Israel: Yesterday's Hero
Geyer, Georgie Anne
Israel: Yesterday’s Hero by Georgie Anne Geyer When a survey was taken of Israelis asking what people would be the most happy in the future, the majority answered that it would be the...
...To the Israelis, they were “terrorists” and nothing more...
...No country ever stays in that early, romantic, super-idealized, hypercharged...
...on the site of A1 Aksa...
...Chava Shing, whom I met one day at Kirjat Tivon in the beautiful Nazareth hills, put it this way: “I don’t know...
...Everything is too modern, too westernized...
...Well, collective punishment makes the water more abundant...
...Let’s go...
...But it is astonishing how few young Israelis were speaking anything resembling workable English...
...In some of his writings, Amnon Rubinstein, one of Israel’s most perceptive sons and analysts, has pointed out that this suspicion and distrust of everything outside-this innate hawkishness-is deeply imbedded in the Israeli soul...
...Its outdoor cafes on the broad avenues were filled with the usual lively people, and the youngsters were more handsome and more breezy than ever...
...Now we follow our own interests, and when we hear of the troubles of Jews elsewhere, we’re not sure we have an affinity...
...I myself was called a terrorist, and I knew I was fighting for the highest ideals of life...
...The younger generation...
...Such a charming, gentle man...
...They live in a democratic, finely-functioning state in which very nearly every citizen takes an active role...
...And yet the youth today...
...The road to Jerusalem was still one of the most glorious drives in the world, ending as it does with the breathtaking entry into the old city while the desert views all around it tore at the soul and salved it at the same time...
...was assassinated in Jerusalem today...
...It’s good, and the younger generation is good...
...Now all that is past...
...Nothing can endanger our national existence,” he ruminated that evening...
...It is the logic of the situation, not of man...
...Today people are not satisfied working without rewards...
...Only four per cent would return all the lands, and substantial majorities wanted to keep the key areas of East Jerusalem, Sham el Sheikh, the Golan Heights, and parts of the Sinai Desert...
...We called ourselves the Stern Group...
...Hatred against Israel is indoctrinated into the masses for 25 years...
...An Israeli youth answered, typically, “It’s all well and good to talk about understanding the Arabs, but we know that if we don’t survive, we can’t worry about Israeli-Arab relations 20 years from now...
...I could be critical of many things the Arab terrorists do,” he said, “as a man of the same...
...I was simply doing my job, and it was unthinkable to me that advanced, educated Israelis would take this defensive attitude...
...There was a strong disappointment here in the gradual realization that the rest of the world did not like the Israeli so much as victor as it liked him as struggler...
...Whenever he would see the Israeli police mistreating an Arab in any way, he’d go up to the policeman and insist that he be arrested too...
...Palestine has given birth to two nations,” he wrote, “the Hebrew and the Palestinian Arab nation...
...and of the enormity of the creation of a totally new Jewish man, the Israeli...
...The former chief terrorist, now a dove...
...That generation passes-always-and a new generation comes which is more practical, more businesslike, more pragmatic, and less soulful...
...The predominant view (57 per cent) was that the refugees should be settled in Arab countries with Israel paying them compensation...
...They had good reason, often enough, to despise them, for while many of the commandos showed extraordinary courage in crossing the Jordan River border, others showed extraordinary cowardice-their kind of attack was to throw a bomb into a school bus...
...the winner...
...The regimes are dictatorial, unstable...
...Now we have 1.3 million Arabs, most of them hostile and smoldering, in territories we feel we have to occupy for our own protection...
...It was clear the Israelis thought of the Arabs as some exotic, non-trustworthy “tribe...
...is far more sophisticated and pacifist...
...Hawkish Attitudes Where is the truth...
...It would be like France at the time of Napoleon, where every consecutive victory meant taking older and older soldiers...
...He was commander of the Irgun and now he’s...
...the Crusaders were here...
...You have two peoples with absolute demands...
...Just as now we call them ‘terrorists...
...We expected more idealism, less class consciousness, less materialism...
...Another said they were “the type of people who only understand force...
...And the young Israeli boys who faced three years of active duty in the army and then reserve duty until age 55 talked drearily about “the desert view” or “Bedouinism”Israeli terms for the drying up of the mind and soul that comes from too much desert military duty...
...It is a typical situation of international tension in which both fear EVERY change of the status quo and the situation increases the insecurity about what the other side should do...
...The day I saw him in his office there he looked discouraged...
...To Dr...
...We know there are no pat solutions, but we don’t think the path you’re following is likely to bring peace...
...As strange and irrational as it may seem, the Arabs genuinely fear the Israelis...
...Outside, it looked as if Israel were Georgie Anne Geyer is a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Daily News...
...When I was a child here,” a fortyish official in the Foreign Office told me one day at lunch, “this was the most idyllic country you could imagine...
...It was, ‘This is bloody rubbish!’ ” 0 c c asio nally , when Yalin-Mor talked about things less serious, he got an impish look on his face...
...The changes in the Jewish state should have been expected, of course...
...Every loss is like the loss of a family member...
...They fight hard and work hard, and we have no troubles with drugs and those things...
...He looked like a Jewish character actor of the old school, from Poland or Hungary...
...I suppose they’ll be looking for me,” he said to his companions...
...But though the nation has been smashingly successful, the fear-succored by the new reality of a sea of surrounding Arabs-did not die...
...Later, after I left Yalin-Mor, I thought about him...
...to have wars without end...
...And many times, it is nowhere...
...He further points out that, in Hebrew, the word “goy” means both “gentile” and “nation...
...Many Israelis were questioning the ultimate compatibility of the “hard line” against the Arabs and the preservation of Jewish humanistic values...
...A disappointment, ironically, that comes of the very success of the new state...
...Support of Israel in the United States was so total that it was nearly impossible to find any realistic mention or analysis of the brutal conflicts between Arabs and Jews between 1917 and 1948, which laid the troubled basis for the new state...
...It exists not only in the older generation of Jews, he says, but coexists in the Sabra [native-born Israeli] with his wellknown openness...
...But it has also created a new Israeli with little of their fascination, with none of that splendid metaphysical mystery that has always characterized the Jews, and with little of that gut and intellectual humanitarianism that sets the Jew apart...
...But it had also saddled Israel-and the world-with the new image of the Jews as victors...
...The world was uncomfortable with these unpersecuted Jews, and the Israelis were bitterly cynical about the fact the world didn’t like them so much now that they were so successful...
...The discrepancies-often more than that-between the ideas of the young American Jews and the Israelis come out constantly...
...There is no end to anything...
...On the other hand, the parents feared their children would learn to hate the Arabs, and did everything they could to expunge any signs df hatred...
...We understand why you are preoccupied with war...
...Too, as with Americans, there was a certain lack of form among the Israelis...
...Ah, yes, the Stern Gang,” he said, almost sadly...
...This was natural...
...On the radio one day, for instance, young American Jews were discussing war and peace with Israelis and there was a marked difference in attitudes...
...A distrust that is often based on fact and often is not and only reinforces itself...
...The Jews are the ultimate activists, while the Arabs are the ultimate sulkers-the men who would rather lose than have anyone hear them say a “dishonorable” thing...
...What is Jewish here today is not exactly religious...
...There are distinct differences between the Jews of Israel today, who comprise 16 per cent of world Jewry, and the Jews of the rest of the world...
...He showed me one article he had published which was astonishing for its forthrightness...
...And while the Arabs, in their failure having grown more and more fanaticized, became surer that they must purge themselves of the “stain” of Israel on the map of the Middle East, the Israelis began questioning-moral questioning...
...Prof...
...There is a black humor...
...they were a tiny Jewish vessel being tossed on a turbulent Arab sea...
...The publicity is not against Israel,” he said, “but there are just more reporters here now...
...Now we have the comforts of materialism...
...What the Arabs are thinking about is really genocide...
...How can your fathers and mothers be sure their children will not be as indifferent to the Arabs’ suffering as your persecutors were to yours...
...But on a popular level, little of this understanding of the Arab world seemed to creep through...
...If we take a unilateral step, we don’t know how the other side will react...
...Yalin-Mor was one of a group of Israeli peaceniks who thought his government was all wrong on its treatment of the Arab commandos, and it came to me after talking with him for a while that he understood the motivations of the “terrorists” on the other side because he had understood his own...
...It would only build barriers between the British and the Jewish population...
...end-of time...
...It was a round face with a large handlebar moustache, and it was both very sensitive and rather comical...
...It makes itself...
...rhis unwillingness and inability to live within the strictures of this new state was distorting the entire Israeli existence outside it and making people uncomfortable within it...
...He had one of the most engaging faces I have ever seen-indeed, I could not take my eyes off it...
...They have forgotten, or they prefer not to remember, that only 21 years ago statesmen and also leading intellectuals negated the existence of the Jewish nation...
...A year ago, we could still talk to the Arabs...
...There were 10 scholars at Tel Aviv University alone...
...There is a hardening on a governmental level and underneath an intensification of worry...
...It struck me that Israel had simply matured, and yet very few people seemed to want to realize this...
...In the first decade of its existence, Americans contributed more than $1 billion in gifts, largely through the United Jewish Appeal, and bought another $500 million in bonds...
...change...
...We’re the strong aggressor-we’re the establishment to these kids...
...He talked of the Middle East being caught up in an “anonymous process...
...If you give them an inch, they take everything...
...Perhaps only one thing further needs to be pointed out at this timethis is a warning not to compare things in the Middle East today too literally to other times...
...A sixtyish kibbutznik who arrived in the midst of Israel’s most idealistic period 35 years ago, Mrs...
...And most felt that way...
...But they don’t hate them...
...This was in contradistinction to the Arab attitude toward Israelis-the Arabs thought the Israelis evil, but brilliantly The same poll also showed a growingly hawkish attitude toward the occupied territories...
...There was even a snob appeal as to who had Arab friends...
...Are you really treating them, as the Clovises and as many Europeans and even young American Jews contend, not like human beings but as “obstacles...
...The rebuilding of the temple was one of the spiritual purposes of the return to Israel...
...unless they felt very, very threatened...
...They had destroyed and built everything so fast there was no time to create new forms...
...I found, too, a curious and hesitant ambivalence among the older Jews about the young...
...He had put down his lemon squash and calmly listened to the details-details he had helped plan...
...they are able technocrats...
...Is the New Israeli a Jew...
...It was a wild and windy day, and the rain seemed driven down like pieces of glass...
...The “Exodus” syndrome, which is so popular with American Jews, frankly horrifies him...
...The Americans felt Israel was so hung up on security that it precluded any progress towards peace...
...This moral questioning, of course, revolved not only around the war but largely around the questions of the occupied territories, those 50,000 square miles of Arab land and those one million Arabs which Israel took under occupation after the 1967 war...
...I thought of Israel over the years, about how doggedly it had wooed the world propaganda-wise, and I was startled...
...Among the young, almost none do...
...Actual physical rebuilding of the temple is not necessary-it is only symbolic of putting emphasis on the spiritual as well as the material side of life...
...Eighteen per cent wanted to retain all the occupied territories and three per cent wanted to expand them...
...All of this has created a new Israeli with few of the complexes, emotional scars, and traumas of his parents...
...How much difference was there, really, between a Western European looking down on the Orthodox Jews, with their strange, archaic ways and curls and the modern, technicallyoriented Israeli looking down on Arabs, with their strange, archaic ways...
...Sure we’d win another round...
...And so they became even more filled with the sense of a Biblical inevitability of a return...
...To a great extent, the Israelis came to treat them almost as if they did not exist...
...This is not a mischievous question...
...Today it is changed...
...Zionism has changed...
...People were scared and, more, they were often traumatized...
...The state of Israel was founded on the idea not only of a return to a piece of land, but of a spiritual return...
...Unless they had their own homeland and their own nation, like other nationalities, the Hitler-hurled Jewish refugees reasoned, they would be persecuted to the...
...By a 58 per cent to 34 per cent margin, Israelis found it difficult to feel sympathy for the Palestinian refugees because they believed so many of them wanted to see Israel destroyed, and pnly two per cent wanted them to be allowed to return to Israel...
...The only time when he lost, for just a moment, his charming manner was when I referred to the “Stern Gang...
...Even those “doves” who were in strongest opposition to this Golda Meir-Moshe Dayan government policy had few answers-their “answers” tended to be more in the area of the kind of attitude Israel should take than in specific suggestions...
...One is more fascinating than the other...
...Paul walked here...
...The Supreme Court ruled in 1970, in the Shalitt case, that people can have Jewish nationality without practicing the Jewish religion, thus changing the entire basis of original Zionism and, in effect, opening the country to nonJews...
...This type of comment is typical of a vague, amorphous disappointment many older Israelis feel with their state today...
...The repressions of the Arabs could also come to apply to Israeli citizens, and everyone who talks against repressions could be considered a traitor...
...With Israelis of this generation, who were the giants of the creation of the Jewish state, there is today a slight yearning for paradise lost, for the years of the great victories-and the great sacrifices-and perhaps, too, the years of absolute moral certainties...
...Caesar was here...
...tell us what to do...
...For while these older Jews were, in the best sense of the word and not the pejorative sense, “cosmopolites,” that is men with a truly sophisticated and yearning knowledge of the world, of other peoples, of the sciences and the humanities and languages, the young people were not...
...I feel it...
...Yes, we’ve heard about you,’’ he said at once when I entered his office...
...Since then, rabbis point out, there has been utter silence on the question of the rebuilding-not only because of the inappropriateness of destroying other religions’ holy places but because it is clearly of no importance to modern Israelis...
...An attitude refreshingly different from the hatred inculcated in Arab children by their parents...
...What I fear is that if Israel gets into a paroxysm of anger, it will destroy everything between Turkey and Aswan...
...The people generally despise them...
...Everything-every reference, every question, every anger and yearningrevolved around the Arabs...
...She should see Begin,” the other journalist said...
...Both nations have just claims to the same motherland, like two children who claim the love of the same mother...
...But the difference is not only generational in Israel, it is national and international...
...On the other hand, we could destroy them...
...If you drove north from Tel Aviv, you traveled the brilliantly blue Mediterranean that slapped at your side, ringing with old voices...
...It is silly talk to think they will be frightened by executions...
...But the idealism today takes different forms...
...but “What have we done to ourselves...
...The debate on the “terrorists” went on and on in Israel, “It is very serious,” my friend Boaz Evron, the well-known commentator for the newspaper Yediuth Aharonot, told me one day...
...And the older people were increasingly concerned over the increasing isolation of their country and their young people in the world...
...Which is why they so often lose...
...American Jews Sociologists and historians say that the young in Israel were far more apt to accept the Arab as inferior and worthless than the old...
...He was commander of the Stern Gang, and now he’s a prominent dove...
...I asked Jay...
...One day, in a driving rain, I stopped by myself to see the golden ruins of Ceasaria, the old Crusader city on the sea...
...It could become a garrison state...
...Israel today is schizoid,” said the rabbi of a large synagogue in Jerusalem...
...Or the doctor,” Jay went on...
...That, as we used to say when we were children, was the killer...
...But the next step...
...revolution...
...Harsh punishments work only for the benefit of the organization, for the people with no courage then fall by the wayside...
...Or Yalin-Mor,” the other young man went on...
...He had been in on the murder of the Swedish mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, whom the Jews thought was giving too much land to the Arabs...
...To me, it is no surprise that many Israeli Arabs are joining in Arab terrorist acts,” he told me that night...
...Amnon Rubinstein, the young, vibrant, incisive dean of the Law School at Tel Aviv University and a particularly popular newspaper columnist...
...They are very strong in terms of the visions and idealism of the earlier days...
...It was not only “What will the Arabs do to us...
...The passion of a return to Zion had informed Jewish religion and Jewish passions for centuries-“Next year in Jerusalem,” they greeted each other in their Diaspora all over the world-by World War 11, they considered it not a *dream but the only reality possible...
...There is no question that the secularization of the Israeli state is proceeding steadily...
...Yalin-Mor was worried...
...Israeli Doves He lived then in a roomy modern apartment on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, and I immediately liked the man...
...This enormous confidence and understandable pride in what they had accomplished in so short a time lasted through the 1956 war over Suez and came to a peak right after the enormous victories of the 1967 war...
...People who know something about national liberation movements should know this...
...This article is adapted from her book The New 100 Years’ War, to be published by Doubleday & Company...
...He got up and stared for a moment at the map of the Middle East in which Israel, even with its territories tripled by its victories in 1967, still remained a tiny enclave in a huge Arab land mass...
...The country itself remained as vibrant and lovely as ever...
...As William Polk has put it, “Taunted by the notion that they were merely, in the words of the Balfour Declaration, the ‘existing nonJewish communities in Palestine,’ infuriated by their own incapability to act, their inability to coalesce into an effective national unit in the face of the European or the Zionist challenge, ever trying to prove that theirs was not the ‘empty land’ depicted in early Zionist literature, the Arabs retreated from reality into a world of myth, posture, and pretense...
...But mainly the Israelis did it themselves, and the saga of their first 20 years of building up their state is one of the great historic sagas of all time...
...What should we do...
...You could drive the whole length of the country in a couple of hours...
...by virtue of the fact that for generations they buried their dead in this land, developed a nationalpopular culture in it...
...Israelis today are very pragmatic,” he told me as we sat one evening in his office and chatted...
...It is now a tool in the hands of the government to mobilize world Jewry...
...I thought that some of the things Israel was doing were clearly counterproductive, but even if these things were corrected there was not the slightest assurance that that would cause the Arabs to talk, or even bring peace any closer...
...That’s why we’ve got to strike harder and harder...
...A generation, even, that despises the dreams of its parents...
...Moreover, Israel could not give up one piece of the occupied territories until a permanent peace treaty-with concomitant recognition of Israel-was signed...
...later I discovered, rather to my astonishment that I, a long time sympathizer with Israel, was considered an enemy because I had reported from the Arab side and because, in particular, I had raised the question of whether Israel was mistreating or torturing prisoners in the occupied territories...
...Of these doves, who only managed to get a meager 5,000 votes in the 1969 elections, the leader and the finest spokesman was Yehoshua Arieli, a big, kindly man who is professor of history at Hebrew University...
...This is because of the Jews’ historic distrust first of the gentile or “goyim,” then of the Arabs, then of protection by international bodies...
...The important thing is how different are the two peoples...
...You feel your survival is at stake,” one American said, “but we can’t see how you’ll ever achieve peace unless you look at the Arab view of things...
...only pushes the Arab population into the hands of the Arab resistance...
...We have this war we never wanted, you see-we were about to be attacked...
...Perhaps all countries go through that pattern...
...The possibility that the other side will make a gesture of peace is nil...
...There are terrorists of several types, some who want to be executed because they believe that helps their nation’s fight and they believe they gain eternity...
...The first day I paid my respects to the government information office and found myself talking to a charming older man from South Africa named Petan...
...We’re too small a country...
...Boaz Evron, columnist and philosopher, puts it this way, “I’m an atheist, but when I read the Bible, it’s not a religious book, it’s a national book...
...I don’t see how anything could change...
...Just look at that map,” he said...
...We are not entitled to deny the just right also of the Palestinian people to this country...
...They are even bored with Zionism, and one of the reasons there is a feeling of uneasiness about the state at this moment is that the leadershipalmost all of which comes from the generation of the second Aliyah and is thus highly ideological and passionately Zionist-is so out of step with the young...
...The Arabs are playing the political game the w8y it always has been played, mobilizing fears to unify dissident factions...
...Another $250 million in private American investment went into Israel plus another $800 million in U.S...
...The old kibbutz spirit is dead...
...The Jews, while often traumatized underneath, are rational people on an action level...
...Mao wrote that the terrorists are the fish in the water of the people...
...It was as close to an idyllic society as any I have ever seen,” one Israeli friend told me...
...The British called us that...
...Have you created a new race-Israelis and not Jews...
...There is a feeling of hopelessness, that it will never end...
...Israel: Yesterday’s Hero by Georgie Anne Geyer When a survey was taken of Israelis asking what people would be the most happy in the future, the majority answered that it would be the Americans and only 11 per cent answered that it would be the Israelis...
...My friends feel it...
...There’s not much romance here...
...Another man who saw very clearly what was going on and analyzed it was Dr...
...Hebrew, obviously, was a very limited language, spoken by only a minuscule number of people in the world...
...I read this with great interest, while he smiled a gentle, somewhat sad smile...
...and finally, tragically, aside...
...He has none of the style and manners and civilized forms that, for instance, the British have and which brought them through the worst of times with their style and their dignity intact...
...It gives credit to their political theories and makes them look like a national liberation movement...
...If, indeed, they lasted that long...
...Jews as Victors What was to strike me forcibly was the fact that Israel was no longer the Cinderella of the Western World, for the simple reason that Cinderella could never be an occupying general...
...The Israeli government works ,for Fatah by giving the impression it is going to annex the Arab populations in these areas...
...Somehow it didn’t turn out the way we thought it would...
...The rain swirled about me with such life and power that it seemed to me all the historic energy of the centuries was, in that moment, there...
...and about everything...
...His eyes sparkled...
...However, until 1967 the site and the mosque were in Jordanian hands...
...A few days after the war, they gave a review in Tel Aviv called ‘You and I and the Next War’ and another one, ‘Catsup,’ which made fun of Israel as a ‘brave little counIt was not like that, of course, in the “early days...
...For the important element in the Middle East conflict is not that the Jews did this at a certain time or the Arabs did this at another...
...It is simple-he finds the constant nagging reminders of his grandfathers’ sufferings tiresome...
...The reality of the question never emerged, and the promise was never challenged...
...They wanted to make friends with the Arabs after the 1967 war...
...Arab Humiliation ~ While the Israelis suffered over these questions, the Arab attacks continued so brutally and Arab rhetoric continued so blindingly that there was occurring an unquestionable hardening of Israeli attitudes-toward the Arabs and toward peace as well...
...The movement starts to attract only the most idealistic element...
...There’s not much romance in selling gladiolas from a kibbutz...
...perhaps saddened is a better word...
...We have the army reserve now until age 55...
...YOU know Arabs,” a cab driver told me bitterly...
...Contempt or Hatred...
...And there were the other nibbling, nagging, niggling questions...
...Yet-there was no question about it-they were finding it very hard to be treated in this objective way...
...But is that the aim of our lives...
...What do you do, the Israelis started asking with troubled eyes, when you are caught in our dilemma...
...Every day the roots of the conflict grow deeper...
...It is even possible to ask today: Is this new Israeli really a Jew...
...Still, very few Israelis, I found, were any more willing to try to understand the real motivations and sufferings of the commandos and the Palestinians than the commandos were willing to understand theirs...
...They’ve gone through everything...
...They were living in a state where 40 per cent of the GNP was going for defense and where the average of 20 deaths a month they were sustaining at that time was equal to 1,500 American deaths a month...
...In Israel, Jews were to become a nation like all other nations, and thus escape these centuries-old fears of the alway s-p ersecu ted wandering Jew...
...What, then, is it to be a “Jew...
...Yet I remembered that the Stern Gang had been one of the most brutal of all terrorist gangs of all time...
...The war had actually saved Israel-before the 1967 war, emigration was so high there had been a sign at Lod airport reading, “Will the last one out please turn off the light...
...He almost winced...
...Even the Soviet Union does not react like that any more-only the most dismal of the underdeveloped countries do...
...For what troubles the older Israelis, underneath, when you really get down to it, is the fear that this new man, so efficient in work, so courageous in war, so brilliant in conceptualizing, does not have the basis of suffering that made of his fathers unusually humanitarian men and made the Jews such an extraordinary people...
...Could we get in touch with him...
...Or, as one put it, “Can Israel maintain the martial posture of Sparta and the civic virtues of Athens...
...The Arab countries have been able to show themselves as the underdogs, and that underdog image is hard to beat...
...Not now...
...They only understood a strong hand from Israel and only respected a strong hand...
...It is anti-Jewish, yes, but certainly not an ti-Semi tic...
...What Rohan, who was adjudged mentally insane, did was to bring attention to the Jews’ centuries-old promise to rebuild the temple of Solomon, which stood until its destruction by the Romans in 70 A.D...
...The next evening I saw Nathan Yalin-Mor...
...Copyright 1971 by Georgie Anne Geyer...
...There is more idealism and personal courage here than in any society I know...
...It was no accident that those responsible for Count Bernadotte’s death were never punished-the new state of Israel rewarded the Stern Gang for the assassination with no prosecutions...
...It is a little bit here and a little bit there...
...But in the course of time our country could be turned into a state not very pleasant to live in...
...she paused, unsure herself as to how to classify her sense of unease, “we didn’t expect it to be like other countries...
...What a marvelous character...
...Rubenstein probably put it most deftly: “There is a general contempt for the Arabs,” he said...
...I was astonished...
...But some were...
...What counts is that there is a nation here...
...Unlike any arrangement with any other country, the U. S. permitted tax-deductible donations to Israel, and all American sentiments were with Israel...
...Tel Aviv buzzed with activity and with a nice, totally unique, JewishlMiddle-Eastern/ Berlin/cosmopolitan/American flavor...
...For the simple fact is that in this “Jewish state,” fewer and fewer of the population practice Judaism...
...The Old Days Some Israelis saw the problems clearly...
...And I had to admit...
...I think this produces a feeling of realism, yet also one with paradoxes...
...I always said we should differentiate between our side and the other,” he told me in his measured, thoughtful way...
...The state is created now, why do we need Zionism...
...asked one young Sabra...
...We see it with the New Left kids who come in here every day-and with the papers of Western Europe...
...Or, as one Israeli diplomat told me, “It looks like we’re losing just a few men on Suez, but the fact is we can’t even bear the loss of that small number...
...This new man, this Sabra, is a little embarrassed by the bravado which attended the early years of the state...
...They, too, are attached to it not by the virtue of some caprice, but of the fact that they have been living here for 13 centuries...
...But I don’t think I’ll give them any advice...
...When you know Hebrew, the Bible is the feel of the country, the shape of its national consciousness...
...they were afraid they might find in themselves the same hatreds that throughout history they had found in their own persecutors...
...Key to all these debates-a dark catalyst here as in the Arab world -were the Palestinian commandos...
...but inside, it did not feel that way...
...They spurn ideology...
...To older and Orthodox Jews, this outlook is anathema, and contradictions between Jewish religiosity-Jewish nationality and spirituality-materialism seemed for many to come to a head last year with the fire started in the A1 Aksa mosque in Jerusalem by a fanatic Australian Christian, Denis Rohan...
...Ironically, it was only in their return to the promised land after nearly 2,000 years, only in their return to the mount where the temple was to be rebuilt, that the Jews for the first time in their history created a secular generation for whom the old Jewish customs, so guarded and cherished all those years in exile, no longer matter so passionately...
...I was sitting in the office of our stringer, Jay Bushinksy, and another journalist the second day I was in Tel Aviv in the big Beit Na’ariv building, and we were talking about the wonderful panoply of “characters” in Israel...
...It occurred to me to remember that Yalin-Mor had been sipping a lemon squash in a cafe that night in 1948 when the announcer broke into the music from the loudspeaker and said, “Count Folke Bernadotte...
...Collective punishment...
...And the brazen, open person, so attractive in pioneer days, becomes less attractive as a boss or a sergeant...
...It turned out that he had been born in Poland...
...And what is an Israeli Jewwhat is the justification for the state itself-when most Israelis no longer practice Judaism...
...A nation exists from the day that a certain society attains independent national consciousness, and that needs no confirmation from outside...
...I didn’t exactly understand then the reason for this initial (but only initial) hostility...
...The first years of the Jewish state - d espite the always-present threat of the Arabs-must have been ecstatic...
...For them, it was Israel or destruction...
...There are incidents with the Israeli Arabs...
...I remember how interested we were for the British to put collective punishment on the Jews...
...He smiled, “I do not use ‘terrorist’ in a pejorative sense,” he added...
...Casualties are mounting...
...Some Israelis were saying, “Give them back, we are not occupiers of other people’s lands...
...You should see them, ” Jay was saying...
...Nobody makes it...
...Still, over and over, I noticed a strangeness about this self-conscious determination not to hate the Arabs, who after all were daily bombing, kidnapping, and killing Israelis...
...The great moral driving force that brought Jews to the shores of Palestine in 1948 was the literal belief that we were chosen by God to give back to the world a body of faith...
...It is part of the new role of the state...
...One American diplomat characterized the new mood and the dilemma in these words: “We have a simultaneous hardening and softening...
...metier...
...Immediately after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, nearly the whole world applauded roaringly...
...The Israeli youth are less ideological than their parents...
...This victory made, initially, generous victors out of the Israelis, many of whom then were ready to give back all the Arab territories they occupied during the flash-flood war in exchange for peace, but it made even more sulking and furious enemies out of the Arabs, driven by this further humiliation into an even more maddened posit ion...
...Arieli, the first step for Israel was to realize that she and not the Arabs must take the initiativesthe policy of strong-arm offense was counterproductive-and then to make the qualitative change in attitude that would enable a new step to be taken...
...captured, the commandos in Israel were treated as civil and not political prisoners, and the Israelis called them not “fedayeen” (those who sacrifice) but “meshablim” (the dark forces...
...Dimont, an eminently fair Jewish scholar, warns that “rightly or wrongly, the Arabs think they have good cause to fear the Jews, because in their eyes the Jews have dispossessed them from what they consider their land...
...Before, many would not report anything bad about Israel because of anti-Semitism, Now Israel is open to objective reporting for the first time...
...A friend of mine at the Foreign Ministry, who is a very discerning man, talked about the Israeli complex, about the whole world being against it...
...The important thing for Israel was to keep the ceasefire lines...
...Another said, “When they blow up bridges and bus stops, then counter measures don’t bother us at all...
...It occurred to me as I wandered around Tel Aviv that perhaps they could not bear to allow themselves the luxury of reacting spontaneously...
...It’s not like Arabs on horse back...
...Yet it has become the fashion, so to speak, to represent Israel as a brutal militaristic power intent only on crushing its sadly inefficient neighbors who are unable to compete with Israeli technology...
...They don’t think you should get praised for doing something that is your duty,” one government spokesman told me...
...As for their children, they never knew quite so viscerally that it was paradise because, unlike their parents, they had never known hell...
...In the Israeli universities, there were admirable departments of Oriental studies, where some of the finest scholars studied and restudied the Arab world...
...As my friend from the Foreign Ministry said one day in Tel Aviv, as we sat lunching in the Gondola, “Tell us...
...The Arabs, they argued, would eventually give up under the pressure of enough “punishment...
...It was too good to be true...
...But, eventually, they would be forced to sue for peace or see all their own internal development fall by the wayside of the war...
...It is regrettable that one may hear Israeli leaders in the highest offices, including the Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister, and the Minister of Information, denying knowledge of the existence of the Palestinian nation...
...And they despise them not because they lost the war but because, for instance, the way they treat prisoners...
...And here it was quite literally that...
...From a high apartment building in Tel Aviv you could see the outskirts of Jerusalem...
...Then he sighed and said immediately, “There’s no question that we’re losing the propaganda battle...
...When that was published in Australia,” he interjected, “there was a Jewish typesetter, and he put an extra line of his own in...
...The government seemed convinced that its position was correct...
...One aspect of this was the curious disinterest on the part of the young in language...
...Most said, “No, give them back and these people will rise to destroy you as they have promised for 20 years.’’ “But if you keep them,” still others argued, “don’t you realize that with only 2.5 million Jews you soon won’t have a Jewish state -which is all the reason for this suffering and killing...
...Today is not Nazi Germany again...
...For this reason, eight years of English study are compulsory in the Israeli schools...
...I perked up...
...state in which Israel was born...
...The application of more and more Israeli air power to Suez and even to the interior of Egypt would eventually bring the Arabs around, It would be gradual, for hadn’t the war gone on already for 30 years...
...It was such a little country to be the reason for more than 100 million people to be locked in total combat over i t . . . such a troubled country...
...How do you, as Jews, who have suffered more than probably any other single people in the world, justify the suffering you are now inflicting on others, even if they instigated it...
...In the spring of 197 1 , a Louis Harris poll showed the growing hawkishness of the Israelis: with 53 per cent of them thinking that “Arabs are lazier than Israelis,” 74 per cent finding them “less intelligent than Israelis,” and 67 per cent “inferior to Israelis...
Vol. 3 • October 1971 • No. 8
