Israel: Mission and Survival

...But he is sufficiently agitated over portents of moral disaster to write lengthily about the hazards ahead...

...Although his foreword is dated April of this year, he writes as if the inconvenient revelations of last October-November had never occurred...

...But, loaded with the weight of Frank's conceptual baggage, the reader approaching these enigmas will find them transformed into blank mysteries...

...He is particularly distressed by a "dangerously egocentric" self-absorption which he thinks he finds widespread in Israel—in old pioneers, new immigrants, farm colonies or cities—an indifference to outside worlds and considerations, an all-consuming concentration on the finite (and hence comparatively narrow) problems of one's intimate group and one's intimate self...

...There is certainly point to his belief that Israelis apply themselves to their insular problems with massive intensity tending to shut out the world beyond — something like the self-dedication of a contestant inside a television-quiz isolation booth...

...They can, however, scarcely be the dominant, central issues demanding the priority attention of a people who today are literally at bay before more corporeal threats of annihilation...

...Worse, the Israeli may become incapable of reaching out to understand his Arab neighbor if he relies on "shallow weapons" like dollars, diplomacy and armaments but loses "his greatest strength — his knowledge of the search after God...

...Only then can Israel's quest for a brotherhood of man including the Arab enemy (beyond the concessions she has in the past proffered and even made) evoke any useful response...

...Against the peril [of Arab assault] they dig trenches, turn commune into fort...

...The incessant psychosis of an armed camp, breeding contempt for historic ideals and ignorance of ancient virtues, may produce an Israel without Jewishness—totally alien to the Diaspora and without bridges to the neighboring lands among which Israel must find a way of life...

...They understood what I said, the praise pleased them...

...But nowhere does he suggest how, given the urgent and challenging tasks besetting Israel, she could do otherwise or even, perhaps, ought to do otherwise if the tasks are to get done...

...And all of this he says simply, unpretentiously, without "the big words...

...Unhappily, Frank does not stop there, or proceed usefully to describe the phenomenon of emergent Israel in rich journalistic detail or with sociological acumen...

...and because it is good to be alive . . normally, naturally good they sing soberly and laugh, while they work...

...Thus, despite Nasser's debacle in Sinai, he still credits Arab leaders with the folly of thirsting for another military test, and is haunted by "the grim fact that the Arabs have something to gain by war, if the Powers permit it...

...Having filed his dispatches, he has now written this book because he felt the articles were not enough: He wanted to say "something more direct" about the relations of Israel and of Jews "with history and with man...

...Meanwhile, his near-obsession with matters of redemption compels him to blunt the meanings of Israel's day-to-day crisis...

...Now anyone who has ever been trapped in Allenby Road traffic, or waited his turn in a Tel Aviv cinema queue—or, for that matter, walked the lonely, morose streets after dark in Istanbul, Damascus or any other Levantine capital (even Beirut)—is entitled to blink at the length to which Frank happily goes to make uncooperative evidence fit his doctrines...

...yet they made me feel my words did not fit...

...A few days later he came across the merry Kameri players again, in a crowded Beersheba cafe...

...True, Frank stresses as prerequisite that the United Nations first proclaim Israel's right to live and make the Arabs hearken to the proclamation...

...What they seek, what they live for and are ready to die for, is the normal...

...The Arabs will accept Israel's permanence not when they are admonished about it but when they feel it in their bones...

...Where those primarily concerned with ethics and those whose immediate duty is action for survival move apart is on the question of degree: When does conciliation become overdue, and when is it so premature that it defeats itself...

...He fears that the State, in pursuing a tactic of power, may grow away from the imminent Jewish strategy of love...

...We're just having a good time being ourselves...

...One has the right to expect from Frank fresh insights into the seen and hidden perils of the here and now, or at least, long-range evaluations which have some possibility of being taken seriously under the pressure of actual circumstances...

...Another illuminating passage in Bridgehead: The Drama of Israel stresses the feet-on-the-ground stance of the young Israelis: "They refuse the romantic, the heroic...

...The time is quite due for an informed appraisal of Israel at the close of her First Decade—an objective summing-up of progress, errors, problems and prospects...

...Instead, he offers Cosmic advice which is pregnant with unreality, and implementable only in the security of library or cloister...

...His arbitrary verdict of disappearance of the "culture Jew" has long been anticipated by such relieved observers as Arthur Koestler, his routine alarm over the petrifactions of a garrison-state long sounded by Hannah Arendt and many others...

...He contrasts this "hush" of Tel Aviv with the "ebullient racket of Levantine capitals...

...If death comes, while they defend their land: this too is normal...

...His social intelligence (lowed from bis esthetic of personal relation with the Cosmos...

...The author neatly labels various types in the Diaspora—the "genetic Jew," "culture Jew," "ideological Jew" and so forth—with a view to disqualifying world Jewry en masse from any sense of kinship with a Jewish State which may have regained its territory but presumably lost its soul by putting his cherished Cosmos aside for a later, quieter day...

...A word must be added about the author's performance as reporter and analyst...

...He went over to tell them, gravely, that they were wonderful...

...author, "Israel: The Beginning and Tom-orrom'' Waldo Frank had a gay time in Tel Aviv one evening, watching the Kameri Theater group cavort on light and liquid Hebrew through a Parisian musical comedy...

...But even his emphasis betrays his un-awareness of Arab complexities— and of Arab simplicities...

...Their silence and their smiles told me: 'We're just ourselves...

...Indeed, there are few responsible Israelis who do not agree that, for Israel's ultimate peace in the island she inhabits, she must and will in the long run exhibit more charity and nobility toward the human Arab sea around her than she has so far been able to manifest...

...They must first conclude—not only from the Western world's opinion but from Israel's visible strength and their own visible futility—that they have no recourse but to accomodate themselves to a fact (as, historically, they have always done...

...and, in fact, the large accomplishment so soon of that desire, the casual air of belonging which has already been achieved—measured by the author himself when he looks out the window and beholds the astonishing spectacle of the Jewish milkman, the Jewish newsboy, the Jewish street-cleaner on a Jewish street...

...In his absolutist demands on Israel for sanctity toward the Arabs, Frank indulges in the same ivory-tower conceit of flicking away the unpleasant but plain realities besieging the Jewish State...

...Instead, he puts Israel and world Jewry on a kind of global psychoanalytical couch, reporting his presumed findings in a brand of metaphysical lingo awesome for its obscurities...

...But not often enough to redeem the interminable rhetoric and the lost opportunity...

...The fact is, of course, that the last thing which the Arab potentates desire—or have ever desired since 1948—is "permission" by the Powers for them to confront the formidable Israelis once again on a field of battle without being able to rely on Western rescue...

...The essence of reborn Israel, as nearly as can be derived from Frank's ambitious prose, should be a transfiguration of the ancient communion into some new form of reaching for the Universal, a search infused as ever with love of God and dedication to Israel's "special mission to the nations...

...In that direction, Frank warns, lurk parochial arrogance, inward demoralization and a dreadful betrayal of destiny...

...There may be recondite truths concealed from less profound observers beneath the surface of Israel's quest for survival and of all Jewry's quest for proper awareness of Israel's place in the world Jewish constellation...

...But the observations he has registered fall considerably short of being "penetrating and sensitive...

...We do not have such a book here, despite the fanfare attending its publication...

...The nature of the developing State's Jewishness, the attitudes of the future Israeli community toward the world and the universe, are obviously problems of high concern for all who wish Israel well...

...For if Israel's foes are given any encouragement in their diehard dream that she will vanish unless they are conciliated, they will only derive new zest for remaining unreconcilable...

...In any case, Frank contends, the "culture Jew" abroad—who flourished in the inspiration of Exile and Zionism—is marked for extinction by the plain fact of the Land restored...

...If in his battle to survive, or in his stanco of preparedness for battle, he loses this relation, what survives in Palestine will not be Israel...

...Even the choice of the issues which Frank designates as paramount for Israel's security is open to severe scrutiny...

...His text indicates that he journeyed widely in the land, was generously received as befitted his distinguished credentials, met many valuable witnesses, and saw many illuminating scenes...

...Fraternity offered before the Arabs are fully ready for it will only invite fratricide...

...Frank's own stance engages some respect for the tinge of the heroic in it, but there is little that is new and less that is relevant to Israel's real and very present dangers...

...Frank's passion for eternal verities renders him strangely obtuse to current developments which do not suit his pattern of general anxiety concerning perils over the horizon...

...But without the saving grace of the renewed quest for harmony with Creation, the "organic Jew" whose existence for two millenia has centered on the idea of Return cannot be reborn in Israel—and the new Israeli will inexorably grow a stranger to his kin...

...He conveniently neglects, however, to ticket or note the existence of that great body of Jews abroad who will surely persist in loving Israel — taking pride in whatever good she may achieve, ruefully recording or even resolutely criticizing whatever faults she may commit, but always cherishing a warm, healthy and natural sense of relationship— no matter how far Israel's preoccupations lead her from religious ritual and Cosmic obligations...

...He sometimes seems to suggest that all will somehow be well...

...By dressing this mass concentration up as a sin instead of the normal, human and rather admirable thing it is, he ends by effectively belying the soundest of his judgments about Israel: that she yearns for, and has, to a degree, miraculously accomplished a normal life despite exceedingly abnormal obstructions...

...In the main, he makes only arid, impressionistic and congenitally obfuscated allusions to persons and places, taking space away from reportage in order to leave room for apocalyptic meditation...

...Meanwhile, they are alive...

...The result, at least to this reviewer, is more fog than philosophy, particularly in its windy reflections on such "direct" matters as Cosmos and the Eternal...

...The genius of the Jew is 'to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God.' Without this the Jew no longer changes, but ceases...

...One is obliged to wonder where Frank was looking while in Israel...

...But this to them is not heroic...

...They looked at me in sudden silence," he recalls...

...The essence of Jewry in Exile has been the unwavering continuity of the People's search for God, its "belonging within not-belonging" to the gentile cultures to which the Judaic genius gave original seed and subsequent nourishment, and its passionate yearning for return to the Land...

...They distrust enthusiasm, including that of their Zionist elders...

...Frank is not sure that modern Israel is losing its divine heritage and purpose...

...Frank's theses are visible enough because of reiterated assertion...

...But on these latter hazards the author bestows only a relatively cursory glance...

...Conversely, he installs as hobgoblins for the future certain phenomena which have long been solid in the flesh...

...if there is failure, it lies in the lack of proof or even of communication...

...Before Israel can shower the loving kindness on the Arabs which Frank impatiently urges, the Arabs must first have brought themselves (or been brought) to a mood of receptivity which will interpret such a gesture as a sign to be respected rather than scorned...

...Justly honored for his lifetime contributions to mutual understanding between our northern and southern American continents, Frank went to Israel, after a lapse of some decades since his last Palestinian journey, on behalf of a string of Spanish-language newspapers in this hemisphere...

...There it is, said as well as, and perhaps better than, anyone yet has said it: the essential craving of Israel's people to be a normal people, within their land, like any other people...

...The core of his view is that the essence of ancient Israel was an epic communion of People and Land with Creator...

...In his zeal to demonstrate Israel's demonic "introversion," for example, Frank hits upon silence (!) as the chief trait of Tel Aviv—"a meditative, contemplative pause of reserve within a social organism still inchoate...

...He worries, for example, that Israel's economy may weaken "such prophetic experiments as the kibbutz," or that Histadrut may become a "monolithic economic power for centralization...

...Yet venerated men like Hugo Bergmann and Martin Buber, whom he cites tellingly, are not as lonely as Frank implies...

...And this imperils not only understanding but survival: "The survival of the Jew has hinged on his prophetic sense of brotherhood with all men, inclusive of his enemies, under God...

...Why the big words?' " This throws "a clear and brilliant light" on the nature of Israel, as the publisher promises in the jacket blurb, and even on Frank himself...

...Here and there he draws an intelligible portrait and makes a competent assessment, notably in reviewing the roots and evil flowers of Arab-Israeli antagonism...

...One hesitates to appear philistine and scoff at subtleties...