Considering the West Bank
CONSIDERING THE WEST BANK How shall we think about the West Bank? For the Jews, history is experienced as biography. We are instructed not merely to remember the past, but to relive it. And even...
...Periodically, we meet with him to discuss developments in Israel...
...In the wisest of worlds, choices so grave as those Israel confronts would occasion dispute...
...our present choices emerge as compensations for the wretched past rather than as calculations of the future good...
...Finally, Ted Mann was, from 1978-80, Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations...
...We bring to the task prodigious memories and spectacular imaginations, but these may prove impediments, misguiding talents, for the ancient hopes and ancient fears may be of little use in assessing the gritty episodes of the present, the harsh risks implicit in the actual choices of the day, of this day...
...So: Most people who care for Israel's safety and welfare are in substantial agreement regarding the critical facts of the Arab-Israel conflict...
...Thus it is that Jewish strength is taken by some people as a reason to stand fast, by others as a reason to be flexible...
...All of which makes sober analysis rather difficult...
...The State of Israel—a place, a state—is, for us, a faith, a sign, a restoration of the promise, a reassurance that the Kingdom of Night is not forever...
...He is widely recognized as one of Israel's leading analysts of Arab affairs, and his research on the Bar Kochva period has attracted considerable attention in Israel...
...The subtleties and nuances are lost, and mostly what we remember—and internalize—is the history of opposites: On the one hand, chosenness, covenant, the promise of redemption...
...it has much more to do with perceptions of reality that lie outside the realm of facts...
...All this is by way of introducing four articles that examine, from different perspectives, the choices Israel now faces...
...In our world, the task is made still more difficult by the baggage we bring to it...
...Too often, it is yesterday's struggles that inform today's perceptions...
...Who would dispute, for example, that the Arabs wish Israel ill, that if they but could, they would do Israel in...
...An English edition of his recent book on Bar Kochva will be published this fall by Rosell Books...
...in the meantime, in real time, no messiah, not yet even a rainbow, just clouds and sometimes storms...
...unlike most generations of Jews that have come before, we are aware that it has been given to us to be witnesses to large events, events that will one day be studied and, God willing, celebrated...
...His comments below are adapted from his remarks at the annual American Jewish Congress Dialogue in Jerusalem in 1980...
...To our understanding of Israel we inevitably bring the code words and the topic headings we have gleaned from our past...
...He was adele-gate to the armistice negotiations at Rhodes at the end of the war, and then, from 1950-59, he served as Israel's Deputy Chief and then Chief of Military Intelligence...
...There are those who believe that the very existence—or, at the least, the character—of this, the Third Commonwealth, is now at stake...
...Given the actual events of our time, we are more alive to the nightmare than to the fantasy, more intimate with the Kingdom of Night than with the End of Days...
...Like Harkabi, he draws lessons for Israel's present from past events...
...And even without the instruction, the collective memory of the Jewish people is so powerful that it infiltrates and informs the consciousness of the individual Jew in every generation...
...Who would deny, for example, that.it is Israel's strength—the strength of its will, the strength of its arms—that has preserved the Jewish State until now...
...Israel is the land of our hopes—and the land of our fears...
...Our ancient ancestors, those who went forth out of Egypt and those who stood at Sinai, knew both in their own time, in what was for them the present...
...We are transfixed by symbols, by fears and by hopes we have inherited, fears and hopes that have helped us prevail against great odds but that today, now that we have re-entered history, now that we live in real time, may well mislead us...
...Most of all, it has to do with what the facts mean rather than with what the facts are...
...Thus it is that Arab malevolence is taken by some people as a reason for Jewish militance and by others as a reason for Jewish moderation...
...The State of Israel is as close as we have come to the rainbow...
...English experience in Ireland...
...He has returned to government work intermittently since, as a senior advisor on both strategic and intelligence matters...
...Somewhere, over the rainbow, the messiah...
...Lustick speaks of more recent experiences, suggesting that we may learn useful lessons from the French experience in Algeria and th...
...All four demur from the doctrine now operative in Israel and widely accepted by Jews both in Israel and in the Diaspora...
...To be a Jew is to be suspended between these opposites, between the deliverance and degradation...
...Abba Eban, former Foreign Minister of Israel and today both a Member of Knesset and a leader of Israel's Labor Party, is also a contributing editor of this magazine...
...The very same set of facts leads different people to opposite conclusions...
...Israel today is at a crossroads...
...With justification both ample and dismal, we have been more comfortable uncoupled from real time, immersed instead in our memories and our imaginings...
...The debate has only peripherally to do with the facts...
...In our generation, Jewish history is recognized mostly in outline form, as a set of code words that help link the vast data of our past to the troubled events of our present...
...Yehoshafat Harkabi is Heckster Professor of International Relations and Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University...
...They speak to dangers and to possibilities less often explored than those the prevailing doctrine cites, and they are part of this magazine's continuing effort to broaden the scope and enrich the quality of debate on these matters...
...the conversation here reported took place at the end of April (as did the interview with General Harkabi...
...He serves today as Chairman of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, and is active in a variety of other Jewish organizations...
...We bring the intuitions and categories of a people that has known more of the past and more of the future than it has of the present...
...How we cherish that break in the clouds, and oh, how distressing its continuing travail...
...Ian Lustick, who teaches political science at Dartmouth, is the author of Arabs in the Jewish State: Israel's Control of a National Minority, which was published in 1980...
...on the other, chastisement, calumny, the reality of persecution...
...Harkabi goes back 1,850 years, to the history of the Jews, to derive his lessons...
...It has to do with values and interpretations that are not readily subject to refutation...
...Yet among those who count themselves lovers of Zion, there is, these days, bitter disagreement...
...He was born in Haifa, his grandparents having come to Palestine in the 1880s, and he served in the infantry during Israel's War of Independence...
...And so it is that it seems quite natural for us to refer to Israel, as we do in our prayers, as "the beginning of the flowering of our redemption...
...Further, we have been taught and we have believed that the Jewish people is a people of cosmic dimension, a people not amenable to conventional analysis, a people once intimate with God, now, thousands of years later, still marked...
...How may we begin to understand these matters, we who have invested Israel with such transcendent meaning...
Vol. 7 • June 1982 • No. 6
