Antidote to Despair

...Few individuals have the foresight and courage to reject the dominant attitudes of their community in search of a way out...

...But in the 1950s and 1960s, Labor faltered under the pressure of new problems quite unlike the challenges of the pre-state period: national security, the need for rapid industrial development, the absorption of hundreds of thousands of refugees (including many Sephardim who had little cultural contact or understanding of socialist Zionism...

...These are some of the consequences of a movement built around a deadly contradiction between socialism and nationalism...

...Two million Palestinians remain on their land, and many Israelis remain willing to respond to their concerns, provided the atmosphere can be purged of threatening polemics and violent acts...

...salem after the Six Day War and then deputy mayor of the city, Benvenisti has participated intimately in the troubling history of his country...

...What is tragic is that both Zionism and Palestinian nationalism contain strong tendencies toward exclusivity and chauvinism, though both also have strong humanistic elements...

...But Benvenisti's harsh criticism of his generation is useful because it zeroes in on a crucial issue: the paralysis of Israeli liberals in the face of the Palestinian problem...

...No attempt was made in this period to educate the Jewish majority about pluralism or the rights of the minority...

...Its leaders continue to talk in terms of a territorial compromise with Jordan, as though such a thing might be acceptable to the Palestinians, and its apologists bemoan the absence of a "suitable" partner for negotiations...

...In few areas does this statement apply with greater or more tragic force than in the hundred-year-old war between the Jews and the Arabs, between the idea of Israel and the idea of Palestine...

...For the first fifteen years after Israel's independence, the Arabs were viewed as a potential "fifth column" and ruled by military law...

...But this is far more than a book of facts...

...The Labor movement has refused to acknowledge that it built Israel on the backs of the Palestinians...

...I am obsessed with conflicts, yet I am aware that many conflicts may be insoluble...

...most are between legitimate positions containing relative truths...

...As Benvenisti writes, "I am not concerned with facts in themselves, but in the way in which these facts integrate into broader frameworks...

...No one in Israel knows more about the precise extent of Israel's increasing control over the lives, land, and economy of the Palestinians who inhabit the occupied territories...

...The response of Labor Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion was to create a new set of "pioneering" values for the new generation: toward technical training, increased productivity, the expansion of the state bureacracy, careerism...

...Both Israelis and Palestinians have strong claims to the land they so uneasily share...

...Finally, the trauma of the Holocaust has no echo in Benvenisti's understanding of the Israeli psyche...

...Conflicts and Contradictions is tempered by a personal touch missing from most books on the Arab-Israeli situation...

...With that simple message, the Right has become the leading force in Israeli politics...

...The first Zionist colonists were consumed by "an obsessive search for rootedness," canvassing every corner of the Holy Land with a Bible as their map, though many were anti-religious...

...It supplied a pioneering ethos for the new society, mobilized a young and energetic community, and built the institutions that became the backbone of the state: the army, the Histadrut workers' federation, the kibbutz...

...The age-old concept of "the chosen people," for example, played a crucial role in Jewish self-preservation during centuries of persecution, but in a situation where Jews are the dominant majority, it became a sinister justification for oppressing the Arabs...

...Meron Benvenisti is one such person...

...Socialism in Israel did not stall solely because of a lack of honesty about its problems...

...In Conflicts and Contradictions Benvenisti is trying to foster Israeli understanding of Palestinians as human beings who have rights and as neighbors who share a love for the land—not just as enemies...

...By contrast, the Israeli Right has never doubted that Jews and Palestinians were engaged in a desperate contest for dominance that, given present conditions, only one side could win...

...When dispossession and revenge, terror and counterterror, humiliation and defiance are the daily experience of the two communities, the result is a deep-seated refusal on the part of each to see any legitimacy in the other's grievances...

...As the grandson of Israel's first geographer, as a member of the pioneering socialist youth movement of Israel's early years, as a soldier in four of Israel's wars, as the chief administrator for Arab JeruMicah Sifry is director of development and publicity for The Nation magazine...

...it was also undermined by the revelations of Stalinist crimes in the Soviet Union, by the burden of absorbing almost a million refugees, and by the effects of living in a constant situation of no-war/no-peace...

...On that basis, a new consensus might be forged around the options of partition or power-sharing with the Palestinians...

...certainly not the pioneering activists for a society we were striving to bring into existence...

...Benvenisti's analysis is far from complete, however...

...Both of these choices have been obscured by what Benvenisti derisively calls a "Her-renvolk democracy," a tyranny of the majority...

...His advice to Palestinians and Israelis seeking to block the institutionalization of an Israeli form of apartheid or worse—an expulsion of Palestinians, as called for by Meir Kahane—is to focus on short-term efforts to use the system against itself...

...Labor's failure was that it could not explain why this new attachment was wrong or unhealthy...

...For Benvenisti, best known as the director of the West Bank Data Base Project, Conflicts and Contradictions seems, at first glance, a surprising choice of title and subject matter...

...Benvenisti admits his book offers no simple prescriptions or plans to achieve this goal...

...From 1917 to 1948, Labor Zionism was the creative, dynamic center of the Jewish national liberation movement...

...Only today, with the ugly rise of overt racism, has the Israeli establishment realized the danger of such an approach...

...But now the guide for such excursions tends to be a Bible-toting religious zealot, and the new pioneers in khaki shorts live in settlements built with Army bulldozers and heavy government subsidies...

...Much of the book is a passionate and bitter eulogy for the failure of Labor Zionism, on which he places much of the blame for the present...

...The result, Benvenisti argues, was "the production of a class of competent technocrats...

...In the same way, the successful creation of an indigenous Jewish economy in Palestine, based on the concept of Jewish labor, led to the practice of giving preference to Jewish enterprise after the state was established...

...Benvenisti focuses on another value central to the lives of the founding generation—the concept of moledet, which can be loosely translated as "love of one's homeland...

...This book, then, is not a beginner's guide to the Israeli-Palestinian problem, though it might help those seeking to end that conflict...

...The elite continued to pay lip service to an earlier vision of socialism while sidestepping the growing contradictions between their ideals and their changing priorities...

...I tend to go beyond the problems to the conditions that created them...

...Perhaps we should wonder that Israel's democratic and humanistic institutions, though they exclude Arabs, are as strong as they are...

...Benvenisti examines the many personal conflicts he has faced in a life that follows the trajectory of an entire Israeli generation: prepared from his youth to join the elite of the new society, vaulted as an adult into the center of power, torn by the demands of conscience and raison d'etat, and now grappling with the disintegration of a dream...

...With the rapid growth of Israel's coastal areas and the opening of the West Bank after the Six Day War, moledet has undergone a kind of revival, Benvenisti observes...

...Indeed, many old-time Laborites saw in the Gush Emunim movement to settle the West Bank a revival of the values of their youth...