What, Then, Shall We Do

Fein, Leonard

WHAT, THEN, SHALL WE DO The mood on the eve of Israel's 35th birthday is grim. Here, moment's editor reports on his recent visit, and reflects on independence, on Ariel Sharon, on West Bank...

...A one-third minority is not easily digestible, even if the appetite is large...
...What that means, I'm told, is that B'nei Brak, just outside Tel Aviv, is full-up, and here, just a 25 minute drive away, the adult children of B'nei Brak can have low-cost housing and still live near their parents...
...It's too late now," he averred...
...Let us talk not of distant and necessarily speculative scenarios, but of a present that is oh so tempting to ignore...
...Remember how it used to be...
...If scoring points is the purpose of the exercise, those who defend Israel's claims are in good shape...
...Add in the West Bank and Gaza, and the ratio changes dramatically...
...What went wrong...
...They say the world is unfair to the Jews, that it demands that we behave better than everyone else...
...They note that for all that the Arabs of the West Bank have a birth rate roughly twice that of Israel's Jews, their number does not increase...
...You Jews in the Diaspora sit in moral judgment over us, as if this were some theological debating club instead of a battlefield...
...I know from our sources that sinat chinam—baseless hate—was one of The point about doing the right thing is that most of the time, it's also the smart thing to do...
...Blame enough to go around, if it's a verdict we seek...
...And if an Arab wants to dispute Israel's claim that the land is mawat, the burden of proof is on him, a burden he must meet before an Appeals Board headed by the legal advisor of the Israel Land Authority—not exactly a neutral observer...
...For what profit can there be in winning the right to do yourself in...
...About, then, an end to Jewish independence...
...Yes, the enemies are there, and they provide an explanation...
...Let us speak of the present...
...Writing in the Herat magazine Yoman Hashavua last December, Elissar informs us that...
...But I'm ready to trade it for something more valuable...
...That is what the continuing occupation of the West Bank means, right now...
...But it's a dreadful and dangerous mistake to assume that Sephardim are hawks and Ashkenazim are doves...
...Is it not relevant to Israel's security, for example, that during each of the last two years, more Israelis left the country for good than were replaced by new immigrants...
...Peace is only a start, it would give us the chance to begin to rebuild, to rebegin, our society...
...Joseph Burg, Israel's Minister of Interior...
...We don't say all that because our hearts are bleeding, or because we're mushy...
...at home, you can belch away to heart's content...
...One version: Nothing went wrong...
...Blame instead the fears and prejudices that inform Saudi behavior, the venality and thuggery of the PLO, the timid wisdom of King Hussein, the awesome feuds of the Lebanese, the machinations of the Soviet Union, the vacillations of the United States...
...A couple of months ago, they held a planning session, seeking to determine Israel's needs in the year 2010...
...Instead, we are saddled with immigration from the Oriental countries only, and we are eating the bitter fruit of that...
...Those who decide for themselves that the dream is dead decide that for others as well, they change the odds for all of us, and thereby insure its death...
...One of the arguments against the Jews has always been, 'YourTorah is very theoretical...
...Benvenisti says three years, maybe four...
...Now, there are signs of change: In the first weeks of his tenure as Minister of Defense, Moshe Arens, the hawk who replaced the vulture, has moved rapidly to curb the excesses of the vigilantes, has sought to demonstrate that the policy of settlement need not be accompanied by cruelty and lawlessness...
...In real time, in the here and now, in the cave of shadows where the best you can hope for is a crude approximation of your dreams, winning debates doesn't count...
...People say that Jordan is Palestine, that a majority of the Jordanian population is Palestinian...
...the reasons for the destruction of the Second Temple...
...Perhaps, however, we may dismiss the episode it describes as atypical, simply the cranky expression of bigotry that might be—and is—found anywhere and everywhere...
...When the Arabs are ready to make peace, then come with your values, and I won't even mind if they're impractical...
...The tragedy of the occupation—1 use the word "tragedy" pointedly—is that what is happening in the West Bank, from the bigotry of a settler in Ariel to the vulgarity of the incumbent Minister Without Portfolio, from the unlawful behavior of soldiers of the I.D.F...
...Why to the readers of moment...
...They hate us," he had told me...
...And when I ask myself which I prefer, the partition of the Land or the partition of the soul of the people, the answer is simple...
...Is it a wonder that we are frustrated...
...Having stumbled, we can collapse, lie there waiting for someone to stretch out a hand—or a dagger—or we can pick ourselves up and move on, this time in a more promising direction...
...It is a detail, ugly though it be, less sinister, in the end, than the continuing killings in the West Bank, than the continuing vigilante terrorism there, and one would like to believe that it is an entirely exceptional detail...
...His interim report on his research has created a major stir in Washington as well as in the Arab world, and we talked at length during my December visit: "At most, there are three or four years left...
...They established a bunch of dots, involving very few people...
...But suppose the jury files back, and announces its verdict: "These are the guilty, those the innocent...
...Neither, then, are its failures...
...The siege of Beirut, or the Report of the Commission of Inquiry...
...And that will take quite some time, and it will require ideologically motivated people, and they don't exist, not in those kinds of numbers...
...Half of her family was massacred by the Arabs there in 1929...
...We do not, we are not permitted to, set aside our values "for the time being," while we see to the building of our house...
...Most of the editorial writers and columnists who addressed themselves to the episode in the ensuing days expressed horror at what they described as "the first political murder in Israel's history...
...I love the land, all of it...
...We're taught that when the world's working right, what's good is good for the Jews...
...We have been unable to fulfill our mission in exile, because we could not make our lives a true expression of our own character, independent of the will or opinion of others...
...But stumbling is permitted, is to be expected...
...The reality we face is hardly perfect, but it is surely normal, and "normal" is what Israel was established to allow us to be...
...A here...
...That precedent was most dramatically confirmed during the Eichmann trial, in 1961...
...I know: The brute doesn't inquire before he rapes and slaughters...
...Jews stand at a peculiar but ingenious intersection, the intersection of two questions that do not seem to fit together, but which we ask in one breath: If I am not for myself, who will be for me...
...I mean that specifically: The Jews mean nothing without morals...
...Can you say nothing good about Israel...
...Serious considerations existed in favor of such a decision . . . and had the decision-makers and executors been aware of the danger of harm to the civilian population on the part of the Phalangists but had nevertheless, having considered all the circumstances, decided to enter the camps while taking all possible steps to prevent harm coming to the civilian population, it is possible that there would be no place to be critical of them, even if it had emerged that the decision had caused undesirable results and had caused damage...
...The whole thing started with expectations so extravagant they were bound to be disappointed, even in the best of worlds—which this, assuredly, is not...
...easier or harder, they'll come to heel...
...But why blame the victim...
...Some there are who will have read all the rest and who will still be wondering why others of us are so upset...
...We say that each depends on the other, that in this world there is no health for self save as there is health for the other, that in this world, the particular and the universal must both be nurtured if either is to be sustained...
...II...
...And that, too, was done by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank two months ago...
...One is not, for example, to roust them from their beds in the middle of the night and then, using a ballpoint pen, inscribe numbers on their forearms...
...What went wrong, you want to know...
...Morality is a resource, not a luxury...
...What went wrong...
...Is it, then, that we are dealing here with the familiar case of orders from on high being a bit too literally interpreted at each lower echelon...
...In 1977, after 40 years of continuing Arab rejection, the Jewish State changed its mind...
...Ever since the tragedy of Kfar Kassem in 1956, the precedent has been established that a soldier is forbidden to execute a patently illegal order...
...So if I think of Hebron, I think not only of the lives that were lost but of the lives that were saved, and by whom...
...A small test: Which did more to promote and insure Israel's survival, and that of the Jews—the Lebanese adventure, or the rally of the 400,000...
...That's been a popular assumption among students of these matters ever since the Camp David negotiations...
...Then the government came along and invoked a clause from Ottoman law—it's from Article 103 of the Turkish Land Code—that reads, 'Vacant land, such as mountains, rocky places, stony fields . . . and grazing ground which is not in possession of anyone by title deed, nor assigned ab antiquo to the use of inhabitants of a town or village, and lies at such a distance from towns and villages from which a human voice cannot be heard at the nearest inhabited place is called mawat (dead) land . . . anyone who is in need of such land can, with the leave of the official...
...they will destroy us, because we haven't yet established our foundations...
...It is sufficient to say that the heart of the matter was that the soldiers had engaged not merely in gratuitous violence, but also in utterly despicable acts of humiliation against Arabs...
...Among those things, it has desensitized us...
...A second version: "Practical values...
...You can use any argument you want, but not that one...
...Sure, I'd like it if Eretz Yisrael were empty and all the Palestinians were on the other side of the Jordan and we could be Eretz Yisrael as the Prophets described it, within the borders that were promised to Moses in Bamidbar 34...
...I very well understand their complexes...
...He's paying about four percent of what he'd have to pay in Israel...
...People abroad think that because the West Bank is so famous, it must be at least the size of France...
...The 'other Israel' no longer lives in immigrant camps, its economic situation is generally good, but it's still the 'other Israel.' They don't think the way we do, they don't act the way we do, they don't care Within Israel, there are five times as many Jews as Arabs...
...The manpower crisis, and the deeper crisis, the crisis in the streets...
...They were expensive political demonstrations, an effort to repeat the experience of the 30s and 40s, controlling the land by creating settlements...
...The people from Interior projected 250,000 Jews in the West Bank by then...
...VI...
...cultivate it on the condition that the ultimate ownership shall belong to the Sultan.' You see, you don't need to make a security claim any longer...
...That's not an easy question, but, as they observe, given that hardly anyone accepts that Israel is, in fact, entitled to hang on to the territories, there's no more insurance of safety in retention of the territories than in their devolution...
...In any case, using the Ottoman code, the Israeli government claimed about 30,000 dunams [one dunam = one quarter acre] on which they plan to build Ariel, a city of 150,000 people...
...In their view, the question ought not to be how Israel can persuade the Arabs or the world of its entitlement, but how Israel can insure its safety once the West Bank is relinquished...
...The Jewish State came to provide the framework for our genuine independence, but the agenda of that State is imposed upon it...
...I'd rather have a tiny, little state of Jews than a big state that is shared...
...And one day, unmarked, unnoticed, the last trend falls into place, the one that makes the tale complete, the one that closes the chapter, the one before which there is still time, there is still choice...
...You expect us to build Utopia while the bombs are falling...
...But here we're talking about a suburb rather than a settlement...
...Their tortured questions are symptoms of self-doubt and even self-hate...
...And in the meantime, they're busy opening up areas for urban sprawl...
...No, no, morals are not manners...
...Nothing will remain...
...That's pretty compelling stuff, but it invites a somewhat skeptical response...
...It's when you're far away, as we wep, that you do that...
...A clever ploy to force the Jordanians to the negotiating table...
...whether the war in Lebanon was justified, Sabra and Shatilla mean nothing to them, corruption in the government does not interest them...
...Israel sacrificed for the sake of this peace [with Egypt...
...It's too self-serving...
...it is a prescription, a perspective, a path to proportion...
...Duress may be the forge of our character, but we hold the anvil in our own hands...
...that is, no one has written the kind of book that would suddenly alter the consciousness of the Ashkenazi community, as, for a time at least, some books altered our consciousness here in the United States 20 years or so ago...
...Now, the value of the land to start with is about 20 percent of the value of the same kind of land 15 miles down the road in Israel proper...
...I do know, however, some things one is not to do...
...It's too easy, too self-serving...
...As the military tribunal said in its verdict, "The Israeli Defense Forces cannot be expected to handle rioters with silk gloves...
...No, our history and texts do not permit, nor does our present condition require, that we choose between morals and muscles...
...As important, we're taught that the only way the world will ever work the way it's meant to, which is to say the only way there'll ever be security, is if we take God's work as our own...
...Here, moment's editor reports on his recent visit, and reflects on independence, on Ariel Sharon, on West Bank settlements, on peace and on Israel's future...
...It's especially infuriating to hear American Jews, often the same American Jews who object to anyone on this side of the ocean "telling" Israel what to do, condemning Israel's doves, urging upon Israel a blind hardness they would denounce as insane in their own country...
...The "wrong" Jews came and the "right" Jews stayed put, according to one reading...
...Here's part of a recent letter from an Israeli friend, an attorney, the kind of liberal person who, had he lived in America, would be for all the right things...
...the dynamite's been there, and Begin has seen fit to light its fuse, according to a fourth...
...And why should Israel permit an enemy "entity" to be established at its doorstep...
...There, he observed that "on the one hand, there still lives within us, though it be only in the form of an instinctive feeling, a belief in that moral fitness from which we were chosen from all the nations, and in that national mission which consists in living the highest type of moral life, in being the moral Supernation...
...That's no blessing, that's a curse...
...What went wrong is that they hate us and they want to kill us, that's what went wrong...
...That's what it's come to be about, be our eye on the future or on the present...
...What went wrong is that we stumbled...
...I can say, in fact, very much that is good about Israel, and the very best thing I can say is that Israel does have choices, that for all its travails, and with all the constraints, it is an independent State...
...and there are loans and grants available that make it almost irresistable...
...So the Sephardim—some of them— shout their vulgar imprecations and daub their swastikas, and the Ashkenazim, some of them, grumble about life's unfairness, and do not understand, do not begin to understand, the depths of Sephardic bitterness, any more than they understand the deeply Jewish elements in the non-secular, non-liberal, non-Western culture of the Sephardim...
...Their shared villainy is that they ignore the civilizing perception that power must be clothed in restraint, else it is naked power, and naked power is indecent...
...For now, values are a luxury...
...The crisis in the streets: On December 23, 1982, a police bullet killed Shimon Yehoshua, son of a Yemenite Jew who came to the Land on the wings of a silver eagle 35 years ago...
...It is easier by far to turn a blind eye to these things, to fancy that the occupation is just another chapter in the difficult history of Israel's continuing war of independence...
...As one senior civil servant put it to me recently, "Our great disappointment is that the American Jews stayed put...
...the inevitable historical process, the consequence of the revolution of rising expectations, has finally overtaken the early romantic assumptions, according to a third...
...I hope, and believe, that there is no Jew, anywhere, who can read this last, this thing about the numbers, and not feel sick to his/her stomach...
...I have nothing against these people...
...But I take seriously what our Chief of Staff has said, that we are in a situation where for the next hundred years there will be a war every ten years...
...Over and over again, one hears from Israeli Ashkenazim these days a sigh of resignation, followed by language about "we" and "they" and about "their mindlessness" or "intolerance" or "primitivism...
...Under those circumstances, is it not likely that there would be voices raised within Israel demanding that democracy be "attenuated" in order to preserve Jewishness...
...It was absolutely clear to Egypt why we were doing this...
...Reality intruded...
...We did it for the sake of peace, but not only for the sake of peace: also in order to preserve our control of Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip...
...And the price is right, less than half what comparable apartments, were they available, would cost in older areas within Israel proper...
...It was magic, or miracle, and it took the breath away...
...One of Israel's leading experts on the West Bank is Meron Benvenisti, former Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, now Director of something called "The West Bank and Gaza Data Base Project...
...They're talking about 140 rural settlements, which is probably an exaggeration...
...Wonder upon wonder, a modern dayenu as overflowing with gifts as the old: Not just a State, which would itself have sufficed, but swamps drained, deserts reclaimed, language reborn, lives redeemed...
...of Alfei Menashe...
...No dust, no ideology...
...Say "settlements" and we conjure up visions of a few austere buildings atop a dusty hill, some dozens of hardy settlers who command respect for their audacity if not for their balance...
...And the reference is not always euphemistic...
...The painted slogans included "Ashkenazim to Auschwitz," "Ashke-Nazi," and so forth...
...Like the soldiers, Eitan is both villain and victim...
...Multiply that by 600 or so per settlement, and you're talking about 60,000, maybe even 80,000 people...
...Nobody ordered it...
...No, it makes no sense...
...That is what the commandments teach, that is what the history shows...
...But we knew that others owned the present...
...Because, dear readers, that is how it starts, and there is not a Jew alive who does not know that, who has not made that very point to others...
...Menachem Begin, Prime Minister of Israel, speaking in Ariel in 1981: "I, Menachem, the son of Zev and Hasia Begin, do solemnly swear that as long as I serve the nation as Prime Minister we will not leave any part of Judea, Samaria, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights...
...No, the only reason for the rural settlements is so that people will look at the map and say, "Look how many dots there are...
...The malfunction, instead, is to cause us to redouble our efforts I'taken olam, to repair, to fix, to make whole...
...they began before, when others were in charge, back in the days of the Labor government...
...The Zionist movement has a proud record of seizing historic opportunities, and not just of seizing them, but of creating them...
...Nor, for sure, do the relevant officials in the Ministries of Interior and Defense...
...My sign in the next demonstration: an end to false dichotomies...
...About two-thirds of the land of the West Bank is 'vacant,' unlisted in the Land Registry...
...The land will remain government land, and people will lease it from the government on 49 year renewable leases...
...I hesitated for quite some time before writing this last paragraph...
...All that counts is owning your choices...
...Best of all, it "lies in the heartland of Israel...
...Avrum Burg was near Emit when the grenade exploded, and he was among the nine who were wounded...
...But, if in addition to them we had another three or four million people from the West, we would look very different...
...We did not seek to extend our boundaries in 1967, and, having extended them, we were prepared to reduce them again, but the Arabs persisted in their obduracy...
...In both directions...
...It's nice, but no one can live up to those standards.' It's like the story Yehuda Halevi tells in his Hakhuzari...
...It's not a vast area that can be neatly divided...
...How to respond to such profoundly realized frustration...
...if Jordan were to join the talks now, it might preempt all that...
...West Bank reporter for the daily Davar, wrote a year ago: "There is no chance that Israel will be able to give up as much as one meter in the West Bank and Gaza even if it wishes to do so . . . The extensive settlement operations in the territories, the confiscation and acquisition of land, the Israeli Defense Forces deployment there, the bases, the emergency stockpiles, the training fields, the economic integration of the territories, all have been perpetrated by Israel's latest government in a way that even a partial renunciation thereof will lead the entire country to collapse...
...So the question now is how to insure that success, how to act in ways that will protect it, how to choose, and choose wisely...
...Hakovesh etyitzro' — "Who is a hero...
...Yet there is still a considerable distance to go before that intention is adequately realized...
...to a group of Sephardi demonstrators, but if they haven't, it's not for lack of bigotry, it's for reasons of style...
...Well, what of it...
...We ignore those circumstances at our peril, moral and physical...
...Incorporation of the West Bank and Gaza into Israel, whether by formal annexation or de facto arrangement, radically alters the composition of the population of the Jewish State...
...If that's a sign that we're still ghettoized, even in Israel itself, then whoever said "you can take the Jew out of the ghetto, but you can't take the ghetto out of the Jew " had a poi nt...
...Take Ariel, for example...
...After all, we are not talking about a Boy Scout jamboree, but about a tense and volatile area...
...What is it that we want to see in the Middle East, all of us...
...Actually we are not superior to other nations even in the sphere of morality...
...And when it's not working right, which is all of the time, we're supposed to know that we can't use its malfunction as a license to pursue evil...
...Is all this too harsh...
...I'm concerned with the spiritual challenge...
...Those who press Israel's claim must take account of the costs of its exercise...
...That changed the character of the country, and brought on the terrible manpower crisis we now face...
...is a symptom of abnormalcy, there are very, very many abnormal Jews in Israel and around the world these days...
...If we hang on to the land, I'm worried...
...And, to top it all off...
...And I've walked through all the valleys and the hills of Judea and Samaria...
...But it is a chapter that has gone on for nearly 16 years now, and it has done things to us, to all of us...
...I don't mean just peace...
...in the meantime, we will move, move, move, we will bring people to the land, we will build new settlements, we will create new facts the negotiators will have to deal with...
...If we'd had such large-scale immigration, as we thought we would, then there would be today no majority for Mr...
...Let us ask what the continuing occupation of the territories, which means the continuing rule over a hostile population, is doing...
...instead, he said, he was confident that in conditions of peace, there would be massive immigration to Israel of Jews from the West, enough of them to "redress" the deIf the West Bank is retained, is there any way to avoid Israel becoming a "secular democratic state...
...Then the government gives it to the contractor for about five percent of its value, which means, for all practical purposes, that the contractor is getting it for nothing...
...And the King says, 'When you find the strength, you, too, will kill...
...Accordingly, one is not necessarily talking about an eventual Arab majority in the expanded Jewish State...
...So: On the eve of Israel's 36th year of independence, Amos Oz asks, "What else must happen before we all understand that our people is liable to shatter to pieces from within...
...That's how it was, of course, for most of the two thousand years of our wanderings, when debate was all there was for us to win, when words were all we owned...
...The disappointment with the way things are turning out is almost palpable, especially in Israel...
...Here, for example, is the thinking of one of Israel's most distinguished champions of human rights, a man widely known and respected in the West for his commitment to liberal values, for his urbanity and civility...
...Within Israel proper, Arabs come to some 16 percent of the population...
...Is that the voice of the ghetto...
...Still, that's the same Menachem Begin who traded the Sinai for peace...
...On the other hand, unrealism, on which policies of vainglory are founded, is an exaggeration of one's capabilities...
...It's also their problem that while the Cabinet prepares to annex the West Bank, Sharon has already annexed the Cabinet...
...Zionism was a success...
...The one who can control his instinct, his might.' That's not just a phrase...
...Zionism came to give the Jews a present tense...
...Not, as is often claimed, a choice between naive idealism and hard-headed realism...
...The second problem with this version is that Emil Grunzweig is dead...
...the one is messy, the other messianic...
...In Israel, however, there are limits to how far one can press the defense of "higher orders...
...after bitter debate, the Jews, meaning in this case the World Zionist Organization, accepted it...
...But on the occasion of the anniverary of Israel's independence, yesterday's mistakes are less interesting than tomorrow's opportunities...
...Worse yet, Arabs were seen to be sitting on the Dan buses while Jews stood...
...Nor does the hatred move in only one direction across the ethnic divide...
...Ariel, after all, is just a 40 minute drive from downtown Tel Aviv...
...It would not take much by way of policy to "encourage" the departure of Palestinians, to cause a dramatic acceleration in the rate of emigration...
...And I know what it means...
...These were not, however, the acts with which the men on trial were charged...
...the Defense people predicted 500,000...
...Go dream your aimless dreams—but bear in mind, please, that if we start dreaming along with you, there'll be nobody left to guard the house...
...For years, we've been asking in despair what happened to the dream...
...They, those already there and those to come, don't see it that way...
...When the State of Israel was established, we assumed, as a matter of course, that it would enjoy large-scale immigration by Jews from all over the world, including the West...
...Why bother, then, to bring it to the attention of readers of the Jerusalem Post...
...Emphasis added.] "Having considered all the circumstances...
...When the King of Khuzar asks the Jewish philosopher what's special about Judaism, the philosopher answers that the Jews don't kill, they don't even kill their enemies...
...What went wrong...
...And for this, there must, of course, be peace...
...Here, for example, is what Dani Rubenstein...
...You can't simply trot out Ahad Ha'Am—or Avrum Burg—and expect their pretty words to provide a sufficient response...
...We can't absorb them at this stage, we can't digest them...
...That's one of the really neat things about the way the world works...
...Indeed, the link between the Sinai and the West Bank is not that the renunciation of the one provides a precedent for the renunciation of the other, but that the renunciation of the one was intended to facilitate the retention of the other...
...Much of the split owes to the politics of resentment rather than to ideological predisposition...
...Avrum Burg, who is the son of Dr...
...Even outside the Land, the Jews have wielded that anvil with imagination and with energy...
...mographic imbalance...
...Some day, that will mean yet another war...
...what, specifically, it is doing to the occupiers...
...now we have confirmation from Eliahu Ben Elissar, Chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, and a member of Israel's delegation to Camp David...
...Some might say—some do say—"Let the future take care of itself, it's all speculation anyway, in the meantime the present is more than enough to contend with, and there's nobody to talk to, to make peace with, so we really have no choice but to do what we're doing...
...And my friend, a senior official in Israel's security establishment, writes to me: "How have we fallen...
...It becomes impossible—unless, of course, you're willing to create yet another refugee problem...
...to the unlawful behavior of vigilante settlers, is roughly what is bound to happen under circumstances such as these, independent of the actors and their motives...
...But then reports began arriving from all parts of the country that wherever Peace Now demonstrators, honoring their fallen comrade, had gathered in silent vigil, passersby would shout—or mutter— "The next grenade's for you...
...its end is failure...
...Lest it be thought that Col...
...No Sephardic Jew in Israel, so far as I'm aware, has yet written a letter from a region of his mind, or described what it means to be a man-child in the truly Promised Land...
...Some of it owes to the fact that so long as the Arabs are around, the Sephardim are not, as they fear they otherwise would be, Israel's niggers...
...Because you can't make a fact out of a fantasy, and it is a fantasy to suppose that there can be both extended boundaries and peace...
...What went wrong...
...I'd have guessed he'd be there, for late one Jerusalem afternoon, this last December, Avrum and I had spoken at length of these things—of the dream (one cannot escape the metaphor) gone astray, of a future as ominous as the winter sky, of Avium's move, during the course of the summer, to political activism...
...it is not yet freely chosen...
...And beyond that, you must understand that the Palestinians will not shift their focus from Jerusalem to Amman...
...Perhaps it's only that the wolves still eat the lambs, that the swords are not yet plowshares, that the dreams are beginning to feel like fantasies, that this isn't the Heavenly Jerusalem after all...
...As if morality were a form of etiquette, required only when you're in a stranger's house...
...No, replied Begin, not at all...
...So if you continue putting major Jewish settlements in Arab areas, you finish the possibility of partition...
...Tell that to the 10,000 families—that's 50,000 people—of Emanuel, and to the families of Ma'Aleh Adumim and of Ariel and of Nofim and of Tsavta and Renunciation of the Sinai was intended to facilitate retention of the West Bank...
...trends converge, and become history...
...In fact, Ahad Ha'Am's reasoning might be enlisted to explain the frustration rather than to relieve it...
...For partition to work, the map must be drawn along demographic lines—Jews here, Arabs there...
...But not an excuse, for that would be both a sacrilege and a distortion...
...Several years ago, Prime Minister Begin was asked how he proposed to deal with the problem, was asked, more bluntly still, whether he intended to preserve the Jewishness of the Jewish State by denying its Arab residents the vote...
...And if I am only for myself, what am I? I need to stop here briefly, lest the cliches obscure the content...
...To cut even more deeply into it...
...But given the repeatedly stated position of Israel's government, it seems plain that it is history's hand rather than Hussein's that Israel seeks now to force...
...It was wrong to suppose that we, so deeply wounded, could set aside our fears and pretend the world's a playing field...
...Yossi Klein said it in these pages two months ago: It was preposterous to suppose that the Jewish people could move from the traumas of its recent past to the time of the wolf and the lamb, the time of the plowshares and the pruning hooks, without stumbling somewhere along the way...
...We sought to rule over a people that did not and does not and will not welcome us...
...What went wrong is that we were seduced by all the glitzy technology, and came to believe that hardware could serve as a shortcut to security...
...About others...
...But that's true because there are so many refugees in Jordan...
...What all of us want is an Israel free to discover what the Jewish people can accomplish, what it can make of its new nation...
...The point about doing the right thing is that most of the time, it's also the smart thing to do...
...I'm not concerned mostly with the political challenge of having so many Arabs...
...Perhaps it's not, as I think it is, a clear choice—but it's at least close enough to show that security is not simply a function of muscle...
...It's a challenge for all of us here, for the whole society: Can we control our force, our power...
...From 1937 to 1977, partition remained the formal doctrine of the Jewish people and of the Jewish State...
...The beginning," so said the prayer, "of the flowering of our redemption"—Jewish workers and Jewish farmers, Jewish skyscrapers and Jewish symphony orchestras, a Jewish army and a Jewish diplomatic corps, the remarkable achievements of a remarkable people finally free to turn its genius to nation-building...
...But that's not the point...
...But they are also all victims...
...Not only catastrophic immigration from people who had to come because they were persecuted, but idealistic immigration from people who wanted to come because they wanted to join the effort...
...Suppose, further, that we manage to convince the world of that superiority...
...But the whole of the West Bank is the size of the state of Delaware...
...He bought some thousand dunams from an Arab...
...It was in 1898 that he wrote his essay, "The Transvaluation of Values...
...But we do not need to contemplate an Arab majority to foresee a bitter and essentially insoluble problem...
...The fact is, like it or not, that they developed the same kind of emotion to Jerusalem, towards the rest of the places here, as we did...
...And, indeed, it might...
...They don't have the literature we do, but one of the reasons for that is that when you live with your beloved, you don't bother to write her letters...
...I think, sometimes, that we are still not used to power, to the meaning of our having re-entered history, that we still imagine the whole thing is about words...
...And much of it owes to the infuriatingly patronizing perspective even liberal Ashkenazim adopt when trying to think about the problem...
...Hartabi was merely a trifle overly enthusiastic in his manner, it must be added that his orders were based on directives issued by Israel's Chief of Staff, Rafael Eitan, who last spring recommended that unrest be dealt with by such things as the punishing of parents of disorderly students, depriving the inhabitants of areas where rioting has occurred of the right to purchase cement or fuel, the arrest and detention of instigators of disturbances (where formal charges cannot be brought against them for lack of evidence) for a few days, followed by their release and then their re-arrest...
...The Jews are commanded to be a holy people all the time, not just when it's convenient...
...Outsiders might have expected that a man so roundly chastised by the Commission of Inquiry would have seen fit to offer up some visible, if modest, act of contrition, if only to make it easier for his colleagues to play musical ministries, shifting him as they did to a different post within the Cabinet in order to provide the appearance of compliance with the Commission's recommendations...
...I think not...
...That is why there are some Israelis who have said, bluntly, that even if the Arabs were tomorrow morning to change their mind, and to announce their readiness to live with an Israel that reaches from the Mediterranean to the Jordan, and even if the entire family of nations were to give its blessing to Israeli rule over the West Bank and Gaza, still they would object...
...There are two problems with this version...
...And, ingathered, Jews hate Jews...
...The government, for the most part, takes care of the infrastructure—-roads, water, public spaces and such...
...It would be—it is—a profound mistake for us to conclude that just because their being here is inconvenient for us, it's not important to them...
...But Sharon knows his colleagues well...
...They're still putting the rural settlements there, but they don't really care whether they're viable...
...It does not increase because there is a continuing and substantial emigration of Palestinian Arabs from the West Bank...
...But if there is any learning that ought have come to us these past years, it is that being Jewish does not of itself provide absolute immunity against the nastiness that afflicts mankind...
...The more the two populations become intermingled, the harder it will be...
...As the Jerusalem Post, no fan of Eitan, said in an editorial on his directives on January 23, 1983, Eitan is a'"victim . . . like the society as a whole, to the corrosive effects of military occupation...
...Suppose, for example, that we establish that Israel's claim to the West Bank is superior to all other claims...
...These days, it takes ideology to stay out of the West Bank, not to move into it...
...Even under the Labor plan, what was left to the Arabs was not viable...
...So: Ariel is a new city in the West Bank...
...But, on the other hand, since the day when we left the Ghetto, we cannot help seeing that our superiority is merely potential...
...In defending themselves, the soldiers pleaded that they were merely following standard orders regarding the proper response to disturbances...
...without morals, we are meaningless...
...Let the mind roam a bit, away from the bombs and away from the quarrels...
...it's been discussed and debated at great length in Israel ever since 1967, and still more vigorously since 1977, when the Likud government came to power with its promise of permanent retention of the West Bank and Gaza...
...Our conversation in December was devoted mostly to "the situation," but it touched for a bit on the ethnic problem as well...
...No dove I know proposes that Israel can make it on sweetness alone,' that if only Israel were more forthcoming, the Arabs would suddenly welcome the Jews in their midst...
...the "Establishment" was insensitive and the Ashkenazim are bigots, according to another...
...As the brochure says, "Yeshivot, Girl's Seminars, Mikvaot" in a city that has "received the blessings of the most prominent rabbinic leaders of our time, who see in the building of this 'City of Faith' a hope and a solution for the thousands of religious families blessed with children...
...What does that amount to...
...We do not say, first let us look to our own health and then, with what's left over, to the health of everybody else...
...The government says they're against partition, they believe in shlemut ha'aretz, the 'integrity of the Land.' But what they want will mean partition, because it will mean taking in partners in running the country— either that, or an end to democracy...
...In mid-January, we are informed by Hirsh Goodman (military correspondent of the Jerusalem Post), the newspaper published by the settlers in Ariel carried an item complaining that local Arabs were using the Dan bus service rather than the bus service provided for Arabs...
...And practical, too: If the early Zionists had not so believed, the house would never have been built, it would never have been sufficiently compelling to attract the needed resources...
...So you cannot say that what will remain in Arab possession will be viable...
...Real peace...
...Remember that, lest by abandoning that belief today, the house is caused to come tumbling down...
...Samaria and Gaza are part of Eretz Yisrael, and what is part of your country you do not annex...
...But if the purpose is peace, with security, points won't take us there...
...When they do that, they immediately have an unlimited number of people...
...Ya'Skov Hartabi, former military commander of the West Bank, had ordered his men to drive people out of their homes and beat them, to shoot into the reflectors of rooftop solar heaters and to break the residents' watches...
...I decided, finally, to tell about the numbers on the forearms not because I think the incident "typical," but in order to shock us out of our willful lethargy...
...we had a past, we had a future...
...But now it's no longer just the dream that's in jeopardy—it's the reality, it's what we've actually achieved...
...they are not merely the mechanical response to external stimulus...
...What one is to do with troublemakers I do not know...
...And here's Sharon, asked by one of his commanders how to respond to Arab disturbances: "Cut off their testicles...
...Why spum the opportunity...
...Ah, but the 500,000 aren't there, -yet, nor even the 50,000...
...We are becoming heirs to the blessing that Jacob gave Esau: Al charbechah tichyeh.' ('By your sword you shall live.') That's Esau's blessing, and 1 don't want it...
...So what...
...Indeed, even Ariel Sharon, this time around, is not the villain...
...No, it does not, not unless it can be shown that the exercise of that claim is to Israel's advantage—which means that it is consistent with Israel's desire for peace...
...What went wrong...
...they will ask...
...We may argue first causes and original sins from now until midnight, but save as we move beyond such sterile argument, the dawn will never break...
...The fact is that they did not begin with Sharon, or, for that matter, with the Likud...
...Another version: The reason things haven't turned out the way they were meant to is that the wrong people came...
...If so, then whose is the voice of Israel...
...Listen, if you will, to Avrum Burg once more: "I love Eretz Yisrael, all of it...
...Ariel Sharon bulls merrily, and ferociously, along, perhaps the only adult in Israel who sleeps well...
...That's what being truly independent means...
...Worse, it is probably safe to assume that ugly episodes will continue...
...And a youngster of my acquaintance here in America, product of, as we say, "a good Jewish home," has come to view Israel as "a place where bad things happen...
...Oh, it is likely the case that the "get tough" policy pursued by Sharon and Eitan of late reflects their distinctive styles and intention, and it may even be the case that their policy was intended to encourage Arab emigration from the West Bank...
...When Labor started building settlements, there wasn't much to it...
...And in the event that sufficient energy and effort is devoted to making it work, to making it possible for so large a minority to be fully integrated into the life of the country, are we not then talking, essentially, about a bi-national state, or, to use the contemporary phrase, about a secular democratic state...
...Let us speak of future costs: For years we've known of what's come to be called "the demographic problem," by which is meant the simple fact that there are today somewhere between 710,000 and 800,000 Palestinian Arabs who live on the West Bank, and another 450,000 in the Gaza Strip...
...Emanuel, City of Faith" is what it's called, 10,000 homes and apartments for religious folk...
...How shall we relate to such a report...
...it makes you use it...
...just clean air and low-cost housing, cheaper by far than what's available within the Green Line (the pre-1967 boundaries...
...But though morality doesn't guarantee individual life, its absence does guarantee communal death...
...Nor, as it turns out, does the newspaper of Ariel describe an isolated episode...
...the mortgage rates are very low...
...I don't relish this next, but I have much in mind these days a lesson taught us by the Kahan Commission (the Commission of Inquiry): "We do not say that the decision to have the Phalangists enter the camps should under no circumstances have been made and was totally unwarranted...
...Obviously, it is disgusting...
...Ariel Sharon, born without umbilical cord, with no inhibiting connection to any civilized tradition, be it Jewish or secular democratic—Ariel Sharon yes and Avrum Burg no...
...The acts in question were considerably more base...
...In the trenches, there's no time for scruples...
...Those who choose now to reject the Israel of the nightmare also abandon the Israel of the dream...
...But it happened, and it, or things like it, will happen again...
...It may be, as we are told, that his presence gives them little pleasure, but that's their problem, not his...
...We had memories, and we had dreams...
...For over a hundred years, the United States has announced its intention of integration...
...Away with such drivel...
...My mother was bom in Hebron...
...they will ask...
...Add to these the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza, and you move from 16 percent to 35 percent, from a ratio of more than five Jews to one Arab to a ratio of two Jews to one Arab...
...And though the State of Israel is less independent than we might have wished, it is by no means without choice, and the chance to choose is what independence is finally^about...
...They ask their soulful questions without realizing how silly those questions are, how craven...
...That's not just aimed at the private instincts, at the passions, it's not just about sex...
...The Jewish citizens of the Jewish State are therefore no more free to set their own course than are the scattered Jews of the Diaspora...
...Black Americans, who live in a country that is not located in Africa, and who are not heirs to a doctrine of conquest, come to about 12 percent of this nation's people...
...On February 17, 1983, a military court in Israel convicted four of seven soldiers arrested for aggravated assault on Arabs in the Hebron area last spring...
...That doctrine holds that by your actions on the ground, you can alter the political environment...
...Ahad Ha'Am believed that with the rebirth of Jewish independence, we'd at last have the chance to "make our lives a true expression of our own character...
...It elected a new leadership, committed to the retention of all the Land...
...And even if they did, that would still leave you with a ten-to-one ratio of Arabs to Jews in the West Bank...
...Here's Burg: "It's not that having all that power pushes you to use it...
...They cannot stand it that we ask questions, and they hate us...
...He'd been to a demonstration in front of the P.M.'s offices once before, back during the endless summer, a demonstration of wives and mothers against the war, and he'd seen the pushing and the fists, felt them, heard the curses...
...Those orders, detailed during the course of the trial by the testimony of officers all the way up to the Chief of Staff, call for the harassment of local Arabs...
...Although from Hussein's perspective, the prospect of endless months of negotiation during which new settlements continue to be created and old ones expanded cannot be very appetizing...
...in their hard-headed assessment, retention of the land endangers the safety of the state...
...Ashkenazi bigotry gets expressed in subtler ways, as befits the group in power (and the group with higher education...
...We demand that of ourselves...
...And what they wanted seems to be what they're getting...
...The only thing that's wrong is that there are some Jews who are still trapped, whose minds have never left the ghetto...
...That's what coming back to history means...
...III...
...Without manners, we are boors...
...First" began to feel right...
...The first piece of land there was bought by a private person...
...When Begin says in the Knesset, 'We will go to the people, let the people decide,' he's not referring to me and my neighbors, and not to the kibbutznikim and not to the intelligentsia, he's referring to this embittered group, because he knows that the more he lies and misleads them, the more he splits the Jewish people, the more support they'll give him.™ It's a fact that there is a political correlate to all this, that 70 percent of the Sephardi voters cast their votes for the Likud in the last elections, while 75 percent of the Ashkenazi voters cast theirs for Labor...
...Is it vindication we seek, or a way out of the morass...
...V. An interlude for a commercial message: Here on my desk is a sales brochure for apartments and houses in a place called Emanuel, a new town in the West Bank...
...who nonetheless volunteered to rejoin his combat unit when the war in Lebanon began...
...In the negotiations for peace, we knew exactly what we wanted: Israeli rule over Western Eretz Yisrael...
...Their vocabulary does not include 'Diaspora Jewry.' They get their kicks out of disturbing meetings of the Opposition...
...The Likud has very cleverly changed the whole strategy...
...The matter, as they see it, is not law, or justice, or right, but self-interest...
...But he will not, because he cannot, curb the bigotry, the corruption of the soul that comes of being an occupying power...
...These days, other Israelis of annexationist bent make a rather different point, a point that is both more plausible and more ominous...
...In Pirkei Avot (The Ethics of the Fathers) we read, 'Eizeh hu gibor...
...But no nation, not even the mega-powers, can make it on hardware alone...
...The Arabs rejected the notion out of hand...
...Does that necessarily mean that Israel is wise to press its claim...
...After that, we'll have to view Israel as a permanently polarized society, one where there can be no surgery, where you cannot achieve partition...
...There are so very many other elements that go into security's equation—the morale of the people, the health of the economy, the strength of the alliances, even the moral stature of the country...
...The facts of the tragedy don't matter much...
...The voice of the ghetto...
...It was wrong to think that the nightmare would not overtake the dream, somewhere...
...Or, more veiled, one hears about the desperate need for immigration from the West...
...Let the diplomats and politicians waste their time in intricate negotiation...
...And I feel, deep in my heart, in my bones, that this sinat chinam exists here and now, as well, that you just have to scratch a little to uncover it...
...Except, of course, that retention of the Sinai was never part of Begin's fundamental commitment, and retention of Judea and Samaria is...
...I don't know that any Ashkenazim have ever shouted, "Why don't you go back to Morocco...
...In the meantime, it means a different kind of horror...
...Perhaps less, for to retain them is to prescribe permanent war...
...The earthly Jerusalem is necessarily more complicated than the heavenly Jerusalem...
...And Israel, independent/dependent Israel, for sure cannot...
...And they also have access to private investment...
...Begin, who knocks the Ashkenazim, the kibbutzim, the intellectuals, who shows the Arabs and the world how powerful we are, he is the King of Israel...
...The question is what we do next...
...It is "surrounded by springs and natural reserves, with a magnificent panorama of the seashore and the Shomron Hills" and it "is replete with clean air...
...And that's not all: Emanuel features "an urban transport system based on a modern technological approach as the definitive solution to noise, air pollution and road safety...
...Initially, it seemed rather premature to use so loaded a word as "first," intimating thereby that now that this threshold had been crossed, there would be more to come...
...We forgot that Judaism doesn't teach us to distinguish between God and Caesar...
...Doves are as self-centered as hawks...
...A brief digression: It is altogether too easy to blame Sharon, but that's not the way things work in a democracy...
...The rest of the country, hawks and*doves alike, scrambles at the edge of a nervous breakdown, dozes fitfully through a national nightmare...
...The real challenge for us is to make the Torah come alive, to show that now that we have the strength, we can still try to live according to our highest values, and, more than that, to show that those values are practical, that they can be the basis for daily life...
...The newspaper complained that on the bus from Ariel, Arabs sat while Jews were standing...
...Long before Moshe Dayan coined the phrase, the doctrine of "establishing facts" was at the core of the Zionist enterprise...
...Those Israelis who had imagined Israel as an outpost of West-em civilization in the Middle East, a fulfillment of Herzl's vision in Altneuland, who did not and for the most part do not understand Jewish culture, or, understanding it, eschew it in favor of fin de siecle Viennese, lament what they euphemistically refer to as "the manpower crisis...
...One hears—in polite company—references to frankim, a word disturbingly akin to "nigger...
...There may not be much chance for peace with partition, but there's no chance at all without it...
...Five bedrooms in Emanuel will set you back just $66,000...
...Another version: We forgot what we were supposed to know so well it didn't even need remembering...
...what matters is that in reaction to the violence, Sephardi Jews went on a bit of a rampage, painting swastikas and such on identifiably Ashkenazi homes and institutions...
...Writing of these things in his The Bar Kokhba Syndrome, Yehoshafat Harkabi, former Chief of Military Intelligence in Israel and no romanti-cizer of history's complexity, has this to say: "A realistic orientation includes an awareness of one's ability accompanied by a recognition of one's limits . . . Such realism is not belittling oneself, or folding up one's tents and retreating, but is taking a balanced view of the world...
...Another version: In 1937, the Peel Commission, appointed by His Majesty's Government to propose a solution to the continuing conflict in Palestine, recommended the partition of the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan...
...People who now live in a two bedroom apartment in Rishon L'Tzion can get, for the same price, a three-level detached villa in Ariel, with a quality of life you can't find any more in Israel proper, not unless you're ready to move quite a distance from the urban centers...
...The dread that haunts us these days owes to the belief that such a peace, such a freedom, grows less likely day by day...
...Sharon holds onto office at the pleasure of his colleagues...
...who walks with a cane because of the spinal injury he suffered in a parachute jump some years back...
...Collective punishment, arbitrary imprisonment, economic sanctions—all orders that became a matter of public record only during the course of the trial...
...Events converge, and become trends...
...Judaism has insisted, from its beginnings, that morality is not an indulgence, but a way of life...
...But why shouldn't Jews be permitted to live in all parts of their historic homeland...
...Not—even the roaming mind cannot roam so far from reality—a love feast, but the kind of peace that is marked by decent neighborly relations...
...The first is that if asking "What went wrong...
...We say it as diamond-edged wisdom, the accreted wisdom of a people that can speak to the relationship of the particular to the universal, of the self to the other, with greater experience and authenticity than any other...
...But I have to remember that she and her father and two of her sisters were saved by Arabs...
...The image of the State would be entirely different...
...That's not a "new" problem...
...Inside, Israel's Cabinet had convened to consider its response to the Report of the Commission of Inquiry...
...What went wrong...
...And Jews hate Jews...
...Besides, despite all the confusion and constraint, it just won't do to say that circumstances do not permit us to make our lives a true expression of our character...
...There are those who think him an optimist...
...Grunzweig was murdered by a hand grenade while participating in a Peace Now demonstration in front of the Prime Minister's office...
...But here it is, just 15 years from the centennial of his essay, 35 years into the independence he sought, and we've still not managed it...
...We simply have to make the best with what we have...
...We had even talked of the growing violence between the opposing camps, the pushing and the shoving he'd experienced as one of the founders of "Soldiers Against Silence...
...At most...
...Begin...
...Circumstance overwhelms intention...
...So let's assume a hundred...
...What, after all, is one to do with troublemakers...
...Yitzhak Shamir, Israel's Foreign Minister, who voted against Camp David: "Judea...
...I shall spare you the grizzly details of the behavior which led to their indictment...
...And what about Camp David, which insures that the final disposition of the "territories" will be the subject of negotiations that have yet to take place?»x And so forth...
...To use that as an argument is to raise the question, haratzachtah v'gam yarashtah?— you've killed, and now you propose to inherit...
...That's the work that's waiting...
...Endless enemies later, countless dead later, they still don't leave us alone, leave us be...
...Those Americans who've not visited the West Bank recently may be somewhat taken aback by this...
...Hail Israel's achievements...
...A now...
...Is Eitan the villain, are the convicted soldiers merely victims...
...In the case at hand...
...We did not hide that from the Egyptians, and when we signed the Camp David accords, in September '78, and later, in March '79, the peace treaty—the Egyptians knew, in the clearest possible way, what Israel is prepared to sacrifice and what it is not prepared to sacrifice...

Vol. 8 • April 1983 • No. 4


 
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