Heroes and Hustlers; Hard Hats and Holy Men
Chafets, Ze'ev
HEROES AND HUSTLERS, HARD HATS AND HOLY MEN: INSIDE THE NEW ISRAEL Ze'ev Chafets/William Morrow/$17.95 Joseph Shattan As readers of this journal doubtless know, the Puritan pioneers who came to...
...But since a "silver" child is occasionally born of "golden" parents, or a "golden" child of "silver" parents, Guardians are charged, in Plato's words, "to let nothing else play a more important role in their work . . . than the concern and scrutiny they devote to the admixture of metals in the souls of their children...
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...They have destroyed our dream...
...For just as the election of 1828—in which Jackson and his Western supporters defeated John Quincy Adams and the New England establishment in a campaign of unprecedented viciousness—is commonly regarded as a turning point in the political history of the United States, so too the Israeli elections of 1977 and 1981—in which Likud beat Labor in campaigns that were unusually vitriolic even by Israeli standards—marked the emergence of the Oriental Jews into Israel's political mainstream...
...I am the pure embodiment of service, prepared for every-thing...
...I know only one command: Build...
...Chafets's analogy between Begin and Jackson is a good one, and might be extended further...
...They are brutal, vulgar people, people who have introduced violence and intolerance...
...But I don't see it yet...
...The heroes were the privates and sergeants and junior officers—most of them civilian reservists—who stopped the Arab advance on the Syrian and Egyptian fronts...
...They called their new land Canaan, cultivated a knowledge of Hebrew (it was not until 1787 that Harvard under-graduates were excused from compulsory Hebrew study) and regarded them-selves as "the Israel of our time...
...But perhaps Chafets's most startling experience occurred during his conversations with a sabra (native-born) physics student named Yisrael, wholived next door in the student dorm at the Hebrew University...
...But the generals were wrong, and in the early days of the war they seemed just as confused and ineffective as the politicians...
...Judging from Ze'ev Chafets's very entertaining study, Heroes and Hustlers, Hard Hats and Holy Men: In-side the New Israel, while the possibility of modern Israelis embracing Unitarianism en masse is remote, it cannot be excluded altogether...
...what mattered was that the various communities could be classified, and that each constituted a type of human clay that could be molded with lesser or greater difficulty into the building blocks for the new country...
...In Michigan-born Chafets, who emigrated to Israel in 1967, became director of the Government Press Office in 1977, and is himself in his late thirties, this "brooding, introspective young adult" has clearly found a most talented and perceptive biographer...
...Yet even in the excitement of those heady days, certain features of Israeli life grated on Chafets's nerves...
...HEROES AND HUSTLERS, HARD HATS AND HOLY MEN: INSIDE THE NEW ISRAEL Ze'ev Chafets/William Morrow/$17.95 Joseph Shattan As readers of this journal doubtless know, the Puritan pioneers who came to the New World strongly identified with the Old Testament and its people...
...And now the people who vote for the Likud, the kind of people who want Begin, have ruined my country...
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...It may not be entirely coincidental that one of Ben-Gurion's favorite philosophers was Plato, and that, in late middle age, Ben-Gurion actually learned ancient Greek in order to read his beloved Plato in the original...
...Israel's Guardians had regarded these Orientals as singularly poor "human material," and had consigned them in-definitely to the Producer class...
...True enough, Chafets never actually cites the Republic...
...Even more upsetting was the extent of the Labor government's control not only over the economy, but over Israel's cultural life: I had never encountered anything remotely like this kind of government control...
...As Conor Cruise O'Brien has re-marked, "Language of this kind, coming from politicians in a working democracy, and reflecting adversely on huge blocs of voters—soon to be a majority in the State—must be highly unusual, and is probably unique...
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...They were to own no private property, and their children were to be brought up communally...
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...And so the Orientals went ahead and elected Menachem Begin, "the Black Pope of Zionism," prime minister of Israel...
...Plato believed that the Guardians should live disciplined, self-denying lives in common barracks, sharing meals, clothing, and food...
...Faced with a mass of newly arrived immigrants from all over the world, these pioneers—now the leaders of a fledgling state—set about an "audacious undertaking: to transform [the immigrants]—or at least their children—into Real Israelis...
...The first time he turned on the radio, for example, and heard Patti Page's rendition of "Where Will My Baby's Dimple Be...
...Nonetheless, to anyone who knows his Plato, much of what Chafets says about the views of Israel's Founders is uncannily reminiscent of the attitudes and practices of the Guardians and Auxiliaries, who collectively formed the Republic's Ruling Class...
...The entire country became a laboratory for turning diaspora dross into Israeli gold, with the pioneer veterans and their sabra sons serving as the alchemists...
...And it is with Plato's Guardians, rather than with exponents of American individualism, that Israel's Founders shared a common ethos...
...There was nothing wrong with the Jews that sovereignty wouldn't cure...
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...Curiously, all this seemed both just and natural...
...Overnight, as it were, there were no longer any Real Israelis...
...On the contrary, says Chafets, "Everything worth controlling was in the hands of the Labor establishment, which greeted the victory of Begin's coalition with all the enthusiasm of Bostonian Whigs at Andy Jackson's inauguration ball...
...In theend, says Chafets, the Yom Kippur War became the war of the little guys...
...I will enlist...
...Consider, to begin with, the matter of life-style...
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...he "couldn't help thinking that there was something seriously wrong with a country whose national radio would play such a song . . . over and over...
...What makes the kibbutz so unusual is not simply its communal aspect (many such communes exist throughout the world), but the fact that, especially during the fifties and sixties, a disproportionately large number of Israel's political and military elite were drawn from these kibbutzim, and returned to them at the close of their careers...
...In his view, Jews—Sephardi or Ashkenazi—didn't need any radical alterations beyond the natural changes that in-dependence conferred...
...The Israelis believed their own leg-end that summer," he recalls...
...His mentor, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, had preached a kind of "Jewish Is Beautiful" philosophy...
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...Once restored to an independent government and no longer persecuted they would soon wear away some of the asperities and peculiarities of their character, possibly in time becoming liberal Unitarian Christians...
...But the resemblance between Israel's Founders and Plato's Guardians ex-tends well beyond life-styles, and touches upon fundamental attitudes toward the individual and the state...
...For the sake of Israel, one hopes that the Laborites won't repeat Adams's mistake...
...46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1986...
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...But however much (or little) one might sympathize with these Laborites, one can't help noticing a disturbing analogy between their anguish and the alienation of Henry Adams (great-grandson of John, grandson of John Quincy), who also felt like a stranger in his own country during America's Gilded Age...
...He couldn't have cared less if they kept their original diaspora names (as he kept his...
...It would have been asking far too much of human nature to have expected Labor's leaders to yield power gracefully to Begin's Likud, and in fact they did not...
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...Romanians were "healthy but untrustworthy," Yemenites "hard-working but primitive" and so on...
...This ethos was eloquently expressed by Joseph Trumpeldor, an early settler who died defending the northern frontier: Is there a wheel lacking...
...Plato's Guardians, on the other hand, were raised from childhood to subordinate themselves to the state, to regard selfless service to the community as the highest good...
...Moshe Dayan and the generals had assured the country that it would not, and in the Era of High Certitude that was enough...
...instead, everyone became a real Israeli...
...Of course, Plato's entire system of government was predicated on the be-lief that the Guardians really knew what they were doing...
...When Chafets arrived in Israel in the summer of 1967, it seemed to him a shining city on a hill, inhabited by larger-than-life heroes and prophets...
...Throughout his long political career, Begin never referred to himself as an Israeli: He was always "a Jew" or, later, "an old Jew"—and this, more than anything else, endeared him to the Sephardi masses: He didn't see them as incomplete, inadequate or primitive...
...Maybe in the third generation something will appear from the Oriental Jew that is a little different...
...And being so thoroughly steeped in the Bible and its lore, it occurred to a number of them that perhaps it wouldn't be such a bad idea if the old Israel were reestablished...
...He points out that for all the "asperities and peculiarities" of his character, Menachem Begin liked, and even loved, his fellow-Jews...
...I hate their values, their attitudes...
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...lished public committees to approve or censor films, plays, and other forms of entertainment...
...I am not a person...
...When the fighting ended and people had a chance to look around, they realized that they had been alone, and that the fathers and mothers and glorious big brothers of the pioneer elite had failed, for the first time, to provide any inspiration or leadership...
...He certainly never accepted the notion of the New Jewish Man and Woman whom the socialists dreamed of creating in the Zionist laboratory...
...The reason Labor politicians got away with it is that the Orientals, like everyone else in Israel, believed in the Myth of the Real Israeli...
...It was during one such conversation that Yisrael informed Chafets that, as an American Jew, he was excellent "human material": This phrase, as Yisrael explained it, stood for a system of human quality control, in which each group of Jews was assigned a collective value...
...I was astonished, for example, to find that Israel had no television...
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...The white-maned revolutionaries produced a generation of Hebrew warriors, personified by the golden Moshe Dayan, and in 1967 this generation had won an almost mythical victory over Israel's enemies...
...The Labor-Zionist equivalent of the Myth of the Metals was the Myth of the Real Israeli, according to which becoming a Real Israeli meant shed-ding the psychological characteristics acquired in the diaspora—Adams's "asperities and peculiarities"—and accepting the values of the pioneers who founded the state and established its institutions...
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...Chafets succeeds in conveying the anguish of these people, one of whom said: I am a sabra, the daughter of sabra parents...
...They've stolen my homeland...
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...Even when television was finally introduced, the [Labor] leaders saw to it that its broadcast day would end at 11:00 p.m., to make sure that the workers didn't stay up till all hours of the night...
...As late as the mid-sixties, Ben-Gurion could say: "Those from Morocco had no education...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1986 45 A key task of the Guardians was to protect all classes from the beguiling at-tractions of poets, musicians, dramatists, and painters...
...For I really wish the Jews again in Judea an in-dependent nation," declared John Adams toward the end of his life...
...Chafets, however, offers a better explanation of the Begin phenomenon...
...And just as Plato's Republic was made up of a minority of Guardians and Auxiliaries, on the one hand, and a majority of Producers, on the other, so was Israel divided between a minority of Real Israelis, and a majority of ordinary Jews...
...From the Labor party's perspective, Begin's popularity with the Orientals only showed how easily a Polish "primitive" can appeal to Oriental "primitives...
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...and the first task of achieving it was to develop self-respect—not for what you might become, but for what you already are...
...For me, the absence of TV was disorienting, as if some vital natural element was missing, and I found the reason for it somewhat chilling...
...of somehow rewriting a badly writ-ten page in the annals of the Jewish people...
...He was prepared to concede that there might be variations and exceptions within each group, but these were essentially irrelevant...
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...Especially noteworthy is the case of Israel's Grand Old Man, the late David Ben-Gurion, who retired from the prime ministership to Sde Boker, a pioneering kibbutz in the Negev desert...
...I feel like a stranger in my own country...
...They love their wives, but they beat them...
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...This was the "Era of High Joseph Shattan, a frequent contributor, is a writer living in Washington, D.0 Certitude" in modern Israeli history...
...These evaluations were apparently self-evident (and, as I later learned, almost universally accepted among the sabra elite) and, as presented by Yisrael, they seemed as absolute as the elements on the periodic table...
...My grandparents came to the land of Israel as pioneers, to build a just, beautiful place...
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...Although this austere ideal has nowhere been fully realized, perhaps the nearest the world has come to it is on the Israeli kibbutz...
...Spotting the proper "human material" from which Real Israelis might be fashioned was therefore just as important to Israel's Founders as determining "the admixture of metals in the souls of their children" was to Plato's Guardians...
...Chafets's description of the "audacious undertaking" of the Israeli pioneers bears a striking resemblance to an earlier experiment in social engineering: Plato's Republic...
...He didn't want to alienate their children, mock their traditions, scoff at their religious beliefs...
...Simply put," answers Chafets, "these people knew what they were doing...
...For having gone from "a high-spirited adolescent" in 1967 to a "brooding, introspective young adult" today, Israel in its late thirties 'Ss still a nation that doesn't know what it wants to be when it grows up...
...If you please, I am ready to do all...
...And why was becoming a Real Israeli so important...
...He didn't attempt to change their style of dress, their diet, their music...
...The war was not supposed to have happened in the first place," Chafets writes...
...Taking their cue from the Declaration of Independence, most Americans believe that the state exists to serve the individual, to help secure his "inalienable rights...
...Adams eventually con-soled himself by adopting a sour and bigoted attitude toward his country and all its works...
...With the downfall of the Labor-Zionist patriciate, the Jews who immigrated to Israel from North Africa and the Middle East--the so-called Orientals or Sephardim—and who by now constituted a majority of the country, finally came into their own...
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...For some Labor supporters, the political history of Israel since 1977 has been one long nightmare...
...The occasion of their downfall was the Yom Kippur War of 1973...
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...His view is summarized in the Myth of the Metals, ac-cording to which those who rule are "golden" men who rightfully deserve to govern lesser men of "silver" and "bronze...
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...Plato could not have put it any better...
...In the aftermath of the Six Day War, "there was a palpable sense of making not just history, but ancient history...
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...The government, it seemed, considered television a bad influence and, until 1968, simply refused to allow it...
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...Eventually it dawned on Chafets that Israel was an "ideological creation," a product of the "flinty Hebrew Calvinism" of the Labor-Zionist pioneers...
...By 1977, however, no one believed in this myth any longer...
...Plato wanted to ban Homer because he depicted the gods as immoral, and he also sought to censor what he regarded as the effeminate harmonies of certain musicians...
...As in a classical Greek tragedy, however, in which the protagonist is an admirable man brought down by some fatal flaw of character, so too were the "Real Israelis" brought down by their overweening self-confidence, their hubris...
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Vol. 19 • July 1986 • No. 7
