Venice is sinking. The jewel of mankind, with its unparalleled beauty, is in the process ofvanishing. Scientists are already calculating when the waves will finally close over thecity. But the sinking is so slow that the inhabitants do not notice it.
Israel is in a similar situation. Our Israel, the state that we have created with our sweat andblood, our talents and dreams, with its new Hebrew language, culture and society that havefascinated the entire world, is vanishing. Its place is being taken by a different,antithetical state.
That is the real meaning of the process that has reached its climax during the recent weeks. Thesticky brew of “unity” must not conceal from us what is happening underneath. A realrevolution.
For years now our eyes have been riveted to the war between Israel and Palestine, because itkills human beings and determines the fate of peoples. But this war is but a part of a much moreprofound struggle: the struggle for the character of the State of Israel itself.
In recent years, it has become a fad to talk about the struggle between Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv,the rift between the religious and the secular, the confrontation between left and right, theKulturkampf. But all this modish talk is blurring the truth instead of clarifying it.
The simple truth is that this is a struggle between two quite different states: the State ofIsrael on the one side, the Jewish State on the other.
This struggle started on the state’s first day, but was hidden by a thick layer of conventionallies, faulty definitions and endless talk about “unity”, “conciliation” and “dialogue”.The Supreme Court contributed to the blurring by adopting the formula of “a Jewish anddemocratic state”, an oxymoron if ever there was one. The Israeli state cannot be savedwithout exposing the contradiction and reaching a clear decision on its identity.
The JewIsh State is one that does not belong to its place and its surroundings, but to aworld-wide entity called “the Jewish people”. It is based on myths thousands of years old,while ignoring the present-day reality of the country. It carries with it the memories of theJewish Diaspora, mainly consisting of generations of persecution, from the pogroms of the 14th century, through the Spanish inquisition to the Holocaust. It is subject to religiousimperatives that are accepted by the “secular” under the guise of “national values”. It isclosed and self-centered, goyim-hating (the goyim including the Arabs), facing the pastrather than the modern world.
The Israeli State is bound to be a modern one, open to the world, integrated into the world-widecivilization and contributing to it. Not, by any means, cut off from the Jewish past, buttreating it as belonging to the realm of the past. For it, the Bible is a monumental literarymasterpiece, the workshop of the Hebrew language, a universal treasure. The Jewish religionis a glorious creation, the cradle of the monotheistic religions, and every person is free tobelieve in it, without the state being involving. It is a state that exists for its citizens,and citizenship – solely – defines their being Israelis, the way citizens of the United Statesare Americans, a state open to cultural influences, participating in the struggles ofhumanity: to save the planet, equality of the sexes, egalitarian globalization, nucleardisarmament and peace.
Striving for peace with the Palestinian people and integration into the Semitic region isonly a part of this perception of the state, its character and interests. It is a patrioticIsraeli endeavor. On the other hand, the eternal war against the Arabs that makes ethniccleansing, expansion and settlement possible, is a patriotic Jewish attitude.
During the last few years it seemed that the Israeli state was gaining strength, while theJewish state was in retreat. Israel recognized the Palestinian people and its nationalleadership. It started to create connections with the Arab world. It became a high-techpower. The internet exposed the young to fresh ideas from all over the world. The Arab citizenshad become part of the political system. Waves of new immigration had enriched and deepenedthe cultural and scientific life. It was possible to think that this was an irreversiblepolitical-social trend, gathering force. But this was an optimistic and complacentimpression. All this time a reaction was gathering speed, because of the lack of clarity indefining the state from the outset.
Now the counter-revolution has come, and it is a massive one. It is no accident that its symbolis Ariel Sharon – a person born into the new Hebrew life but conditioned by the perceptions of aJewish State. The “national unity” that has come about under his auspices is not just a cynicalalliance between power-hungry opportunists, as it seems on the surface, but a realcoming-together of all the counter-revolutionary forces. In this respect, the differencesbetween Peres and Sharon, Rehavam Ze’evi and Dalia Rabin-Pilosof are minimal. In practicethey all belong to the same party, and so do most of the factions that have remained inopposition by accident.
Limor Livnat may not be a shining light, but by introducing “Jewish-Zionist values” into theschool system she expresses the counter-revolution, as does Fuad Ben-Eliezer, no shininglight either, by introducing even more brutality into the army’s behavior. The army itself,whose “chief education officer” has declared that non-Jews are inferior soldiers, has movedall the way from a Kibbutz-based force to an army dominated by the members of thereligious-military “Yeshivot Hesder” order.
The “Zionist left” has crashed because it never dared to recognize this basic contradiction.No wonder that its spiritual leaders, people like Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua, are now playing amajor role in the war against the Palestinians, by leading the charge against Muslim controlof the Temple Mount. It is now paying the price for the conventional lie on which it has restedfrom the beginning, when it preached “Zionism, Socialism and the Brotherhood of Peoples”,while being engaged whole-heartedly in evicting the Fellahin from their lands.Intellectuals who do not strive with unflinching honesty for the truth crumble at the momentof truth and are swept away with the sullied tide.
The danger inherent in the counter-revolution is terrible indeed. Its take-over of the stateresembles the take-over of Jerusalem by the Zealots who, 2000 years ago, eradicated theliberal, progressive elite and put the community on the path to suicide.
I do not believe that this will happen to us. A state based on the “values” of Limor Livnat cannotendure in the 21th century. The counter-revolution may indeed drag us into a dark tunnel ofescalating conflict between Israelis and Palestinians and cause a severe retreat in alldomestic processes, but in the end it will be shattered on impact with the world-wide andregional reality. The Israeli civilization will not give up and it has many vibrant, new cellsin the young generation.
Venice is sinking – but scientists have already prepared daring plans to arrest the processand reverse it. Here, too, forces must come to the fore that can, even now , prepare plans forarresting the retreat and restarting the march into the 21st century. Perhaps, inretrospect, the Sharon-Peres government will be viewed by historians as the last gasp of theghetto.