REPORTS FROM THE MIDDLE EAST A Journey to Israel
Walzer, Michael
DURING THE FIRST two weeks of August, along with three friends, professors like myself, I traveled in Israel, talking with people in the government, the new opposition, the army, and the...
...Here is a factor obviously militating against the full integration of immigrants from preindustrial countries...
...Indirect rule has provided something of that protection: one of the signs of its success is that Arab investment on the West Bank is up steeply this last year...
...We were there when the cease-fire went into effect, and the "American initiative" was the chief topic of our conversations...
...But there is no Committee on un-Zionist Activities, and Talmon and many others like him continue to speak out, and do so from what look like perfectly secure academic, political, and journalistic positions...
...It would be a great mistake to impute to them the feelings of their American counterparts...
...Between war and socialism there has always existed an ambivalent relation, whose precise working out in any particular case is necessarily confusing...
...It won't be ended, however, by a coming together of Arabs and Jews...
...What is more important, there isn't any discernible group of men with anything that remotely resembles a "militarist" perspective...
...That is one reason why the presence of soldiers everywhere, and often of soldiers carrying guns, doesn't give one the sense of living in an armed camp...
...The Cold War has come to Israel—but only, it's worth insisting, at this late date...
...Israel is a democratic state, and the range of opinion is wide...
...The rise in absolute numbers continues, and there are now some Oriental Jews living on kibbutzim—an important development since socialism had no roots among Jews in the Islamic countries...
...War and Socialism The prospect is for continued tension, whether open hostilities are resumed or not, and the long-term effects of this upon the country need to be considered...
...Income distribution after taxes, we were told, is nearer to equality than in any Western country...
...First of all, everyone goes into the army at age 18 for three years—men and women alike...
...The terrorists and the tough Israeli response to them have changed that, but not so very much...
...Why encourage the development of possible opposition centers...
...Israeli democracy seems as vigorous as ever...
...These are the oldtimers, of course, and there are other tendencies in the society to which I'll refer in a moment...
...This can be illustrated most easily in the army and the government, but one MICHAEL WALZER senses it too on the streets, in restaurants, buses, and so on—less so, however, in the big hotels catering to tourists...
...Menachem Begin of the right-wing Gahal party emphasized the risks and the likely losses and talked of a Mideast Munich...
...the Israelis have tried instead to be invisible...
...It might well be in Israel's best interests not to maintain the King, but once again, her options are limited...
...I hope no one in Women's Liberation will be offended if I say that it doesn't make the women look more warlike but the army more domestic...
...We talked of a possible peace, but the notes that follow are notes on a nation at war...
...It is an openly antiZionist party, and while not officially opposed to the existence of (some sort of) Israeli state, the implications of its politics point to something considerably more serious than the overthrow of the government...
...Occupation policy still requires a minimal Israeli presence and points toward a Jordanian return...
...So the young "peaceniks" interrupt their agitation to take their turns at the Suez...
...When pressed about defensible boundaries short of the present cease-fire lines, one general brusquely told us, "The army will defend the borders the government negotiates...
...The presence of women in the army makes a bigger difference than I expected...
...But there are also forces born of the war that undermine Israeli socialism...
...the Speaker of the Knesset waits on tables in his kibbutz...
...The decline in the kibbutz population relative to the number of Israelis as a whole seems to have been arrested and even reversed in recent years...
...Binationalism (that is, equal citizenship for the West Bank Arabs) is the official policy of the Israeli Right, as it is the official policy, in slightly different form, of the Palestinian Left...
...And Israeli culture is not constructed so as to regard these deaths as anything but tragic...
...The standard of living on the West Bank has been raised considerably, largely as a result of income from workers employed in Israel proper and of income from an increasing agricultural production (exported to Jordan, to Israel, and very recently, via Israel to Western Europe...
...There has been no attack on the social or political structure of Arab villages (while in Israel proper the old chiefs have been replaced by elected councils...
...Economic routines with their inevitable differentiation and conflict are thus interrupted by what has to be an experience in solidarity...
...We visited an observation post on the Golan Heights manned entirely by reservists, who looked and sounded very much like the part-time soldiers they were...
...Social investment in schools, hospitals, welfare, and so on, is far less than it should be, again because of the requirements of the military budget...
...is very different, less threatening, perhaps, but infinitely more depressing...
...They are (rightly) afraid that they would be overwhelmed by Israeli technology, enterprise, wealth, and power...
...On 170 of Israel's 230 kibbutzim, industry brings in more income than agriculture...
...This is partly due to the harshness and efficiency with which the Israelis have responded to particular terrorist incidents...
...Allon's official reply in the Knesset suggests the more precise measure with which the government (and, I think, most Israelis) views the present situation...
...The Longing for Peace Despite the years of intermitttant fighting, there is no exaltation of war or of the military virtues in Israel...
...No one, for example, can sit in Jerusalem and urge that Hussein return to the West Bank, if that means that the Fatah with its katuisha rockets would be established in Bethlehem or Ramallah, within easy range of Jerusalem itself...
...Once again, the key factor in accounting for the rate of integration is almost certainly the national sense of solidarity: the country can't afford the luxury of "racial" division...
...The effects of this are plainly visible in everyday life...
...we spent much of our time discussing them...
...There seems no reason not to credit him...
...The Cease-fire Decision There was nothing surprising about the decision except—for Americans—the way it was presented to the country...
...and no permanent settlement of Jews on the West Bank (except in East Jerusalem...
...Educational opportunity especially, we were told, has lagged behind the growth of population and the changing needs of the economy...
...These are important matters...
...The obvious answer is the industrialization of the West Bank, but while there have been some loans for that purpose, Israelis have not, for obvious reasons, invested much money in the occupied territories...
...Except for some kibbutz hostels, it is privately exploited, with the big hotels catering lavishly to the luxury trade...
...What it amounts to is a refusal of false hopes and false promises—not (except for a very few) a commitment to a "greater Israel...
...In both cases, I don't hesitate to say, the real policy, only barely disguised, is one of Jewish or Arab domination...
...Its officers play an important part in occupation policy and their view or views of the strategic situation are obviously taken very seriously...
...The Future The occupation has not been an experiment in living together...
...To maintain the King...
...The men are thrown together against a common enemy whose threat all of them take entirely seriously and into a battle whose risks they share equally...
...The goal here seems twofold: to use the West Bank as a bridge to the Arab world, beginning the very slow process of building trade connections...
...Equally important is the fact that the Jordanian civil service (including the police) has continued to run the day-to-day life of the country...
...But there is virtually no disagreement about the requirements of a final settlement, nor about the need for military strength until a settlement is reached...
...The government America has committed itself to is not a government it created for cold-war purposes...
...It's easier to do that, and more, in New York, but traveling in Israel one is struck over and over again with how incredibly small the country is (it is a 20minute drive from Jerusalem to the present frontier at the Jordan River) and how narrow its geopolitical margins...
...Building socialism is the task of the next stage...
...is recent and by no means eager...
...There are disagreements about posture, about language, about the details of occupation policy, about possible government initiatives...
...We listened to harsh criticisms of the present government...
...September 5, 1970...
...The Army About 100,000 Israelis live on kibbutzim, but there is an important sense in which military service, involving many more each year, is a kibbutznik experience...
...Social distances seem as short as geographic distances...
...That too follows from their general decision not to transform the existing social structure and (I think) not to stay...
...I don't mean to romanticize it...
...One of the parties officially supports the Russian line...
...Israel's immediate problem is to integrate its own survival into some American vision of international strategy...
...In the circumstances, that seems a humane and intelligent choice...
...Two-thirds of the settlers were themselves kibbutz children, reliving the hardships and dangers of their parents' lives...
...But the occupation is a temporary expedient and most of the Israelis we met hoped it would not last much longer...
...Though they have tried hard to improve agricultural techniques, they have not been modernizing invaders...
...The Arabs need the protection of an independent state as much as the Jews do, though for different reasons...
...The Two CPs The Communists split in the aftermath of the Six Day War...
...Thus a top Israeli official: "What is the mission of Israel...
...the Israeli army isn't...
...My own sense was that these priorities might best be expressed this way: better half a war than half a peace...
...Civilian control of the army seems routine and quite firm...
...The trauma of May 1967, a decade after the Sinai retreat and the American promises that induced that retreat, has left its mark on Israelis in a way visitors can only begin to understand...
...That was pretty clearly what the Arab notables we talked to wanted, though they also hoped for greater autonomy for the West Bank than it had enjoyed under the last Jordanian administration...
...The immediate sense a visitor gets is of an expanding private sector...
...The terrible anxieties of that month and even more the sense of international abandonment have generated a pervasive conviction that, short of a "real" peace, Israel's security requires military strength and territorial buffers...
...And it may be the case, too, that Fatah ideology is peculiarly oriented toward those Palestinian Arabs who are not living in Palestine and who have or think they have nothing more to lose...
...Rates of participation in and employment of the Arab labor force have risen each year since 1967, largely be REPORTS FROM THE MIDDLE EAST cause of the Israeli labor shortage, and about 30,000 workers now cross the "old" ceasefire lines each day...
...Virtually no one in Israel doubts the justice of the struggle, and this "subjective factor" largely accounts for the world of difference between Israel and the U.S...
...Nor, however, will the Russians leave Egypt because Americans talk peace (or even impose half a peace on the Israelis...
...And we listened to geopolitical fantasies about Russians in East Africa and the Persian Gulf—none of this at all necessary to underline the seriousness of Sam III's and Soviet pilots in Egypt...
...The authorities have probably acted, as authorities generally do, in the interests of an easy administration...
...So they are rightly impatient with hyper-critical Americans: "Find us another country...
...Earning power is also up dramatically, since Arab workers in Israel are paid Histadrut wages (so we were told: some contractors apparently cheat, but this seems generally true) , and the resulting competition has pushed West Bank wages up too...
...Equally important, the army is not in any sense an alien force: sexually, politically, ethnically, economically, it is simply a cross-section of the population, everybody's kids...
...and more immediately, to make it difficult to reestablish a closed and armed frontier west of the Jordan...
...Discipline and training are tough, but the spirit of the army is informal and equalitarian...
...It is naive (and prob ably willfully naive) to pretend, as many American leftists do, that the war's only effects are to distort Israeli society and undermine its achievements...
...The Americans think there will be a settlement and the Russians will go away," an official at the Foreign Ministry told us...
...It was clear to me that the Arabs don't want that, don't want "binationalism," anymore than the Israelis do...
...The Prime Minister of Israel works in considerably less elegant surroundings than the President of Harvard...
...Everyone also pays for the war: taxes are astonishingly high, income taxes rising quickly to something like 80 percent, consumer levies tripling the cost of cars and electrical appliances...
...For now, however, some first impressions...
...One would think that Western radicals would be eager to do this...
...Tourism is the biggest dollar earner and is growing at an amazing rate, despite occasional terrorist incidents...
...Other armies are legions of prowling men...
...it doesn't matter to them whether it is called Jordan or Palestine...
...The pro-Russian party won 30 percent of the Arab vote in the last election and only .03 percent of the Jewish vote...
...We tried to get some feeling for the army as a factor in the country's political life, but came away believing what we were so often told: that as a distinct force, with collective opinions, it hardly exists...
...Its members now draw pay from both the Jordanian and Israeli authorities and presumably report regularly to their Jordanian superiors...
...We think there are two possibilities...
...Half a peace inevitably means a weaker Israel, open to continuous threat, semi-permanently insecure...
...its dependence on the U.S...
...A settlement between the two peoples themselves is a long way off—that is the overwhelming impression of my visit...
...But the structure of the economy makes status differentiation hard and the pressures of war by and large work to maintain a spirit of informal camaraderie...
...Otherwise, service is genuinely universal...
...Occupying powers cannot hope to be popular...
...The Kibbutzim Israel's major social experiment is still the kibbutz, though collective and cooperative agriculture are firmly established...
...The reestablishment of a parlimentary opposition is one of the major benefits of the "American initiative...
...Nor does it stop at 21: middle-aged men still spend a month a year on reserve duty...
...But they move into different political parties and behave like other politicians— all of whom have been in the army at one time or another...
...Here is another problem for Israeli socialists: the possible creation of an Arab proletariat, gradually replacing Jewish workers at lower paid jobs in construction and industry...
...Land has been taken temporarily for security purposes along the Jordan, and there are military settlements there, but no kibbutzim like the one we visited on the Golan Heights...
...Israel, he said, is stronger and in a better strategic position than Czechoslovakia in 1938...
...DURING THE FIRST two weeks of August, along with three friends, professors like myself, I traveled in Israel, talking with people in the government, the new opposition, the army, and the universities...
...It can't be doubted, either, that wartime conditions have fostered the integration of Jews from North Africa and Mesopotamia into the general population...
...Equality, commitment, moral discipline: along with much else we like less, these are the products of war—though not, as our own experience demonstrates, of any war...
...Given the size of the Russian move into Egypt, however, the Israelis have no choices left...
...The content of our conversations was (mostly) as ephemeral as political talk always is, but the impressions left by the people and the country are profound, and they relate mostly to the experience of war—an inescapable experience in Israel and one not broken, even temporarily, by the cease-fire...
...But there are "objective factors" as well...
...I'm not sure how to evaluate this criticism...
...At any rate, terrorism is for the moment substantially confined to the border areas and it is not in any sense a major threat to the survival of the Israeli state or to the lives of its inhabitants...
...one-third were new immigrants...
...And if American assurances were taken as gold in public and in private as baser metal, we met no one who was confused by the diplo matic conceit...
...Better the present lines and the war of attrition than a peace like that of 1957, which draws in the perimeters in exchange for nothing more than a temporary lull...
...There is no spit and polish, no salut ing, and there are no swaggering officers: all the visible privilege and deference that we associate with armies is missing...
...The country is too small, the knowledge of death too intimate: everyone, literally everyone, has had a friend, son, husband, brother, or cousin killed in 1967 or the years since...
...Moshe Sneh, chairman of one of the two Communist parties, offered a classic Marxist description of the problem: "This is the stage of national defense," he told us...
...It's not easy to do, and that suggests the minimal but real core of truth in cold-war ideology...
...About this too the government officials we spoke to had no illusions...
...Our situation in the U.S...
...As a group, they still lag behind in all the things statistics measure (income, longevity, education, ownership of consumer goods, etc...
...With regard to the last of these, things might be different were Hussein to return to preside over but not effectively to govern the West Bank...
...I won't try to discuss the diplomatic moves, for anything I wrote would be out of date long before this issue of DISSENT appeared...
...Israeli Cold Warriors We spent time, perhaps foolishly, arguing with Israelis about Vietnam...
...What the Israelis require is a strong state to their east, which can control its frontiers and alleviate the misery of its people...
...MICHAEL WALZER The Occupation We spent quite a bit of time on the West Bank and the Golan Heights, and we talked with both Arabs (mostly members of the old elites) and Israelis involved either in making occupation policy or in criticizing it...
...There will be a settlement and the Russians won't go away...
...no confiscation of lands held by absentee owners...
...The Israelis have not created or tried to create a quisling class of collaborators dependent on themselves alone...
...This is not at all what the Arabs expected: one fairly radical young physician admitted that the first months after June '67 had been a "honeymoon...
...today...
...The government has acted with a very different end in view (despite its refusal to say so...
...At the same time, they have avoided undermining Hussein's position—and this doubtless is in response to American urgings...
...Not that we met anyone who relished the comparison of Marshall Thieu's government with Golda Meir's...
...On the West Bank, of course, it doesn't look that way and that is a key reason for the policy the Israelis have adopted in the occupied areas: they don't fly the flag...
...The cease-fire was a risk...
...indeed, they have no American counterparts...
...Perhaps the most important thing to stress is what the Israelis have not done: they have made no effort to lay the foundations of a "greater Israel" or of a binational state...
...Israel was supported in 1948 by the Russians, in 1956 by the French...
...It will be consequence of, not a foundation for, a settlement between states...
...Exemptions are granted to students at the more orthodox Yeshivas (I'm not sure they can be called conscientious objectors...
...For him, the Russian arrival in the Middle East is 22 years too late...
...Israeli socialism is harder to judge...
...We did not have time even to begin to study the effects of industrialization on labor-Zionist values...
...Which sounds like a Jewish joke...
...Its freedom to organize and agitate is a key index to the state of civil liberties in Israel...
...Doves and Hawks The strategic considerations that reinforce these priorities were urged upon us by the most diverse people...
...the soldiers we met mostly complained about it...
...My own sense was that they have failed...
...So we heard the domino theory re-argued with new names: first Egypt, then Turkey, then Italy will fall to the Communists...
...the soldiers keep out of sight...
...In any case, Israel has little reason to worry about the sensibilities of American socialists...
...Political invective is harsh and shows the pressure of the times: at a conference in Rehovot, we heard Jacob Talmon's "Zionist" credentials questioned because of his criticisms of government policy...
...Nixon's U.S., for all the ravages of Vietnam, is not quite like the Britain of Chamberlain...
...So much that we have missed here happened in Israel—from a government that was honest with its people to an opposition that dared to resign...
...it was worth taking for these reasons and in any case, there was no choice: that is the way the decision was described to the Israeli public...
...The West Bank has been administered as a foreign country which will one day revert to foreign control...
...So are the dis tances small between so-called doves and hawks...
...The result is not quite a coordinated administration, but a combination of indirect rule and self-govern ment...
...It is also true that they tend to retire (or to be replaced) while quite young and often to enter politics...
...There is great uneasiness about American staying power and a consequent stress upon U.S...
...In fact, an embattled nation and a citizen army are breeding grounds for socialist and democratic virtues...
...it operates, so far as we could tell, with complete freedom, with several representatives in the Knesset and a substantial following among Israeli Arabs...
...Many of these young people must first have met in the army...
...We met no Oriental Jews among government officials or university teachers, but they have penetrated the officers' corps of the army and the ranks of technical workers throughout the society...
...Sneh's party now espouses a kind of "Dubcek communism" and though ostensibly nonZionist, it defends the Jewish right to REPORTS FROM THE MIDDLE EAST statehood (and also the Palestinian right...
...Economic policy has been more aggressive, achieving at least a partial integration of the Israeli and West Bank economies, though without cutting Arab ties to the East...
...But the dominant fact impressed upon us, coming MICHAEL WALZER as we did from a bitterly divided America, is the substantial unity of the population...
...The most important of these is simply private investment, mostly from America, which now plays a major part in economic growth, while tax money is channeled into defense...
...The common element for Israelis is the American commitment: if it fails there, won't it fail here as well...
...but the gaps are far less than I expected on the basis of a visit in 1957, when the Oriental immigration was still going on in a big way and Israel looked to be getting itself a permanent proletariat...
...Hence Israeli intransigence is likely to be much in evidence by the time these notes appear...
...we were told...
...I only hope the Egyptians are as clear-minded...
...interests in the Middle East...
...We visited only one kibbutz, a new settlement on the Golan Heights (not a nahal or military settlement), where 250 young adults and 40 children were living within range of Syrian guns...
...and the Russians, threatening as they are, are not Nazis...
...Only with such a state can they make a "real" peace, that is, a peace which brings physical security to the two peoples living apart in their own lands...
...The Israelis have not encouraged autonomous Palestinian organization on the West Bank, and this is the feature of their policy most frequently criticized by local "doves...
...Foreign investment is such a crucial source of hard currency that there have been a number of sales of state-owned industries to investors from abroad—vigorously protested from both Left and Right, as a threat to socialism and national security...
...I hope to write at length on the occupation...
...it raises very difficult questions for a political theorist...
...Now it is the capacity of the kibbutz to function as an industrial center that is being tested...
...That is clearly a more realistic fear than the fear of Israeli territorial expansion, and it suggests again the dishonesty of Fatah's official creed...
...Or there won't be a settlement and the Russians won't go away...
...The large number of Oriental-European couples on the streets of the cities is evidence enough that such divisions as presently exist are not likely to last...
...It seems generally accepted that promotions made by the Israelis will be recognized by the Jordanians...
...Judging from the bookstores of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, of which there are an extraordinary number, military history is a little more popular than in the U.S., but no one we met wants more of it...
...But however that harshness and efficiency is described (the first is undoubtedly exaggerated by the Arabs and the second by the Israelis), it can't be a sufficient explanation for the apparent inability of the terrorists to establish even a foothold on the West Bank...
...officers spend 40 days...
...But if a resumption of full-scale fighting is their greatest fear, the priorities of Israelis after that are peculiar to them, the product of their 22-year history...
...It is the obvious goal of the terrorists to force the army and military police into view, to make the Israeli presence felt and brutally felt by the Arab population...
...Our party," Sneh told us, "is truly internationalist: we got 1.5 percent of the Arab vote and 1.5 percent of the Jewish vote...
...Of course, news of the fighting during those last weeks, when Russian intentions were being tested every day, was heavily censored...
...That is not so difficult to do, it seems to me, given a fairly decent American vision, but the business of doing it (and overdoing it) generates fa REPORTS FROM THE MIDDLE EAST miliar ideological distortions...
...it involved almost certain military losses of such and such a kind...
...Israel is not, as South Vietnam is, a coldwar product...
...Israeli discourtesy is a saving grace...
...Economic well-being and the policy of political non-interference must also be important factors...
...There is nothing wrong with this, I suppose, though it does increase the number of men and women in what are essentially servile occupations...
...The present government could certainly order a withdrawal, even a withdrawal like that of 1957, and be obeyed...
...But the political situation was sketched with almost brutal candor in speeches defending the cease-fire by Allon (the deputy premier) and Dayan...
...I can't think of an analogy less apt than that of Sparta, and the reason is apparent in every snatch of conversation: there are no Spartan mothers in Israel...
...Sneh himself is a charming and highly intelligent man, who might have led the Israeli Left and the whole country, had he not bet on the Russians after 1948...
Vol. 17 • November 1970 • No. 6
