live in such a New Middle East, what would be their identity? Peres is unequivocal: “One day our self-awareness and personal identity will be based on this new reality, and we will find that we have stepped outside the national arena.” True, “people are not yet ready to accept an ultranational identity,” but he nevertheless believes that gradually “a new type of citizenship is catching on, with a new personal identity.… Particularist nationalism is fading and the idea of a ‘citizen of the world’ is taking hold.”30
It was therefore no coincidence that the agreement with the PLO was drafted without consulting the Israeli military. Oslo was based on a presumed “new reality”—one in which both Zionism and Arab nationalism are “fading,” and the location of the defense borders is irrelevant, because the end of nationalism means the end of war.
But is also clear from Peres’ hoped-for “new personal identity” that the end of nationalism means the end of the Jewish people in Israel as well.
V
The Jewish state is first and foremost a political idea. Armies may menace it physically, but it is on the level of ideas that the gravest threats are registered. The Soviet Union was perhaps the most powerful state in the world militarily, but it fell in 1989 because (to borrow from Gidon Samet) “the ingredient that was the cement in the wall of the old national identity” had long since broken down.
Israel is in the midst of an ideological disintegration whose magnitude and meaning defy comprehension. Its most prominent political and cultural figures speak about the absorption of the country into the Arab League, compare the Israeli armed forces to Nazis, condemn as “archaic” the values of the national movement which founded the state, and is conducting negotiations over its capital city, Jerusalem.
The Jewish state is poorly equipped to cope with such a crisis. The Labor Zionists who built the state wished to flee the realm of ideas in which the Jews had been immersed for millennia and build something powerful and real, something physical. They built farms and factories and fighter planes, among the best in the world. But they did not recognize the need to build the idea of the Jewish state in the minds of the people. The result is that today, with the Zionist idea being expunged before their very eyes, most cannot even see what is happening. The factories and the fighter planes look fine.
In most countries, the role of defending the idea of the nation—the preservation and deepening of its heritage, its texts and holy places, and the wisdoms and social crafts which its people have acquired—belongs to political conservatives. But Israel has never had an organized political conservatism. What passes for a “national camp” in Israel, the Likud and its sister parties, has no tradition of intellectual discourse to speak of. It has no colleges, no serious think-tanks or publishing houses, no newspapers or broadcasting. Nothing like the writings of Smith, Burke or Hayek has ever been written in Hebrew, or even translated; the founding fathers translated Marx.
This means that, in spite of all the hardware procured over the last fifty years, the Jewish state will have to wage and win its next war, the war of ideas, outgunned again. Yet in this fight Israel’s Jewish nationalists have a hidden advantage: No people gives up its identity and life-meaning too easily, least of all the Jews. Indeed, it is just such conditions of intellectual wilderness and danger which bring the most creative and powerful aspects of the national character to the fore.
Consigned to political opposition for the first time during the last four years, Zionism has now become a conservatism. But just as it was the taste of annihilation that taught the Jews the need for physical defenses, it may be that this brush with ideological decay was needed for the Jews to learn the importance of the national idea—and of the political conservatism which protects it—for the survival of even a “normal” people.
VI
Israel’s new prime minister has been described as the first of a new type of national Israeli leader—young, telegenic, drawing his power from the public rather than the party. But Benjamin Netanyahu is also the last of the old type: A believing Zionist, for whom the Jewish people’s revival in history is the greatest of human achievements. One need only compare Netanyahu’s A Place Among the Nations to the writings of his defeated opponent to recognize that this is a man for whom the well-being and flourishing of the Jewish people and the Jewish state truly means everything.
The election of a Jewish nationalist prime minister does not solve Israel’s fundamental problem—the disintegration of its national culture—and it is far from clear what one man, even if he is prime minister, will be able to do about it. Enthusiasts of Israel’s “national camp” should remind themselves again that the Likud and its allies held sway over the Israeli government for a full fifteen years immediately prior to the Rabin-Peres government. It was precisely during those years that post-Zionism ceased to be the hobbyhorse of intellectual oddities and became the dominant cultural force in the Jewish state. Then, as now, a handful of Jewish nationalists haunted the corridors of the Prime Minister’s Office, but the battle was being fought and lost elsewhere.
The relentless trend towards a post-Zionist Israel must be reversed on the battlefield of ideas. If it is not, Netanyahu’s hairbreadth victory could just as quickly be transformed into defeat four short years from now; and then the process of dismantling the Jewish state will continue as though the Netanyahu administration had never been.
Dr. Yoram Hazony is the Director of The Shalem Center in Jerusalem. A version of this article first appeared in the October 9, 1995 issue of The Weekly Standard. Reprinted with permission.
Notes
1. Ha’aretz, July 4, 1995.
2. Ha’aretz, July 28, 1995.
3. Moshe Shamir, “Is Hebrew Literature Still Zionist?” in Nativ, January 1989, p. 44.
4. The Jerusalem Post, January 19, 1993.
5. “The Israeli Urge to Suicide”in Musaf Ha’aretz, June 10, 1994.
6. Musaf Ha’aretz, July 24, 1992.
7. The Jerusalem Post, May 10, 1995.
8. Ha’aretz, April 13, 1995.
9. Ha’aretz, January 6, 1995.
10. Ha’aretz, December 10, 1995.
11. Kol Tel-Aviv, April 28, 1995. Bible analogy referred to in Ha’aretz, May 2, 1995.
12. Ha’aretz, February 15, 1994.
13. The Jerusalem Post, June 4, 1993 and October 15, 1993.
14. Ha’aretz, July 2, 1995.
15. Yediot Aharonot, January 12, 1995.
16. Ha’aretz, July 7, 1995.
17. Ma’ariv, January 2, 1995.
18. Ben-Shachar is former president of Tel-Aviv University; Carmon is head of the Institute for Democracy; in Ha’aretz, March 16, 1995.
19. Ma’ariv, January 16, 1994.
20. Ma’ariv, March 2, 1995.
21. Nativ, May 1995, p. 9.
22. The Jerusalem Post, May 3, 1993.
23. Davar, January 12, 1995 and Al Hamishmar, January 12, 1995.
24. Outpost, May 1995, p. 5.
25. Nativ, July 1995, p. 10.
26. Israel at Forty-Something: A Political Profile of Israeli Society in the 1990s (Tel-Aviv: Yediot Aharonot, 1993), p. xiv.
27. Ha’aretz, December 21, 1994.
28. Speech before the 21st Zionist congress in Basel, 1937.
29. Shimon Peres, The New Middle East (New York: Henry Holy, 1993), p. 81.
30. Peres, p. 98.
