IsraeI Divided

...media between irresponsible extremes...

...With loyalties hopelessly divided but their belief in the shelter afforded by Jewish weakness unshaken by the Holocaust, members of the Peace Movement were themselves instrumental in fabricating a "Palestinian identity" and in encouraging Palestinian claims to the West Bank...

...Flexibility, concessions, indirect negotiations, even explorations of the Peace Movement's favorite nostrum of a "Palestine entity," failed to bring either peace or any abatement in the Arab view that Israel's existence in itself constituted aggression...

...The Land of Israel Movement, far more popular in Israel than its dovish adversary yet scorned by Western intellectuals as religious, fanatical, and "right-wing," has adhered steadfastly to two principles...

...Neither could accept the official view that the disaster had resulted from technical failure...

...By 1973, on the other hand, the very government which denied the first principles of the Land of Israel Movement had established 44 Israeli settlements in the Golan, on the West Bank, and in northern Sinai...

...Now, however, in a world in which, as Isaac says, "radical leftism has identified Arab nationalism as progressive and Zionism...as retrogressive" and made the destruction of Israel its great desideratum, the margin has disappeared...

...But the absence of progress towards peace, symbolized by the three Arab "nos" issued at Khartoum in August 1967 --no recognition, no negotiation, no peace --signified the paralysis of government policy and enabled the competing ideologies to crack the government consensus...

...The Yore Kippur War confirmed each ideological group in the rightness of its convictions...

...Also, most members of the Peace Movement inherited ideologies which sought to combine Jewish values with radical leftist ones...

...But they had one drawback from the political point of view: they never worked...

...The Peace Movement saw the 1967 victory as an opportunity to prove Israel's good intentions by forfeiting all territorial claims and returning to pre-war boundaries...

...Initially, these competing ideological alternatives weakened each other and strengthened the government, which came more readily into public view as the via Edward Alexander is Professor of English and Chairman of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Washington, in Seattle...

...34 The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1977...

...What could seem more expedient than for Israel to disappear altogether...

...Although Isaac's presentation of the two opposed movements is fair and dispassionate, she makes clear her preferences...

...The other is that in Jewish weakness lies not security but danger, for the Arabs wilt establish peace with Israel only when they no longer see the possibility of destroying her...

...Isaac is adroit in tracing the paradoxical developments of the next six years during which government members felt the impact of the Peace Movement ideology with great immediacy, yet implemented programs of the Land of Israel Movement without ever embracing the principles underlying those programs...

...Israel Divided is one of the few necessary utterances on the Middle East to appear in recent years, and is of the first importance...

...But always, for the Zionist socialists, there remained some margin between probability and certainty on this point...

...Her final chapter asserts with clarity and authority that despite the Achilles' heel of the Land of Israel Movement--the large, growing Arab population in the West Bank--it, and not the Peace Movement, has penetrated to the heart of the conflict: namely, Arab refusal to countenance Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine...

...One, the Land of Israel Movement, argued for the incorporation into Israel of the captured territories, either because (like Judea and Samaria) they belonged to the Jewish people by historic right or (as in the case of Sinai) for security reasons...

...But Rael Isaac, in her book IsraeI Divided, shows that a Jewish state is endowed--whether for blessing or curse remains to be seen--with a disproportionately large number of citizens who share Mill's belief that the true parliament is not the elected one but the ideological debate which supplies the vision for temporal power...

...Hence the Peace Movement urged the government to cease insisting on a full peace and all the trappings of normal relations between nations...

...The sole result of U.S...

...One is that the Jews' claim to the land of Israel not only is, but must be, based upon historical and religious claims, because the absence of a principled basis for action makes Israel helpless in the face of outside pressure from advocates of expediency...

...Above all, the Peace Movement argued that the resolution to the entire conflict lay not in making accommodation with the Arab states, but in satisfying the "national aspirations" of Palestinian Arabs by creating for them another Palestinian state (in addition to Jordan) in the West Bank and Gaza...

...peace efforts wilt be, she therefore concludes, to put Israel into a more disadvantageous position when the next war begins...

...Last December he and his wife were interrogated and arrested in the USSR for "endangering Soviet citizens" by car~jing elementary Hebrew language texts in their suitcases...

...The leftist and generally secularist ideas of the Peace Movement might have been music to the inward ear of a Labor government...

...The Peace Movement held that the inadequacy of territory and military might as deterrents was now proven...

...The fact that most radical left-wing parties during these past hundred years have been antiSemitic might have suggested that this was a quixotic attempt to reconcile irreconcilables...

...The Peace Movement has applied to the Israel-Arab conflict what Hannah Arendt once called the incurable delusion of European Jewry: the belief that in weakness and dependence lies the best security for the Jewish people...

...oi0OgOQmiiI0Qg~QQgg~8QIi0BQQQQQmiQOUDUggwQ4OOoQQgQg~Qo00Q0siQgjQ6oIO0QgQ0gqiOQIm00QQI~8iBi0BQgI0o4iQOm04I00~QQDQ0Q00Qoi6iQI0oQg0QloQQQo~Qg~O4o~0iOD4 BOOK REVIEW Israel Divided: Ideological Politics in the Jewish State RaelJean Isaac / Johns Hopkins University Press / $10.95 Edward Alexander In so desperately beseiged a country as Israel, it might be supposed that people would cling for life to the conviction that the government is their collective representative, and that ideological politics is a luxury to be indulged in by a handful of intellectuals who believe in truth even though the heavens fall, but are not prepared to say what will happen after the heavens fall...

...The Land of Israel Movement insisted that the technical failure was rooted in the government's failure to perceive the legitimacy of its own title to the land of Israel, parts of which its agencies persistently referred to as occupied rather than liberated territories...

...Isaac argues that, in the aftermath of the Six-Day War of June 1967, two antithetical ideological movements arose in Israel to challenge the government consensus based on the polic 7 of trading captured territories for a genuine peace, formally ratified...

...By presenting their composition, ideology, and influence with lucidity and shrewdness, Isaac shows that both movements represent traditional elements within Jewish life...