THE END OF ZIONISM AND THE LAST ISRAELI

Witness 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 supporter of Rabin’s governing Labor party, “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 the Golan Heights, Bethlehem, and Jerusalem could be put on the negotiating block by the Labor government without pandemonium in the streets is the near-total collapse of the Jewish nationalist ideology that built the state. “Our people has long since tired of bearing Zionism on its shoulders genera- tion after generation,” Marcus observed. “While the Arabs have remained faithful to their ideology of the holiness of the land… Israel is ready lightly to with- draw from the lands that were the cradle of Judaism,” in exchange for “personal safety and a “normal” life.” Marcus’s piece was gleefully parried by his colleague at Ha’aretz, Gidon Samet. ” Thanks be to God,” Samet cheered; the agree- ment with Arafat “has bro- ken down the ingredient that was the cement in the wall of our old national identity.” According to Samet, the disintegration of the cultural wall that 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. ”

It is not coincidental that both articles focused on “normalness” (normaliut in Hebrew), an old Jewish code-word 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 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 Jor- dan, 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 many “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 entire purpose of the Jewish state in the first place — a calamity of unfathomable proportions.

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, virtually none could stomach the idea. Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Haim Soloveitchik, and the Hasidic rebbes of both Lubavitch and Satmar — all rejected Zionism for much the same reason: They believed the Jewish people was essentially a thing of the spirit. The creation of a 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 like David BenGurion and Menachem Begin had managed to bomb the British off their backs, the state they had founded had really become the state of virtually the entire Jewish people. After the gas chambers, almost every Jew everywhere became a Zionist, a believer in the necessity and obligation of Jewish power.

Yet Jewish and even Israeli intellectuals never really reconciled themselves to the Jewish 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 nation’s early 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.

The most famous novel by the nation’s most famous novelist, Amos Oz’s My Michael, portrays Jerusalem — the very symbol of the Jewish national revival — as a city of brooding insanity and illness. A.B. Yehoshua’s story ” Before the Forest” has a young Jew joining forces with an Arab to burn down the “Zionist” forest planted on the ruins of an Arab village. In The Lover, Yehoshua’s best-known novel, the hero deserts his Army 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.”

While literary figures have long led the effort to create a post-Zionist consciousness in Israel, academics have been even more ferocious. The 1967 Six Day War immediately inspired attacks by opponents of nationalism such as Yishayahu Leibowitz, who claimed that Israel was undergoing Nazification, used the term “Judeo-Nazi” to describe the Israeli armed forces, and said the nation would soon set up concentration camps. In the last two decades, these seemingly beyond-the-pale 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 Papo. 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.

There are certainly elements of truth in some of the allegations raised. The reality of power — and especially of power wielded in desperation, as Zionist power has been — 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. They have joined novelists, poets, 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.”

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 notorious 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 personality 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, written 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 a “complete inability to understand the Israeli reality” and a “capricious and burning hatred” of the left-cultural clique, which had showered her with honors “she will probably be sorry to give up.”

In the three years since the appearance of Mirski’s handiwork, Kaganskaya has been erased from the Israeli literary establishment. Not a single essay of hers has appeared in Hebrew. She has been blacklisted by the cultural media and salons. She returned to the land of her forefathers — there to become a despised Jewish dissident.

Few Israeli politicians would or could openly admit to being post-Zionists. They could still lose a lot of votes that way. But this does not mean that Israeli policy-making has remained immune to the intellectual assault on Zionism.

With the disappearance from public life of Zionism’s founding fathers — Labor’s Ben-Gurion died in 1973, and Likud’s Begin ceased all public activity in 1983 — both major political parties began to drift. In the absence of a countervailing nationalist intellectual movement, the nationalist agenda of the Labor party (which ruled the country for three decades from Israel’s founding until the late 1970s) has been rapidly eviscerated. In its place: a menu 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 more right-wing Likud.

The victory of the Labor party in June 1992 therefore marked no return to the full-throated, proud, and aggressive Labor Zionism of 20 years ago. Indeed, the “Labor” half of the formula had been recanted de facto at a party convention that year, which discarded the red banner of Socialism and even the Socialist anthem, the Internationale, which had been warbled by Labor Zionists for seven decades or more. And as the policies of the Rabin government have unfolded, it has become clear that the “Zionist” half has fared no better. Virtually every area of government policy has been 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, of its most radical anti-religious 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 armed forces memorial services. The educational activities of the deputy minister, Micha Goldman, have included calling for a change in the text of the national anthem, Hatikva, “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 modern Hebrew bard Chaim Bialik; and ordering a purge of religious teachers in the ministry’s school system.

The ministry’s appointee as chairman of the Committee for History Curriculum Reform is Moshe Zimmermann, who has used media interviews to compare orthodox Jewish children to Hitler Youth, the Bible to Mein Kampf, and the armed forces to the SS. Says 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.”

A similar trend is in evidence at 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 11 ” values” and 34 “basic principles” does it refer to the Jewish state, the Jewish people, the Jewish tradition, or the land of Israel.

So ubiquitous are efforts to dejudaize the Israeli government that it is often hard to read the papers without thinking it all a joke. Shortly after the 1992 elections, in which Labor had pledged to stop spending money to build highways in the West Bank “for the benefit of the settlers,” Housing Ministry Director-General Aryeh Mizrahi announced a new plan in which highways would be built anyway — so products from Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan would be able to arrive in the port cities of Haifa and Ashdod once peace is at hand.

The new Ministry of Tourism has determined its focus to be encouraging tourists from Islamic countries. The Ministry of Religious Affairs recently pro- mulgated new guidelines for the disbursement of funds that give preference to groups encouraging meetings between Jewish and Moslem youth, ” secular” groups using “multi-media and games” to promote Judaism, and organizations promoting Moslem pilgrimage to Mecca. Even as seemingly benign an agency as the Parks Authority has called for cutting the nation’s birth rate to zero and, if necessary, amending the law giving any diaspora Jew immediate citizenship if he immigrates — all to protect the national parks, of course.

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. Its new head, Avrum 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,” and declared Yishayahu Leibowitz (of “Judeo-Nazi” 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.

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 Arab citizens who choose not to serve. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court’s new chief justice, Aharon Barak, has articulated a doctrine under which the beliefs of “the enlightened public in Israel” will be the benchmark against which Israeli law is interpreted (these beliefs have proved to include court-ordered hiring quotas and gay families).

But nowhere is the strange fruit of post-Zionist policy more in evidence 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 — based on the principle that they will become peaceable if they are plied with ever-higher levels of aid. Thus, in the judgment of former deputy foreign minister Yossi Beilin, while Israel is “a wealthy country” needing no donations from abroad, Jewish philanthropic organizations have an “obligation” to provide assistance to the PLO and Jordan. Ministry Director-General Uri Savir claims that “anyone who objects to American aid to the PLO has no right to be called a friend of Israel.” Aid for Syria, too, has become an aim of Israeli policy.

As for more traditional Israeli foreign policy goals, like explaining the needs and interests of the Jewish state, Foreign Minister Peres has ordered the closing of the Foreign Ministry’s Information Department because “if you have good policy, you do not need public relations.” Sites such as the Golan Heights and Masada that connote Israeli nationalism and strength have been removed from the schedules of visiting dignitaries (while the Holocaust memorial remains sacrosanct). For ambassadors, the new Foreign Ministry has selected post-nationalists such as Gad Ya’acobi at the United Nations (“There is no such thing as Jewish land”) and Shimon Shamir in Jordan (“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”).

The strategic aims of Israeli foreign policy? Again, Yossi Beilin: Israel should become “a country involved in resolving other people’s conflicts, [and] providing offcials for the U.N., including U.N. secretary-generals … . “Foreign Minister Shimon Peres: “There can be no doubt that Israel’s next goal should be to become a member of the Arab League.”

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 a raison d’etat for Israeli lea&rs.

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 20 Arab national states, do not need one more. It was such a Jewish-nationalist view that 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.”

Nothing could be farther from these original Zionist premises than the Oslo agreement, in which the government of Israel and the PLO agree 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 Strip.

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 — 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.” 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 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.”

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 it is also clear from Peres’s hoped-for “new per- sonal identity” that the end of nationalism may mean the end of the Jewish people in Israel, as well.

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 disintegra- tion whose magnitude and meaning defy comprehen- sion. 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 illegitimate the national movement which founded the state, and are preparing to open negotiations over the 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, 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 set down in Hebrew, or even translated; Israel’s founding fathers translated Marx.

This means that, in spite of all the hardware procured over the last 50 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, 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.

Yoram Hazony is the Director of the Shalem Center- National Policy Institute in Jerusalem.