Next Year in Jerusalem
ROSE, TOM
Next Year in Jerusalem? No Greater Israel; no New Middle East. What's next? BY TOM ROSE Jerusalem THE EVENTS of the past few weeks have forced Israelis to jettison fantasies of a "New Middle...
...The core operating premise of modern political Zionism, Theodore Herzl's famous motto "If you will it, it is no dream," has been shown to have its limits...
...While conservative Zionists were executing the vision of Jewish settlement, Israel's socialist Left was patiently chipping away at Greater Israel's ideological preeminence...
...Now, without any fresh political visions on offer, Israelis are groping...
...Israel's attendance at the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference under the leadership of a Likud government, followed by Benjamin Netanyahu's acceptance of the principle of land for peace after his election in 1996, were the final nails in the coffin of Greater Israel...
...One wing went right, while the other stayed left...
...Today, both visions are in ruins...
...The state of Israel was the product of a political movement whose objective was to restore the Jewish people to its ancient homeland, sovereign and free...
...Their post-Zionist Zionism championed the view that Israel's historic conflict with the Arab world in general, and the Palestinians in particular, resulted less from the Arabs' rejection of Israel's right to exist than from Israel's military occupation of Arab land...
...Just because some Israelis are desperate to live in peace does not mean they can...
...By the early 1990s, the Israeli public was tired of spending money on infrastructure in the territories, and of enduring casualties and world opprobrium in the face of the intifada...
...It held that Jewish settlement of all of the ancient Land of Israel—notably the newly captured territories—would presage the in-gathering of the exiles and the subsequent redemption of man...
...Arafat's war revealed that the Left's success had been almost exclusively internal: The only hearts and minds the peaceniks had changed were Israeli...
...While Ehud Barak's days as prime minister are numbered, the question of who and what should replace him remains unanswered...
...Israel emerged from its victory tripled in size—in possession at last of the Jews' ancient and sacred capital of Jerusalem and the lands of biblical Israel, along with the Golan Heights and Sinai Desert...
...This vision held sway under Rabin, Peres, and Barak...
...Freed from the burden of grandiose visions and horizon-stretching dreams, Israelis have been given the chance to refocus their energies on taking tangible steps to improve themselves and their country...
...They must recast their ambitions to accomplish the real instead of striving after the illusive...
...Yet at bottom, it was the initial Zionist vision that legitimized all the subsequent iterations of the Jews' claim to sovereignty and power...
...For the first time since the state of Israel was reestablished in 1948, there is no abiding or even ascendant ideology that guides her...
...Perhaps Israelis can begin to lay the groundwork for a more modest yet profound Zionism...
...For a decade after 1967, the socialist Labor party held political power, but the conservative religious Zionist movement made headway on the ground...
...After that fact, what...
...BY TOM ROSE Jerusalem THE EVENTS of the past few weeks have forced Israelis to jettison fantasies of a "New Middle East" characterized by regional integration, open markets, the free movement of people, and, most important, peace and security...
...But beyond mere survival, Israel needs a reconstructed Zionism born of hope for the future, pride in the past, and acceptance of the present...
...The founders of modern political Zionism formed this revolutionary movement as a practical solution to a very material problem: The Jewish people's statelessness subjected them to persecutions and dangers they were helpless to combat...
...Only one imperative is obvious: the painful necessity of preparing for more sacrifice...
...Elections can be won without guiding visions...
...But by the early 1980s, it was starting to decline...
...While it took the better part of two decades for Israel's peace camp to extinguish the political viability of Greater Israel, it took only two weeks for Yasser Arafat to decimate the hopes of the peace camp...
...A new state of Palestine would take good care of Jewish holy sites under its jurisdiction and would afford full rights to Jews who chose to live there...
...As recently as this past September, Shimon Peres was proclaiming the dawn of a "New Middle East," where Israel no longer needed to worry about its borders, could replace its outmoded and offensive national Jewish characteristics, and should ready its application to join the Arab League...
...Yet, as desperate as the present condition seems in the life of this still largely unformed nation, it could be the harbinger of a new beginning...
...The two surviving wings of modern Zionism have spent the last 30 years developing and trying to implement their contrasting visions of modern Israel...
...It was the Left's turn...
...Like most things Jewish, Zionism long ago underwent its almost preordained schism...
...Israel's political, social, and religious systems have so far been more accommodating of division than conducive to unity...
...Comprising Jews from more than 80 countries, speaking more than 150 languages, Israeli society is still in its formative stage...
...Ending the occupation, they reasoned, would not only end the conflict, it would usher in a period of peace, prosperity, and security for Israel unprecedented in the 4,000 year history of the Jewish people...
...The Left argued that the only true way to fulfill Jewish destiny was to relinquish the lands conquered in 1967 in exchange for a comprehensive regional peace...
...Futures can't be built without them...
...Tom Rose is publisher of the Jerusalem Post...
...That version of the Zionist dream was dead...
...The two camps, with their evolving values and political programs, have taken turns running Israel ever since the country was established...
...ust as the 1960s taught Americans the limits of government, Arafat's war has taught Israelis the limits of Zionist messianism...
...The overriding responsibility of Israel's next government must be the defense of its territory and citizens against a hostile and increasingly militant enemy...
...Instead, they face the depressing task of recalibrating their national compass to reflect reality: Israel remains trapped in a dangerous, violent, and rejectionist Middle East...
...Just because some Israelis thought their biblical obligation to settle all the land of Israel was more powerful than the forces that opposed them didn't mean it was...
...The past month's organized and violent assault against Israel has destroyed the last operating political idea to prevail in these parts: that a settlement could be reached with the Palestinians, and that this peace would usher in prosperity and stability...
...Their country is in a state of national depression aggravated by ideological vertigo...
...The Six Day War changed that in 1967...
...Security hawks jumped aboard, not because they shared the movement's religious views but because they believed that holding the 1967 territories was essential as a bulwark against Arab invasions...
...Israel's first generation was too busy staving off physical destruction while developing the institutions of statehood to worry about much else...
...If a homeland could be fashioned, early Zionists argued, the Jewish people could be saved from disaster and even restored to national greatness...
...But now Israelis have an impetus to think about how to build themselves up by working together...
...The current moment of ideological confusion could lead to efforts to encourage civil behavior, to limit the role of a corrosive public sector, to expand individual rights, and to foster a Judaism at once strong and tolerant...
...Israelis could suddenly afford to dream...
...Israelis therefore must once again ready themselves for struggle and sacrifice...
...Now, chastened, adjusting their sights to newly understood limits, Israelis must attempt something new...
...The settler movement, spawned in the very first days after the Six Day War and later dubbed "Greater Israel," grew for more than a decade and finally saw political triumph with the election of Menachem Begin in 1977...
Vol. 6 • November 2000 • No. 8
