I have pondered on the specific theme that has been
chosen for your Dialogue. It is the problem of the relationship between the
Jewish people and Israel to the new revolutionary movements. The fact is that
the question is pervaded by an atmosphere of disquiet. We feel that the new
revolutionaries do not like us, and we are traditionally and historically most
anxious to please.
Let my first reflexion be about the obsession of the
Jewish people and of the State of Israel with the question of their image. It
is a specific product of Jewish history. We are constantly looking at ourselves
in every mirror. The question “what does the world think of us?” breaks in upon
our consciousness morning, noon and night.
The fact is that whatever other people thought of us
could determine not merely our sense of self-esteem but our very prospect of
survival. What other people thought of Jews would determine whether they would
remain alive with any kind of dignity or whether they would be consigned to the
most odious of violent brutalities. Hence, this rather restless, neurotic
insistence on being admired does deserve the respect of historic justification.
Nevertheless, it has disconcerting effects. Here Israel is the inheritor of the
predicaments of Diaspora Jewry.
Other sovereign nations do not continually ask
themselves what others think of them. The main objective and theme of Foreign
Policy is not to be universally loved. The questions asked by a State in its
international and external relations are these: Do our international relations
suffice to ensure us the means of our physical security? Do our international
relations suffice to ensure us that measure of economic sustenance and
interchange without which a viable society cannot be maintained? Do our
international relations suffice to preserve and develop us as a trading unit
able to nourish its existence by a balanced and expanding commerce?
But the State of Israel must ask, additionally: Are
our international relations sufficient to save us from the depressive effects
of isolation? Because precisely in the light of Jewish traumatic experience, if
Israel were really a kind of leper colony, boycotted, shunned, banished, denied
the equality of status in the international enterprise, then the resulting
mental and psychological effects would be severe.
When I ask these questions about policy, I reach an
affirmative answer: Yes, our foreign relations are adequate to ensure our security.
Do not the past five years prove it? Yes, our external relations are sufficient
to ensure that Israel, during its period of inevitable economic imbalance, can
receive from outside, in various forms, the additional nourishment that its
society and Economy need. Yes, Israel is integrated into the rhythm of
international commerce, reflected in the most impressive of Statistics, its
commercial relations with 103 countries. Its Gross National Product has
increased in the past five years from IL 11 billion to IL 23 billion; its
export earnings have gone up in that period from $700 million to $1,300
million; the movement of pilgrimage and tourism has gone up since 1967 from
270,000 to 690,000; its average per capita income is now overtaking that of
many western European countries, which is, however, offset by the monumental
dimension of our per capita debt.
You will notice that I have not included within the
fundamental aims of a Foreign Policy that we should be universally loved. First
of all, nobody has achieved this. Our adversaries have achieved it, perhaps,
less than anybody. Normally, a certain amount of sympathy goes out to the
victims of History but not to those who surmount the vicissitudes of History in
triumph. The victor is usually not popular. The extraordinary achievement of
the Arabs in 1967 is that they managed at the same time to be the underdog and
unpopular in the eyes of many.
It is the total weight of values and interests which,
in the last resort, determines a nation’s place in the world. To those who have
come from the United States, may I offer this reflexion from the news of the
week. It has so often been said, for example, that the United States had no
possibility, so long as it maintained its present support of Israel, to achieve
its two major objectives in the Middle East, namely, the withdrawal of soviet
power leading to a favourable transformation of the American strategic balance,
and the expansion of recuperation of american interests in the Middle East.
Well, here we find [unclear] prophecy is completely [unclear]
has nothing to do with [unclear]. It has everything to do with [unclear]
interests. The United States [unclear] through the tenacity that [unclear]oped –
if I might say so [unclear] Israeli wall of tenacity [unclear] without any
change of [unclear] to Israel, celebrated the [unclear]viet strategic power
from [unclear] without any way affecting [unclear] with Israel it finds itself [unclear]
a long line of arab States [unclear] Yemen and Algeria and [unclear]ing the
resumption of [unclear] it. In other words, problem [unclear]larity and of
sympathy [unclear] the long run, decisive.
With Israel there must [unclear] due sense of
balance. The [unclear] History – and here I speak [unclear] History in its long
and [unclear] continuity – is the word [unclear] jewish History is the story [unclear]
people’s unprecedented resolution [unclear] in conditions completely [unclear]
to its persistence. It is the [unclear] in which this miracle of [unclear] has
evolved without a [unclear]ritorial base, without the [unclear] social cohesion
that [unclear] the powers of central [unclear] other words, this instinct [unclear]
insistence must have been [unclear]ably more potent than [unclear] instinct in
History, for [unclear] that other nations, subjec[unclear] same destiny of
exile [unclear] territory and absence of [unclear] compact territorial instinct
[unclear] never survived, in the [unclear] the term “national survival.” [unclear]
Let me then put this [unclear] what the Left and the [unclear]
movements think of us [unclear] perspective. It would be [unclear] thought
better of us. We [unclear] in the effort to improve [unclear] what is called
our “im [unclear] that Thucydides would [unclear]nied Israel the appraisal [unclear]mulated
about ancient [unclear] people was born to have [unclear]self and to give none
to [unclear].
One of the things [unclear] give no rest to others is
[unclear] to affirm the legitimacy [unclear]tice of our historic efforts [unclear]
our survival.
[unclear] next point complements, inadvertently,
something that Hertzberg has already said. There are illusions about the past
relationship between the jewish people and the revolutionary left. For a [unclear]
and a half, the liberal left [unclear] jewish political and social [unclear].
But this attitude was always [unclear]. One of the payments that revolutionary
left asked of the [unclear] in return for individual rights [unclear]
appearance. What the revolutionary left said to us was: “We will [unclear] your
individual freedom, at the expense of your collec[unclear]ideation.
Assumption was that in a free [unclear] society there
would be no [unclear] the maintenance of jewish [unclear]rism. Throughout the
19th century the revolutionary left literally [unclear] full of
invidious remarks about [unclear] insistence of self-affirma[unclear] survival.
[unclear] as assumed that the destiny [unclear] duty
of Judaism was to dis[unclear] in the universal utopia. [unclear] Zionism came
on the scene [unclear] product not only of specific [unclear] in Judaism but
also of [unclear] Nationalism, the phrase [unclear] “Zionism” no longer had
about [unclear] glow that it possessed in [unclear] of Garibaldi and Mazzini. [unclear]
was now a great amount of [unclear]cerning reactionary national[unclear]
reactionary Nationalism is the [unclear]ism of others.
[unclear] should note, however, that the [unclear]
left, the Social Democratic [unclear]conciled its support of jewish [unclear]rights
with an imaginative [unclear] to the Zionist Movement [unclear] recognised as a
movement [unclear]nal liberation and self-expression.
[unclear] we have witnessed
the rise of the new left which identifies Israel [unclear]tablishment, with
acquisition, smug satisfaction, with, in fact, [unclear] basic enemies against
which [unclear] is waged. Let there be no [unclear] the New Left is the author [unclear]
progenitor of the new anti-Semitism. One of the chief tasks of [unclear]
dialogue with the gentile world [unclear]ve that the distinction between
anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is [unclear] distinction at all.
Anti-Zionism is merely the new anti-Semitism. The
old, classic anti-Semitism declared that equal rights belonged to all
individuals within a society, except the jews. The new anti-Semitism says that
the right to establish and maintain an independent, national, sovereign State
is the prerogative of all nations, so long as they happen to be jewish. And
when this right is exercised not by the Maldive Islands, not by the State of
Gabon, not by Barbados, not by 23 american Republics and not by 50 african
States, but by the oldest and most authentic of all nationhoods, then this is
said to be Exclusivism, Particularism, and a flight of the jewish people from
its universal mission.
Therefore, neo-anti-Semitism is a legitimate label to
put upon the denial by the new left and others of Israel’s right to its
national identity. The common element between the two anti-Semitism is
discrimination.
A factor in the hostility of the revolutionary left,
perhaps becoming increasingly marginal in the general socialist world, is the
fact of our victory. The tendency is to associate palestinian Terrorism with
the concept of liberation. It is of course an antiliberation movement. It is a
conscious attempt to destroy an enterprise of national liberation that has
already been achieved. The Ideology is sustained by false analysis and
analogies. Of course it is true that the Mau Mau liberated Kenya from the
british, and that the FLN liberated Algeria from France, but they didn’t
liberate France from France, and they didn’t expel Britain from Britain. The
Fatah and kindred movements seek to free Israel from Israel. They do not seek
to expel a foreign or external colonial presence. Their efforts are dedicated
to “politicide” that is, the assassination of a State.
The problem of our victory is also of psychological
importance. The generous, liberal gentile mind is well conditioned to the
spectacle of jewish fragility, vulnerability and defeat. It has not grown
accustomed, to the phenomenon of jewish security and self-expression. In a
sense we have done many people a vast injury by ceasing to be an object of
their benevolent indulgence. We have withdrawn ourselves from the scope of
their compassion. There is therefore a certain Logic in the slogan which was so
current shortly after the 1967 War: David unfair to Goliath.
Let us not attempt the impossible. I suggest to you
that to win the sympathy of the new left is something that is in its totality
not feasible. I don’t say that the phenomenon of alienation cannot be
restricted, but the alienation is inherent in the ideological world of those
movements which are in conflict and collision with our own world of jewish
values.
If we are true to our set of values, we cannot win
the approval of any Ideology that is based on Negativism [whatever that means,]
on Nihilism, on anarchical revolt, on contempt for the human legacy. If these
people are wrong about everything else, why should they be right about Israel?
I do not believe that any
argument, however sophisticated, can probably change the convictions of Noam
Chomsky or of I.F. Stone whose basic complex is one of guilt about jewish
survival. They feel themselves associated with our unpardonable audacity at not
having been destroyed or eclipsed or, more accurately, at not having been
merged into some homogenised universalist utopia.
The fact is that Israel can only be approved within the framework
of a positivist Philo, and not of a nihilist Philo. Israel, whether it is
fashionable to say this or not, is still an essentially positivist venture.
[Whatever that means.] In Israel growth is still the central theme. It is still more
important to say what you build than what you destroy, to say what you are for
than to declare what you are against. Affirmation is more important than
protest. If the new left asks of us to separate ourselves from traditional
values, the answer can only be that an Israel that is cut off from its
continuous legacy cannot possibly be Israel in any essential meaning of the
term. An attitude of iconoclastic revolt against Traditionalism is not
consistent with the Israeli personality. Innovation, yes. The adaptation of the
old legacy to the new needs, certainly. But a sundering of one’s self from
roots in past History would be more destructive of this nation than of any
other.
Therefore, the only answer to
ourselves and to others is to find out what [] Israel’s essential dimensions
[are]. What are those dimensions that enlarge it beyond the restrictive effects
of its Geography and its small physical size? I suggest to you that there are
four or five such dimensions. There is, first of all, the jewish dimension. To
the extent that Israel is jewish, it is not just a small middle eastern
country. By developing its jewish dimension it saves itself from the perils of
Provincialism and regional limitation. It is no longer a small country but a
people that strides across unlimited vistas of time and space.
All the literature about Israel attempts to relate
Israel to various terms of reference: Are we going to be orientalised? Are we
going to be European? Are we going to be western? All the learned gentlemen who
discuss Israel in such terms overlook the other possibility, namely, that we
are going to just be Israel, that is to say, we are going to stand firm in the
belief that we have meaning only insofar as we stand high and aim straight
within our own distinctive frame of values. Israel is affected, of course, by
universal currents but remains persistent in its particularity.
It is this tension between Universalism and national
specificity which animates the whole of jewish History. To be jewish means
having the special relationship to the sources of israeli identity, to
prophetic Judaism, to liberal Nationalism, to Democracy, and to contemporary
Humanism. Thus, to be a jewish State means that there cannot be full separation
between State and Religion. Our unique faith is one of the elements at the
source of Israel’s particular identity.
The relationship cannot be modernised, it can be
humanised, it will have to be taken out of its present harsh and rigid
orthodoxies. But what is called the status quo is not a parliamentary
conspiracy. It is a contract between the secular majority and the religious
minority with both aiming at preserving the unity of the jewish people, because
without such a contract it is not certain that this unity could be preserved.
The contract has got to be modified and humanised as
have all contracts, but the matter cannot be resolved by the secular majority
sweeping aside the special place of faith in jewish national identity.
To be jewish also means to be Hebrew, and here I want
to express a concern for Israel’s cultural future. There is a danger of
inundation. There is a growing and regrettable admiration of certain
meretricious externalities of western civilisation. We must resist being
smothered by what is in general a beneficient contact with Europe and American
and thus lose that which is specific in our own culture. In a sense, all
nations are like other nations, joined together in the same destiny, but that
which each nation holds particular to itself might be its real contribution to
the universal storehouse of culture. [This motherfucker’s obviouslyhigh.
Nothing new.]
The other danger derives from our regional position.
It is the danger that we shall be “arabised.” I am not speaking about the
immigrants from arab lands, I refer to the effects of the present political and
territorial situation. We must reach a firm decision on how jewish we want the
jewish State to be. We are now in 1972. Let us take the year 1990, in which I
have no doubt we will be having a Dialogue here on this very subject. 1990 is
not a very remote date. I shall be at the age at which israelis usually begin
to qualify for the highest office.
In 1990, if we take the Israel before 1967, with
Jerusalem, that area will have 4 million jews and 900,000 arabs. But if we look
at the situation in 1990 within the present cease-fire lines then, according to
the statistical evidence that our Cabinet has received and which has in any
case been published, there will be in this country either 6.7 or 7.5 million
persons – the latter figure based upon the idea that there will be an
immigration of at least 50,000 for every year until then. Of that 6.7
million or 7.5 million, there
will be 40-43% arabs.
The destiny
of such a society will not be the subject of jewish decisions, because a 40%
arab minority will in effect constitute a majority, because our 60% jewish [unclear]
a pluralistic population. [unclear] decisions by controversy, [unclear]sensus.
Therefore, on [unclear] which jews are divided, [unclear] will decide.
Our political life will [unclear]nated by a constant [unclear]
arab vote. I take it that [unclear]cide on a unitary State that [unclear] have
to be free and [unclear]. Whatever you say of that [unclear] will not be jewish
in the [unclear] the main decisions about [unclear] its Economy, its social [unclear]
not rest with the jewish [unclear].
To say that this doesn’t [unclear] to speak
contemptuously [unclear]raphy – I heard one of my [unclear] solve the problem
by saying “Geography, Shemography” – is [unclear] of utmost frivolity and [unclear]ness.
There is no modern [unclear] a State existing in a [unclear] which 40% of its
citizens [unclear] deepest loyalties and [unclear] to its flag and the culture [unclear]
memories and the association [unclear] neighbours. Therefore, a [unclear] upon
whether we find a [unclear] I think we must find, of [unclear] a majority of
the arabs in [unclear] West Bank and Gaza a separate destiny.
I believe that a separate destiny is not incompatible
with the high measure of social, economic integration and the main[unclear] processes
of mutual [unclear] sibility. I believe it is [unclear] reconcile separate
soverei[unclear] the creation of larger [unclear]nomic energy and organis[unclear]
above all, keep the front[unclear] I believe that this decision [unclear] total
but maximal satisfaction and determination. Self-Determinism is not an absolute
right: the [unclear] arab Nationalism in its [unclear] is that it demands 100% [unclear]
determination, saying that [unclear] wherever they are must [unclear] their
sovereign flags.
We must retain the [unclear] developing our
pioneering [unclear] namely, the special israeli [unclear] not acknowledging
the [unclear] of nature. There is also [unclear] dimension, the search for [unclear]
of individual liberty and [unclear]. And if this element in our [unclear]
tapestry were to be lost, [unclear] our appeal to all progressive elements
would be diminished. And [unclear] there is the special scientific [unclear]
intellectual vocation which is [unclear] for a nation that seeks to [unclear]
and matter and quantity by [unclear] and quality.
[unclear] dialogue with the outside [unclear] must be
based on an element [unclear] understanding. We need not [unclear] any
exaggerated view of our [unclear] the human scheme, and yet [unclear] difficult
not to be impressed by the disproportionate impact of this small jewish people
upon the intellectual and spiritual History of mankind. [A great step for me.]
The human composition of our country is not less
important than its geographical configuration, for when all is said and done,
we will have to make our own revolution. We are a people that has had a
continuous experience of contact with all the intellectual currents of History,
from ancient prophecy to modern Science, from the dim roots of man’s past to
the shining possibility of his future. The fact is that Israel is a
revolutionary movement in its own way because it is an effort to transform
human and physical realities.
I can only hope that a dialogue of this kind – and a
dialogue is not a discussion between two, but a discussion between many – will not
be externally directed to a disproportionate extent. The problem is really not
what the new left thinks of us, but whether we are ourselves true to our most
essential image. To be our not to be is not the question. Everybody wants to
be. How to be and how not to be, that is the essential question.
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