A MOMENT Interview: Abba Eban
ABBA ???? MOMENT INTERVIEW Abba Eban, a contributing editor of this magazine, is a member of the Knesset and has served as Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Education, and, from 1966 to 1974, as...
...That's a grave thing to say, but I don't understand otherwise how people of lucid intelligence like Ball and Heath can drag the Afghan-Iranian-oil problems back to Gaza...
...There was no international or intrinsic party motivation for having such documents at all...
...So on the whole I would say there has never been a time when the intellectual and moral frontier between us and the Likud has been as sharp as it is today...
...But when they became aware that that was not possible, that they could not get anything from us by violence, they went over to the idea of getting their interests back through diplomacy and conciliation—and they have been triumphantly successful...
...The way Jews respond to the Holocaust memory and the way that in spite of all difficulties they rally around Israel— this is comforting...
...It means that objectives which ought to be obtained by human grace and understanding are obtained, if at all, by methods which most liberals would choose not to adopt...
...Why is Gaza any different from the Cyprus question...
...But their position was easier to sustain when there was no response to the idea of peace on the Arab side...
...Inverted pyramids have a distinguished history in Zionist theory...
...Perhaps it doesn't even have to be inverted...
...He has signed a document which definitely creates an objective gravitation towards secession—full autonomy, withdrawal and replacement of the military administration, transfer of authority—the language is rich with associations of eventual separation...
...I only hope that he and others will not allow themselves, in the quest for what is called "party unity," or consensus, to obscure or to blur these very sharp definitions...
...It has, I think, learned the lessons that derive from separation from power...
...On the consoling side, I was much more apprehensive than events have proved warranted that young Jews, born in a generation for which the Holocaust and Israel's struggle for independence, are matters of documentary history rather than personal memory, would not react in the same way as those who actually witnessed the events themselves...
...I haven't seen the United States government enter into a conference either with Western Europe—what does the alliance mean?—or with the Soviet Union— is this really what detente is about...
...For we would not have this phobia that by giving too many powers we might be laying the foundations for a separation or a secession...
...And therefore there was logic in saying to you, in 1947 and 1948, that your job was resources, finance...
...It was not sharp enough when we fought the election of '77...
...both vilify the Jews...
...But now, after the settlement in Zimbabwe— which is, incidentally, together with the Egyptian-Israeli treaty, a triumph of reconciliation—we might soon end up as being the only free country that is exercising a coercive jurisdiction over other people...
...But is Labor today prepared to move beyond its insistence that only a Jordanian solution can be contemplated...
...Although the idea of the Jordanian character of the territories has been muted by Palestinianism since then, there is some juridicial legitimacy in Jordan's position in the West Bank...
...Of course not...
...There's no real reason why people should be interested in the Jews at all...
...The art of politics, of course, is how to integrate the obdurate element into a policy that is also flexible, to be tough enough to deter aggression and yet flexible enough to make negotiation viable...
...We didn't have a manpower problem...
...I remember sitting next to the late Haile Selassie, and not knowing what on earth to talk about...
...I think that is a favorable development...
...You end up in the position of that person who was once compared to a mule—having neither pride of ancestry nor hope of posterity...
...Then, in order to protect the protective territory, you capture another belt...
...Not one of them has said "Because of your rectitude...
...I remain convinced that the destiny of the West Bank has to be ambivalent with respect both to Jordan and to Israel— separate from Israel politically, but I hope not hermetically sealed off the way it was under the Armistice...
...American Jewry needs to compensate for its numerical and other limitations by the vitality and intellectual resourcefulness it musters...
...Being out of office provides an opportunity to revise platforms, thoughts, attitudes...
...But my feeling is that the mainstream now has a clearly defined position in which we prefer peace to territory, in which we prefer a selective security settlement policy to the irresponsible settlement policy that has caused so much furor in the last year...
...Now if, in the course of such a negotiation, Palestinian particularism were so strong and were so much recognized by Jordan and the world, if they were to say that whatever territory we choose to give up or we agree together you should give up will not be centralized under Jordan, then I would come in with my proposal for a confederative or community structure...
...Such formulations as "We do not intend to exercise permanent rule over the 1.2 million Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza" never appeared in our platform before...
...The elements of our history that gave exhortation to our Jewishness are fading from memory—I mean the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel— and there is no clear image of what being Jewish means...
...Those are favorable developments...
...I also think that there's nothing to praise in the uncontrolled proliferation of "statelets" that has marked the international system...
...There used to be a vaguer formulation...
...Yet I find that there is still an extraordinary power to react, although it is now, in a sense, a vicarious reaction...
...Going to the Olympic Games would have been disastrous, but the fundamental problem remains: how to get an operative result, and how to reconstruct Western self-respect...
...Is Labor prepared to initiate a national debate on other alternatives, including, most obviously, the alternative of an independent West Bank-Gaza state...
...In order to defend yourself, you capture a belt of protective territory...
...Let's shift, if we may, to the world...
...Frankly, when we were not negotiating with any Arabs, the hard-line policy didn't do much harm...
...you must say, "What is it that you promise to do and what is it that we promise to do...
...The real implication of that statement was that if we had more Jews, we wouldn't mind such a rule...
...You have the great poverty of the Asian peoples, the galvanizing and intoxicating effect of oil wealth, the torment of Moslems who want Western technology but who fear the effect of technology on their ancient sources of faith and culture, the unresolved competitive appearance of the two major powers—these are the events that are shaking Western Asia to its foundations...
...There seems to be a preference for individual, fragmented treatment, for crisis management, and this might be a reflection of the conceptual limitations of leaders...
...Which does not appear to be on the verge of repair...
...Yes, but perhaps we can afford it less...
...It seems to be much more anonymous, in the sense that its leaders, the leaders of organized Jewish life, seem to have less reverberation...
...both vilify Israel and the Jews...
...The predicament of Begin lies in the gulf between the policy to which he aspires and the document which he has signed...
...It may have done us harm in terms of image, but here I come to a great dilemma as a liberal...
...X" of containment...
...I think we should take this duality as part of our historic experience and not react negatively one to the other...
...Of course it wouldn't...
...But the Israeli episode has been so dramatic and evocative that the tendency has been to say "Middle East" and you immediately equate it with the Arab-Israeli dispute...
...One of the implications of what you've been saying is that the Labor policy might provide Hussein with the inducement to join the process which he evidently feels is lacking today...
...We cannot say, on the one hand, that we plan to separate from these territories, but on the other, that we will control their constitutional future...
...I would say that one of the problems that affects your friends everywhere in the world is not what you do to us, not American attitudes towards Israel or towards any other nation, but American attitudes towards America, which are probably just as important...
...I've written and spoken against the idea that we should deny the legitimacy of dissent on the grounds that "the goyim might be listening...
...I'd like to clarify my own thinking here...
...I think that should be the first step...
...But even defensive reactions can be dangerous...
...That's another problem...
...or "What are the conditions in which we could give it up...
...Every Egyptian of whom I've asked the question, "Why did you change your mind...
...And the problem may also have something to do with the American Jews, who are, after all, the dominant factor in creating the image of the Jews...
...And therefore the broad sweep of the European idea, with its implications of federalism, and super-nationalism, the concept of creating a power that would be equivalent at least to the Soviet Union and the United States, has been dissipated in squalid discussions about how much Mrs...
...Take, for example, the monstrous irrelevance of linking Israel with the Iranian and Afghan crises...
...And, "What is it that you promise not to do and what is it that we promise not to do...
...Even a few decades ago, there were so many communities in a tutelary relationship to other communities that Israel's exercise of jurisdiction over the West Bank and Gaza would not have been very startling...
...If you're serious about saying that you don't want permanently to rule over 1.2 million Arabs, that determines your settlement policy as well...
...For example, in the American-Soviet dialogue, since 1972-73, when detente reached contractual form in the Nixon-Brezhnev communiques, there hasn't been a review of the concept itself, as a result of which there has been a series of crises, with Soviet encouragement...
...You made a passing reference to American Jewry a few minutes ago, and I'd like to pick up on that...
...Incidentally, I believe that's one of the reasons for Europe's very equivocal position on the Middle Eastern situation, a position dominated by fossil fuels rather than by a vision of regional stability...
...I presume that the "elsewhere" has to do with Mr...
...Would Khomeini release the hostages...
...We didn't get anything back from you by war," they've said to me, "but by peace we got back our territory, we got back the oil, we got back the Suez Canal, we got an American alliance...
...Desperately groping for something to say, I came up with "Your Majesty, that's a very interesting legend, the one about your descent from the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon," and he looked at me sternly and replied, "That isn't a legend, that's a fact...
...because the fact is that we would not give all of it up...
...Clearly, a community that has a sense of itself and of its own possibilities cannot accept as its organizing principle the doctrine of its own illegitimacy...
...And second, I come back to what I said before: He dismissed the power-strategic element by statements like "I don't know much about it," whereas it is in fact the build-up of Soviet military power that is the starting point for consideration of detente, or, to put it in a more balanced way, for a disturbance of the equilibrium...
...My theory is that if you have more education, and more aliyah, financial support will also increase...
...Now he has a tendency to underestimate the gravity of Soviet expansionism...
...That is such a change in the assumptions under which Israel secured legitimacy and recognition that it sends a shock reaction throughout the whole international system...
...It's interesting that there hasn't been a broad international discussion in the past five or six years...
...and "What are our reservations about giving all of it up...
...Nobody enjoys that principle when he falls on the wrong side of it, but it does give one a chance to look at the national situation with different eyes...
...It's been trivialized by a kind of provincialism and mercantilism in which only the pay-check and the prices of agricultural commodities are brought into account...
...Motta Gur, for example, has been elevated to a senior position within the Party, yet his perspective on Israel's relations with the Arabs is hardly in agreement with what you've been saying...
...Yes, you have Israelis who, using that theory, can get you as far as Alexandria or the Sudan...
...That says something about Saudi policy, which I presume you mean to say...
...American Jews are a minority community, and you have to compensate for the lack of quantity by a degree of intellectual incisiveness...
...You have to make a decision...
...And yet you find everybody, from Edward Heath to George Ball, writing articles in which the two appear together, in which the argument is put forward that you cannot solve the problems of Afghanistan, of Iran, of the Moslem world, unless you solve the problems of Gaza and the West Bank...
...If they do listen, I think they are likely to have respect for the new pluralism and diversity of expression...
...They will probably not be at the Olympic Games...
...I see rather less evidence of new or original thinking on the economy and the society...
...Much as the political leaders we were talking about a while back...
...Yes, that was proved when it came to condemning the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan...
...American Jewry has been very effective in political pressure, in self-preservation, but has not been very successful in explaining itself in historic ideological terms...
...What we want from America, they are saying, is not benevolence towards us, but a shrewder concept of your own interest and responsibility...
...They accepted 242...
...if the United States, by its insistence on the nuclear weapon, creates a situation in which the only choices are between nuclear weapons and doing nothing, a situation which makes it clear that you'll end up doing nothing, in which, paradoxically, the nuclear obsession leads you to impotence...
...I think Shimon Peres has been largely responsible for shifting us into a position different from the one with which he himself used to be associated, and quite different from the Dayan-Galili documents...
...In 1948 what we needed,most from American Jews was financial support...
...The Soviet Union is at war with Afghanistan...
...To my regret, some of my colleagues signed a petition saying that the Golan is a part of the State of Israel...
...And although I don't believe that this exonerates or excuses the exaggerated reactions of the international system, the fact is that the Israeli-Palestinian relationship is a very strong contributary cause of the development you cite...
...They're not complaining about American attitudes to France, to Germany, to Italy, but about a lack of consistency and coherence in American policy itself...
...If we say to the Jews of America and the other Diaspora communities, "We want your money and your political pressure, but we don't want your opinions," in other words that the contribution should be political and Financial but not intellectual, they would probably accept the veto and then subside into apathy, leaving Israel's cause impoverished...
...It's not a zero-sum game, where if one thing goes up the other must go down...
...If you look at the sources of crisis in the Middle East, you see how few of them lie within Israel...
...in 1977, the Soviet Union encouraged a united Vietnam to attack Cambodia...
...Sadat came to Jerusalem in '77 largely because of those ten years in which we on the one hand kept the wall up and on the other hand had a door in the wall...
...They're not being massacred, they're not starving...
...But when we look at the internal coalition with Labor, that coherence is not obvious...
...His theory is that 242 excludes Jordan and is applicable only to withdrawal from Sinai...
...Iran is at odds with everyone...
...That reflects a negative view of yourself, in which there is no pride...
...To what degree does the American nuclear umbrella commit Europe to solidarity...
...Israeli opinion is still based on the classic Zionist doctrine of shlilat hagolah—the negation of the Diaspora—the doctrine that held that if the Diaspora exists, it's an anomaly, an abnormality, it oughtn't to exist, the attitude towards it should be negative: Get what you can from it while it exists, but it has no legitimacy...
...Incidentally, the sources of instability in the Middle East have always been polycentric, with most of the focal points lying outside the Israeli context...
...But it has never said, "Shouldn't we meet together and look at the whole thing again...
...we would say, in terms of Peres' statement of May '76, "we are willing to negotiate with every Palestinian representative who accepts the idea of peace with Israel...
...There is certainly a very dark wave flowing across the world...
...Amongst the powers, I think it's true in the Great Power relationship as well...
...Thank you...
...I don't know why Peres, Rabin and the late Allon signed that, because my belief has been that the concept of territorial compromise applies to the Golan as well...
...I think he has swung too far over from his own doctrine, as "Mr...
...By the time that was published, the Soviet army was in Afghanistan...
...We also carried over from the early days, when the need for resources to go to Israel was so great, a hostile view towards the allocation of any American Jewish resources to American Jews...
...I think another reason lies in the unresolved nature of Israel's struggle...
...in 1978, the Soviet Union encouraged South Yemen to conquer North Yemen in the communist interest...
...Felix Frankfurter used to tell me the story of a man who was brought up before the court because he had not paid his alimony, and he explained that he hadn't made enough money...
...Thatcher should pay and what should be the price of butter and grapefruit...
...they are not part of people's memory any more, in the way that they were as recently as two decades ago...
...It ought to be turned upside down, with aliyah and education at the top...
...we had 650,000 people who came in the first two years...
...I think that not only Israelis, but Jews everywhere should be concerned...
...Therefore, if I've been reluctant to accept the dove image, it is because I cannot bring myself to eliminate the question of power from international relations...
...At that point, we are involved in a real negotiation...
...It's no longer "Israel right or wrong," perhaps because we are not as right as we used to be, perhaps because the leaders no longer excite the same unquestioned fidelity as the original leaders of the Ben Gurion era...
...They have nothing to do with Israel, and you can prove that by elimination: If the Israeli-Palestinian problem were solved either by Israel subsiding into the sea, as the Palestinians would like, or by a settlement that was satisfactory to everybody, would the Soviets move out of Afghanistan...
...It's not all that central, it's not one of the world's major problems...
...But when I say that in Labor we are more definitive than before, I must make a personal reference...
...But I think we have taken the opportunity...
...It means that the obdurate element in our policy was one of the major incentives for bringing them to the peace table...
...And I think we as doves ought to look at that very carefully...
...Pakistan and India are feuding...
...Are the changes that we here note and celebrate obvious to you, or do we seem to you today merely a straight line projection from what we were two or three decades back...
...And since we have a different vision of the future, and since in our vision of the future the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza are not Israelis, therefore we could afford to interpret autonomy more liberally...
...Out of that premise of not wanting to rule 1.2 million Arabs there flow obvious corollary positions, such as rejection of a unitary structure for Eretz Yisrael...
...Instead of which, you signed a joint declaration about the rights of man and the virtues of motherly love...
...What happened since 1972, to say nothing of the Helsinki agreements, in which the Soviet Union was to liberalize contact and intellectual interchange...
...But my feeling is that we can do no more than state a preference...
...Autonomy does tend to lead to secession—and we face that frankly...
...But now, our reluctance to rule over 1.2 million Arabs is stated as an independent moral imperative, not only because it's useful to us in the preservation of Israel's Jewishness, but also because it is the right thing not to want to do...
...In general, the less power you have, the more intellect you have to display...
...And the judge asked, "Why don't you get a job that pays better, so that you'll be able to pay your alimony obligations...
...The fact is that the Soviet Union has the capacity and the will to put power to work beyond the capacity and the will of the United States to put power to work...
...Did I really sign that...
...A formula as subtle and elusive as "detente" must be manipulated with some degree of intellectual vitality and resourcefulness...
...The community today has taken over the priorities and the slogans and the solidarities of its predecessors...
...We might then create the motivation for a Jordanian-Palestinian-Israeli discussion, of which the first item would be, "Does the territory remain with Israel...
...If they could have had a Middle East without Israel, then their historic memory and imagination made that preferable...
...I now think that Israel should declare its interest in American Jews keeping a good share of their resources in America and building their schools and their centers and anything that makes for Jewish conservation—because if they're not going to be Jews, Israel is not going to benefit...
...if the Soviets have no inhibitions about moving their ships around the Persian Gulf and the United States doesn't recognize that by the Law of the Seas you have exactly the same rights to be anywhere that they are...
...And their oil policy is obviously dictated by a very shrewd economic interest...
...There is a point at which the quest for unlimited defensive security becomes illegitimate, because unlimited security for you means unlimited danger for others...
...No, insofar as I would advise Americans—advice, after all, is Israel's chief export...
...Those who are charged with office tend to lose touch with the popular mood...
...After all, how many are we...
...But the Arab-Israeli dispute is one thing, the Middle East crisis is another...
...Now and again some of our people propose motions attacking the government for not settling enough in the Golan...
...He seems to be rather to the right of Dayan...
...Since the Egyptians withdrew themselves from the circle of war, my theory about the Arab-Israel dispute is that it's become provincialized...
...Unfavorable developments are the institutional conservatism, the total refusal to look at priorities...
...And to resound...
...So we have to find a formula in which the West Bank and Gaza area is separate—and not separate...
...It did not represent a change in Soviet thinking on American interests...
...And of course, there is a continuing tendency in the Gentile world to seek an Israeli or a Jewish cause for every human affliction...
...both vilify the Jews...
...Or to what degree do the special interests and experiences of Europe justify separate and autonomous judgment...
...But that's a rather egocentric reason for not wanting to rule over 1.2 million Arabs...
...All this has to be told again because the episodes which illustrate it are now in history books...
...You don't establish settlements in such a way as deliberately to break up the territorial contiguity of the Arab population...
...What used to be called the West Indies under the colonial regime has become about seven or eight states, with little islands joining all the time...
...Fourteen million, less than one of the smaller states of the United States...
...And Europe as an idea, as a vision, as a will, has receded...
...It might now want to be separate from Jordan politically—but nobody can deny the immensity and the multiplicity of links—family, human, Arab—between them...
...But even beyond these general influences, among which I give precedence to the concept of humility, of having to live the life of ordinary citizens, I think our leadership has achieved a more balanced position on the most crucial issue—namely, our relations with the Arab world...
...Well, the problems of Gaza and the West Bank ought to be solved for their own reasons, within their own rhythm and context, but they are irrelevant to these other matters...
...And criticism is its chief import...
...in 1980, you have the invasion of Afghanistan...
...We therefore built a pyramid of Jewish priorities with financial support at the top, political lobbying— not quite as sophisticated in its organization but still very impressive—in second place, the educational network which could be better is not negligible, third—and right down at the bottom, things like aliyah, although really what we now need from world Jewry is an increment of manpower...
...Kennan was really caught short when in his last irascible reply to his critics he argued that we must understand the difference between a Soviet Union that works through proxies and puppets and totalitarian regimes that used to use their own armies...
...It's gone on at least since the destruction of the first Temple...
...I therefore think we should move in two installments...
...Exactly...
...if you won't give yourselves a fair deal in your information policy...
...Afghanistan and Pakistan are at odds...
...The paradox here is that among the OPEC countries, those that have tried hardest to push for higher prices are those who have nothing against Israel at all, like Venezuela and Nigeria, and Iran under the Shah, which was the most mischievous influence in that direction...
...Which may be as good a place as any to pause for a month...
...It's a problem, but not one of the major ones...
...in 1979, in the Horn of Africa, the Soviet Union sponsored a takeover in Ethiopia...
...It represented a change in the American thinking on the Soviet Union...
...Now Begin cannot say to them, "Let's have a discussion of the basis of 242...
...I think that's true of Europe as well...
...You say the words "Middle East", and there's a fallacy there, since under that umbrella you have totally disparate and disconnected situations...
...For example, such jobs as the Pope or the Secretary General of the United Nations depend entirely on the presence or absence of intellectual vitality in the incumbent, because there's nothing else behind them...
...If, having read our platform—which we will enclose as an explanatory document, including the sentence "We do not plan to rule 1.2 million Arabs"—they would recognize its value, we would begin to negotiate with him...
...I am thinking a good deal about that now, in connection with my work in preparing a television series that will depict the entire Jewish story, not simply in Holocaust terms, not simply the Jews as victim, but the Jews as creators, as champions of their own persistence and originality, the extraordinary paradox of resonance, of a small people whose voice ought not to be heard at all and yet which reverberates across history...
...If, for example, we read that young Americans don't want even to be registered for the defense of their country, while the Soviet Union has no such inhibitions...
...And the same is true of the American relationship with Western Europe...
...In fact, many of our Party documents, such as the Galili document and the so-called Oral Law were formulated not on their merits, but as a device for assuring that Dayan would graciously consent to appear on our party list at election time...
...I think one reason for all this is psychological...
...How much Helsinki has been implemented we may see in the Sakharov imprisonment...
...There are about a hundred bigger nations in the world, and yet we have a bigger resonance than 14 million...
...Therefore, his departure, with all the pain that it caused, did enable us to fix a very clear position, distinct from the right wing...
...All of them have said, in effect, that if they had been able to get their territory and their interests back without this ideological wrench they would have preferred to do so...
...I still believe, as I did when we last spoke, that if you could reconstruct a Palestinian-Jordanian entity on both sides of the Jordan, that would be the most rational course...
...When Israeli leaders come here and speak egocentrically only of Israel, I think we bring to light an ideological predicament that has not been solved...
...The danger then was that we had too much manpower and too few resources, and that we would end up in catastrophe—with famine and starvation and disease—that the Zionist adventure would collapse under the weight of its own success...
...That pyramid doesn't make any sense...
...But we've had others, whose names I won't mention, whose careers prove that nature does not always abhor a vacuum...
...You're drawing accurate attention to the composite character of large political parties, each of which is a coalition...
...We do have hard-liners in Labor as well...
...There's no senior Israeli who has watched American Jewry for so long a time and so intimately as you...
...And that is why he was reduced to describing the invasion as an "essentially defensive reaction...
...There hasn't been one occasion on which you could attribute a price increase in oil to a development in the Palestinian-Israeli context...
...They go about their business in serenity day by day...
...I don't remember a time when Israel and the Jewish people were more embattled, at least on the level of international sentiment...
...And I come back here to the crux...
...Of course he wouldn't...
...I think that on the whole, the Labor policy is rather nearer a moderate dovish position that it was when we left office, largely because we are without Moshe Day an...
...Would the price of oil be changed...
...after all, from the annihilation of Israel to a peace treaty is a very dramatic ideological transition—every one of them, from Sadat downwards, has said, "Because of your strength...
...The last serious attempt was the 1972 and 1973 meetings where an attempt was made to define detente...
...You'd have a state that was capable of absorbing refugees, in which the center of geographical gravity would be rather removed from Israel...
...Has Labor learned anything during its time in opposition...
...Yes, I think he's wrong on two points...
...The Saudis voted in the UN with 104 others...
...we know their interpretation of it...
...And the man looked at the judge sternly and said, "Your Honor, are you not underestimating the glamour of public office...
...Now the implications of all this should be rather grave for us...
...What is it that leads to this obsession with our tiny people...
...I think that's a fact, not a view...
...I think in the second round, when Hussein said "What about the Palestinians...
...I don't know whether measures like not going to the Olympic Games will get the Soviets out of Afghanistan...
...It's very rare that you have a nation going back on the principle that enabled it to be born...
...If we take Europe first, and look at the founding fathers of the community, Churchill and Adenauer and Spaak and deGasperi—and I'd even include DeGaulle, despite his initial anti-Europeanism—that's a generation without successors...
...But today, there's a kind of fossilization in the priority which is given to fund-raising, and everything else becomes incidental...
...Perhaps it's not a such a bad thing that Israel seems to be held to a very high standard of performance...
...You said that here you agree with Kennan, indicating that elsewhere you disagree...
...And that's why the community idea ought to be explored...
...If we take the situation since 1972, when detente was formally enacted, in 1973 the Soviet Union encouraged the Syria-Egyptian attack on Israel...
...Kennan's reflections on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan...
...And under the pressure of Gush Emunim and others, he has really gone back to a pre-Camp David position...
...There is also a certain humility that goes with the absence of office that I think is very salutary...
...Of course, there are some people who never lose the chance to miss an opportunity...
...And I think Mr...
...The struggle against tendencies towards assimilation, abandonment of heritage, matters to us, and instead of being hostile or envious, I even think that people like myself should be asked to come here and speak on behalf of the establishment with Jewish money of Jewish institutions in Cleveland or Chicago or wherever— which is heresy today, because this is seen as a diversion...
...That's true, but he doesn't have the weight of influence that Dayan had...
...The fact is that detente was based on an initial ambiguity...
...That's why Pope John or Dag Hammerskjold were what they were...
...In a sense, what we see today is a lineal descendent of the community of the late 1940s...
...You can't say that you exist, but that you ought not to exist...
...Is it a part of the nature of Israel to be ruling another nation...
...We're not just a pushover, we're not going to give up our interests for nothing...
...Scanning the troubled Jewish horizon these days, there's a very disconcerting trend...
...Instead, there's a tendency for fragmentation and pettiness in international thinking...
...They came to a conference of Moslem countries in Islamabad and condemned Soviet aggression...
...The residents of the West Bank are Jordanian citizens, the UN has never cancelled its resolution...
...In a world in which there is so much suffering and anguish, you could argue that the plight of the 1.2 million Palestinians is not all that dreadful...
...Perhaps it has something to do with a kind of atavistic tendency towards "cherchez le Juif," whether it's the Black Plague or an economic crisis...
...Here I do agree with my ex-neighbor, George Kennan: when you talk to the Soviet Union, you must not talk in general terms which they and you interpret differently...
...That sounds rather like Israel's current settlement policy...
...Why this capacity to survive and to be oneself...
...But the paradox of a Jewish state exercising jurisdiction over another nation without the premise of temporariness—that is a startling thing...
...In order to explain yourself, you first have to understand yourself...
...Do you share the generally critical view regarding the quality of this generation's political leaders, around the world...
...There is a difference between a temporary situation in which you find yourself and in which it is clear that you want to cease this jurisdiction, if only conditions permit, and a situation where you come to regard it as fixed...
...There seems to be a reluctance to have what I would call comprehensive studies of inter-power relationships...
...it vilifies Israel...
...if by a righteous revolt against abuse you go to the extreme of undermining the presidential executive power...
...The major positive developments in modern Jewish history—the resistance to Hitlerism, the establishment of Israel's independence and the peace treaty with Egypt are all connected somehow with power, and not one of them—neither the defeat of Hitler, nor the establishment of Israel, nor peace with Egypt—would have been obtained by a policy in which some element of steel was missing...
...It would be a defeat, would it not, for Israel to be held to the same debased standard which informs our judgment of international affairs and the behavior of nations...
...Yes...
...But having done this at Camp David, and received the Nobel Prize, all the encomiums, he seems to have looked at the document again and said, "Oh my God...
...MOMENT INTERVIEW Abba Eban, a contributing editor of this magazine, is a member of the Knesset and has served as Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Education, and, from 1966 to 1974, as Foreign Minister of Israel...
...Of course the Cyprus question ought to be solved—but nobody says that unless you solve that, you can't solve anything else...
...My feeling is that we should abandon an ideology that has no relationship to reality, because the division of the Jewish impulse between the impulse for concentration and the impulse for dispersion—on the one hand to be yourself in your own terms, on the other hand to flow with the stream of universal culture—this duality has gone on for so long that it's time we recognize its permanence...
...But there are attempts to draw the Labor party away from its vocation of flexibility, of reasoned flexibility, towards a nationalist consensus closer to the Likud...
...we'd said that we wanted Israel to be a Jewish state...
...Dayan was a very dynamic influence in formulating our proposals...
...In those areas, I think the Labor Party has discharged its duty of criticism—and heaven knows there's been a lot to criticize—but on the question of the conditions of co-existence with the Arab world, the fact that our connections have been much less with foreign governments and much more with Social Democratic movements has had an effect on us...
...Another consoling factor, which not all my fellow-citizens would regard as consoling, is that there is now an element of criticism in the American-Jewish attitude to Israel...
...The great poet who wrote "We wept when we remembered Zion", he wept and he wrote in Babylon— and nobody knows whether he went back with the Shavei Tzion or whether he stayed on in Babylon writing distinguished poetry...
...I would say that that is now a fair statement of the Labor position...
...We would say that, provided our relationship with our Eastern neighbor is based on the concept of open boundaries and accessibility and mutuality of contact and intercourse, and, of course, a due measure of demilitarization, it is for them and not for us to decide whether they want to have a Jordanian-Palestinian federation or whether the two parts of it would be confederatively linked to each other and to Israel, according to the Benelux idea...
...if there's an atmosphere in which nobody would dream of capturing a Soviet embassy but people do dream of capturing American embassies and they even carry out such dreams, then there seems to be a lack of what I would call a psychological equilibrium...
...Would you doff your international diplomat's hat and don your Jewish historian's hat...
...Now that there is a negotiation, it's not enough to have an image...
...There was a rather silly meeting in Helsinki...
...How does what you've been saying affect your perspective on the negotiations now under way...
...The eccentricity of our position becomes marked more and more...
...Yes, its own cohesiveness arises more from intuitions and emotions and sentiments than out of intellectual analysis of what it is and why...
...in 1975, after the Paris accords, the Soviet Union incited Cubans to establish communism in Angola...
...Under these circumstances, when we do show solidarity it will have more meaning...
...The judge asked him what his occupation was, and he replied that he was the toilet attendant in City Hall...
...The inflated effects of public office must have had a more corrosive effect on us than we wanted to confess or than we were conscious of...
...If a Labor government came in tomorrow, I think that next week we should send a letter to Jordan, directly or through the United States, saying that we suggest that we now negotiate a peace treaty on the basis of Resolution 242...
...In the party, there are people like Major General Motta Gur, some people in the Kibbutz Meuchad, some of the old activists of the Achdut Avodah, some who voted against the peace treaty—in other words, some who were to the right of Begin...
...There is virtue in the rota-tionary principle in parliamentary life...
...An area that France used to govern as a single province has become twenty sovereign states in West Africa...
...To all this, the United States has reacted sometimes passively, sometimes with episodic indignation...
Vol. 5 • June 1980 • No. 6
