“When it comes to defaming Jews, the Palestinians are pisherkes next to Ha’aretz.”
—Philip Roth (Operation Shylock, 1991)
In his essay of 1838 on Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill wrote that “speculative philosophy, which to the superficial appears a thing so remote from the business of life and the outward interests of men, is in reality the thing on earth which most influences them, and in the long run overbears every other influence save those which it must itself obey.” Of course Mill was not always willing to wait for the long run and was often tempted by shortcuts whereby speculative philosophers and other intellectuals could make their influence felt upon government. Frightened by Tocqueville’s observations of American democracy, Mill sought to prevent the “tyranny of the majority” by an elaborate scheme of plural voting that would give everybody one vote but intellectuals a larger number; when he awoke to the folly and danger of such a scheme, he switched his allegiance to proportional representation as a means of allowing what he calls in On Liberty the wise and noble few to exercise their due influence over the mindless majority.
By now we have had enough experience of the influence of intellectuals in politics to be skeptical of Mill’s schemes. To look back over the major American intellectual journals in the years prior to and during the Second World War—not only Trotskyist publications like New International or Dwight Macdonald’s Politics, but the highbrow modernist and Marxist Partisan Review—is to be appalled by the spectacle of the finest minds of America vociferous in opposition to prosecuting the war against Hitler, which in their view was just a parochial struggle between two dying capitalist forces. The pacifism of English intellectuals in the late thirties led George Orwell to declare that some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals could believe them; and in one of his Tribune columns of 1943, he said of the left-wing rumor in London that America had entered the war only in order to crush a budding English socialist revolution that “one has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe something like that. No ordinary man could be such a fool.”
If we look at the influence of Israeli intellectuals upon Israeli policy over the decades, and especially during the Yitzhak Rabin/Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak governments that prepared the Oslo Accords (1993, 1995) and, by 2000, Intifada II, we may conclude that Mill and Orwell were both right, Mill in stressing the remarkable power of ideas, Orwell in insisting that such power often works evil, not good.
Among the numerous misfortunes that have beset the Zionist enterprise from its inception—the unyielding hardness of the land allegedly flowing with milk and honey, the failure of the Jews of the Diaspora to move to Zion except under duress, the constant burden of peril arising from Arab racism and imperialism—was the premature birth of an intellectual class, especially a literary intelligentsia. The quality of Israel’s intelligentsia may be a matter of dispute. Gershom Scholem once remarked, mischievously, that talent goes where it is needed, and in Israel it was needed far more urgently in the military than in the universities, the literary community, the arts, and journalism. But the influence of this intelligentsia is less open to dispute than its quality. When Shimon Peres (who views himself as an intellectual) launched his ill-fated election campaign of spring 1996, he surrounded himself with artists and intellectuals on the stage of Tel Aviv’s Mann Auditorium.1 Three months earlier he had listed as one of the three future stars of the Labor Party the internationally famous novelist Amos Oz, the same Amos Oz who was notorious among religiously observant Jewish “settlers” for having referred to their organization Gush Emunim (Block of the Faithful) in a speech of June 1989 in language generally reserved for thieves and murderers: they were, he told a Peace Now gathering of about 20,000 people in Tel Aviv’s Malchei Yisrael Square, “a small sect, a messianic sect, obtuse and cruel, [who] emerged a few years ago from a dark corner of Judaism, and [are] threatening to … impose on us a wild and insane blood ritual.… They are guilty of crimes against humanity.”
Intellectuals in many countries have adopted the motto: “the other country, right or wrong,” and worked mightily to undermine national confidence in their country’s heritage, founding principles, raison d’être. But such intellectuals do not usually arise within fifty years of their country’s founding, and in no case except Israel have intellectuals cultivated their “alienation” in a country whose “right to exist” is considered an acceptable subject of discussion among otherwise respectable people and nations. As Midge Decter shrewdly put it in May 1996, “A country only half a century old is not supposed to have a full fledged accomplished literary intelligentsia.… This is an extravagance only an old and stable country should be allowed to indulge in.”2
The seeds of trouble amongst intellectuals in Zion antedated the state itself. On May Day 1936 the Labor Zionist leader Berl Katznelson asked, angrily,
Is there another people on earth whose sons are so emotionally and mentally twisted that they consider everything their nation does despicable and hateful, while every murder, rape and robbery committed by their enemies fills their hearts with admiration and awe? As long as a Jewish child … can come to the Land of Israel, and here catch the virus of self-hate … let not our conscience be still.3
But what for Katznelson was a sick aberration would later become the normal condition among a substantial segment of Israeli intellectuals. A major turning point came in 1967, when the doctors of Israel’s soul, a numerous fraternity, concluded that in winning a defensive war that, if lost, would have brought its destruction, Israel had bartered its soul for a piece of land. The Arab nations, shrewdly sensing that Jews were far less capable of waging the war of ideas than the war of planes and tanks, quickly transformed the rhetoric of their opposition to Israel’s existence from the right to the left, from the aspiration to “turn the Mediterranean red with Jewish blood” (the battle cry of the months preceding the Six-Day War) to the pretended search for a haven for the homeless. This calculated appeal to liberals, as Ruth Wisse has amply demonstrated,4 created legions of critics of the Jewish state, especially among devout believers in the progressive improvement and increasing enlightenment of the human race. Israeli intellectuals who were willing to express, especially in dramatic hyperbole, criticism of their own country’s alleged racism, imperialism, and religious fanaticism quickly became celebrities in the American press. They were exalted by people like Anthony Lewis as courageous voices of dissent, even though what they had joined was just the opposite: a community of consent.
But it was not until a decade later that the Israeli intelligentsia turned massively against the state, against Zionism, against Judaism itself. For in 1977 the Labor Party lost its twenty-nine-year-old ownership of government to people it considered its cultural inferiors, people Meron Benvenisti described as follows: “I remember traveling on a Haifa bus and looking around at my fellow passengers with contempt and indifference—almost as lower forms of human life.”5 Such hysteria (which burst forth again in May 1996 when Benjamin Netanyahu won the election) now became the standard pose of the alienated Israeli intellectual, and it was aggressively disseminated by American publications such as the New York Times, ever eager for Israeli-accented confirmation of its own views. Amos Oz, for example, took to the pages of the New York Times Magazine during the Lebanon War to deplore the imminent demise of Israel’s “soul”: “Israel could have become an exemplary state … a small-scale laboratory for democratic socialism.” But that great hope, Oz lamented, was dashed by the arrival of Holocaust refugees, various “anti-socialist” Zionists, “chauvinistic, militaristic, and xenophobic” North African Jews, and so forth.6 (These are essentially the reasons why it was not until Menachem Begin became prime minister that the Ethiopian Jews could come to Israel.) By 1995 Oz was telling New York Times readers that supporters of the Likud party were accomplices of Hamas.7 Even after spiritual brethren of Hamas massacred three thousand people in the United States on September 11, 2001, Oz declared that the enemy was not in any sense the radical Islamist or Arabic mentality but simply “fanaticism,” and that in any case the most pressing matter he could think of was to give “Palestinians their natural right to self-determination.” For good measure he added the patently false assertion that “almost all [Moslems] are as shocked and aggrieved [by the suicide bombings of America] as the rest of mankind.”8 Apparently Oz had missed all those photos of Muslims round the world handing out candy, ululating, dancing, and jubilating over dead Jews and dead Americans. It was a remarkable performance, which made one wonder whether Oz gets to write about politics because he is a novelist or gets his reputation as a novelist because of his political views.
People like Benvenisti—sociologist, deputy mayor of Jerusalem until fired by Teddy Kollek, and favorite authority on Israel for many years of the New York Times and New York Review of Books—foreshadowed the boasting of the intellectual spokesmen of later Labor governments that they were not only post-Zionist but also post-Jewish in their thinking. Benvenisti, writing in 1987, recalled proudly how “we would observe Yom Kippur by loading quantities of food onto a raft and swimming out with it to an offshore islet in the Mediterranean, and there we would while away the whole day feasting. It was a flagrant demonstration of our rejection of religious and Diaspora values.”9
Anecdotal evidence of the increasingly shrill anti-Israelism (or worse) of Israeli intellectuals is only too easy to amass. The sculptor Yigal Tumarkin once stated that “when I see the black-coated haredim with the children they spawn, I can understand the Holocaust.”10 Ze’ev Sternhell, Hebrew University expert on fascism, proposed destroying the Jewish settlements with IDF tanks as a means of boosting national morale.11 In 1969 the guru of Labor Party intellectuals, the late Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, began to talk of the inevitable “Nazification” of the Israeli nation and society. By the time of the Lebanon War, he had become an international celebrity because of his use of the epithet “Judeo-Nazi” to describe the Israeli army. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, he outdid even himself by declaring (in words redolent of what Katznelson had deplored in 1936): “Everything Israel has done, and I emphasize everything, in the past 23 years is either evil stupidity or stupidly evil.”12 And in 1993 Leibowitz would be honored by the government of Yitzhak Rabin with the Israel Prize.
In third place after Oz and Benvenisti among the resources of intellectual insight into Israel’s soul frequently mined over the years by Anthony Lewis, Thomas Friedman, and like-minded journalists is David Grossman, the novelist. Grossman established his credentials as an alienated intellectual commentator on the state of his country’s mind in a book of 1988 called The Yellow Wind, an account of his seven-week journey through the “West Bank,” a journey undertaken in order to understand “how an entire nation like mine, an enlightened nation by all accounts, is able to train itself to live as a conqueror without making its own life wretched.”13 This is a complicated book, not without occasional patches of honesty. But its true flavor can be suggested by two successive chapters dealing with culture and books, especially religious ones. Grossman first visits the Jewish settlement of Ofra, at which he arrives fully armed with suspicion, hostility, and partisanship, a “wary stranger” among people who remind him, he says, of nothing human, especially when they are “in the season of their messianic heat” (52). In Ofra, Grossman does not want “to let down his guard” and be “seduced” by the Sabbath “warmth” and “festivity” of these wily Jews (34). Although most of his remarks to Arabs in conversation recounted in The Yellow Wind are the perfunctory gestures of a straight man to whom his interlocutors pay no serious attention, he angrily complains that the Jewish settlers don’t listen to or “display a real interest” in him. He asks them to “imagine themselves in their Arab neighbors’ places” (37) and is very much the angry schoolmaster when they don’t act like compliant puppets or accept his pretense that this act of sympathetic imagination is devoid of political meaning. Neither are the settlers intellectually nimble enough to make the appropriate reply to Grossman: “My dear fellow, we will imagine ourselves as Arabs if you will imagine yourself as a Jew.” But Grossman has no intention of suspending his own rhythms of existence long enough to penetrate the inner life of these alien people: “What have I to do with them?” (48). His resentment is as much cultural as political. He complains that the settlers have “little use for culture,” speak bad Hebrew, indulge in “Old Diaspora type” humor, and own no books, “with the exception of religious texts” (46). And these, far from mitigating the barbarity of their owners, aggravate it. The final image of the Jews in this long chapter is of “potential [!] terrorists now rocking over their books” (51). For Grossman the conjectural terrorism of Jews is a far more grievous matter than the actual terrorism of Arabs.
The following chapter also treats of culture and books, including religious ones. Grossman has come to Bethlehem University, one of several universities in the territories that have been punningly described as branches of PLO state. Here Grossman, though he admits the school to be “a stronghold of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine,” sees no terrorists rocking over books, but rather idyllic scenes that remind him of “the pictures of Plato’s school in Athens” (57). Bubbling with affection, eager to ascribe only the highest motives, Grossman is now willing to forgive even readers of religious books. He has not so much as a snort or a sneer for the Bethlehem English professor who ascribes Arabs’ supreme sensitivity to lyric rhythm in English poetry to the “rhythm of the Koran flow[ing] through their blood” (59). The author’s ability to spot racism at a distance of twenty miles when he is among Jews slackens when timeless racial categories are invoked in Bethlehem.
When the Labor Party returned to power in 1992, so too did the Israeli intellectuals and their disciples. People once (rather naively) casually referred to as extremists moved to the centers of power in Israeli government and policy formation. Dedi Zucker, who used to accuse Jewish settlers of drinking blood on Passover; Yossi Sarid, who once shocked Israelis by declaring that Holocaust Memorial Day meant nothing to him; and Shulamit Aloni, whose statements about religious Jews would probably have landed her in jail in European countries that have laws against antisemitic provocation, all became cabinet ministers or prominent spokesmen in the government of Rabin. Two previously obscure professors laid the foundations for the embrace of Yasser Arafat, one of the major war criminals of the twentieth century, responsible for the murder of more Jews than anyone since Hitler and Stalin. The Oslo process put the PLO well on the way to an independent Palestinian state, had Arafat, or any other Arab leaders, actually desired one. Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua and David Grossman were delighted. Oz announced in 1993 that “death shall be no more,” and Grossman assured Anthony Lewis that Israel had finally given up its “instinctive suspicion,” and that although “we have the worst terrorism,” “we are making peace.”14 Benvenisti proved harder to satisfy: in 1995 he published a book called Intimate Enemies, the ads for which carried glowing endorsements from Thomas Friedman and Professor Ian Lustick, in which he proposed dissolution of the state of Israel.
Only a few figures within Israel’s cultural establishment expressed dismay at what was happening. The philosopher Eliezer Schweid warned that a nation that starts by abandoning its cultural memories ends by abandoning its physical existence.15 Amos Perlmutter analyzed the “post-Zionism” of Israeli academics as an all-out attack on the validity of the state.16 A still more notable exception to the general euphoria of this class was Aharon Megged. In June 1994 this well-known writer and longtime supporter of the Labor Party wrote an explosive article in Ha’aretz on “The Israeli Suicide Drive” in which he connected the Rabin government’s record of endless unreciprocated concessions to a PLO that had not even canceled its charter calling for Israel’s destruction, to the self-destructiveness that had long before infected Israel’s intellectual classes. “Since the Six Day War,” Megged wrote, “and at an increasing pace, we have witnessed a phenomenon which probably has no parallel in history: an emotional and moral identification by the majority of Israel’s intelligentsia with people openly committed to our annihilation.” Megged argued that since 1967 the Israeli intelligentsia had more and more come “to regard religious, cultural, and emotional affinity to the land … with sheer contempt”; and he observed that the equation of Israelis with Nazis had become an article of faith and the central idea of “thousands [emphasis added] of articles and reports in the press, hundreds of poems … dozens of documentary and feature films, exhibitions and paintings and photos.” He also shrewdly remarked on the methods by which anti-Zionist Israeli intellectuals disseminated their message and reputations. Writers like Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe, and Baruch Kimmerling “mostly publish first in English to gain the praise of the West’s ‘justice seekers.’ Their works are then quickly translated into Arabic and displayed in Damascus, Cairo and Tunis. Their conclusion is almost uniform: that in practice Zionism amounts to an evil, colonialist conspiracy.”17
The minds of the majority of those who carried on the Oslo Process of the Israeli government from 1993 to 1996 were formed by the writers, artists, and publicists whom Megged excoriated. Although Shimon Peres’s utterances about the endless war for independence that his country has been forced to wage often seemed to come from a man who had taken leave of the actual world, they were rooted in the “post-Zionist,” post-Jewish, and universalist assumptions of the Israeli intelligentsia. Just as they were contemptuous of any tie with the land of Israel, so he repeatedly alleged that land plays no part in Judaism or even in the Jewish political philosophy that names itself after a specific mountain called Zion. Like the Israeli intelligentsia, he accused Israel’s religious Jews of an atavistic attachment to territory over “spirit,” claiming that Judaism is “ethical/moral and spiritual, and not an idolatry of soil-worship.”18 Just as Israeli intellectuals nimbly pursued and imitated the latest cultural fads of America and Europe, hoping to be assimilated by the great world outside Israel, so did Peres hope that Israel would one day be admitted into the Arab League.19
Despite the enlistment of then President William Clinton as virtually his campaign manager, and the nearly unanimous support he received from the Israeli and world news media, to say nothing of the herd of independent thinkers from the universities, and the rented academics of the think tanks, Shimon Peres and his Oslo Process were decisively rejected by the Jewish voters of Israel. Predictably, the Israeli intellectuals (not guessing that Labor’s successors would blindly continue the process) reacted with melodramatic hysteria. David Grossman, in the New York Times of May 31, wailed sanctimoniously that “Israel has moved toward the extreme right … more militant, more religious, more fundamentalist, more tribal and more racist.”20
Among the American liberal supporters of Israel’s intellectual elite, only the New Republic appeared somewhat chastened by the election result. Having for years, perhaps decades, celebrated the ineffable genius of Shimon Peres and his coterie, the magazine turned angrily upon the Israeli intellectuals for failing to grasp that “their association with Peres was one of the causes of his defeat.”
Disdainful of [Jews] from traditional communities, they thought of and called such people “stupid Sephardim.” This contempt for Arab Jews expresses itself in a cruel paradox, for it coexists with a credulity about, and esteem for, the Middle East’s Christians and Muslims—Arab Arabs. Such esteem, coupled with a derisive attitude toward Jewish symbols and texts, rituals, remembrances and anxieties, sent tens of thousands to Netanyahu.21
The most ambitious attempt to trace the history and analyze the causes of the maladies of Israeli intellectuals is Yoram Hazony’s book The Jewish State, which appeared early in the year 2000. Within months of its publication, the dire consequences of the Oslo Accords, post-Zionism’s major political achievement, became visible to everybody in Israel in the form of Intifada II, otherwise known as the Oslo War, a campaign of unremitting atrocities—pogroms, lynchings, suicide bombings—launched by Yasser Arafat after 97% of his demands, including an independent Palestinian state, had been conceded by the government of the hapless Ehud Barak.
The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel’s Soul is a broadside aimed at those Israelis who, in what its author calls “a carnival of self-loathing,”22 are busily eating away at the Jewish foundations of that state. The book’s very title is a conscious affront to Israel’s branja, a slang term for the “progressive” and “enlightened” experts whose views, according to Supreme Court Chief Justice Aharon Barak, should determine the court’s decisions on crucial matters. For these illuminati have sought to enlist no less a figure than Theodor Herzl in their campaign to de-Judaize the state of Israel. Nearly all the “post-Zionists” discussed in The Jewish State claim that Herzl did not intend the title of his famous book to be The Jewish State at all, that the state he proposed was in no significant sense intrinsically Jewish, and that he believed in a total separation of religion from the state. Hazony argues (and massively demonstrates) that Herzl believed a Jewish state was essential to rescue the Jewish people from both antisemitism and assimilation, the forces that were destroying Jewish life throughout the Diaspora. (Most of Herzl’s rabbinic opponents argued that Zionism was itself but a thinly veiled form of assimilation.)
Hazony’s Jewish State has two purposes. The first is to show that “the idea of the Jewish state is under systematic attack from its own cultural and intellectual establishment” (xxvii). These “culture makers” have not only renounced the idea of a Jewish state—“A state,” claims Amos Oz, “cannot be Jewish, just as a chair or a bus cannot be Jewish” (338). The writers who dominate Israeli culture, Hazony argues, are adept at imagining what it is like to be an Arab; they have, like the aforementioned David Grossman, much more trouble imagining what it is like to be a Jew.
If Israeli intellectuals were merely supplying their own illustration of Orwell’s quip about the unique susceptibility of intellectuals to stupid ideas, their hostility to Israel’s Jewish traditions and Zionist character would not merit much concern. But Hazony shows that they have had spectacular success, amounting to a virtual coup d’état, in their political struggle for a post-Jewish state. “What is perhaps most remarkable about the advance of the new ideas in Israeli government policy is the way in which even the most sweeping changes in Israel’s character as a Jewish state can be effected by a handful of intellectuals, with only the most minimal of opposition from the country’s political leaders or the public” (52).
The post-Zionists imposed their views in the public-school curriculum, in the Basic Laws of the country, and in the IDF (Israel Defense Force), whose code of ethics now excluded any allusion to Jewish or Zionist principles. The author of the code was Asa Kasher, one of Israel’s most enterprising post-Zionists, who modestly described his composition as “the most profound code of ethics in the world of military ethics, in particular, and in the world of professional ethics, in general”—so terminally profound, in fact, that an Israeli soldier “doesn’t need to think or philosophize anymore. Someone else already … did the thinking and decided. There are no dilemmas” (53, 56).
The ultimate triumph of post-Zionism, Hazony argues, came in its conquest of the Foreign Ministry and the mind of Shimon Peres. Both came to the conclusion that Israel must retreat from the idea of an independent Jewish state. In the accord reached with Egypt in 1978 and even in the 1994 accord with Jordan, Israeli governments had insisted that the Arab signatories recognize the Jewish state’s “sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political independence” (58). But the Oslo accords with the fanatically anti-Zionist PLO conceded on every one of these issues; and if the agreement with the PLO was partly an effect of post-Zionism, it was an effect that became in turn a cause—giving respectability and wide exposure to post-Zionist political prejudices formerly confined to coteries in Rehavia and Ramat-Aviv.
Thereafter, Peres and his Foreign Office routinely promoted the interests not of a sovereign Jewish state but of the (largely Arab) Middle East. In a reversal of policy akin to that of the Soviet Foreign Ministry in the wake of Stalin’s pact with Hitler, Uri Savir and other Foreign Ministry officials exhorted American Jews who had for decades resisted the Arab campaign to blacken Israel’s reputation to support U.S. foreign aid to the two chief blackeners, the PLO and Syria. They—it was alleged—needed dollars much more than Israel. Peres himself, as we observed earlier, carried the post-Zionist campaign for assimilation and universalism to the global level, grandly announcing in December 1994 that “Israel’s next goal should be to become a member of the Arab League” (67).
The second part of Hazony’s book has a twofold purpose. The first is to write the history of the ideological and political struggle within the Jewish world itself over the idea of the Jewish state, paying particular attention to how that ideal, which a few decades ago had been axiomatic among virtually all Jews the world over, had so quickly “been brought to ruin among the cultural leadership of the Jewish state itself” (78). Hazony’s second aim as historian is to demonstrate the power of ideas, especially the truth of J. S. Mill’s axiom about the practical potency, in the long run, of (apparently useless) speculative philosophy. It was the power of ideas that enabled philosopher Martin Buber and other opponents of the Jewish state to break Ben-Gurion and to undermine the practical-minded stalwarts of Labor Zionism. (Likud hardly figures in this book. The quarrels between Ben-Gurion and Begin have from Hazony’s perspective “the character of a squabble between the captain and the first mate of a sinking ship” [79].)
Hazony is a masterful political and cultural historian, and his fascinating account of the long struggle of Buber (and his Hebrew University acolytes) against Herzl and Ben-Gurion’s conception of a genuinely Jewish state is told with tremendous verve and insight. Buber is at once the villain and the hero of this book. He is the villain in his relentless opposition to a Jewish state; in his licentious equations between Labor Zionists and Nazis; in his fierce anti-(Jewish) immigration stance (announced the day after he himself had immigrated from Germany in 1938). But he is the hero because his posthumous ideological victory over Labor Zionism—most of today’s leading post-Zionists claim that their minds were formed by Buber and his binationalist Brit Shalom/Ihud allies at Hebrew University—is in Hazony’s view the most stunning example of how ideas and myths are in the long run of more political importance than kibbutzim and settlements. Because Buber understood the way in which culture eventually determines politics and grasped the potency of books and journals and (most of all) universities, his (to Hazony) malignant influence now carries the day in Israel’s political as well as its cultural wars.
Hazony argues that since the fall of Ben-Gurion, Israel has had no prime minister—not Golda Meir, not Menachem Begin—who was an “idea-maker.” Even the very shrewd Ben-Gurion and Berl Katznelson (who presciently warned of the dangers lurking in the “intellectual famine” [299] of Labor Israel) were slow to recognize the potentially disastrous consequences of entrusting the higher education of their children to a university largely controlled (for twenty-four years) by the anti-Zionist Judah Magnes and largely staffed by faculty he recruited. Magnes, in language foreshadowing the clichés of today’s post-Zionists, charged that the Jewish settlement in Palestine had been “born in sin” (203); moreover, he believed that seeing history from the Arabs’ historical perspective was one of the main reasons for establishing the Hebrew University.
Hazony’s book is written backward, something like a murder mystery. He begins with a dismaying, indeed terrifying picture of a nearly moribund people, exhausted, confused, aimless—their traditional Labor Zionist assumptions declared “effectively dead” by their formerly Labor Zionist leaders, most crucially Shimon Peres. He then moves backward to seek the reasons why the Zionist enterprise is in danger of being dismantled, not by Israel’s Arab enemies (who gleefully watch the spectacle unfold), but by its own heavily petted intellectual, artistic, and political elite—professors, writers, luminaries in the visual arts.
The material in the early chapters is shocking, and I speak as one who thought he had seen it all: the visiting sociologist from Hebrew University who adorned his office at my university with a PLO recruiting poster; the Tel Aviv University philosophy professor who supplied Noam Chomsky’s supporters with a letter of kashrut certifying the “lifelong dedication to Israel” of their (Israel-hating) idol; the Haifa University sociologist active in the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination League (a PLO front group); the contingent of Israeli professors taking up arms on behalf of the great prevaricator Edward Said. But the material Hazony collected (and dissected) from Israel’s post-Zionist and post-Jewish intellectuals continues to shock nevertheless. Compared with the Baruch Kimmerlings, the Asa Kashers, the Ilan Pappes, and other protagonists in Hazony’s tragedy, Austria’s Jorge Haider, the right-wing demagogue about whom the Israeli government once kicked up such a fuss, is a Judeophile and lover of Zion.
Hazony carefully refrains from applying the term “antisemitic” to even the most extreme defamations of Jewish tradition and of the Jewish state by post-Zionists and their epigones. But surely such reticence is unnecessary when the secret has long been out. As far back as May 1987, the Israeli humorist and cartoonist Dosh, in a column in Ma’ariv, drew a picture of a shopper in a store that specialized in antisemitic merchandise reaching for the top shelf—on which lay the most expensive item, adorned by a Stuermer-like caricature of a Jew and prominently labelled “Made in Israel.” The article this cartoon illustrated spoke of Israel’s need to increase exports by embellishing products available elsewhere in the world with unique local characteristics. Israel had done this with certain fruits and vegetables in the past, and now it was doing the same with defamations of Israel, produced in Israel. Customers were getting more selective, no longer willing to make do with grade B merchandise produced by British leftists or French neo-Nazis. No, they wanted authentic material, from local sources; and Israeli intellectuals, artists, playwrights, were responding with alacrity to the opportunity.
But Dosh had spoken merely of a specialty shop. To accommodate the abundant production of Hazony’s gallery of post-Zionist/post-Jewish defamers of Israel (both the people and the land) would require a department store twice the size of Macy’s or Harrod’s. On bargain day, one imagines the following recitation by the elevator operator: “First floor, Moshe Zimmermann, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, and sixty-eight other members of the progressive and universalist community on Israelis as Nazis; second floor, A. B. Yehoshua on the need for Israeli Jews to become ‘normal’ by converting to Christianity or Islam; third floor, Boaz Evron in justification of Vichy France’s anti-Jewish measures; fourth floor, Idith Zertal on Zionist absorption of Holocaust refugees as a form of rape; fifth floor, Benny Morris on Zionism as ethnic cleansing; attic, Shulamit Aloni on Zionism (also Judaism) as racism; basement, Ya’akov Yovel justifying the medieval blood libel; sub-basement, Yigal Tumarkin justifying Nazi murder of (religious) Jews. Watch your step, please.”
Although Hazony’s argument for the large role played by Israel’s professoriat in dismantling Labor Zionism is convincing, it cannot be a sufficient cause of current post-Zionism and post-Judaism. The habitual language of post-Zionists, and most especially their hammering insistence on the contradiction between being Jewish and being human, is exactly the language of European Jewish ideologues of assimilation over a century ago. Gidon Samet, one of the numerous resident ideologues of post-Judaism and post-Zionism at Ha’aretz, is not far from the truth when he likens their attractions to those of American junk food and junk music: “Madonna and Big Macs,” Samet says, “are only the most peripheral of examples” of the wonderful blessings of Israel’s new “normalness” (71–72). Of course, whatever we may think of those who in 1900 urged fellow Jews to cease being Jewish in order to join universal humanity, they at least were not promoting this sinister distinction in full knowledge of how it would be used by Hitler; the same cannot be said of contemporary Israeli ideologues of assimilation and universalism.
Most readers of post-Zionist outpourings have little to fall back on except their native mistrust of intellectuals. Thus when Hebrew University professor Moshe Zimmermann declares that Zionism “imported” antisemitism into the Middle East (11), it requires knowledge (not much, to be sure) of history to recognize the statement as preposterous. But sometimes the post-Zionists are tripped up by overconfidence into lies that even the uninstructed can easily detect. Thus Avishai Margalit, a Hebrew University philosophy professor spiritually close to, if not quite a card-carrying member of, the post-Zionists, in a New York Review of Books essay of 1988 called “The Kitsch of Israel,” heaped scorn upon the “children’s room” at Yad Vashem with its “tape-recorded voices of children crying out in Yiddish, ‘Mame, Tate [Mother, Father].’” Yad Vashem is a favorite target of the post-Zionists because they believe it encourages Jews to think not only that they were singled out for annihilation by the Nazis but also—how unreasonable of them!—to want to make sure they do not get singled out for destruction again. But, as any Jerusalemite or tourist who can get over to Mount Herzl will quickly discover, there is no “children’s room” and there are no taped voices at Yad Vashem. There is a memorial to the murdered children and a tape-recorded voice that reads their names.23 Margalit’s skullduggery is by no means the worst of its kind among those Israelis involved in derogating the memory and history of the country’s Jewish population. But it comes as no surprise to learn from Hazony that Margalit believes Israel is morally obligated to offer Arabs “special rights” for the protection of their culture and to be “neutral” toward the Jews (13). With such neutrality as Margalit’s, who needs belligerence?
In Hazony Israel had perhaps found its latter-day Jeremiah, but given the widespread tone deafness of the country’s enlightened classes to their Jewish heritage, perhaps what is needed at the moment is an Israeli Jonathan Swift, especially the Swift who in his versified will “gave the little wealth he had / To build a house for fools and mad; / And showed by one satiric touch, / No nation wanted it so much.”
I began this essay with statements by J. S. Mill and George Orwell about the role of intellectuals and their ideas in politics, and I shall conclude in the same way. The first statement, by Mill, might usefully be recommended as an aid to reflection by the intellectuals of Israel: “The collective mind,” wrote Mill in 1838, “does not penetrate below the surface, but it sees all the surface; which profound thinkers, even by reason of their profundity, often fail to do.” The second statement, by Orwell, seems particularly relevant as the Arab Muslim war against Israel rages on, unabated: “If the radical intellectuals in England had had their way in the 20’s and 30’s,” said Orwell, “the Gestapo would have been walking the streets of London in 1940.”24
1.Jerusalem Post, April 6, 1996.
2.Midge Decter, “The Treason of the Intellectuals,” Outpost, May 1996, 7.
3.Kitvei B. Katznelson (Tel Aviv: Workers’ Party of Israel, 1961), 8:18.
4.Ruth R. Wisse, If I Am Not for Myself … The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews (New York: Free Press, 1992).
5.Meron Benvenisti, Conflicts and Contradictions (New York: Villard, 1986), 70.
6.New York Times Magazine, July 11, 1982.
7.New York Times, April 11, 1995.
8.“Struggling against Fanaticism,” New York Times, September 14, 2001.
9.Benvenisti, Conflicts, 34.
10.Jerusalem Post, December 1, 1990.
11.Ibid.
12.Jerusalem Post, January 16, 1993.
13.The Yellow Wind, trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988), 212. Subsequent references to this work will be cited in text.
14.New York Times, May 17, 1996. The most detailed account of the influence of Israeli intellectuals specifically on the Oslo Accords is Kenneth Levin, The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People under Siege (Hanover, NH: Smith and Kraus Global, 2005).
15.Jerusalem Post International Edition, April 15, 1995.
16.“Egalitarians Gone Mad,” Jerusalem Post International Edition, October 28, 1995.
17.Aharon Megged, “The Israeli Suicide Drive,” Jerusalem Post International Edition, July 2, 1994.
18.Quoted in Moshe Kohn, “Check Your Quotes,” Jerusalem Post International Edition, October 16, 1993.
19.The Arab League contemptuously replied that Israel could become a member only “after the complete collapse of the Zionist national myth, and the complete conversion of historical Palestine into one democratic state to which all the Palestinians will return.”
20.“The Fortress Within,” New York Times, May 31, 1996.
21.“Revolt of the Masses,” New Republic, June 24, 1996.
22.The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel’s Soul (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 339. Subsequent references to this work will be cited in parentheses in the text.
23.Ten years later Margalit reprinted this piece in a collection of his essays called Views in Review. There he says he has omitted a sentence from the original essay that “had wrong information in it about the children’s memorial room at Yad Vashem.” But he blames this on “an employee” who misled him. Margalit’s sleight of hand here reveals two things: (1) When he says in his introduction to the book that “I am not even an eyewitness to much of what I write about,” we can believe him. (2) The Yiddish writer Shmuel Niger was correct to say that “we suffer not only from Jews who are too coarse, but also from Jews who are too sensitive.”
24.In The Lion and the Unicorn (1941), Orwell also wrote, “The really important fact about the English intelligentsia is their severance from the common culture of the country.… In the general patriotism, they form an island of dissident thought. England is the only great nation whose intellectuals are ashamed of their country.” This, not to put too fine a point upon it, no longer seems true.