The implementation of the "Palestinian Grand strategy" would
not have come about were it not for the death of Zionism in Israel.
Ironically, the Zionist ideal was abandoned with its fulfillment in 1948,
and treated with growing hostility by the extreme left after 1967. Indeed,
for many Israelis, this once uplifting ideology has become a virtual embarrassment,
as they yearn for "normalcy" and a cosmopolitan identity. For
others, there is uncertainty about the Jews' right to the Promised Land.
An insidious fatigue and crippling loss of will now afflicts an otherwise
dynamic, successful Jewish national enterprise.
Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, speaking on the White House lawn on September
13,1993, represented the war-weariness of a people which had made peace
the focus of policy. This was not grand strategy, nor even strategy at all.
His address was a wailful plea for peace, with past suffering and death
providing the leitmotif for his future hopes. Rabin did not radiate strength
and his words evinced more melancholy than self-confidence. He said:
We have come from an anguished and grieving land. We have come from a people, a home, a family, that has not known a single year--not a single month--in which mothers have not wept for their sons...Rabin went on to ask the "Palestinians" to make peace with Israel. The PLO condescended to answer the tired man in the affirmative, and went on to apply the phased strategy for Israel's demise.
The experience of history brings ample evidence that the downfall of civilized states tends to come not from the direct assaults of foes but from internal decay, combined with the consequences of exhaustion in war. A state of suspense is trying--it has often led nations as well as individuals to commit suicide because they were unable to bear it.Rabin's plaintive "enough of blood and tears" reflected, it would seem, Liddell Hart's notion of "exhaustion in war." After winning every military encounter with the Arabs, after stretching Israel's military reach in war to Damascus and Cairo, Beirut and Baghdad, Israeli politicians have betrayed the victories of a great army and, no less significant, the fortitude of a diligent people.
Now that Israel has given official birth to "Palestine" via
elections, disappearance of the Jewish State is all but assured. For the
Arabs, whose political and geostrategic operations since Oslo assuredly
have been brilliant, this disappearance is only a matter of time. For the
Israelis, whose guiding government policies have centered only on various
nuances of autodestruction, it is effectively a matter of indifference.
Can anything be done to rescue a state that seems determined to embrace
its own demolition? Or is it already too late? Israel's current leaders
approach national annihilation as a healer. Let us not think too much about
existing, they caution. It will only anger our "partners in peace."
It will disturb the New Middle East.
Others, however, have yet to surrender. Although their government has now
actually spawned another enemy state--the unprecedented gestation of an
altogether unique form of Jewish self-hatred-- these particular Israelis
resist the soulless herd of Hebrew-speaking gentiles. Animated by more than
an awe-inspiring wish to become Los Angeles (who needs Jerusalem if one
can become L.A.?), these stubbornly authentic Israelis refuse to accept
collective disintegration or to bring everlasting shame upon the memory
of so many (so very many) martyred Jews who now sleep in the dust.
But what can they do? For the moment, their efforts seem focused upon the
coming elections in Israel (not to be confused with the recent elections
making Yasser Arafat the President of "Palestine"). To an extent,
such a focus makes perfect sense. After all, the defeat of the current government
is an obvious sine qua non for national survival.
Defeat of the Peres government, however necessary, may no longer be sufficient.
The problem of survival lies not only in the obvious intellectual and programmatic
deficiencies of the opposition parties, and in the substantially irreversible
Oslo harms already inflicted upon the nation's security apparatus, but also
in something much "deeper," something much more important. It
lies in the heart of a nation that no longer believes in itself, that no
longer believes in anything that is truly important. Indeed, all that once
mattered for Israel, all that was once firm, resolute and incorruptible,
has now withered, broken apart, gone to pieces. Small wonder, then, that
there is no longer any air to breathe, or that asphyxiation has become the
Israeli government's prevailing idea of "peace. "
Israel's Islamic enemies have something that Israel lacks, something altogether
vital and commendable. Truly they should be admired. They believe in something
important! They believe in the promise of Islam! They believe in themselves.
And they understand time.
Israel, however, at least as a collectivity, believes strongly in unbelief.
Worshiping only clichés, and adoring only those whose promises are
without foundation, it believes largely in what is small, transient and
fleeting. To be sure, it believes not at all in the meaning of Judaism.
It believes in virtually anything but itself. Above all, in what is perhaps
the crowning irony, Israel believes in its enemies.
Israel's leaders fear Jewish rebellion, but their fear is unwarranted. It
is a baseless fear for several reasons. Not only is the government's opposition
dedicated entirely to peaceful and patriotic political competition, genuine
rebellion against political authority could serve absolutely no pertinent
security function. The political authority of the Labor government is merely
epiphenomenal, a symptom of a much larger pathology. This authority is not
the actual disease that afflicts Israel. The only rebellion that can save
Israel today from the underlying disease is a far-reaching revolt against
that national self-hatred that now cripples each Israeli Jew as a productive
citizen and that has already immobilized public safety.
Israel, for the most part, has entered into a Faustian bargain in which
"things" are exchanged for the passive acceptance of falsehood.
Whether they are confronted with extravagant claims for a new kind of regional
common market or for new government policies of territorial concession,
fantasy is taken for granted. For Israelis, as for their American models,
truth is what is manufactured in the print media and on commercial television.
These manufacturers are now the Chief Rabbis of the true state religion
in Israel--the acknowledged worship of consumption and commodities.
Where the throne sits on mud, only mud can sit on the throne. To create
the conditions of a decent and purposeful foreign policy--one that could
give the country at least a small chance to survive-- Israel will first
have to transform itself. Otherwise, the so-called Jewish State will be
left bloodless, a skeleton, dead also with that rusty death of machinery,
more hideous than even the death of an individual person.
There is so little time left for understanding. Amidst the eternal babble
of politics, Israel can endure as a nation only where Israelis first learn
to take themselves seriously. As long as it remains captivated by the smooth
mediocrity and squalid contentment of mass society, Israel will pluck its
prime ministers from the flies of the political marketplace and reveal impatience
with any one who dares speak the truth.
Let us be frank! Israelis now inhabit a tiny land of enormous spiritual
emptiness and intellectual mediocrity--a disappearing land of surface glitter,
smug comforts, sham conventionality and wholly irrational optimism. It is
a nation where the final arbiters of personal meaning are located in Dizengoff
Center and where a great number of citizens have traded a Jewish soul for
presumed opportunity in the interrelated worlds of quick pleasure and expanding
commerce. In this barren land of Israel, all vital rapport with genuine
meaning has been lost. Here, in the land of Jewish learning, real wisdom
is not only rejected; it is despised.
You may say, however, that Israel is a happy society. Listen, after all,
to the laughter and the persistent merriment along Tel Aviv's beach front.
But listen more attentively! Today's sounds of happiness in Israel are largely
the canned reverberations of a methodically-rehearsed gaiety, of a dreadfully
false communion, of shrill, dried voices calling only for conformity. This
triumphant reign of vulgarity flows from an increasingly fearful collection
of outerpersons, a mimicking collection that may still call itself a nation,
yet is internally decayed, externally weak, soon forced by itself to disappear.
Hope for Israel? It must exist, to be sure, but it must now sing softly,
in a calculated undertone. The great emptiness of Israel creates a terrifying
noise, but it is still possible to listen for real music. Tuning out the
shrieks and mutterings of the politicians, of the generals, of the "experts"--of
the whole faceless herd whose well-varnished nonsense about "peace"
now passes for insight--we may still find, like an old master violin discovered
beneath a layer of dirt, the majestic structure and full broad bowing of
the strings. Caught up in a war of extermination against the individual
Israeli (a war foreshadowing a Final Solution to the Israel Question) the
murdered and murderous sounds ooze on and on, but the original spirit of
music need not be destroyed. While life in Israel's dominant herd seeks
to strip this music of its most wondrous tones, spoiling, scratching and
degrading it, for those who learn to listen even the most ghastly of disguises
can give way to life.
How shall Israel listen? To begin, the People of Israel must pay close attention
to their private feelings of anxiety, restlessness and despair. For Israel,
the time for "science," "progress," "confidence
building" and "peace agreements" is over. To listen, and
therefore to survive, the individual Israeli must rediscover life by conscious
separation from the pitiable herd, by total detachment from contrived optimism,
and--above all, by coming face-to-face with the inexpressible prospect of
death as a nation. In this spirit of Third Temple impermanence, they may
still learn that agony is infinitely more important than economics, that
cries of pain are always more revealing than the expansion of celebrated
technologies, that anguish counts for much more than recrimination and that
tears always have far more substantial roots than public smiles. As for
the New Middle East, let us recall, from Thomas More, that utopia means
nowhere.
The great existential dangers to Israel cannot be undone or halted entirely
by elections, by the coming of a new political leadership. This is, in the
first instance, a non-political task that can be accomplished only by Israelis
acting as individuals, not as herds. At the most telling level, Israel lacks
a future not merely because its people have been selecting the wrong leadership,
but more importantly because they have steadfastly refused, as Jews, to
become persons. Israel is now kept distant from survival in the world
not because its people have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but because
they have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life.
[Louis Rene Beres is Professor of International Law at Purdue University
and a frequent contributor to Outpost.]