MOMENT Interview:
Eban, Abba
ABBA EBAN INTERVIEW The new political situation is a bit absurd, because we find here that when the Government made a dovish gesture on the Geneva Conference, the Labour Party comes out against...
...And so Labour governments became the great attractors of private investment, from millionaire Jews and from American governments...
...And more and more Israelis take our sovereignty and all the emblems of it for granted...
...But the Rabin government turned it down because it would have meant an election...
...It lives very much on superficial sentiment and...
...Judaism has never accepted the pontifical idea, but the Council of Sages is perilously close to the idea of a College of Cardinals...
...All I can say is that after the war more people retrospectively take the view that that was a correct analysis, that our style and mood went beyond our strength, as I there suggested, and that there had been an unnecessary distortion in our values What interests me however is the great file of letters I have from people saying that it was a fine thing to say—yet how few people then went public on it...
...Al yithalel hoger k'm'fateach...
...We have to get away from the arrogance of the Ahad Ha'am theory to which I was once addicted, that Israel was the center, from which there would radiate like spokes of a wheel great waves of cultural and spiritual influence...
...In other words, we think of the problems in the Begin regime, but the psychological atmosphere of the Golda Meir regime was one in which relative arrogance was normative...
...It's been a long time, thirty years now...
...I've found two things curious...
...But when these find their only incarnation in the East European shtreimel and kapotte, and in the rigidities of the Mafdal, this excludes from religious experience many who would not wish to be excluded and who in the United States would find their place within the Conservative or Reform framework...
...The major dilemma of opposition is to distinguish between those matters which are legitimate points of rivalry, dissension, and discord, and those matters which are such central national interests that they have to be transcended...
...What is consoling is how little what I call the experience gap, which has had its effects in Israel, how little it's affected American Jewry...
...To make amendments in our legislation, the effect of which would be divisive in terms of world Jewry, seems to me the height of madness...
...We can get capital investment, we can get the American, German, Dutch, Swedish, British, Danish experts I think all that we can offer them is liberation from the choking oppression of a conflict which has more negative effects on them than we sometimes realize...
...The European Economic Community of the Six was developed as a Catholic clan, with DeGaulle, Adenauer, and deGaspeny...
...The only viable position of the Labour movement is to the left of the Likud-religious alliance...
...I don't think it's really looking for a desire to control our policy...
...You know the American Jewish community certainly better than any leading Israeli figure...
...Yes...
...In other words, there's a determination outside the political realm of things which have a political consequence...
...Labour is, after all, part of an Alignment which also includes Mapam...
...It's one of the paradoxes in the left part of our party—on the one hand, the pioneering impulse which takes people to settle, and on the other hand, political minimalism...
...It might if the accessibility is such that one can live in Hebron, settle in Hebron, one isn't cut off hermetically as we were under the armistice regime It mightn't suffice with Gush Emunim, but Dayan would have to be a bridge between Likud and that kind of pragmatism in which the West Bank...
...I think that's true of every new government...
...I know some people are looking for formulae...
...In the Labour Party it will be difficult for us even to maintain the religious status quo...
...It is after all the mam source of their tension with the United States...
...Above everything else, there's the personal level...
...My only consolation is that Begin might be doing this perfunctorily, that he will vote for it, but that he knows as well as I do that we have the votes to defeat it...
...But it ceased to enunciate any vision of an Israeli society that was distinguishable from that of its opponents...
...And that they would have to start bargaining with the Likud, which they've done successfully...
...I think it's a marriage of interest and not of anything else...
...Neither should we expect them to do anything about it...
...In the Jewish case, one can ask for as much separation as possible, but complete separation is historically anomalous in the sense that no nationalism has ever been more closely associated with articles of faith than Jewish nationalism...
...Given the other concessions which Likud has made to the Agudah, it would be folly for the Agudah to break with____ I would think so...
...It's really crazy...
...But it becomes an abuse when the rabbi will NOT marry you, when you cannot get married even by a rabbi, because of some obscurity of status...
...After all, Israel is, in spite of its economic stringency, one of the more affluent of the 150 nations...
...Language is your metier...
...Has something soured along the way...
...And third, when it becomes apparent that the Begin government will undergo the same process as most revolutionary movements undergo when they pass from rhetoric to responsibility— they have to compromise between their rhetoric and their responsibility—the atmosphere is one of relief All the terrible things that were predicted have not happened...
...It involves them in a ludicrous military posture...
...There are balancing factors...
...We criticize you for not going further and being moderate on substance and not only on procedure...
...At any rate they've accepted a formula that the United States thinks is viable...
...The dovish proposal is that we should get an Arab signature for us to have 30 percent of the West Bank That's the Allon plan It happens to be as manifestly unrealistic to reach as the conclusion that the West Bank is not basically divisible, that either all of it must be held in a certain link for Israel or all of it must be given up But that we can eat chunks out of it with Arab signature and consent is very unlikely I think that there is growth of interest in the idea of giving it all back with very few alterations of territory but with a very large impact upon the security situation—demilitarization, free access, free movement, and community relationship—in other words, the West Bank is to be shared, not so much territorially but in other ways My own feeling is that if you're thinking of a signed peace you'll have to make a very large, an enormous, complete territorial concession— but balance it by giving ourselves other rights, such as access A Benelux relationship, trade, an ability to remain or to settle in religiously significant places like Hebron After all, if Arabs can live in Jerusalem we can live in Hebron...
...Everyone is distrustful of ideologies...
...It's now statistically demonstrable that if that split had not occurred, if Yadin and Amit and their followers had sought their aims or reforms or ambitions within the Labour movement they would have achieved their ambitions within the Labour movement, they would have risen to positions of influence and the Labour movement would have won the election...
...There was a feeling that the Labour Party had begun to identify itself with the State to a dangerous degree, to the degree in which no separation was possible...
...Here we put ourselves at a disadvantage by having a leader who does not communicate at a time when leadership and communication are almost identical terms...
...And also, I think a greater humility...
...The idea of a rigorous amendment of the Law of Return could be the next crisis...
...My chief anxiety is how the Jewish consciousness is sustained when you no longer have the East European memory nor a very great knowledge of what the Jewish heritage is...
...The pioneering impulse is still within the Labour Party...
...There is a honeymoon period that every government enjoys, and if you challenge it too early, they haven't had a chance...
...In the classic democracies— in Britain, America, the Federal Republic of Germany, it works almost statistically...
...One is that, now, in retrospect, Labour says "We had a solution, the Jordanian solution"____ Why didn't they accept the Jordanian thing in 74...
...If we say that we can help you accelerate your technological development, they can say we can do that in any case...
...I think nothing could be more disastrous than to have forced young Israelis to choose between the East European established Orthodoxy and secularism, denying them medial options...
...We are not being flooded with spurious and undesired proselytized Jews...
...But I would say that an organic connection with the Hebrew language is certainly the key...
...The fact is it's the other way around...
...I mean the idea of Labour personalities withholding their support from an effort to enhance the Israeli position in the United States, in other words, not to regard the support of public opinion in the United States as overriding national objective...
...any number of speeches which you made in the UN in which you invited Arabs to peace with a vision of the wonders that peace in the region might mean in terms of technological transfer from Israel to the Arab states...
...If it's simply a case of ritualism, nobody cares, but if it inflicts hardship then there is a demand for reform What they've done by claiming exclusivity in their interpretation of Judaism is to force an "either-or" choice on a generation of young Israelis...
...It was a kind of perverse desire to inflict humility...
...They're regarded in the international community as sick people, because they only have one subject, and the man who has only one subject is psychologically sick...
...If you look at Europe, which has a greater political influence on our institutions than America, nobody's heard of separation of church and state...
...This little Israel is portrayed as a threat to their huge expanse enhanced by all their mineral and monetary wealth...
...That's what I meant when I spoke of the Benelux formula, the European Community formula, that as you travel between the Scandinavian countries, the Benelux countries, it's remarkable how little the boundary impinges itself on you One reads these days that Gush Emunim has captured the flavor, although perhaps not the substance, of the chalutzim, that the left is simply exhausted and without ideology, without ideals, without representation, that charm, magic, charisma, is all on the right What is the Left about in Israel these days...
...I think if we take the next decade, the political and demographic weight of the Arabs, their geopolitical weight is increasing We already have a new situation, I think, that never since the seventh century, the era of their first conquests, have the Arabs faced history in such a posture of strength, such a mood of self-confidence...
...In the meantime, the rota-tionary principle has been vindicated, there's a chance for the Labour Party to look at itself, to show its prowess in the opposition capacity, which is an honorable and essential part of the balance of a democratic society...
...That's right...
...But they thought that they would be able to do that deal by being the balance of power between Labour and Likud, but within the supposition of a Labour victory...
...Above everything else, I believe what the electorate was trying to do was to inflict a measure of humility upon a party that had got used to identifying itself with the State...
...I remember the reluctance with which they admitted the Protestant infidels from Scandinavia and from the United Kingdom...
...the Labour Party is cutting up the skin of the bear before having caught the bear...
...I mean the implications of Begin's Jewish commitments for domestic policies which so many find difficult to live with...
...All of this has happened within two or three decades...
...The discovery of other options, the legitimization of emigration, not simply that people emigrate but that they're no longer ashamed of it...
...And therefore there is a kind of transformation of society that's been somewhat drastic in its pace and makes it very hard in a society of this kind to maintain the rather rigorous puritanical ideals of the 1920s and '30s...
...And it's much more than a way of getting to be understood...
...Why isn't it enough to say withdrawals...
...Everything depends on what you compare us to I have a colleague, Ben Aharon, who when he talks to the public in Israel says, look how big the gaps are compared with what they were...
...In other words, failure to understand that even in the parliamentary system the opposition still has an international function...
...So that the two experiences, one of them traumatic and the other ecstatic, which determined our own spiritual shape, are not present...
...The second thing that's happened is through the workings of time...
...The two in Israel's ideological history are Zionism and socialism...
...Two other subjects interest me...
...It isn't a law of nature, it's not even a law of politics...
...I think this shows a lack of understanding...
...I said it's a way of getting the Geneva conference together, by some act of tactical flexibility, so hell, let's get it together...
...It distorts it completely...
...The question is whether the self-criticism is really deserved...
...The confused middle ground the rest of us occupy...
...Israel's decision to accept a pan-Arab delegation at Geneva is no more than Begin said two months ago, isn't it...
...They're not only unpleasant to contemplate, I don't think it's necessary rationally to contemplate them The Arabs are not all that strong And the Soviet Union is not all that fanatical...
...Although one can't ignore that Maimonides wrote a great part of his work in Arabic...
...In terms of Jewish scholarship and research, if s probably at least arguable that the gross communal product of the American community matches that, perhaps exceeds that, of the Israeli community, but we lack, quite apart from the physical locus, we lack a language...
...Yes, Diaspora Jewry means something to Begin...
...At the best we'll get a Geneva Conference, at the worst we've prevented an American-Israeli clash...
...It's the soul and not the body of our culture...
...After all, a hundred new states have been created since Israel...
...The second difficulty arises in the tendency to take such a simplistic view of opposition that it leads you into a situation where we attack the Likud from the Right all the time...
...But ideologically it's very uncomfortable for us to be defending some of the religious restrictions...
...In other words we became the protagonists of settlement of the West Bank...
...Can we have a Jewish culture in a non-Jewish language...
...I'd like to move away from foreign policy and party matters to an area that in your various roles you've sometimes articulated with characteristic elegance of mind as well as language, and that is again the quality of public and private morality, of the civic ethos in Israel...
...Blood would flow in the streets, the police would be hitting workers, we would break with the United States, and here we are now attacking Begin for reaching an agreement with the United States about the Geneva Conference What is it that accounts for the explosion of popularity for Begin in Israel...
...What about the issue of time...
...There are other hardships...
...We were 59th amongst the 149 members of the United Nations...
...In other words, there is a certain status for religion within society that is embedded in the history of parliamentary democracy...
...Has it been difficult for you in Labour circles undertaking a mission on behalf of the Begin Government...
...What's happened since your University of Haifa speech which so shocked the country...
...Short-term I don't see much into it, because there is not yet that degree of acclimatization to the Opposition function...
...I think that if you had an election in this country, the present government would get a large majority on the grounds that it hadn't been given the chance to do anything and therefore it's unwise to push the issue too soon...
...If the Likud decided to reduce the defense budget, why do you reduce the defense budget...
...Here we were changing places with them and making exactly the kind of speech that they would be making if the roles were reversed...
...That was before the Arabs had the money to buy technology wherever they wanted to...
...There's certainly no room any longer for any condescension in the Israeli offer of cooperation with the Arab states...
...When he receives a group of Italian social democrats he boasts about how relatively egalitarian we still are compared with them, or compared with Sweden or Britain or Germany, other countries in which social democracy has had a very long run And all the changes I refer to .. . are rising through the passage of time and the decline of ideology and the dimming of the heroic memories and the growth of gaps...
...I think if they had joined the Labour committee and said we want two things as a condition of not separating, one is a common policy on changing the electoral system, which after all we were committed to anyhow, and some other matters—I'm not very clear what they stand for so I don't know what else they stood for—but we also want our place within the hierarchy, I think they could have done a deal...
...The preoccupation of their leadership is so much with the conflict and so little with their social dilemmas, that although one can say that Israel suffers through the lack of peace more than the Arabs, they do suffer from it as well One has the sense these days that at least at certain levels of the American government Saudi Arabia has replaced Israel as our chief ally____ Not quite...
...And therefore the relation should be more balanced than it is...
...It's probably amongst the thirty leading nations in per capita income...
...For example, it is not possible to get married except by a rabbi...
...A registrar would probably make some kind of declaration in prose' of lesser elevation...
...Distance has grown up between the dramatic memories of the Holocaust and the establishment of the State, and the contemporary consciousness of people which does not include these experiences...
...Israel is one of the veterans in the international community...
...Therefore, to say that Jewish religion has nothing to do with Jewish nationalism is a historical solecism...
...The DMC is nothing but a split in the Labour Party, it's nothing more nor less than that...
...the electorate wanted to say, "look, we decide these things, don't presume anything in advance...
...Nothing unites them more than the attempt to humiliate them...
...There's less illusion about ostensible situations of stability On the other hand, I see that there is a growth of opinion favoring solutions to the West Bank which maintain its unity in some way...
...Ballots aside, quality of life, issues of corruption, issues of "normalization," issues of the yeridah (emigration), a sense of loss— is that something you perceive...
...I don't think that Israel should draw from this the lesson that you must accept any settlement however fragile...
...And electorates tend to apply this douche of cold water...
...But I think the first reason is that the pendulum law does apply in parliamentary democracies...
...The Labour Party, together with the Movement for Democratic Change and the Likud liberals, has enough votes to prevent an amendment which is not necessary because there's nothing wrong with the present situation, even from the Orthodox view...
...Washington is probably already saying that these people are easier to deal with than Rabin...
...Then Rabat wouldn't have happened, because if Hussein had been in one place—Jericho was the issue then, that was to be the parallelism with Kuneitra—then that would have given him the locus standi in the West Bank which he lacked at Rabat And now therefore, for our party and some of the people like Rabin to scream for the Jordanian option is a little bit tendentious...
...Certainly one of the surprises about Likud and its leader is the grace with which he has assumed power...
...I think that's a very important thing to learn, that Israel cannot really flourish outside its Jewish context...
...It's interesting, they're now impressed by visiting the concentration camps That's very important indeed, a sense of the Holocaust...
...faced with office, every government has to compromise between its slogans and its realities...
...And the question is how to pass to Israel a small percentage of the enormous abundance of intellectual and spiritual and material energy that resides in Diaspora Jewry...
...Fewer and fewer Israelis react to the Holocaust as something through which they lived, even as eye-witnesses...
...This responds to the balancing element in a democratic society...
...Isn't there really a considerable difference, not only in political perspective and not even in Weltanschauung, but in orientation to life...
...A lot of people don't know each other and couldn't care less...
...Or is there an inherent violation of metaphor that simply prevents one from sensing____ I think that language is something much more powerful than simply a medium for communication...
...That was very interesting...
...I think what went wrong with the Labour Party was that it didn't present a vision of society...
...And they become an element in disturbing the detente between the United States and the Soviet Union...
...I remember there was an election in Britain when I was passing through, and Harold Wilson was about to run for reelection, but he received the Soviet ambassador and made an arrangement with him saying, "after the election I will come to Moscow...
...In general, its international policies were accepted...
...Yes, exactly...
...Perhaps it is...
...The fact is that Diaspora Jewry has a greater concentration of physical, material, intellectual, scientific, technical resources than Israel has been able to accumulate...
...In other words the intimacy, small town neighborhood solidarity, has given way to some of the metropolitan coldness...
...It vitiates their relations with the powers...
...Everything is rather flat and more routine, pragmatic, taken for granted...
...They're regarded as hypochondriac because the thing that they're so afraid about seems so little threat...
...Yes, there are changes which I think arise out of the tension between quantity and quality...
...Does it lose its sharpness for those people who now form the core of Likud support...
...It's also a return to a Jewish government, because there was almost something non-Jewish about the Rabin regime, the whole atmosphere...
...Because one had the fear that Americans who have grown to consciousness after Israel's establishment would be less excited, elevated, concerned, and that isn't the case at all...
...First of all, it has obsessive effects on their mentality...
...That's why in the European parliament I suggested the idea of the community boundary, Benelux, because if you can move in the whole area and the whole area has an economic integration, the political frontier line loses some of its sharpness...
...if you say "opposition at any price," you find yourself occupying the hawk position...
...It has a conceptual soul of its own...
...Has the chronic crisis sapped public morals, privatized what was so manifestly a civic approach...
...The last chance to establish Jordan as the partner to the West Bank was to give them a symbolic position under a disengagement agreement which Hussein asked for and Kissinger proposed and I advocated...
...What was unexpected was that they would have such an overkill effect that Labour wouldn't be a bargaining partner at all...
...My feeling is that the legislation will fail, happily, but that this will not bring about the fall of the Government...
...It doesn't happen in most places...
...I don't believe that the Labour defeat is very catastrophic...
...Something very strange has happened...
...But since we ourselves acknowledge that so much depends on American Jews they have the normal courtesy of giving our partnership some semblance of equality, consultation, not simply dictates...
...Because there is an interest in the effect of Jewish faith on Jewish nationhood and on the ethical values of prophetic Judaism...
...There were one or two questions like that in which we attacked from the right instead of from the left...
...But the Labour Party should say that we welcome this as well...
...Thaf s been widely felt here...
...Well, socialism is all very well, but if you have to get investment and you have to increase production, you must create incentives and you have to be practical about it...
...One example, which affects me...
...Since 73 there's been increasing talk whether time is working against Israel's interests, whether, therefore, Israel should simply push urgently for the best terms it can get...
...Reality will force you to accept other aspects of our program, too, because our program is the natural predilection that reflects the reality, but we welcome the sacrifice that you've made of your previous slogans...
...Yes...
...Do you have any short-term predictions of an end to the disarray of Labour...
...It's one thing to have an elitist society of 650,000...
...no historian would possibly sustain it...
...I don't see any hardship in getting married by a rabbi even if you don't happen to believe what he's saying...
...It's the kind of ally that you're not very proud of, like Chiang Kai-shek or Saigon or the Korean regime...
...The second element was that the party lost its unity...
...Then you must add the business of insecurity and war and the tendency of many young people to say that they must get a rest from it...
...That's what I came out for...
...It's ludicrous...
...They are at their best when reacting against hostile pressure...
...in general Jews always react...
...In the classic parliamentary democracy, Britain, the church is established, and in the European Community there's a definite link between the European idea and Catholicism...
...This makes it more difficult to maintain egalitarian ism When there is a total scarcity it's very easy for everybody to be equal in stringency...
...And Zionism, well, Israel already exists, so Zionism with its unbearable nostalgia no longer speaks to the young people as it used to It even became a kind of subject for jest—until the drama of Russian Jewry and the racist resolution in the General Assembly...
...The sort of unapologetic way in which they said, "anachnu garim poh"—as some Englishman or Frenchman might say...
...There is the spectacle of theological fanaticism, vulgar wealth and Koranic legislation, so there's no community of values at all...
...But the major extant Jewish communities today in the United States, North America, in Europe and in the Soviet Union, if you think of them in terms of their academic experience or their scientific and technical know-how, constitute accumulations of resources which Israel ought to try to bring to itself...
...In other words Diaspora Jewry is stronger and Israel weaker in cultural terms than the Ahad Ha'am theory believed...
...The paradox is that there's really much more hityashvut (settlement) done by Mapam than by Gush Emunim or their followers...
...We find that the Labour Party has not really adjusted itself to that selection...
...We exceed the Diaspora Jews, I think, in the completeness of our Jewish consciousness, in the totality of our dedication to the Jewish fate...
...With us it took 29 years, but when it happened, it happened without cataclysm...
...They are still more than in the Israel of our memories and of our dreams...
...We're told in all the books about parliamentary democracy from Bagehot onwards—that Opposition is a very honorable function in a democracy, but it is the only honor that politicians do not actively pursue...
...One of our members put down the motion in the Knesset expressing suspicion lest Begin had agreed with Carter not to embark upon a large-scale settlement project...
...ABBA EBAN INTERVIEW The new political situation is a bit absurd, because we find here that when the Government made a dovish gesture on the Geneva Conference, the Labour Party comes out against it...
...Their scenario was that Labour would still form the government but would not be able to form it without the Yadin group...
...Then there's the flight from ideology towards pragmatism...
...Self-criticism was not well-regarded Since then I think Israelis are more realistic about themselves...
...When Shimon Peres announced that in his cabinet Allon would be the Defense Minister, number two, many people in the public said, "Look, he's already dividing up the spoils...
...Isn't the result that we find Israelis who say "I'm an Israeli, not a Jew," where they really mean that they are not Jews as the Agudah defines the term...
...Realistically, if Yadin and Amit and Rubinstein had come knocking on Labour's door, would Labour have been responsive...
...The Yadin group would then dictate both their personal and ideological terms...
...So they try to make distinctions between the virtue of annexing Golan and the wickedness of annexing places where they don't want to settle...
...One last question...
...The fact is that the greatest works of Diaspora Jewish creativity have been by Diaspora Jews who were in some measure Hebraized...
...Are there any changes since your first exposure to us...
...I have the impression that Brzezinski is looking for formulae which preserve Eretz Yisrael as a unity, although you do have a political boundary not very far away from where it was before...
...Yet that very Jewishness raises some problems for us, doesn't it...
...Therefore the only achievement of the DMC to date is to bring the Likud to power, which is so far from being its ambition that it must be involved in a great frustration...
...Now, if we defeat this, whether the Agudah will say, "Begin did his best," or whether they will break the Government, I don't know...
...Our society has lost its family structure, its compactness...
...One has the sense, especially from a distance, that the country is going through a bitterly self-critical time...
...And to have an authentically Jewish culture that is not in a Jewish language is, I think, very difficult...
...And now if Begin and Dayan are accepting it this proves that responsibility imposes a certain empiricism that would have been inconceivable before...
...I can't think that you would get speeches now like Sharon's, that we have the power to conquer every piece of territory from Kenya to Turkey, Teheran to Morocco...
...But there are some—in the Labour Party—who believe or hope that the present Government will fall soon on the issue of the failure to accept legislation on "what is a Jew...
...Downstairs some people came up to me, spoke in Hebrew, we are Israelis—what do you do—we live here...
...Not fundamentally...
...But when you become some millions, especially millions created without any kind of pioneering selectivity, you cease to have a society in which everybody knows each other...
...Therefore people are accustomed to the idea that in any decade, most politicians would expect that about half their time would be in opposition and half in government...
...It's not quite true because in spite of their public relations successes, most of the settlement policy is still done by the socialist movement...
...After all, the United Arab delegation was a Syrian proposal that Israel rejected...
...He thought of Diaspora Jewry in terms of a decaying Polish Jewry...
...Egypt's army is grotesque for an African state with no resources...
...I think the crisis moment will come for the present government not in the realm of its foreign policy, where its options are very much restricted by international realities, but in this question of the theocratic emphasis...
...Whereupon Peres and Rabin said no, let's refuse In other words, it's like changing places on a moving staircase...
...The electorate has given its verdict, let it be respected...
...Many of us were surprised in 73 that it took so long to get the ceasefire That's simply because we didn't do well enough militarily But I think the power balance is sufficient either to deter war or, if it breaks out, to curtail it It usually brings Washington and Moscow together in the ceasefire operation Next time they do a ceasefire operation they may say, "we're fed up with having ceasefires every four years, let's see if we can cooperate in the political situation as well" But contingencies which involve cataclysms and liquidations of Israel . I don't think that they're realistic...
...Therefore, the religious establishment if they were well-advised, would interpret these predicaments in a liberal direction so as to reduce the hardships...
...Once one envisages a community relationship the question of sovereignty loses some of its stringency...
...All you can do is to try to restrict the areas in which this connection impinges negatively on civil liberties and on human rights, and especially to treat those aspects of it which cause hardship...
...He had the chance...
...It began in a kind of party-chauvinistic way, but when Yizhar Smilansky came out for it and Moshe Carmel and others, warning against what they called party chauvinism, most party people were for it...
...This fear of Breira is absurd...
...The poetry is beautiful anyhow...
...When there is affluence, the objective possibilities of gaps in income and in standards of living become greater, so that even if there is more, I would say the gaps in standards of living of Israel are less than in any other social democratic country...
...My guess is that since from their point of view they do better with him than they would do with us, they will probably say, "an effort was made," and they'll live to fight again...
...But it's good that you are at least moderate on procedure...
...Do you sense in the last decade perhaps any growth at all in the sophistication of the elite of American Jewish life with respect, in particular, to what it expects as part of the terms of its partnership with Israel...
...That brings us to the question of what the costs of precarious survival are...
...It makes them sick...
...Therefore the young Israeli or Sabra tends not to live in a rhapsodical world at all...
...In other words he was already preempting the results of the election and some people said that that had quite a big psychological effect...
...Well, the concession is that he then opposed the pan-Arab delegation, because this was an excuse for putting the Palestinians in, and it is definitely a change, but we ought to say, "fine— you've retreated from a position which would make Geneva impossible...
...The military establishment that it maintains bears no relationship to its power or its needs...
...You can't lead the Jewish people from moods of depressiveness and gloom and misanthropy...
...The other effect is, of course, to create a division between an Israeli religious reality that is based on monism and the pluralism that is characteristic of Diaspora Jewry...
...Israel plus the Jewish people is a stronger element than Israel alone The great power relationship is not really congenial to the idea of states disappearing I don't believe the power balance prevents short eruptions of war, but it is sufficiently tight to see that they are short eruptions...
...It's just as though Peres were asked to go and clear out some dislocation in the tank supply program and were to refuse to do it...
...There is a movement now to legitimize civil marriage, and it's difficult to know how a secular social democratic party can oppose that for long, except on the grounds of force majeure— then you can't help it...
...But the political boundary should lose its hermetic significance and become as irrelevant as possible in the daily traffic of life...
...It's the ally of Wall Street and of the oil companies but it doesn't ring many bells in the American people...
...To talk as we do, so comfortably, about church-state separation is meaningless against that difference, isn't it...
...In other words, when they accepted 242 and the Geneva Conference we responded with derision instead of saying "Welcome, you've accepted our position on 242 in Geneva...
...but apparently it's enough—they go for five days to Israel, they have a look at the Wailing Wall, they hear a rousing oration here or there...
...With Mapam the paradox is extreme because they're against settling anywhere outside the green line, yet where any area has to be settled, there they are...
...I think that was one of the major elements in the public desire to have a change...
...And with that of course goes its elite character...
...Yes, and that's another dilemma for our party, since we fought the election on the somewhat horrendous description of the catastrophe that would happen if Begin were in power...
...That was August 1974...
...There are cycles of eight years or, at most, twelve...
...He'd say, "I hope you don't get the tanks, then we'll use that against you in the election...
...These are some of the changes that have taken place with time, and the other one arises through the growth of affluence...
...Now we have this instance in which the government finds some kind of formula for reviving the expiring corpse of Geneva, and I hear that there are voices in the Labour Party in protest...
...Church-state separation is an American syndrome...
...Especially when otherwise we say that we resign from the Jewish people for four years and leave the field clear, which is just absurd The fact is that in most democracies, you do have a ro-tationary principle...
...But we in turn ought to acknowledge the superiority of their other resources...
...Why did Begin say that we would make significant withdrawals in Sinai and in Golan...
...And of course the great stimulus of external hostility, the maddening effect of these grotesque resolutions in the UN...
...As I point out in my book, that was the crucial point after the disengagement agreements with Egypt and Syria...
...The reaction was what it normally is in a democracy: "Let's see what somebody else can do...
...With us the whole thing has been so revolutionary that our party hasn't yet waked up to the shock, whereas Likud, having had the opposition experience, is more attuned to some of these chivalries and bipartisan gestures...
...It was also curious at the time because it seemed to me to suggest, putting myself in the position of an Arab, a kind of Israeli cultural imperialism which I would have regarded as a threat I don't remember speaking of what we could give to them but what we could give to each other...
...The same is true in Syria...
...Second, because the initial predictions were so horrendous, the fact that so much of life goes on as before is accepted with relief...
...It even creates conflicts with the Soviet Union, because even Soviet support isn't sufficiently wholehearted for them to be satisfied...
...Nor does Israel's disappearance constitute an element of Soviet policy I really believe that what Gromyko said to me on that question is valid...
...Their quarrel is not with Israel's existence but with Israel's orientation And even there they believe our orientation is dialectically inexorable, and that we can't do anything about it...
...And Labour hasn't come to terms with it...
...Therefore there is a greater inner harmony in the Israeli Jew, and I think Diaspora Jews acknowledge that...
...Even if they fail with the Likud, do you imagine that they would do better with the Labour Party...
Vol. 3 • December 1977 • No. 2
