ZIONISM: from realism to autism

...The political realism that characterized the leadership of the movement in this period protected it from the temptation to accept the simplistic interpretation of the slogan "redeeming the land...

...But along with this, since the establishment of the State, Ben-Gurion had begun to divert the Zionist policy from its realistic basis to something messianic, something cut off from reality...

...The term "liberated territories," which was coined at that time, symbolizes the prevailing autism, the severance from reality, which overtook Zionist policy...

...Even though this "settling of the land" has nothing in common with the settlement of Hanita or Kfar Yecheskel in old Israel, the associations from the past have crowned this colonization with the title chalutziut...

...However, even the population]—has undergone some major most successful political slogans are merely changes that can be presented as a threefold the translation of the dynamic aspirations of metamorphosis...

...The Zionist movement thought that this danger could be circumvented or partially prevented by settling Eretz Yisrael...

...Let us review the transformation of one of these ideas...

...The status of the yishuv and the Haganah in their own time was merely instrumental...

...That was the idea of the "wall" that the settlers and the national institutions took care to construct and to fortify...

...The politics manifest in the Sinai Campaign of being drawn along, of lacking direction, derives from a process begun earlier in Zionist politics...

...Anyone who seeks proof for the presence of this ZIONISM: FROM REALISM TO AUTISM motif in the pioneer period should examine the speeches of members of Hashomer, the protocols of the Zionist Congresses, and the words of the leaders of the pioneer movements...

...The autism expressed itself in the belief, prevalent among the people and the leadership, that in the very existence of the State most of the problems that had first evoked Zionism were solved...

...teach us that the Zionist leadership in the era Two qualities characterized that stage: of political realism preserved the vitality of (1) sticking close to the goals toward which Zionist goals by abandoning its slogans...

...A heavy autistic fog enwrapped the Israeli public and Israeli policy, and this fog characterized the period between the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War...

...This realism was also marked in the question of partitioning Eretz Yisrael...

...The breakup of the coalition does not refute this analysis but, rather, clarifies it...

...The army and its military power took the place that should have been reserved for political action...

...The erosion of the meaning of "settling the land" began with the establishment of ZIONISM: FROM REALISM TO AUTISM 557 the State...

...Force is an element in our defense, but our security depends on a settlement and an agreement with those who today are our enemies, that is, it depends on making peace with them...

...But although the Zionist leadership played this dangerous game even before the establishment of the State, it did not neglect the Arab problem as a determining factor in policymaking...

...Over complex and difficult to achieve, is not like the years, Israeli policy—in this term I in-adhering to simple, short-range goals...

...At that time a barren attempt was made to preserve the outer shell of chalutziut without its inner content...

...The yishuv [Jewish population of Israel] and its leadership were ready to pay a high price to reach a settlement, even if it was only a modest or partial one...

...It stuck to its task of redeeming the people from its troubles and it generally interpreted the redemption of the land as a means, hence not a goal, which should determine its actions...

...From the beginning, this was a government of "no policy...

...It was an enticement to play the game of two against one...

...This conquest was not military and this fact was, in its time, a sign of the uniqueness of Zionism, a source of pride of Zionists...

...These settlers did not come to establish sovereignty for a people without sovereignty, but "to liberate the land of our fathers from foreigners...

...29–Nov...

...In reading the journalism of the Six-Day War period and the speeches of the leaders, one suddenly learns that the destiny of Zionism was the liberation of the homeland and that the conquering of territories was a goal in and of itself...

...They were tools in the hands of a policy designed to facilitate the realization of Zionism...

...But today, when the strength of our enemies may rise TZVI LAMM above our own, the use of force becomes a nightmare...

...A few minor editorial changes have been made, in order to adapt the text to American standards.—ED...

...Anyone who did not approve of settling the land stood outside of Zionism, even if he swore up and down in the name of Zionism...

...But in the same way, no one can deny that the Sinai Campaign speeded up the process and, much worse, prevented Israel from following an alternative policy to offset the dangers inherent in these developments...

...Without that kind of understanding, policy-making makes no sense...

...The political step which characterized this period is the establishment of a national coalition...

...The Six-Day War marks a transition to the present stage in Israeli policy...

...What happened on Yom Kippur 1973, movement acted, to oppose the hostile forces and is happening today, is not the result of that threatened to destroy it...

...Nevertheless, it is hard to refrain from thinking what our political situation would be today if Israel had announced in those days that it recognizes the right of Egypt to nationalize the canal, that Israel demands the right of free passage through the canal and promises to remain neutral should Egypt be attacked by a power trying to take control over the canal away from Egypt...

...In that political realm most fatal to our people and its sovereignty in the land, Jewish leadership, since the beginning of the British mandate, has not always made far-sighted and reality-tested decisions...

...We heard that our Jewish settlement in Hebron was a guaranty for peace, that only with an Israeli regime in the "territories" could there be peace in the region, ZIONISM: FROM REALISM TO AUTISM and that in practice we already had achieved peace...

...From the beginning of settlement in Eretz Yisrael, it was clear that our strength was a factor in our security...

...This break with reality did not necessarily blind men to the fact that the territories were populated by Arabs, but it kept them from understanding that our settlement and taking possession of the territories would turn our existence as a state into a powerful pressure that would unite the Arab world and aggravate our insecure situation, in a way previously unknown in our history...

...In TZVI LAMM a case like ours where the fact of our existence as a state raises suspicions about our intentions to expand, any offense that strengthens such suspicions jeopardizes the chances for peace and turns tense relations into a full-scale siege...

...Marginal groupings, which understood Zionism according to its slogans and not according to its essence as a rescue movement, began creating the myth of a land waiting for its sons and liberators in imitation of the other national movements in the world...

...It also corresponded to the limits of the meager power of the Zionist movement...

...If a settlement like this is impossible, then we have little chance of continuing to exist in this land...

...No one needed intelligence information to know that should war break out, even if initiated by the Arab states, its purpose would be to return to the territories that we conquered and that the majority of the nations of the world would call us "aggressors," or, at best, "the cause of the war," and hence unworthy of help...

...The Labor party (or the Alignment), lacking an orien tation, was happy: in establishing a coalition government it no longer had to worry that its opponents would force a definition of its positions...

...In comparison with the forces that we can muster, the potential military, political, and economic forces of our opponents— and this is a truth that no one disputes— are beyond all measure...

...By looking at the problems a few weeks after the Six-Day War, we discover an enlightening phenomenon: Zionist ideology, which from the very beginning guided Zionist activity, regressed into the language of a power ideology...

...The policy of the six years of fog preferred to ignore these harsh facts...

...Both tendencies have affected the Zionist ideology since the establishment of the State...

...But along with the building of fortifications there was also a recognition that without an agreement, without talks, without finding a modus vivendi with the Arabs, our existence in this land and in this region of the world was not assured...

...In the era of pioneering Zionism, a period of political realism, all of Zionist ideology was concentrated in the idea of settling the land...

...This kind of narcissism characterized the foreign policy of Israel during the whole period of Ben-Gurion's leadership, even though Ben-Gurion himself was undoubtedly a realistic statesman...

...Even before the first Zionist Congress, Leo Pinsker summarized the essence of Zionism as auto-emancipation, as self-liberation...

...Faithfulness to goals often reing which the foundations of Jewish sover-quires the leadership to act in opposition to eignty were laid, was governed to a large ex-slogans which it once had set itself...

...But in reality it was not the land of Israel that needed to be liberated but the people of Israel, whose chances of continued existence had been shrinking to the danger point...

...In this atmosphere, the Yom Kippur War was a surprise—not a military surprise, as they try to present it now, but a blow to the minds of a public doped with empty slogans, living in a fog, and avoiding reality...

...It was a movement to sever 550 the Jews from the other nations by establishing Jewish sovereignty...

...This too is the origin of the movement of cultural and social rebirth of the nation...

...Past experience has taught the Jews that without self-defense, not only is their existence insecure, but of necessity their relations with their surroundings are distorted...

...The capture of these lands aroused from slumber a deep, sincere, emotional response to the historical events that had once taken place in them: the graves of our patriarchs and matriarchs, paths along which the prophets once trod, hills for which the kings fought...

...It arose in order to establish sovereignty, and hence a national home, for Jews without a home...

...Even the Soviet Union, which does not usually detest cynicism in its political actions, had to cover up its conquest of Czechoslovakia by setting up a seemingly independent Czechoslovak government...

...They called it "state chalutziut...

...The idea of a bridge, of talks and compromises with the Arabs, became increasingly limited and the idea of the "wall" received a new interpretation: "Offense is the best defense...

...Even in critical situations, the human condition is not one-dimensional...

...State chalutziut" has been transformed into chalutziut a la South Africa and Rhodesia...

...Perhaps they were destined to understand it only when the dispute became a subject for global politics during the Yom Kippur War, which has effectively canceled out most of Israel's room to maneuver...

...However, not every territory could inspire the Jews to auto-emancipation—only Eretz Yisrael could bring that to the Jews...

...The Labor party, lacking orientation, did not want to deal with Gahal's viewpoint and for the same reason it could not deal with outside causes: neither with the Arab states for peace nor with the United States against political dictation...

...The emotional associations of this concept match the aspirations of the settlers to renew the life of the people as of old: as the tribes of Israel in the time of Joshua settled the land, so the scattered of Israel will settle it in the modern period...

...We also announced after the SixDay War that we did not recognize the rights of a Palestinian entity...

...National narcissism prevents one from having a sophisticated understanding of the condition of the State relative to the world...

...To the basic political question of what we were willing to give up in exchange for peace, no one had an answer, neither the government nor public opinion...

...There is no doubt that his political intuition was sharp in all matters pertaining to accepting the partition plan and declaring the establishment of the State...

...At first sight, it seemed that this war substantiated the assumptions on which Israeli policy was based...

...The accepance of U.N...

...From its beginnings, the Zionist movement has known small groups devoted literally to slogans, but who either did not understand the essence of the slogans or preferred to ignore it...

...The most decisive of them was the transition from an ideological leadership to a business-minded leadership, a trend that had already begun in the period of BenGurion and that flourished in a government of epigones...

...It turns out that even terrorism, which is nurtured by the suffering of the refugees and supported by powerful political forces, cannot be defeated by force...

...Everyone spoke in the name of peace...

...Somehow, a magical belief prevailed that time was working in our favor, even though for many years we had known that our national movement arrived late and that it awakened, and, unfortunately, sped up the development of the Arab national movement—in short, that time works against us...

...It is doubtful that any serious statesman in 1957 would have believed that England and France could get back their hold on the Middle East, but the helmsmen of the State of Israel hurried to jump on the sinking ship of these declining empires—although it was obvious that if we are to continue to exist in this region it depends on a reconstruction of our relationship with Egypt...

...The ex post facto justification of the Sinai Campaign—i.e., to eliminate the fedayeen activities in Gaza and to open the Straits of Tiran—must be judged in relation to the other results of the war and the possible results of an alternative policy...

...The Sinai Campaign was a political act into which we were drawn by the attraction of a "big opportunity," though it was a dubious proposition from the very beginning...

...The political realism of the pioneering period began to disintegrate after the establishment of the State, and it left the way open 552 to the feelings of autism and ethnocentrism that influenced the policy of the State of Israel in the early years of independence...

...The daring aspect of settling the land was that each group saw itself as realizing now, in the present, the desired future goal...

...But the meaning of these slogans has been ripped out of context, out of the climate in which they grew...

...The perception of the Yom Kippur War as a surprise testifies to the severance from reality of those who present it thus...

...In order to see the widespread autism that dominated Israeli public opinion, compare the number of voices of statesmen, party leaders, and commentators who warned us about this kind of political development with the number of voices that quieted us and assured us that we were "sitting on the best possible borders...

...Even after independence, the theory of the State which he advocated was derived from the assumptions of classical Zionism, according to which the state is the means and the in strument for releasing the Jews from their straits...

...Since the beginning of the era of nationalism in the West, the future of the Jewish people has depended on the possibility of concentrating it in a territory in which it could establish national sovereignty or at least partial self-government...

...The establishment of a government of the grand coalition put an end to that attempt...

...Such achievements, on top of the victory in the Six Day War and the War of Attrition, influenced public opinion and strengthened the prevailing view that power, military initiative, and original army operations were an answer to everything...

...concepts like "strategic depth" and "warning time" became political terms and the economic profits of those who became rich after the war and the conquest seemed to guarantee political stability...

...Nevertheless, the achievements in this war were remarkable: terrorism did not gain a foothold in the territories, the Israeli civilian airline suffered less than several other airlines of nations not involved in the dispute...

...The other begins with burdening empty slogans with new contents that contradict the spirit of the original contents...

...The Labor party considered it a waste to share with Gahal the fruits of prosperity in this rosy period of autism...

...There is no need to explain why it is easier to convert a Jew with the slogan of "redeeming the land" than with the truth lying behind it that the ships are sunk and there is no future for him or his children in the land in which his parents and grandparents lived...

...The war against Nazi Germany was at least partially a war against the legitimacy of rule by the power of conquest...

...When two "have-been" powers, whose plumes had been plucked and who had been frustrated by the loss of their empires made a final last ditch effort, a final convulsive attack to regain their influence, the State of Israel joined in without any consideration for the future or for the present reality...

...In certain tent by political realism, even though at that situations, devotion to these slogans as a retime the Zionist idea seemed more like a sult of the tendency to be doctrinaire constidream than a practical project with a chance tutes, in practice, abandonment of the goals...

...Should this not have forewarned us about the international political situation in which we have found ourselves since the Yom Kippur War (a situation more serious and more disturbing, relative to our future, than the fact that the Egyptian Second Army and the remains of the Third Army are sitting on the eastern side of the canal...

...In political termsthat is the conquest of territory...

...terrorists were caught and quickly freed, even if they had done terrible things...

...All this just goes to show that Zionism was meant from its beginning to establish a "national home" that would sever the Jews, to whatever extent, from the nations in whose midst their conditions in modern times had become a horror...

...In line with the best colonial tradition, the settlers inherited, with all the legal sanctions, the land that was taken from the natives, and the settlers needed the protection of soldiers against the expropriated owners and against their neighbors who feared lest their lands also be expropriated when their turn came...

...But despite the slogans, the leadership of the Zionist movement knew how to distinguish between the kernel (the historical necessity) and the chaff (the slogans) and hence how to adjust to partition borders that located the new Jewish State in the traditional regions of the Phoenicians, the Philistines, and the Canaanites, and removed from their area all that part of the land with which the historical memories and emotional responses of the Jewish people were connected...

...This principle was evident even in the beginning of the War of Independence...

...For a long period, settling the land was the essence of Zionism, and Zionism was wholly the settling of the land...

...The politics of hiring out our sword took the place of the politics of the pursuit of a peace settlement...

...But along with this assumption there is another, which should not be ignored: the problem of our existence in this region will not be solved by force...

...In the early stages of our settlement in this land there was no alternative but to use force, and perhaps we will need it again in the future...

...Self-defense, which was an integral part of settling the land, was not only a reaction to the presence of thieves and bandits, or to the appearance of pogromists supported by political forces in the area, but an expression of the change in values that had occurred in the Jewish people following its decision to seek national sovereignty...

...The identifying mark par excellence of this period is the almost complete deterioration of the concept of peace...

...This was a difficult path, which was not always accepted with understanding from within and entailed a real danger from without...

...The majority interpretation views Uganda as an abandonment of the basis of the Zionist movement...

...The purchase of armaments became a substitute for foreign policy...

...But strategy without political goals is meaningless...

...This is also the case with the army, and the Sinai Campaign has made that very tangible...

...The same is true for our right to free passage from Eilat...

...It would be naive to claim that before the establishment of the State the Zionist leadership followed a perfectly realistic policy, with every section deriving from a rational weighing of possibilities...

...Many countries in Africa and Asia were liberated from colonial rule without a shot being fired, merely by the power of the principle that military conquest must be negated...

...This is because considerations from another field led him to support the messianic atmosphere that prevailed...

...Most important, Gahal [liberal right party] could now approach the position of leadership not just as a plain partner in a coalition, but as a real political force whose slogans and goals had been adopted by the elder partner in the coalition, the Labor party...

...Tzvi Lamm's article is reprinted here, with permission, from Dispersion and Unity (#21-22), a journal published in Jerusalem by the World Zionist Organization...

...Since the end of World War II, conquests have lost the legitimacy they had held over a long period in history...

...And here we mean room to maneuver in a war for our survival...

...The friends of Israel, including even the United States, could not, in the present political cli mate, refrain from attaching to their declarations of support for Israel a statement condemning military conquest...

...But Zionism did not arise in order to return to the Jewish people its lost homeland...

...On the historical plane, there is no point in thinking in terms of "what if...

...Many, many facts have become piercingly obvious since the Six-Day War, but the prevailing autism prevented us from taking notice...

...It was a framework designed to renew the culture of the nation, to change its social and employment structure, and even to alter its position as a nation in the world...

...One begins with holding on to petrified slogans and thus losing contact with Iiving reality...

...About peace...

...Gahal thought —apparently mistakenly—that the dream world the people saw testified to a radicalization toward the Right, so that Gahal could take power by itself, or at least could increase its strength...

...The war against terrorism, for example, was very difficult and forced the government to walk a thin tightrope in taking steps acceptable by world public opinion (such as the attack on Beirut airport, the forced landing of the Lebanese plane, the attacks on terrorists in foreign countries...

...It came about as a gathering together of exiles from various cultures whose only common characteristic was the anomaly of their social structure, a bridgehead seeking a place in the sands, in the rocks, and in the swamps of a little land whose political problems were complicated, a community surrounded by states who found it hard to adjust to the existence of a foreign body in its midst...

...We shall be glad to print replies and comments on this article, either from Israeli or American readers...

...The historical connection of the Jews to this land is undoubtedly a political factor, but its weight must be judged against other political factors functioning in our region: especially the feelings (no less historical) embodied in Arab nationalism, the competition between the Western and the Communist blocs, the specific weight of the Third World (to which the Arabs belong), the power of oil in the lands of the Arabs, and so on...

...This war, unlike the Sinai Campaign, was not the prod 554 uct of the political initiative of Israel, but it would be hard to say that Israeli policy since the establishment of the State did much to prevent it...

...Rather, it was a rescue movement to save a people in a critical situation by concentrating it within one territory, allowing it to take its political fate in its own hands...

...As soon as the decision was made for Eretz Yisrael, the immediate goal was transferred from saving the Jews from their trouble to the ideological slogan of "redeeming the land...

...In this situation the coalition government was a convenient solution for all...

...5, 1956] and the SixDay War [June 5-10, 1967] are wars that represent this period and in them the policies of the period are represented...

...In the absence of clear orientation, one becomes an opportunist...

...This and more: for many years we have demanded of the Arab world that it recognize an Israeli entity as an entity historically, emotionally, and actually tied to Eretz Yisrael...

...We never thought that those who stood on our side during and after our struggle to establish the State would consider it improper to ignore the fact that another group of human beings defined itself as a nation and demanded for itself the "natural right" to a state...

...But in a climate of autistic, ethnocentric short-sightedness the question of "a bridge" has been neglected even though it is vital for the peace of the State...

...Every clude the political policies of the Zionist political movement, including Zionism, transmovement and the yishuv [Israel's Jewish lates its goals into slogans...

...Of course, no one has the power to assure us that the development of events would have been different if it had not been for the Sinai Campaign...

...In the Six-Day War the borders of Israel spread to territories that had previously belonged to the areas of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan...

...Autism is the rejection of actual reality and its replacement by a reality that is a product of wish-fulfillment...

...Resolution 242 by the Labor party, over which Gahal left the national coalition government, was just as much a reflection of real inertia as was the sitting on the territories without any political initiative during the coalition period...

...There are two aspects to the degeneration of ideology...

...The countries in which the Palestinian terrorists worked pretended not to see them...

...The concept of homeland was expanded for the purposes of settlement...

...The nation that lives in a dream world is happy to see the end of public political debate...

...Each period in the history of Zionist politics knew its own battles...

...556 TZVI LAMM The war with terrorism also revealed certain phenomena that served as "writing on the wall" for the future...

...In order to avoid any misunderstanding, let me state that no policy, no matter how realistic, can guarantee that the aims of the Zionist movement will be realized, that we will achieve a secure existence in this land, that the Arabs will make peace with the fact that we exist...

...He was the one who taught: "It does not matter what the goyim (nations) say, it is what the Jews do...

...The national coalition government determined several developments in Israeli policy...

...In a region of tens of neighboring Arab states, the only way to guarantee the passage of our vessels is to make a settlement with those states...

...Our desire for peace turned into an axiom that no longer needed to be proven...

...The short moratorium we enjoyed by virtue of the difference in the level of organization between Israel and the Arab states was wasted during the six years of no policy that was the spirit of the coalition government...

...The very normalization of the situation by advancing their sovereignty required the Jews to be ready to defend themselves...

...The decision for Eretz Yisrael was certainly not a secondary issue for Zionism, but it also was not the point of origin and the decisive factor in its emergence...

...The Sinai Campaign advanced two dangers to our existence, which came to fruition in the Yom Kippur War [October 1973]: (I) the unity of the Arabs against us, and (2) the globalization of the dispute between the Arabs and ourselves...

...The basis of this strategy was founded on the recognition that ultimately we must live with the Arabs, and that we should do everything in our power to see that an hour's landslide does not turn into a permanent collapse, that the blockage of bridges does not turn into the burning of bridges...

...Anyone who does not admit this and who does not base his view of the required political policy on that assumption is nothing but a dreamer —albeit dreaming a different dream from that which was planted in the mind of the people by the leadership over the last six years of autism...

...No one can deny offhand the possibility that, in the situation of 1956, this kind of Israeli stance could have brought terrorism to a halt and opened the Straits, and could have served as a first step in calling for a settlement...

...The government of Levi Eshkol, which preceded the grand coalition, tried to retain a little of the political realism still present in the period of ethnocentrism, or perhaps it even tried to do more, to reinforce the weakened realistic elements in Israeli policy...

...Almost everything in the ideological vocabulary of Zionism has undergone an erosion of meaning and value...

...The realism of the policy-making in this period was reflected in the loyalty to these two motifs...

...But, since the state now is a value in itself, it has become its own raison d'être...

...In these matters Ben-Gurion was the loyal executor of the original Zionist spirit...

...The time has come to abandon the deceptive notion that we are a "power" in the region and the overbearing self-righteousness of our "historical rights" to the land, to stop being dragged opportunistically after transitory advantages of circumstance, and to return to realistic political thinking...

...Indeed, Zionism as a movement that arose to answer the needs of the Jews, under whose feet the ground had begun to fall away, saw itself obligated to seek an alternative when its first choice, Eretz Yisrael, fell through, or appeared to have fallen through...

...The aspiration to return to the land of our fathers was a product of contemporary troubles and of the seismographic signs that foretold a total breakdown...

...a single or frequent mistake but of a process To adhere to long-range goals, which are that began a long time before that day...

...It sought a territory in which sovereignty could be established and in which the Jews could build themselves a homeland...

...The first was a base for absorbing immigrants and the second for the defense of that base...

...The War of Independence did not surprise anyone, and the Six-Day War did not surprise us...

...Some of these articles, such as the one that follows, have been severely critical of the policies pursued by Israel over the past two decades...

...The architect of this viewpoint was David Ben-Gurion...

...Now the feeling has taken root that the army and the state are values in themselves...

...That is what has happened to chalutziut (pioneer settlement), Hebrew labor, defense, cultural renewal, the idea of the uniqueness of our people, and many other notions...

...Such faithfulness in TZVI LAMM that situation would have endangered what little could be done in the part of the land that could be had...

...Again, the ethnocentric atmosphere prevented many from understanding that the suspicions of the Arabs, both the masses and the cabal of colonels who along with Nasser established the regime in Egypt, were reinforced and reaffirmed by the conspiracy of the Suez War in which we took such a major part...

...it was a government of men who carried things out but lacked someone to tell them what to do...

...A policy of positions of strength, which the Zionist movement had rejected and the State had been careful to avoid for most of its existence, became the guideline and won the justification of statesmen, writers, thinkers, and journalists...

...The arming of Hashomer and the Haganah [Jewish self-defense organizations] and the placement of new settlements according to strategic considerations were part of the building of the wall...

...The song writer who saw in the settlement in the Sinai a remembrance of the "old Eretz Yisrael" did not sense the distortion...

...In Ben-Gurion's era this slogan summarized the ethnocentric orientation...

...The Israelis argued about demography, about encouraging the emigration of the Arabs from the land, about keeping Israeli TZVI LAMM citizenship from the Arabs who would remain in the "territories," about rebuilding the Temple, about everthing...

...But feelings cut off from present reality do not serve as a faithful guideline to policy...

...The presence of a third force in Eretz Yisrael—the British— was a temptation that the Zionist leadership could not always brush aside...

...yet the recognition that only an agreed settlement acceptable to the Arabs would make it possible for us to hold on to the land, no less than our diligent effort to prepare ourselves for war, gave expression to the realistic basis of Zionist policy in this period...

...In order to see how this atmosphere came to dominate this state, one must try to trace what has happened in the field of ideology...

...This chalutziut was not like the original, yet to a certain extent it corresponded to the changed reality, even though the idea itself was a manifestation of the prevailing autistic severance from reality...

...Under the pressure of political conditions that could not be eluded, the Zionist leadership preferred to accept a part of the land (one that had continually shrunk from the time of the original promise) in order to absorb and save Jews rather than to remain faithful to slogans that it had coined in regard to the historic rights of the people of Israel to the whole of Eretz Yisrael...

...On the other hand, a sophisticated perception of the problems in our region has taught us that by the sword alone we will not be able to stand...

...This slogan sounds thoroughly Zionist...

...ZIONISM: FROM REALISM TO AUTISM 553 Again it was a short-sighted enthnocentrism that kept many from understanding the significance of the Soviet and American intervention in the region since the Sinai Campaign...

...Offense as a means of defense is likely to assure our security in the short run, but it necessarily prevents peace, which is the only means to guarantee Israel's security in the long run...

...The Uganda question is not properly understood in the standard Zionist interpretation...

...the Zionist movement aimed, and (2) a great One such turning point was the proposal deal of sobriety in appraising the power of of Uganda and Argentina as an alternative the Jewish people, in whose name the Zionist to Eretz Yisrael [the land of Israel...

...When, at a certain point, Zionist leaders believed that they would not be able to liberate the Jews from their troubles by settling them in the land of Israel, they were ready to consider the proposal of Uganda and Argentina without seeing any contradiction to the original Zionist idea...

...It is difficult to determine whether the political realism of the period derived from the realities of life in those scattered settlements in Israel, which stood face to face with the problem of establishing Jewish sovereignty, or whether the settlers learned from a practical, realistic Zionist ideology to stay away from talk and to concentrate on stubborn, difficult, day-today activity, and hence not be tempted by easy answers...

...The forces opposing us are seeking to destroy us: the moderates, politically, and the extremists, physically...

...Was there really no sign that the Yom Kippur War was coming...

...The chief spokesman for Zion-Two painful turning points in this period ist policy in that stage was Chaim Weizmann...

...This approach was fully embodied in the idea of havlaga (self-restraint), which became the strategy of the first years of the 1936-39 riots...

...First came the troubles, then people cultivated the ideology of a Jewish state in which "our days will be renewed as of old," our culture revived, and creative, original ways of life would arise...

...The Sinai Campaign [Oct...

...a collective life into static formulations that freeze these aspirations, and hence slogans The first stage of this metamorphosis, dur-age quickly...

...The wars of the period of political realism were the riots of 1936-39 and the War of Independence [May 14–June 11, 1948...

...Terrorism was eliminated for a short period, but it broke out again later, with immeasurably greater force...

...The decision to disengage was convenient for both of these major parties in the government...

...The military victory proved to many that the defense of the state depends on its military prowess alone...

...After the tanks of Tzahal, after the border-guard units and the military administration came the groups and individuals who settled Kiryat Arba (the Jewish enclave in Hebron), Pitchat Rafiach, the Jordan Valley, and the Golan Heights...

...But this settlement of land was considered both by the settlers and the whole Zionist movement not only as the establishment of political facts but as the daring creation of a new social, cultural, and national framework for life—a life that no one could define once and for all...

...There is nothing in one that was not in the other...

...Zionism in the period of realism knew that 558 it was a movement of a remnant seeking refuge, of a decimated nation weakened by the Holocaust...

...On the basis of the trouble of the Jews and the effort to find a solution, Zionism built a whole ideology, and its main component was the justification of the right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel...

...The ethnocentrism was reflected in the expansion of the national ego, the perception of the needs of our people and our state as the sole perspective from which to determine the goals of state policy without regard to the needs of the other side involved in the dispute...

...Some posed a formulation: in exchange for peace we would grant the Arabs—peace...

...Zionism was not a movement of national liberation on the model of such movements in 19th-century Europe or 20thcentury Africa and Asia...

...But, in the eyes of an autistic individual, everthing seems to depend only on his own will...

...Did we need an intelligence investigation in order to know that the problem of Arab refugees was a powder keg that would explode one day and leave Israel isolated on the international scene...

...This vital political field is, of course, our relation to the Arabs both within and outside our borders...

...It seems remarkable that so caustic a criticism of Israeli policy should have appeared in a magazine sponsored by the Zionist movement...

...But however strongly this erosion of values had affected the idea of settling the land in this early period of the State, it was nothing compared to what happened to the idea after the Six-Day War...

...Even "settling the land" in Sinai was termed as liberating the homeland...

...Nations not involved in the dispute, in whose political territory the terrorists were active, preferred to ignore the open support given the terrorists by the Arab states, their fellow-members in the U.N...

...There is no doubt that in purely strategic terms the principle of offense is the best defense...

...Zionism was born out of the troubles of the Jews and it became a national movement when its most sensitive people realized, while there was still time, that utter collapse was approaching, that there was no hope of living among those nations with whom the Jews then lived...

...This motif of the "bridge" to the Arabs counterbalances the motif of the "wall" of defense against the Arabs...

...I don't mean intelligence evidence, which is only a function of a prior conception, but political evidence, according to which a basic conception is formed...

...of realization...

...This settlement policy cannot be justified even as a "wall" of defense for the interior, because, when the Yom Kippur War broke out, the settlements in the Golan Heights had to be evacuated...

...The political-practical significance of "settling the land" is the conquest (by settlement) of one point after another of the homeland...

...In both battles a dual approach to the Arab problem still prevailed in Zionist policy...

...Since then, Israeli policy has been deteriorating to the point where the present political line barely deserves the term "policy...

...If we are lucky, we have not yet spoiled the chance to return to the situation of a society living with reality, fighting for its existence, and directed by leaders who dare to stand before it with a political position, which is to say neither a prophetic vision nor a policy of reacting to each event as it comes...