Edward Alexander
“Antisemitism directed at oneself was an original Jewish creation. I don’t know of
any other nation so flooded with self-criticism. Even after the Holocaust…harsh
comments were made by prominent Jews against the victims…. The Jewish ability
to internalize any critical and condemnatory remark and castigate themselves is
one of the marvels of human nature.… Day and night…that feeling produces
dread, sensitivity, self-criticism and sometimes self-destruction.”
—Aharon Appelfeld (New York Times Book Review, February 28, 1988)
I
In his essay of 1838 on Jeremy Bentham, J. S. Mill wrote that “speculative
philosophy, which to the superficial appears a thing so remote from the business
of life and the outward interests of men, is in reality the thing on earth
which most influences them, and in the long run overbears every other influence
save those which it must itself obey.” Of course Mill was not always
willing to wait for the long run and was often tempted by shortcuts whereby
speculative philosophers and other intellectuals could make their influence
felt upon government. Frightened by Tocqueville’s observations of American
democracy, Mill sought to prevent the “tyranny of the majority” by an elaborate
scheme of plural voting which would give everybody one vote but intellectuals
a larger number; when he awoke to the folly and danger of such a
scheme he switched his allegiance to proportional representation as a means of
allowing what he calls in On Liberty the wise and noble few to exercise their
due influence over the mindless majority.
By now we have had enough experience of the influence of intellectuals in
politics to be skeptical of Mill’s schemes. To look back over the major intellectual
journals of America in the years prior to and during the Second World
War—not only Trotskyist publications like New International or Dwight
Macdonald’s Politics, but the highbrow modernist and Marxist Partisan Review—
is to be appalled by the spectacle of the finest minds of America vociferous
in opposition to prosecuting the war against Hitler, which in their view was
just a parochial struggle between two dying capitalist forces. The pacifism of
English intellectuals in the late thirties led George Orwell to declare that some
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34 Jewish Divide Over Israel
ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals could believe them; and in one of his
Tribune columns of 1943 he said of the left-wing rumor in London that America
had entered the war only in order to crush a budding English socialist revolution
that “one has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe something like that.
No ordinary man could be such a fool.”
If we look at the influence of Israeli intellectuals upon Israeli policy in
recent decades, and especially during the Yitzhak Rabin/Shimon Peres and
Ehud Barak governments that prepared the Oslo Accords (and Intifada II), we
may conclude that Mill and Orwell were both right, Mill in stressing the remarkable
power of ideas, Orwell in insisting that such power often works evil,
not good.
Among the numerous misfortunes that have beset the Zionist enterprise
from its inception—the unyielding hardness of the land allegedly flowing with
milk and honey, the failure of the Jews of the Diaspora to move to Zion except
under duress, the constant burden of peril arising from Arab racism and imperialism—
was the premature birth of an intellectual class, especially a literary
intelligentsia. The quality of Israel’s intelligentsia may be a matter of dispute.
Gershom Scholem once remarked, mischievously, that talent goes where it is
needed, and in Israel it was needed far more urgently in the military than in the
universities, the literary community, the arts, and journalism. But the influence
of this intelligentsia is less open to dispute than its quality. When Shimon Peres
(who views himself as an intellectual) launched his ill-fated election campaign
of spring 1996 he surrounded himself with artists and intellectuals on the stage
of Tel Aviv’s Mann Auditorium.1 Three months earlier, he had listed as one of
the three future stars of the Labor Party the internationally famous novelist
Amos Oz, the same Amos Oz who was notorious among religiously observant
Jewish “settlers” for having referred to their organization Gush Emunim (Block
of the Faithful) in a speech of June 1989 in language generally reserved for
thieves and murderers: they were, he told a Peace Now gathering of about 20,00
people in Tel Aviv’s Malchei Yisrael Square, “a small sect, a messianic sect,
obtuse and cruel, [who] emerged a few years ago from a dark corner of Judaism,
and [are] threatening to... impose on us a wild and insane blood ritual... They
are guilty of crimes against humanity.” 2
Intellectuals in many countries have adopted the motto: “the other country,
right or wrong,” and worked mightily to undermine national confidence in
their country’s heritage, founding principles, raison d’être. But such intellectuals
do not usually arise within fifty years of their country’s founding, and in
no case except Israel have intellectuals cultivated their “alienation” in a country
whose “right to exist” is considered an acceptable subject of discussion
among otherwise respectable people and nations. As Midge Decter shrewdly
put it in May 1996, “A country only half a century old is not supposed to have
a full fledged accomplished literary intelligentsia... This is an extravagance
only an old and stable country should be allowed to indulge in.”2
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Israelis Against Themselves 35
The seeds of trouble amongst intellectuals in Zion antedated the state itself.
On May Day 1936 the Labor Zionist leader Berl Katznelson asked, angrily:
Is there another people on earth whose sons are so emotionally and mentally twisted
that they consider everything their nation does despicable and hateful, while every
murder, rape and robbery committed by their enemies fills their hearts with admiration
and awe? As long as a Jewish child... can come to the Land of Israel, and here catch the
virus of self-hate... let not our conscience be still.3
But what for Katznelson was a sick aberration would later become the normal
condition among a substantial segment of Israeli intellectuals. A major
turning point came in 1967, when the doctors of Israel’s soul, a numerous
fraternity, concluded that in winning a defensive war which, if lost, would have
brought its destruction, Israel had bartered its soul for a piece of land. The Arab
nations, shrewdly sensing that Jews were far less capable of waging the war of
ideas than the war of planes and tanks, quickly transformed the rhetoric of their
opposition to Israel’s existence from the Right to the Left, from the aspiration to
“turn the Mediterranean red with Jewish blood” (the battle cry of the months
preceding the Six Day War) to the pretended search for a haven for the homeless.
This deliberate appeal to liberals, as Ruth Wisse has amply demonstrated,4
created legions of critics of the Jewish state, especially among devout believers
in the progressive improvement and increasing enlightenment of the human
race. Israeli intellectuals who were willing to express, especially in dramatic
hyperbole, criticism of their own country’s alleged racism, imperialism, and
religious fanaticism quickly became celebrities in the American press. They
were exalted by people like Anthony Lewis as courageous voices of dissent,
even though what they had joined was, of course, a community of consent.
But it was not until a decade later that the Israeli intelligentsia turned massively
against the state, against Zionism, against Judaism itself. For in 1977 the
Labor Party lost its twenty-nine-year-old ownership of government to people it
considered its cultural inferiors, people Meron Benvenisti described as follows:
“I remember traveling on a Haifa bus and looking around at my fellow
passengers with contempt and indifference—almost as lower forms of human
life.”5 Such hysteria (which burst forth again in May 1996 when Benjamin
Netanyahu won the election) now became the standard pose of the alienated
Israeli intellectual, and it was aggressively disseminated by American publications
such as the New York Times, ever eager for Israeli-accented confirmation
of its own views. Amos Oz, for example, took to the pages of the New York Times
Magazine during the Lebanon War to deplore the imminent demise of Israel’s
“soul”: “Israel could have become an exemplary state... a small-scale laboratory
for democratic socialism.” But that great hope, Oz lamented, was dashed
by the arrival of Holocaust refugees, various “anti-socialist” Zionists, “chauvinistic,
militaristic, and xenophobic” North African Jews, and so forth.6 (These
are essentially the reasons why it was not until Menachem Begin became prime
minister that the Ethiopian Jews could come to Israel.) By 1995 Oz was telling
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36 Jewish Divide Over Israel
New York Times readers that supporters of the Likud party were accomplices of
Hamas.7 Even after spiritual brethren of Hamas massacred three thousand people
in the United States on September 11, 2001, Oz declared that the enemy was not
in any sense the radical Islamist or Arabic mentality but simply “fanaticism,”
and that in any case the most pressing matter he could think of was to give
“Palestinians their natural right to self-determination.” For good measure he
added the patently false assertion that “almost all [Muslims] are as shocked and
aggrieved [by the suicide bombings of America] as the rest of mankind.”8 Apparently
Oz had missed all those photos of Muslims round the world handing
out candy, ululating, dancing, and jubilating over dead Jews and dead Americans.
It was a remarkable performance, which made one wonder whether Oz gets
to write about politics because he is a novelist or gets his reputation as a novelist
because of his political views.
People like Benvenisti—sociologist, deputy mayor of Jerusalem until fired
by Teddy Kollek, and favorite authority on Israel for many years of the New
York Times and New York Review of Books—foreshadowed the boasting of the
intellectual spokesmen of later Labor governments that they were not only
post-Zionist but also post-Jewish in their thinking. Benvenisti, writing in 1987,
recalled proudly how “We would observe Yom Kippur by loading quantities of
food onto a raft and swimming out with it to an offshore islet in the Mediterranean,
and there we would while away the whole day feasting. It was a flagrant
demonstration of our rejection of religious and Diaspora values.”9
Anecdotal evidence of the increasingly shrill anti-Israelism (or worse) of
Israeli intellectuals is only too easy to amass. Some years ago the sculptor
Yigal Tumarkin stated that “When I see the black-coated haredim with the
children they spawn, I can understand the Holocaust.”10 Ze’ev Sternhell, Hebrew
University expert on fascism, proposed destroying the Jewish settlements
with IDF tanks as a means of boosting national morale.11 In 1969 the guru of
Labor Party intellectuals, the late Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, as Alvin
Rosenfeld observes elsewhere in this book, began to talk of the inevitable
“Nazification” of the Israeli nation and society. By the time of the Lebanon
War he had become an international celebrity because of his use of the epithet
“Judeo-Nazi” to describe the Israeli army. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990,
he outdid even himself by declaring (in words redolent of what Katznelson
had deplored in 1936): “Everything Israel has done, and I emphasize everything,
in the past 23 years is either evil stupidity or stupidly evil.”12 And in
1993 Leibowitz would be honored by the government of Yitzhak Rabin with
the Israel Prize.
In third place after Oz and Benvenisti among the resources of intellectual
insight into Israel’s soul frequently mined by Anthony Lewis, Thomas Friedman,
and like-minded journalists is David Grossman, the novelist. Grossman
established his credentials as an alienated intellectual commentator on the
state of his country’s mind in a book of 1988 called The Yellow Wind, an ac-
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Israelis Against Themselves 37
count of his seven-week journey through the “West Bank,” a journey undertaken
in order to understand “how an entire nation like mine, an enlightened
nation by all accounts, is able to train itself to live as a conqueror without
making its own life wretched.”13 This is a complicated book, not without occasional
patches of honesty. But its true flavor can be suggested by two successive
chapters dealing with culture and books, especially religious ones.
Grossman first visits the Jewish settlement of Ofra, at which he arrives fully
armed with suspicion, hostility, and partisanship, a “wary stranger” among
people who remind him, he says, of nothing human, especially when they are
“in the season of their messianic heat” (52). In Ofra, Grossman does not want “to
let down his guard” and be “seduced” by the Sabbath “warmth” and “festivity”
of these wily Jews (34). Although most of his remarks to Arabs in conversation
recounted in The Yellow Wind are the perfunctory gestures of a straight man to
whom his interlocutors pay no serious attention, he angrily complains that the
Jewish settlers don’t listen to or “display a real interest” in him. He asks them to
“imagine themselves in their Arab neighbors’ places” (37) and is very much the
angry schoolmaster when they don’t act like compliant puppets or accept his
pretense that this act of sympathetic imagination is devoid of political meaning.
Neither are the settlers intellectually nimble enough to make the appropriate
reply to Grossman: “My dear fellow, we will imagine ourselves as Arabs if
you will imagine yourself as a Jew.” But Grossman has no intention of suspending
his own rhythms of existence long enough to penetrate the inner life of
these alien people: “What have I to do with them?” (48) His resentment is as
much cultural as political. He complains that the settlers have “little use for
culture,” speak bad Hebrew, indulge in “Old Diaspora type” humor, and own no
books, “with the exception of religious texts” (46). And these, far from mitigating
the barbarity of their owners, aggravate it. The final image of the Jews in
this long chapter is of “potential [!] terrorists now rocking over their books.”
(51) For Grossman, the conjectural terrorism of Jews is a far more grievous
matter than the actual terrorism of Arabs.
The following chapter also treats of culture and books, including religious
ones. Grossman has come to Bethlehem University, one of several universities
in the territories that have been punningly described as branches of PLO State.
Here Grossman, though he admits the school to be “a stronghold of the Democratic
Front for the Liberation of Palestine,” sees no terrorists rocking over
books, but rather idyllic scenes that remind him of “the pictures of Plato’s
school in Athens” (57). Bubbling with affection, eager to ascribe only the highest
motives, Grossman is now willing to forgive even readers of religious books.
He has not so much as a snort or a sneer for the Bethlehem English professor
who ascribes Arabs’ supreme sensitivity to lyric rhythm in English poetry to the
“rhythm of the Koran flow[ing] through their blood” (59). The author’s ability
to spot racism at a distance of twenty miles when he is among Jews slackens
when timeless racial categories are invoked in Bethlehem.
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38 Jewish Divide Over Israel
When the Labor Party returned to power in 1992, so too did the Israeli
intellectuals and their disciples. People once (rather naively) casually referred
to as extremists moved to the centers of power in Israeli government and policy
formation. Dedi Zucker, who used to accuse Jewish “settlers” of drinking blood
on Passover, and Yossi Sarid, who once shocked Israelis by declaring that Holocaust
Memorial Day meant nothing to him, and Shulamit Aloni, whose statements
about religious Jews would probably have landed her in jail in European
countries that have laws against antisemitic provocation, all became cabinet
ministers or prominent spokesmen in the government of Rabin. Two previously
obscure professors laid the foundations for the embrace of Yasser Arafat, one of
the major war criminals of the twentieth century, responsible for the murder of
more Jews than anyone since Hitler and Stalin. The Oslo process put the PLO
well on the way to an independent Palestinian state, had Arafat desired one (a
conjectural state, it should be added, that probably commands the allegiance of
more Israeli intellectuals than does the actual Jewish one). Amos Oz and A. B.
Yehoshua and David Grossman were delighted. Oz announced in 1993 that
“death shall be no more,” and Grossman assured Anthony Lewis that Israel had
finally given up its “instinctive suspicion,” and that although “we have the
worst terrorism,” “we are making peace.”14 Benvenisti proved harder to satisfy:
in 1995, he published a book called Intimate Enemies, the ads for which carried
glowing endorsements from Thomas Friedman and Professor Ian Lustick, in
which he proposed dissolution of the State of Israel.
Only a few figures within Israel’s cultural establishment expressed dismay at
what was happening. The philosopher Eliezer Schweid warned that a nation
which starts by abandoning its cultural memories ends by abandoning its physical
existence.15 Amos Perlmutter analyzed the “post-Zionism” of Israeli academics
as an all-out attack on the validity of the state.16 A still more notable
exception to the general euphoria of this class was Aharon Megged. In his
Ha’aretz essay of June 1994 called “The Israeli Suicide Drive” this long-time
supporter of the Labor Party connected the Rabin government’s record of endless
unreciprocated concessions (to a PLO that had not even cancelled its Charter
calling for Israel’s destruction) to the self-destructiveness that had long
before infected Israel’s intellectual classes. Megged argued that since 1967 the
Israeli intelligentsia had more and more come “to regard religious, cultural, and
emotional affinity to the land... with sheer contempt”; and he observed that the
equation of Israelis with Nazis had become an article of faith for the otherwise
faithless learned classes. He also shrewdly remarked on the methods by which
anti-Zionist Israeli intellectuals disseminated their message and reputations.
Writers like Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe, and Baruch Kimmerling “mostly publish
first in English to gain the praise of the West’s ‘justice seekers.’ Their works
are then quickly translated into Arabic and displayed in Damascus, Cairo and
Tunis. Their conclusion is almost uniform: that in practice Zionism amounts to
an evil, colonialist conspiracy... “17
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Israelis Against Themselves 39
The minds of the majority of those who carried on the Oslo Process of the
Israeli government from 1993 to 1996 were formed by the writers, artists, and
publicists whom Megged excoriated. Although Shimon Peres’ utterances about
the endless war for independence which his country has been forced to wage
often seemed to come from a man who had taken leave of the actual world, they
were rooted in the “post-Zionist,” post-Jewish, and universalist assumptions of
the Israeli intelligentsia. Just as they were contemptuous of any tie with the
Land of Israel, so he repeatedly alleged that land plays no part in Judaism or
even in the Jewish political philosophy that names itself after a specific mountain
called Zion. Like the Israeli intelligentsia, he accused Israel’s religious
Jews of an atavistic attachment to territory over “spirit,” claiming that Judaism
is “ethical/moral and spiritual, and not an idolatry of soil-worship.”18 Just as
Israeli intellectuals nimbly pursued and imitated the latest cultural fads of
America and Europe, hoping to be assimilated by the great world outside Israel,
so did Peres hope that Israel would one day be admitted into the Arab League.19
Despite the enlistment of then President William Clinton as his campaign
manager, and the nearly unanimous support he received from the Israeli and
world news media, to say nothing of the herd of independent thinkers from the
universities, and the rented academics of the think tanks, Shimon Peres and his
Oslo process were decisively rejected by the Jewish voters of Israel. Predictably,
the Israeli intellectuals (not guessing that Labor’s successors would blindly
continue the process) reacted with melodramatic hysteria. David Grossman, in
the New York Times of May 31, wailed sanctimoniously that “Israel has moved
toward the extreme right... more militant, more religious, more fundamentalist,
more tribal and more racist.”20
Among the American liberal supporters of Israel’s intellectual elite, only the
New Republic appeared somewhat chastened by the election result. Having for
years, perhaps decades, celebrated the ineffable genius of Shimon Peres and his
coterie, the magazine turned angrily upon the Israeli intellectuals for failing to
grasp that “their association with Peres was one of the causes of his defeat.”
Disdainful of [Jews] from traditional communities, they thought of and called such
people “stupid Sephardim.” This contempt for Arab Jews expresses itself in a cruel
paradox, for it coexists with a credulity about, and esteem for, the Middle East’s
Christians and Muslims—Arab Arabs. Such esteem, coupled with a derisive attitude
toward Jewish symbols and texts, rituals, remembrances and anxieties, sent tens of
thousands to Netanyahu.21
II
The most ambitious attempt to trace the history and analyze the causes of
the maladies of Israeli intellectuals is Yoram Hazony’s book The Jewish State,
which appeared early in the year 2000. Within months of its publication the
dire consequences of the Oslo accords, post-Zionism’s major political achievement,
became visible to everybody in Israel in the form of Intifada II, otherwise
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40 Jewish Divide Over Israel
known as the Oslo War, a campaign of unremitting atrocities—pogroms, lynchings,
suicide bombings—launched by Yasser Arafat after 97 percent of his demands,
including an independent Palestinian state, had been conceded by the
government of the hapless Ehud Barak.
The Jewish State is a broadside aimed at those Israelis who, in what its
author calls “a carnival of self-loathing,”22 are busily eating away at the Jewish
foundations of that state. The book’s very title is a conscious affront to Israel’s
branja, a slang term for the “progressive” and “enlightened” experts whose
views, according to Supreme Court Chief Justice Aharon Barak, should determine
the court’s decisions on crucial matters. For these illuminati have sought
to enlist no less a figure than Theodor Herzl in their campaign to de-Judaize the
state of Israel. Nearly all the “post-Zionists” discussed in The Jewish State
claim that Herzl did not intend the title of his famous book to be The Jewish
State at all, that the state he proposed was in no significant sense intrinsically
Jewish, and that he believed in a total separation of religion from the state.
Hazony argues (and massively demonstrates) that Herzl believed a Jewish state
was essential to rescue the Jewish people from both antisemitism and assimilation,
the forces that were destroying Jewish life throughout the Diaspora. (Most
of Herzl’s rabbinic opponents argued that Zionism was itself but a thinly veiled
form of assimilation.)
Hazony’s Jewish State has two purposes. The first is to show that “the idea of
the Jewish state is under systematic attack from its own cultural and intellectual
establishment” (xxvii). These “culture makers” have renounced the idea of a
Jewish state—”A state,” claims Amos Oz, “cannot be Jewish, just as a chair or a
bus cannot be Jewish” (338). The writers who dominate Israeli culture, Hazony
argues, are adept at imagining what it is like to be an Arab; they have, like the
aforementioned David Grossman, much more trouble imagining what it is like
to be a Jew.
If Israeli intellectuals were merely supplying their own illustration of Orwell’s
quip about the unique susceptibility of intellectuals to stupid ideas, their hostility
to Israel’s Jewish traditions and Zionist character would not merit much
concern. But Hazony shows that they have had spectacular success, amounting
to a virtual coup d’etat, in their political struggle for a post-Jewish state. “What
is perhaps most remarkable about the advance of the new ideas in Israeli government
policy is the way in which even the most sweeping changes in Israel’s
character as a Jewish state can be effected by a handful of intellectuals, with
only the most minimal of opposition from the country’s political leaders or the
public” (52).
The post-Zionists imposed their views in the public-school curriculum, in
the Basic Laws of the country, and in the IDF (Israel Defense Force), whose code
of ethics now excluded any allusion to Jewish or Zionist principles. The author
of the new code was Asa Kasher, one of Israel’s most enterprising post-Zionists,
who modestly described his composition as “the most profound code of ethics
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Israelis Against Themselves 41
in the world of military ethics, in particular, and in the world of professional
ethics, in general”—so terminally profound, in fact, that an Israeli soldier
“doesn’t need to think or philosophize anymore. Someone else already... did
the thinking and decided. There are no dilemmas” (53, 56).
The ultimate triumph of post-Zionism, Hazony argues, came in its conquest
of the Foreign Ministry and the mind of Shimon Peres. Both came to the conclusion
that Israel must retreat from the idea of an independent Jewish state. In
the accord reached with Egypt in 1978 and even in the 1994 accord with
Jordan, Israeli governments had insisted that the Arab signatories recognize the
Jewish state’s “sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political independence”
(58). But the Oslo accords with the fanatically anti-Zionist PLO conceded on
every one of these issues; and if the agreement with the PLO was partly an effect
of post-Zionism, it was an effect that became in turn a cause—giving respectability
and wide exposure to post-Zionist political prejudices formerly confined
to coteries in Rehavia and Ramat-Aviv.
Thereafter, Peres and his Foreign Office routinely promoted the interests not
of a sovereign Jewish state but of the (largely Arab) Middle East. In a reversal of
policy akin to that of the Soviet Foreign Ministry in the wake of Stalin’s pact
with Hitler, Uri Savir and other Foreign Ministry officials exhorted American
Jews who had for decades resisted the Arab campaign to blacken Israel’s reputation
to support U.S. foreign aid to the two chief blackeners, the PLO and Syria.
They—it was alleged—needed dollars much more than Israel. Peres himself, as
we observed earlier, carried the post-Zionist campaign for assimilation and
universalism to the global level, grandly announcing in December 1994 that
“Israel’s next goal should be to become a member of the Arab League” (67).
The second part of Hazony’s book has a twofold purpose. The first is to write
the history of the ideological and political struggle within the Jewish world
itself over the idea of the Jewish state, paying particular attention to how that
ideal, which a few decades ago had been axiomatic among virtually all Jews the
world over, had so quickly “been brought to ruin among the cultural leadership
of the Jewish state itself” (78). Hazony’s second aim as historian is to demonstrate
the power of ideas, especially the truth of John Stuart Mill’s axiom about
the practical potency, in the long run, of (apparently useless) speculative philosophy.
It was the power of ideas that enabled philosopher Martin Buber and
other opponents of the Jewish state to break Ben-Gurion and to undermine the
practical-minded stalwarts of Labor Zionism. (Likud hardly figures in this book.
The quarrels between Ben-Gurion and Begin have from Hazony’s perspective
“the character of a squabble between the captain and the first mate of a sinking
ship” [79].)
Hazony is a masterful political and cultural historian, and his fascinating
account of the long struggle of Buber (and his Hebrew University acolytes)
against Herzl and Ben-Gurion’s conception of a genuinely Jewish state is told
with tremendous verve and insight. Buber is at once the villain and the hero of
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42 Jewish Divide Over Israel
this book. He is the villain in his relentless opposition to a Jewish state; in his
licentious equations between Labor Zionists and Nazis; in his fierce anti-(Jewish)
immigration stance (announced the day after he himself had immigrated
from Germany in 1938). But he is the hero because his posthumous ideological
victory over Labor Zionism—most of today’s leading post-Zionists claim that
their minds were formed by Buber and his binationalist Brit Shalom/Ihud allies
at Hebrew University—is in Hazony’s view the most stunning example of how
ideas and myths are in the long run of more political importance than kibbutzim
and settlements. Because Buber understood the way in which culture eventually
determines politics and grasped the potency of books and journals and
(most of all) universities, his (to Hazony) malignant influence now carries the
day in Israel’s political as well as its cultural wars.
Hazony argues that since the fall of Ben-Gurion, Israel has had no Prime
Minister—not Golda Meir, not Menachem Begin—who was an “idea-maker.”
Even the very shrewd Ben-Gurion and Berl Katznelson (who presciently warned
of the dangers lurking in the “intellectual famine” (299) of Labor Israel) were
slow to recognize the potentially disastrous consequences of entrusting the
higher education of their children to a university largely controlled (for twentyfour
years) by the anti-Zionist Judah Magnes and largely staffed by faculty he
recruited. Magnes, in language foreshadowing the cliches of today’s post-Zionists,
charged that the Jewish settlement in Palestine had been “born in
sin”(203); moreover, he believed that seeing history from the Arabs’ historical
perspective was one of the main reasons for establishing the Hebrew University.
Hazony’s book is written backwards, something like a murder mystery. He
begins with a dismaying, indeed terrifying picture of a nearly moribund people,
exhausted, confused, aimless—their traditional Labor Zionist assumptions
declared “effectively dead” by their formerly Labor Zionist leaders, most crucially
Shimon Peres. He then moves backward to seek the reasons why the
Zionist enterprise is in danger of being dismantled, not by Israel’s Arab enemies
(who gleefully watch the spectacle unfold), but by its own heavily
petted intellectual, artistic, and political elite—professors, writers, luminaries
in the visual arts.
The material in the early chapters is shocking, and I speak as one who thought
he had seen it all: the visiting sociologist from Hebrew University who adorned
his office at my university with a PLO recruiting poster; the Tel-Aviv University
philosophy professor who supplied Noam Chomsky’s supporters with a
letter of kashrut certifying the “lifelong dedication to Israel” of their (Israelhating)
idol; the Haifa University sociologist active in the American-Arab Anti-
Discrimination League (a PLO front group); the contingent of Israeli professors
taking up arms on behalf of the great prevaricator Edward Said. But the material
Hazony has collected (and dissected) from Israel’s post-Zionist and post-Jewish
intellectuals shocks me nevertheless. Compared with the Baruch Kimmerlings,
the Asa Kashers, the Ilan Pappes, and other protagonists in Hazony’s tragedy,
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Israelis Against Themselves 43
Austria’s Jorge Haider, the right-wing demagogue about whom the Israeli government
kicked up such a fuss some years ago, is a Judeophile and Lover of
Zion.
Hazony carefully refrains from applying the term “antisemitic” to even the
most extreme defamations of Jewish tradition and of the Jewish state by post-
Zionists and their epigones. But surely such reticence is unnecessary when the
secret has long been out. As far back as May 1987 the Israeli humorist and
cartoonist Dosh, in a column in Ma’ariv, drew a picture of a shopper in a store
that specialized in antisemitic merchandise reaching for the top shelf—on which
lay the most expensive item, adorned by a Stürmer-like caricature of a Jew and
prominently labeled “Made in Israel.” The article this cartoon illustrated spoke
of Israel’s need to increase exports by embellishing products available elsewhere
in the world with unique local characteristics. Israel had done this with
certain fruits and vegetables in the past, and now she was doing it with defamations
of Israel, produced in Israel. Customers were getting more selective, no
longer willing to make do with grade B merchandise produced by British leftists
or French neo-Nazis. No, they wanted authentic material, from local sources;
and Israeli intellectuals, artists, playwrights, were responding with alacrity to
the opportunity.
But Dosh had spoken merely of a specialty shop. To accommodate the abundant
production of Hazony’s gallery of post-Zionist/post-Jewish defamers of
Israel (both the people and the Land) would require a department store twice
the size of Macy’s or Harrod’s. On bargain day, one imagines the following
recitation by the elevator operator: “First floor, Moshe Zimmermann, Yeshayahu
Leibowitz, and 68 other members of the progressive and universalist community
on Israelis as Nazis; second floor, A. B. Yehoshua on the need for Israeli
Jews to become “normal” by converting to Christianity or Islam; third floor,
Boaz Evron in justification of Vichy France’s anti-Jewish measures; fourth floor,
Idith Zertal on Zionist absorption of Holocaust refugees as a form of rape; fifth
floor, Benny Morris on Zionism as ethnic cleansing; attic, Shulamit Aloni on
Zionism (also Judaism) as racism; basement, Ya’akov Yovel justifying the medieval
blood libel; sub-basement, Yigal Tumarkin justifying Nazi murder of
(religious) Jews. Watch your step, please.”
Although Hazony’s argument for the large role played by Israel’s professoriat
in dismantling Labor Zionism is convincing, it cannot be a sufficient cause
of current post-Zionism and post-Judaism. The habitual language of post-Zionists,
and most especially their hammering insistence on the contradiction between
being Jewish and being human, is exactly the language of European
Jewish ideologues of assimilation over a century ago. Gidon Samet, one of the
numerous resident ideologues of post-Judaism and post-Zionism at Ha’aretz, is
not far from the truth when he likens their attractions to those of American junk
food and junk-music: “Madonna and Big Macs,” Samet says,” are only the
most peripheral of examples” of the wonderful blessings of Israel’s new
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44 Jewish Divide Over Israel
“normalness” (71-72). Of course, whatever we may think of those who in 1900
urged fellow-Jews to cease being Jewish in order to join universal humanity,
they at least were not promoting this sinister distinction in full knowledge of
how it would be used by Hitler; the same cannot be said of contemporary Israeli
ideologues of assimilation and universalism.
Most readers of post-Zionist outpourings have little to fall back on except
their native mistrust of intellectuals. Thus, when Hebrew University professor
Moshe Zimmermann declares that Zionism “imported” antisemitism into the
Middle East (11), it requires knowledge (not much, to be sure) of history to
recognize the statement as preposterous. But sometimes the post-Zionists are
tripped up by overconfidence into lies that even the uninstructed can easily
detect. Thus Avishai Margalit, a Hebrew University philosophy professor spiritually
close to, if not quite a card-carrying member of, the post-Zionists, in a
New York Review of Books essay of 1988 called “The Kitsch of Israel,” heaped
scorn upon the “children’s room” at Yad Vashem with its “tape-recorded voices
of children crying out in Yiddish, ‘Mame, Tate [Mother, Father].’” Yad Vashem
is a favorite target of the post-Zionists because they believe it encourages Jews
to think not only that they were singled out for annihilation by the Nazis but
also—how unreasonable of them!—to want to make sure they do not get singled
out for destruction again. But, as any Jerusalemite or tourist who can get over to
Mount Herzl will quickly discover, there is no “children’s room” and there are
no taped voices at Yad Vashem. There is a memorial to the murdered children
and a tape-recorded voice that reads their names.23 Margalit’s skullduggery is
by no means the worst of its kind among those Israelis involved in derogating
the memory and history of the country’s Jewish population. But it comes as no
surprise to learn from Hazony that Margalit believes Israel is morally obligated
to offer Arabs “special rights” for the protection of their culture and to be
“neutral” toward the Jews (13). With such neutrality as Margalit’s, who needs
belligerence?
In Hazony Israel has perhaps found its latter-day Jeremiah, but given the
widespread tone-deafness of the country’s enlightened classes to their Jewish
heritage, perhaps what is needed at the moment is an Israeli Jonathan Swift,
especially the Swift who in his versified will “gave the little wealth he had/To
build a house for fools and mad;/And showed by one satiric touch,/No nation
wanted it so much.”
I began this essay with statements by J. S. Mill and George Orwell about the
role of intellectuals and their ideas in politics, and I shall conclude in the same
way. The first statement, by Mill, might usefully be recommended as an aid to
reflection by the intellectuals of Israel: “The collective mind,” wrote Mill in
1838, “does not penetrate below the surface, but it sees all the surface; which
profound thinkers, even by reason of their profundity, often fail to do...” The
second statement, by Orwell, seems particularly relevant as the Arab siege of
Israel rages on: “if the radical intellectuals in England had had their way in the
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Israelis Against Themselves 45
20’s and 30’s,” said Orwell, “the Gestapo would have been walking the streets
of London in 1940.”24
Notes
1. Jerusalem Post, April 6, 1996.
2. Midge Decter, “The Treason of the Intellectuals,” Outpost, May 1996, 7.
3. Kitvei B. Katznelson (Tel Aviv: Workers’ Party of Israel, 1961), Vol. 8, p. 18.
4. Ruth R. Wisse, If I Am Not for Myself... The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews (New
York: Free Press, 1992).
5. Meron Benvenisti, Conflicts and Contradictions (New York: Villard, 1986), 70.
6. New York Times Magazine, July 11, 1982.
7. New York Times, April 11, 1995.
8. “Struggling Against Fanaticism,” New York Times, September 14, 2001.
9. Conflicts and Contradictions, 34.
10. Jerusalem Post, December 1, 1990.
11. Ibid.
12. Jerusalem Post, January 16, 1993.
13. The Yellow Wind, trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
1988), 212. Subsequent references to this work will be cited in text.
14. New York Times, May 17, 1996. The most detailed account of the influence of Israeli
intellectuals specifically on the Oslo accords is Kenneth Levin, The Oslo Syndrome:
Delusions of a People Under Siege (Hanover, NH: Smith and Kraus Global,
2005).
15. Jerusalem Post International Edition, April 15, 1995.
16. “Egalitarians Gone Mad,” Jerusalem Post International Edition, October 28, 1995.
17. Aharon Megged, “The Israeli Suicide Drive,” Jerusalem Post International Edition,
July 2, 1994.
18. Quoted in Moshe Kohn, “Check Your Quotes,” Jerusalem Post International Edition,
October 16, 1993.
19. The Arab League contemptuously replied that Israel could become a member only
“after the complete collapse of the Zionist national myth, and the complete conversion
of historical Palestine into one democratic state to which all the Palestinians will
return.”
20. “The Fortress Within,” New York Times, May 31, 1996.
21. “Revolt of the Masses,” New Republic, June 24, 1996.
22. The Jewish State (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 339. Subsequent references to
this work will be cited in parentheses in the text.
23. Ten years later, Margalit reprinted this piece in a collection of his essays called Views
in Review. There he says he has omitted a sentence from the original essay that “had
wrong information in it about the children’s memorial room at Yad Vashem.” But he
blames this on “an employee” who misled him. Margalit’s sleight of hand here
reveals two things: (1) When he says in his introduction to the book that “I am not
even an eyewitness to much of what I write about,” we can believe him. (2) The
Yiddish writer Shmuel Niger was correct to say that “we suffer not only from Jews
who are too coarse, but also from Jews who are too sensitive.”
24. In The Lion and the Unicorn (1941) Orwell also wrote: “The really important fact
about the English intelligentsia is their severance from the common culture of the
country... In the general patriotism, they form an island of dissident thought. England
is the only great nation whose intellectuals are ashamed of their country.”
This, not to put too fine a point upon it, no longer seems true.
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