Sachar on Israel

SACHAR ON ISRAEL Howard M. Sachar was interviewed by MOMENT editor Hershel Shanks at Sachar's home in Kensington, Maryland. Hershel Shanks: Howard, you are one of the world's leading historians,...

...One I might call the zealot theory, the fanatic theory...
...First, the Gaza Strip, formerly a chronic nest of infiltration, was restructured by a deeply chastened [Egyptian president Gamal Abdel] Nasser as part of the ceasefire arrangement after the Sinai Campaign...
...I think that if there is a leader with just enough of the forebearance and the political savvy to allow a situation gradually to evolve rather than risk the sudden amputation of territory, which De Gaulle and De Gaulle alone could have achieved in France, ultimately the results could be the same...
...Fortunately, no one was hurt, but the occurrence was given extensive attention in all the newspapers the next day...
...Think back to the days before we became a republic and recall the circumstances in which the early settlers lived...
...Shanks: I guess th*e question for many of us is whether survival is enough...
...I do not regard it as the heart of Judaism...
...Sachar: Israel will be in a state of chronic semi-war during our lifetime...
...In fact, that's not his intention, as I understand it...
...I would go further...
...Tragically, it's going to take a long time...
...One really cannot do these things from afar...
...it is Jerusalem in the long run that touches on the Israelis' most sensitive political and spiritual nerves...
...Shanks: You said that even if Peres were re-elected by a thin majority he would not have the power to do what you propose...
...Which more accurately describes Jewish history...
...Ironically, I regard the Yom Kip-pur War in 1973 as a kind of healing process...
...The Arabs understand that, they know that it is not in their interest any more than Israel's to re-divide Jerusalem...
...Yet Israel has managed to survive for two generations, 40 years, twice as long as did Czechoslovakia or Austria or Poland or Latvia or Lithuania or Estonia or Albania...
...It's far different in each age from its preceding era...
...Shanks: What are they...
...Sachan My answer to that is that treaties are obsolescent instruments in contemporary diplomacy...
...Plainly, the first was its war of liberation in 1948, which determined that Israel was to be a recognized polity among the community of nations...
...In this fashion, over the years, a kind of functional relationship would develop both with Jordan and Israel...
...Shanks: Because it's Jewish...
...Sachar: No solution...
...Shanks: Well, their children are not refugees...
...And there is no compelling reason either in logic or sentiment that Jerusalem cannot be gerrymandered in such a way that 95 percent of the city's Arab population would be given over to Arab political—not military—control...
...Shanks: Could you make an argument for American Jews going on aliyah today...
...No nation can live in the hair-shirt euphoria of its early independence and pre-independence years...
...I agree that Israel today is probably the heart of the Jewish people...
...This is a heritage that must be taken seriously, and the cultural hinterland that produced it need not be denigrated...
...I am not one of the admirers of [the late French president,] General [Charles] De Gaulle...
...When you go to Jerusalem don't you feel it palpably...
...I mentioned the ultra-Orthodox and those who reject politicized religion...
...The Palestinians on the West Bank want [PLO leader Yasir] Arafat...
...I'm not optimistic that they can exert a significant influence...
...Sachan Admittedly, it's difficult to make, because we are both a people and a religion...
...I almost surgically distinguish between the spiritual ethos of Judaism and the physical, political, sociological and historical fact of the state of Israel...
...They knew the Israeli army could have been all over the West Bank at any time...
...Hershel Shanks: Howard, you are one of the world's leading historians, if not the leading historian, of modern Israel and the Jewish people...
...Israel appeals to the romantic and ethnic adventurer in the best of us, and for that reason alone, living there can be a thrilling experience...
...The Soviet Union does not have a peace treaty with Japan...
...Sachar Yes, I think there is...
...That would be giving them their cake and letting them eat it...
...Many countries go through this ordeal...
...And they couldn't bring themselves to abandon it the way 300,000 other Israelis already have...
...Not that a Palestinian state would be a threat to Israel...
...The notion that the Jews were a people frozen in amber for so many centuries, who then suddenly stepped out of ghettos into the sunlight, is an entirely obsolete interpretation...
...Shanks: Some say that it's not war that threatens Israel, but this kind of breakdown of control...
...How will that end...
...Sachar: It's a logical, a legitimate question...
...Second, think of an even more volatile area, wherein live far many more Palestinians than there are in Gaza—the West Bank...
...And, bit by bit, even if Arafat's partisans shared in those institutions, West Bank produce would still need access to East Bank markets, West Bank workers would still need access to Israeli construction jobs and other employment...
...Egyptian diplomats have told me that for Sadat this was the moment of truth...
...And so at last an imaginative accommodation was devised under which Gaza would simply be occupied not by the Egyptian army but by the United Nations Expeditionary Force, which would use the little enclave as its headquarters...
...Shanks: As I look back on Jewish history, I can discern two theories of Jewish survival...
...Do you share that view...
...Even by the calculations of the most territorially intoxicated Orthodox Jews, after all, the largest part of East Jerusalem and its surrounding hinterland evokes no spiritual or historical resonance...
...It underwent the trauma of the civil rights struggle and the long-delayed liberation of an important component of the American population...
...So you are quite right...
...It has survived a backbreaking ingathering of impoverished refugees, not to mention the hostility of an ocean of surrounding populations...
...Israel offered them the way out of the Soviet Union, but once free of Soviet rule, they were not about to ignore even more compelling alternatives for settlement elsewhere...
...Shanks: What about the resolution of the difficult division within Israel that you've identified between the religious fundamentalists and the non-Orthodox Jews...
...Many things are happening even now between Hussein and Israel...
...Shanks: That was very different from Egypt's reaction to the Ras Bourqa murders of Israeli civilians in the Sinai...
...You've written many books on the subject, and you've recently completed a two-volume history of modern Israel, the second volume of which has just been published by Oxford—in May 1987, to be precise...
...All went under between 1938 and 1940...
...It's for this reason that moderate Israeli leaders (mostly in the Labor and centrist camp) and Hussein himself in recent years have quietly worked out a more feasible scenario for a quasi-autonomous West Bank, functioning cantonally within a Hashemite confederation...
...Shanks: Would any Arab political leader put his signature to such a treaty without risking assassination...
...And this question presupposes still another...
...Sachar: There has been a drain of the youngest, the most vigorous, and very often the best educated...
...No such provocation had taken place for many, many years, and its gravity was recognized by the Arabs even more than by the Israelis...
...Most of the peace arrangements since World War II have come into existence without treaties...
...But it is significant that several thousand North American Jews have made aliyah...
...Can you think of any significant acts of terror across that frontier at any time between 1956 and the Six-Day War...
...The West Bank is in Israel's hands The Israeli army is a standing presence among the 800,000 Arab inhabitants there...
...It acquired territory in a war for which it had not even a scintilla of blame...
...Sachar: It is realistic—and not unprecedented...
...Arabs on the West Bank have very little to lose...
...Two principal reasons can be detected...
...He advocated giving these people a kind of autonomy, leaving them to their own devices...
...This loss is typical of every country...
...For the Israelis, the 1973 Yom Kippur War was no less a watershed experience...
...People, all people, will gravitate instinctively to a higher plateau of life If the doors of the United States were opened indiscriminately to the rest of the world, 95 percent of the rest of the world would be living here...
...Admittedly, the question of Jerusalem—you're quite right—is in the end the most difficult issue that will have to be confronted...
...The question is, of course, how Israel's political leaders can find a way of giving back a large part of this territory and still protect the nation's security...
...Sachan "Should" is not a word non-Israelis have a right to use...
...I do not regard it as the heart of Judaism...
...Even earlier than Ben-Sasson, of course, such nineteenth-century scholars as Leopold Zunz and Abraham Geiger had already adduced much evidence of Jewish adaptation in earlier ages—far back into the medieval era...
...But it's not likely...
...Israel would have loved to get back the lives of its young men that were lost in that war...
...This theory ascribes to the people who refused to budge—who kept praying, who made no concession to change— the very continuity of Jewish identity through thick and thin, whatever the adversity...
...Sachan From my reading of the Jewish past, I would guess that the progress of ethical Judaism—the kind of Judaism Rabbi Avraham Kook once described as "the sanctification of life"—is more likely to develop in the Diaspora than in Israel...
...For many years we deluded ourselves into believing the Soviet Jews were clamoring to leave the USSR because they were Zionists, because they wanted to live a full Jewish life in Israel...
...These are the people who make up a disproportionately large component of the Israeli population...
...Peace treaties are obsolescent instruments in contemporary diplomacy...
...And I think that one of the most lamentable of these consequences will not be resolved, will not be exorcised until this painful and probably gradualistic process of disentanglement ultimately occurs...
...Defense minister Moshe] Dayan advocated that solution in his last few years, and he was not known as a dove...
...I regard the Kulturkampf as the graver of the two threats...
...I do not accept that premise...
...It covers the period from the Yom Kippur War to the present...
...Have I accurately identified these two theories...
...Shanks: Is that what makes you basically optimistic...
...The euphoria, the self-confidence, even the arrogance that swept over the nation in the immediate aftermath of the Six-Day War were largely dissipated by the Yom Kippur War...
...Israel is still Sparta, after all, and the hinterland is still Athens...
...I cannot...
...Sachan I don't think it's going to happen...
...Remember, those of us who grew up before World War II by no means took it for granted that the states created by the Paris peace treaties of 1920 would necessarily survive at all...
...But I think it could happen...
...Shanks: What about the idealism involved in building a Jewish state, a nation that isn't like other nations...
...He could have lost half his kingdom (as ultimately he did in 1967...
...No one is talking about putting up a great iron gate once again between the two sections of the city...
...Shanks: And if they are willing to settle for that, do you think Israel should give it to them...
...What does that portend for the future...
...In short, we must adapt...
...So you begin with the inducements of the huge American economy Shanks: But doesn't Israel have other qualities that make it attractive...
...Sachar: It has lost many of the characteristics of its early idealistic days...
...Just as, conversely, it is possible for Israel to limit its political governance to only a very small area of captured Jerusalem—essentially the Old City with its Temple Mount area—without violating Jewish sensibilities...
...The Jewish nation is above all else a nation of refugees...
...Right now, I don't anticipate it Shanks: Isn't Israel still central to Judaism...
...And that can only happen if there is an unexpected new infusion of Soviet immigrants...
...After the 1981 election, [prime minister Menachem] Begin had to sign a political agreement negotiated with the other parties of his coalition...
...We don't have a peace treaty with Hanoi, do we...
...Shanks: What about Israel simply granting unilateral autonomy to the Arab West Bankers...
...Sachan Some problems don't end, they only get older—and conceivably even more serious, unless additional non-fundamentalists settle in Israel to help restore the demographic "balance" of the 1950s and 1960s...
...I would say that the genius of the Jews has been their ability to absorb whatever is best and most useful in the civilizations around them and to transmute those qualities through their own ethos into forms of creativity that have been uniquely Jewish...
...Howard M. Sachar: The fact that most impresses me is that Israel has survived...
...Shanks: Certainly Israel regards it as a threat...
...Nasser kept order there thenceforth beause he had a vested interest in doing so...
...Does it all go back to the tragic hostilities between the Arab nations and Israel...
...Most of this territory has been urbanized and suburbanized and exurbanized far beyond its original, historic dimensions...
...Israel's was not a voluntary imperialism, to be sure...
...Begin's genuflection to the Orthodox parties reflected their growing and disproportionately powerful role in government policy...
...The moment these people have something to lose again, they will be far less inclined to cooperate with terrorism, as they were disinclined in the 1I years between 1956 and 1967...
...I think every American Jewish young person should at the very least spend a couple of years in Israel...
...The formal treaty of 1979 did not add that much to the locked-in state of non-war...
...Why should Israel be an exception...
...Wars can be, and very often in the hands of orthodox historians are, convenient milestones in a nation's development...
...The ethnic gulf may be somewhat less of a danger than it was 15 years ago, however...
...In two ways...
...But I would not say that, if one were searching for the theological answer to the mysteries of life, one is going to find it necessarily in Israel Shanks: Thank you very much, Howard...
...What do you have in common with the Anglo-Saxons who settled Virginia or North Carolina or Massachusetts...
...But at any rate, we're here...
...I should mention another factor in the emigration picture, and it is one that none of us dares judge or condemn, living as we do in the safety of the United States...
...There have been others who have gone very far to the other extreme...
...That tension has edged the nation closer and closer to a Kulturkampf with every passing year, to a confrontation which some Israeli observers regard as the single gravest threat to the nation's future Among the most acute of these observers, I think particularly of A. B. Yehoshua, who detects in this enmity a kind of replication of the civil war that virtually devoured ancient Israel and rendered it susceptible to Roman conquest...
...In fact, back in 1974 and 1975, Egypt and Israel had achieved functional peace through the "Sinai I" and "Sinai II" disengagement agreements...
...Sachar: I didn't mention the Sinai Campaign of 1956, either...
...Shanks: Do you see any such leader emerging...
...Before 1967 it was ruled by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan...
...In every country there are elements of materialism and idealism...
...Now, the reason you did not have many of these episodes then was King Hussein's awareness that he had something very important to lose...
...And if it were unviable, it would be chronically vulnerable to the imperialist ambitions of its neighbors...
...The second was the Six-Day War in 1967, which in one fell swoop all but eradicated the notion that the little Jewish republic was going to be blown away...
...Isn't it the heart of Judaism...
...Far from bearing any historic provenance for Jews, it has been an albatross for the Israeli government because of all the social problems and social services needed, the sewage and electrification, the hygiene and welfare costs and all the other infrastructure that has to be developed and maintained by Israel...
...Sachan No, but even Sadat on his visit in 1977 made clear that he understood, as Hussein in his secret visits with Israeli leaders has made clear that he understands, that there can be no physical re-division of Jerusalem...
...We argue about whether mistakes were made, whether the situation could have been avoided, whether it's really the Arabs who have been at fault...
...Shanks: Do you see any efflorescence of Judaism as a way of life...
...The first question I'd like to ask you is this: As you look back over the broad sweep of these nearly 40 years of Israel's modern history, can you identify any unifying theme, any persistent direction in the overall picture...
...It was from the experience of the October 1973 war that he girded himself for his ultimate hegira, the trip from Cairo to Jerusalem...
...There are other serious dangers Among them is the alarming growth of crime, a phenomenon I describe in Volume II and the crisis of emigration which, in a sad twist, has left much of Israel in the hands of the wrong people precisely because the best and the brightest often have departed the country for the United States and elsewhere...
...And he did it...
...Many families cannot take it any longer...
...In the case of Israel, I would say that there are three wars that in some measures define the state's evolution...
...Another reason is the state of peace with Egypt...
...he did solve it...
...Most of them, like most departing Israelis, turn their backs on Israel because they want a better life elsewhere—if not a better life as Jews, than as mere mortal human beings...
...Why were the Hashemites so frightened...
...Sachan I wish you had not used the word "material...
...As I see it, for some 20 years now, the gravest dangers to Israel have been from within...
...As you put it, there was a' 'need to evaluate the ways in which the nation had gone off course " Has the state of Israel lost its way...
...This is a miracle of rebirth and of recommitment to decent ideals...
...Neither did Poland nor the Baltic republics...
...Well, Israel doesn't have to rule these people...
...But can he accept, can any self-respecting Arab accept, the notion that his kinsmen in Jerusalem—and we're talking here of nearly 150,000 people—must live under permanent Israeli rule...
...The Western Diaspora is comparatively affluent today, and accordingly thrives and creates If and when—decades into the future— Israel shares in that affluence, conceivably it will share in that intellectual and spiritual creativity...
...The question is a different one...
...If you are looking for a single example of this migration away from Israel, I would say the best example and the most tragic is Soviet emigration...
...Sachar You asked whether there is a way out...
...Shanks: Just from an impressionistic point of view, my experience has been different, that the people who stay behind realize that they're sacrificing comfort and monetary rewards and they nevertheless express their dedication, their idealism, their devotion to that struggling Jewish state...
...Sachar: I think, first of all, that the territorialist phase of Israel's history will have to end...
...Israel obviously has a particular appeal for Jews But (with important exceptions) mainly to certain kinds of Jews, those who have been exposed to the insecurities or even horrors of life as a vulnerable minority among hostile majority peoples...
...East Jerusalem is a geographic expression, nothing more, a great complex of workers' apartments, gasoline stations, restaurants and movie theaters...
...I use that phrase often when I get involved in these discussions...
...Shanks: Some people think a war with Syria is inevitable...
...On the contrary, their numbers are growing, by immigration and reproduction...
...You may recall that, after the Sinai Campaign, [David] Ben-Gurion wasn't willing to pull out of the Gaza Strip because it was a "serpent's nest offedayeen" that simply could not be returned to Egyptian rule...
...Sachan In some ways...
...Sachan Well, you've really put your finger on the major inducement for people to remain there...
...Israel will be in a state of chronic semi-war during our lifetime...
...If it were not a people of refugees, with bitter memories of life among Nazis, Communists, or Arabs, if instead it were a people who came from prosperous, free, democratic countries, I am not at all sure that Israel's population would be even as rooted as it is today...
...Sachar: These things are largely personal...
...It's unrealistic to expect a different reaction from the citizens of a poor little country like Israel...
...I would also like to question the premise of your earlier question— when you stated that the greatest threat to Israel's existence has been its Arab enemies...
...And still ^nother is the curiously cyclic manner in which nations lurch their way to progress...
...Sachan No, I said he would not have the political power to formalize such an arrangement in treaty form...
...It would simply be unviable...
...First, it was an apocalyptic experience for Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat, who understood afterward that, with every possible advantage on his side—of surprise, of shortened supply lines against Israel's extended supply lines, of sheer numbers of manpower—with all these advantages, when that war ended, Israel's armies were threatening Cairo and Damascus...
...It hardly enjoys the luxury yet of functioning as a "civilization...
...Shanks: But the Palestinians wouldn't accept that...
...According to this approach, unless we do change and modify our way of looking at the world, the way we practice our Judaism, we may not survive...
...And these are the people who probably have the greatest vested interest in remaining in Israel...
...Doesn't it have an ambience, a way of life, that we don't have here that could substitute for, that could compete with, the material blandishments of American life...
...The peace with Egypt, although less than a model of warmth and good fellowship, can at least be described as a state of non-war...
...I am romantically attracted by the state of Israel...
...Jordan, Syria, Iraq It would be an endless focus of contention, and that is not a situation Israel wants on its eastern frontier...
...Shanks: Well, for example, Jerusalem...
...It is whether Israel can give back the area of Jerusalem containing the largest part of the Arab population— the municipal enclave that was in Jordan's hands before 1967, plus the vast hinterland attached to greater Jerusalem by Israel after the Six-Day War—and do so in a way that does not threaten Israel's security or Jewish spiritual sensitivities...
...That alone is a compelling inducement for Jews even from free countries such as ours...
...They grew up comfortable and healthy, often with the benefits of a good education...
...Sachar: Actually the people who oppose it—and that's a majority of Israelis of all parties—do so for the right reason, because they recognize that a postage-stamp state, a state politically execrated and economically isolated by King Hussein, would simply be unviable...
...No Jordanian gun will ever again be sited there...
...Czechoslovakia did not, Austria did not...
...And I must say that in the long run of history we will realize that this man saved France with his courage...
...And by this quiet process, without raising the questions of legal rights, the danger to Israel from Gaza would be sterilized...
...As they come to the United States, those who remain behind—sometimes for lack of opportunity, for lack of education, or increasingly now for reasons of intense pietism—are not the most productive elements in their society...
...Sachar: We should not become too sophisticated in our search for explanations...
...Surely one of the most critical is the growing tension between the secularists (or at least the non-Orthodox) and the ultra-Orthodox element in Israel...
...There's nothing foreordained or necessarily permanent about Israel's crisis...
...I don't necessarily envisage this kind of raw political courage in Israel's current leaders on either side...
...The others have their own significant features, but I do not put them in quite the same category...
...If he had not, Israel might have attacked again...
...This nation [the United States] went through the chastening idealism of Franklin Roosevelt, and afterwards of Harry Truman...
...As Egyptian foreign minster Mahmud Fawzi put it: "If the Israelis will keep their mouths shut, we will keep our eyes shut...
...As you know, there have been ultra-Orthodox, frequently ultra-Chasidic, groups that have turned their backs on the rest of the world and have rejected adaptation or accommodation of any sort...
...And it penetrates now into the very heartland of Jerusalem...
...Under UN administration, Gaza would be crowded with so much infrastructure, so many barracks and so forth, that there wouldn't be room for the Egyptian army to return...
...I take it that, on the most basic level, you would say it is financial—the economic conditions in Israel...
...Those who most appreciate Israel are, by and large, those who came as refugees from anti-Semitism elsewhere...
...Is there any way to get out of this vise...
...You talk to the people . . . Sachan I don't get that emotional or sentimental about it...
...It would stiffen his spine, infuse him with a sense of pride and of self-assurance unlike any other experience I know of...
...Let me draw another analogy...
...Israel didn't wake up one bright morning, after all, and simply decide to invade the West Bank This was a country that was fighting for its very existence, and which was attacked, and which had this albatross flung around its neck unwillingly...
...When, by the way, did you last hear of a declaration of war, "formalizing" a military confrontation between two states9 There's an infinitude of diplomatic accommodations that already has developed by experience, by trial and error...
...Shanks: Has there been a brain drain...
...The Israelis gave up the entire Sinai, for heaven's sake, and they gave up the security of the Suez Canal...
...Sachar: Yes...
...Yet because these enclaves are not given official recognition as authentic religious congregations, it's been a very uphill struggle for them...
...But sooner or later it will happen...
...Where is it written, then, that Israel and at least some of its more moderate Arab neighbors are incapable of working out the same sort of arrangement...
...I would ask you to think back to the period between November 1956 and June 1967...
...It is the method of captured peoples everywhere, and since time immemorial...
...I would love it if it were to happen...
...Sooner or later, he believed, it would have been in their interest to work out a functional relationship both with Israel and with the Hashemite state, even if Fatah [Arafat's party] were their political spokesmen on the West Bank...
...I have to assume that Israel is no less materialistic than any other country...
...To give a simple example, you can go to California's "Silicon Valley" today and find entire factories in the computer industry where, from the management offices right down to the production lines, you can make your way speaking just Hebrew...
...The Jewish people could never have survived if this process of osmosis and adaptation had not taken place...
...Plainly, there are areas in which the original Zionist flame has flickered and at times almost sputtered out...
...And that is not an inconsiderable achievement...
...As a historian, do you divide Israel's history into periods according to its wars' Are the wars the principal demarcation points between one period and another...
...One of the most calamitous results of the emigration from Israel has been that the zealots are not among the emigres...
...This is hardly the situation today, however...
...The Jewish people survived because these zealots kept the flame alive Then there is the other theory, what I might call the adaptation theory, referring to those Jews who believed that to survive you must change...
...The United States surely didn't, nor did Britain or France...
...Sachan And what is that...
...If the Arab-inhabited hinterland were linked in this fashion to the Hashemite flag and the Hashemite economy, it would be much less vulnerable to the imperialist claims of neighboring Arab regimes...
...Isn't that a spiritual adventure' Sachan I don't regard it as a spiritual adventure, Hershel...
...Shanks: In the first volume of your History of Israel, published in 1976, you wrote that Israel may have lost its way as a Zionist country...
...The notion that this little postage stamp of territory—the West Bank—is a comparable threat to Israel's security isn't worth serious discussion...
...There has been a very serious confrontation between different elements of Israeli society...
...This wasn't done by Abraham Lincoln...
...Sachar: There are so many—where to begin...
...I don't think it's a deathless revelation to add that the 1967 war contained the seeds of tragedy, as well, for it transformed Israel in a way that gravely threatened the nation's character, if not its survival...
...Writers and diarists from the seventeenth century have left us doom-ridden accounts of their life and their predictions for the future Today, at least, we enjoy the hindsight of better perspective...
...If we continue to adapt, where will Judaism go...
...Shanks: You paint a very pessimistic future...
...Sachan Yes...
...It was a war forced upon them...
...Shanks: You're referring to the First Jewish Revolt [66 C.E -70 C.E...
...Even now, their leverage in the national coalition system has grown ominously...
...I say that without any sense of despair...
...Hussein well understands and accepts that all of this territory—the West Bank, too, of course—must be as thoroughly demilitarized as is the Sinai Peninsula...
...And the answer our brightest students gave him was that ,t.hey felt very comfortable in both countries...
...Is that going on, and what can we do about it...
...Shanks: But no one thinks that the Arabs in any case would accept less than what Israel cannot give...
...We've talked about the fanatics, the zealots on the one hand and the adapters on the other...
...That pressure has begun to take its toll...
...Except for the Bible itself, the greatest works of our law, literature, philosophy and folklore have been produced in the Diaspora...
...And this is a process that continues into our own time...
...Sachar You have defined them precisely...
...This is a transition—a long one, to be sure, and likely to be much longer—that many countries have experienced before they eventually achieve security Shanks: There's been a great deal of discussion about how Israel got into its present state of relations with the Arabs on the West Bank and now, even in integral Israel...
...Precisely because of these advantages, they are mobile enough, literate enough, and vigorous enough to seek out even better material opportunities in the West...
...But it had unhappy consequences in many ways...
...But for many families in recent years—we are speaking in full candor—the dangers and costs of what they regard as an endless state of war, of endless man-hours given up to military reserve duty, have begun to exert a cumulative effect on the nation's central nervous system...
...Of 81 clauses in that document, you may remember, not less than 50 dealt with religious issues...
...Lots of useful things can happen if one doesn't raise issues to the level of public diplomatic argumentation...
...The Land of Israel was the cradle of that peoplehood and of its greatest contribution to mankind...
...Well before the Emancipation, or even before the Enlightenment, Jews by the thousands were exposing themselves to the penetrating rays and glimmers of Western culture...
...Don't you feel more comfortable here...
...Sachan I can't be either pessimistic or optimistic...
...The 1973 conflict in effect opened the possibility of compromise that earlier might not have been entertained...
...Shanks: Do you see any prospect of a renaissance of Judaism in Israel, somewhere between the ultra-Orthodox and the secularists'" Sachan There has in fact been a quiet growth of non-fanatic, non-fundamentalist Judaism...
...Shanks: What kind of scenario would bring that about for Israel...
...Can this be accounted for by the necessarily heavy defense expenditures...
...Despite this "spiral of terror," this open wound of incursion and terrorist violence, I think that there is a way out...
...I can understand their motivations One can live there with a great sense of ethnic relaxation (and it's about the only sense of relaxation one gets there), free of many of the tensions normally experienced by a minority people— assuredly by a Jewish minority people...
...Some very distinguished Jewish historians (I'm thinking here particularly of the late Chaim Ben-Sasson of the Hebrew University) have come up with discoveries in recent decades that have made clearer than ever before the fact that we Jews have long been an adapting people...
...Shanks: What about a Palestinian state...
...It's within the West Bank Sachar Which makes it even more dangerous...
...It's going to take a great deal longer in Israel, because of the infinitely bedeviled and contorted legacies that Israel has to grapple with...
...Indeed, the majority of states created out of the debris of the great pre-World War I empires did not survive as long as 20 years And here is Israel, a little nation that was created under infinitely more parlous circumstances than were any of these European states...
...Those conditions were appalling in their hardships and dangers...
...Shanks: You didn't mention the Lebanese war...
...And so at one focal point of potential terrorism, it was in the interest of the occupying power to keep the peace...
...True, there are in Israel people of the kind you describe Thank God for them I'm proud that one of them is my older daughter, who currently is serving in the Israeli army, who is committed in exactly the way you describe...
...Remember that when we talk about Egypt and Israel, we're talking about the two major players on the Near Eastern scene...
...You mentioned the spiral of terror, and it's a felicitous phrase because that has been the single most debilitating wound inflicted on Israel, the wound of civilian vulnerability, the endless incursion of Arab guerrillas across various frontiers . . . Shanks: But today it's not across the frontiers...
...Let me quote a veteran Egyptian diplomat...
...As recently as 1967, military duty would not have been a major inducement for people to leave On the contrary, service in the armed forces was regarded as a talisman of patriotism that usually surmounted the economic and bureaucratic frustrations of life in Israel...
...Once that happens a very significant era of greatness can develop in Israel...
...Conversely, Nasser could not bring himself to abdicate Egyptian sovereignty over Gaza and give the Strip over to Israel...
...Shanks: Are we moving in that direction...
...I agree that Israel today is probably the heart of the Jewish people...
...And Judaism has changed...
...Sachan They can have Arafat as their prime minister without necessarily having full and total political independence from a Hashemite confederation...
...The major threat to Israel's existence is the surrounding ocean of hostility, as you put it...
...Years ago, American politicians developed an ingenious technique known as gerrymandering...
...Most of the peace arrangements since World War II have come into existence without treaties...
...But he had the vision to understand that until the problem of Algeria was resolved, and that only by using his mystique could he resolve it, the nation could not breathe again and turn to creative tasks...
...it was done by some very pragmatic people like Lyndon Johnson and Everett Dirksen in our own day...
...A Jordanian soldier apparently had fired a couple of shots from the Old City into the New City...
...Sachan Very possibly...
...It may evolve simply by the process of inanition, a kind of lethargic, gradual process of almost imperceptible development...
...It is the sheer pressure of war and of military sacrifice...
...Don't hold your breath...
...There were not lacking faint hearts among visitors and settlers alike...
...Many countries go through this ordeal...
...Shanks: What are the ways...
...The human frailties that have been exposed in so many tens of thousands of Soviet Jews is not, regrettably, less characteristic of tens, even hundreds of thousands of veteran Israelis Shanks: To what do you attribute emigration from Israel...
...Because they had something to lose...
...Take the United States...
...Shanks: What's the distinction...
...It's being cultivated by several groups...
...An important component of those who have emigrated in^recent years has been sabras [native-born Israelis] They have few if any memories of Pharaoh...
...However imperceptible it is at the time, change and adaptation have been virtually the leitmotif of Jewish history...
...The United States does not have a peace treaty with Germany...
...Except from Syria, there was very little terrorist incursion against Israel...
...But they don't have the opportunities to do so...
...In the past, only affluent societies have enjoyed that opportunity...
...But Judaism as we know it is, after all, as much a heritage of the Diaspora as of Zion...
...You'll remember that this was the time span between two wars, the Sinai Campaign and the Six-Day War...
...And I wonder if you share my sense that there is a spiraling of terror and a breakdown of control...
...It would be profoundly unrealistic to expect Israel to do so...
...And there are ways...
...Indeed, it was almost humorous to witness the terrified reaction of the Hashemite government...
...Some did not...
...Israel remains in a state of siege, a poor country...
...What relationship has this modern municipal sprawl to the venerated Jerusalem of biblical antiquity...
...Sachan If I can just deal with the West Bank for a moment...
...If Reform or Conservative Judaism expect to have a major impact on Israel they can do so only if tens of thousands of Reform and Conservative Jews move to Israel...
...Sachar I don't really, but I can say this...
...Former Israeli prime minister Shimon] Peres, too, has been advocating functional autonomy, of course, with an eventual linkup between the West Bank and Amman...
...Militarily, it can protect itself in many different ways without maintaining political sovereignty over the principal areas of Arab-inhabited Jerusalem...
...It was a just war...
...Both the Reform and Conservative movements in the United States over the years have established programs in Israel...
...Within a decade they will dominate Jewish public life in Jerusalem much as they did in the years before the Balfour Declaration...
...Tensions continue between the so-called "two Israels," between Jews of European background and those whose families come from Moslem countries...
...Because Israel has swallowed up this terrain and its people, it is exposed and vulnerable to the only retaliatory method available to the captive Arab population...
...I don't envisage anything necessarily different for Israel someday in the future...
...Now those two countries have been locked together in an arrangement of non-war—not of cordiality, not of meaningful friendship, for that will take many years and will depend on a resolution of the Palestine issue—but at least they have been locked together, like France and Germany in NATO, in a condition of non-war...
...Its hills and valleys still speak to us with a special intimacy...
...That would never happen again...
...In fact, Zionist idealists represent only the tiniest minority of Soviet Jews...
...But we must not be oblivious to the fact that there are others, hundreds of thousands of them, who, if it were within their power, would depart for a more affluent and relaxed ambience in the United States...
...Not their military nerves, because even Hussein understands that the Judean mountain range must be sterilized...
...Sachar It's many, many more than 300,000...
...I don't think it's going to happen by treaty, to be sure, or by any sort of formalized document...
...It's a clout that will not be reduced to manageable dimensions unless the demographic physiognomy of Israel itself is substantially altered...
...Can any selfrespecting Arab accept the notion that his kinsmen in Jerusalem—and we're talking here of nearly 150,000 people— must live under permanent Israeli rule...
...he would ask...
...Rather, quietly and almost passively, by a process of mutual accommodation and discretion, many things can happen...
...Or of certain Israeli politicians, for that matter...
...How can Israel develop a viable government with the political staying power to achieve such a territorial compromise...
...But even if Peres were returned to power by a hair-thin majority, it's doubtful that he would be strong enough unilaterally to proclaim this kind of autonomy...
...And you may recall one fascinating aspect of those 11 years...
...To abort the possibility of Israel retaliation, Amman within 36 hours of the incident announced that the Legionnaire who had fired the shots evidently was psychotic and was currently being held in the psychiatric ward of a military hospital for "observation...
...Indeed, what I can remember is an episode in 1961 (I was living in Jerusalem at the time) when a few Arab bullets whistled through a neighborhood not far from mine...
...In my understanding of the Jewish experience of the last millennium, it seems evident that those who stood fast against change of any sort were—and are—a minority...
...I mentioned only the three most important wars...
...There are very few among Israel's most knowledgeable military figures who believe that the return of substantial areas here will threaten Israel's security even for a moment...
...Doesn't it have a spirituality that is not here in the Diaspora...
...It is guerrilla, terrorist activity What would suggest itself then as a potential solution...
...His scenario is to allow the institutions of autonomy quietly and gradually to develop...
...Old B G. [Ben-Gurion] used to trot out a rhetorical question each time we brought a group of American students to his office...
...Israel had been obliged to wage a succession of "official" wars and an uninterrupted "unofficial" war against guerrilla terrorism...

Vol. 12 • December 1987 • No. 9


 
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