By Steven Plaut
September 13, 2004
One of the great ironies of Jewish history is that the secular Zionism of the nineteenth century was formulated precisely for the purpose of offering an alternative to the assimilationism and Jewish "self-hatred" of the Diaspora.
Zionism arose as a response to both assimilationism and anti-Semitism. Who then could have dreamed that the fulfillment and realization of Zionism would be accompanied by the emergence of the most malignant manifestations of Israeli self-hatred and Jewish anti-Semitism, this in the state of Israel and the land of Zion.
The very same Zionism that was designed to offer an alternative to Jewish assimilationism saw in fact the emergence of a uniquely bizarre movement of assimilationism right inside the Jewish state itself, in the form of "Post-Jewish Israelism" and "Post-Zionist" Jewish anti-Semitism.
Until very recently in Jewish history, it was widely presumed that secular Zionism and the establishment of Israel had achieved an irreversible victory over the movements of Jewish assimilationism and self-hatred, at least among Jews living inside the Jewish state, but also to a large extent among Diaspora Jews as well. Secular Zionism represented a blending of modernity with Jewishness that involved neither the assimilationism of the radical anti-Orthodox "reformers" among Jews in the Diaspora nor traditional Orthrodox rejectionism of modernity.
It had achieved this via the engineering of "Israeliness," which was a new phase of identity for Jews who lived inside their own Jewish State. "Israeliness" was ever-so-modern, with high-tech industries cropping up everywhere like mushrooms, with European standards of living and lifestyles, with prestigious universities and scientific institutions, not to mention a military of legendary prowess. And all this was taking place inside a state whose raison d'etre was its Jewishness, its serving as a national home for Jews.
Certainly Israeliness had its problems, not least of which was a dubious, if not outright hostile, attitude towards Jewish tradition. Israel's intellectual, journalistic, academic and artistic elites long displayed a deep animosity towards matters of religion and towards religious people, an antipathy shared by parts of the broader secularist population. This hostility was fanned in part by resentment at the powers of the politicized religious Establishment. Anti-Orthodox bigotry has long been the primary form of bigotry in the country. It escalated after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by a religious law student, and it found perhaps its greatest expression in the surprising electoral achievements of the Shinui Party, reconstituted as an anti-Orthodox Party under the leadership of Joseph "Tommy" Lapid.
Beyond knee-jerk hostility to Jewish religion and tradition, "Israeliness" also had other dubious roots. There was always a strong "Canaanite" trend present in Israeli society, especially among its intellectual elite, which insisted that Israelis represented a new "post-Jewish" nationality, and so were essentially an altogether non-Jewish ethnic group. (The "Canaanites" were a movement of Israelis in the 1950s and thereafter who attempted to detach Israeliness from Jewishness and create a new "non-denominational" Hebrew-speaking "nationality" of "Israelis," one that could encompass the Arabs as well.) As such, these new "Canaanized Israelis" believed they had little in common with Diaspora Jews and even less with Diaspora history. Many a "Canaanized" Israeli Jew insisted that he had far more in common with the Druse and Bedouins of the country than he did with any Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn. Another of the many forms of backlash against Diaspora Jewishness was a ferocious hostility to Yiddish, the language of exile.
In the first decades of its existence, the celebration of "Israeliness" in Israel took many forms, including those that downplayed the role of Jewishness in the state. The Israeli school curriculum at secular schools, where the majority of Israeli children attend, was largely stripped of Jewish content. Jewish history in the typical Israel school ended at Masada or with Bar-Kochba and then mysteriously rematerialized at the first Zionist Congress in Basel. Jewish religion, other than the Bible, was eliminated almost altogether from the curriculum, except in the religious schools. The result is that today many an Israeli teenager cannot complete the sentence that begins with the words "Shma Yisrael", and few can correctly explain what the Amida is.
The celebration of Israeliness was also widely believed to offer the ultimate path towards resolution of Arab-Jewish differences. After all, there was no reason why Arabs could not follow the example of the more "Canaanite" Jews and embrace with enthusiasm the new "Israeliness", an "Israeliness" that would transcend religion and pre-Israeli ethnicity or denomination.
National challenges and deluded "Canaanitism" aside, until recently few would have questioned the basic conclusion that secular Zionism was an unqualified Jewish national success. The leadership in the state of Israel may have been filled with certain self-delusions, but ordinary Israelis were not assimilating into any alien gentile ethnicity or nationality as were so many Diaspora Jews. Israelis would always remain Jews, even if only deluded Jews knowing little about Judaism. Hebrew was their everyday language of communications. Jewish holidays were the bank holidays. Jewish symbols were the symbols of state. Moreover the secular Zionist merging of JJudaism with modernity appeared to be stable for the very long run. It was not threatened by modernity even in its most extreme forms.
The axioms concerning the ability of secular Zionism to overcome the traditional threats to Jews of anti-Semitism, assimilationism and self-hatred came crashing back down to earth in the 1990s. There emerged inside Israel a movement of mass Jewish anti-Semitism, which effectively exerted its hegemony, first over the radical Left and the chattering classes of Israeli academia and journalism, and ultimately over the entire country in the form of the Leftist Ascendancy.
Under this Leftist Ascendancy, the Left has continued to exercise control over much of national policy making, even when it is in opposition, indeed even when coalitions headed by the Likud have held power.
The rapid growth of Jewish anti-Semitism inside Israel during the "Oslo era" raises serious questions about just how successful secular Zionism really was. The Oslo era was accompanied by a massive assault on Israel's pride and confidence by its own leaders. Israeli intellectuals lectured the country about its original sinfulness. Israeli campuses were flooded with "New Historians" and "Post-Zionists", pseudo-academics rewriting history texts and school curriculum to promote the Arab "narrative" and the Arab version of history, the moral equivalents of Holocaust Deniers in other countries. Israeli politicians in the 1990s leapt forward, ready to strip the country of all of its Jewish national emblems, from the star on the flag to the words of the national anthem. And after 1300 years of discrimination against Jews by Arabs, Israeli politicians were implementing "reverse discrimination" programs, under which Arabs received preferences and Jews suffered quotas.
One after the other, Israeli politicians during the early and mid-1990s mouthed the post-modernist gibberish of the anti-Israel choruses from overseas, about how Israelis needed to stop ruling over another "people," had to learn to understand the "other," had to commemorate the "tragedies" the Jews had imposed upon the innocent Arabs and so make restitution. If no Palestinian people had ever existed in history, Israeli politicians were determined to invent one for peace.
World anti-Semitism exploded as a direct consequence of Israel's own politicians granting lip service and credibility to the anti-Jewish canards that had always been the propaganda underpinnings for hatred of Israel, including Israeli official acquiescence in accepting the rhetoric of the anti-Semites. Here were Israeli leaders agreeing that Israel was indeed a colonial "conqueror" and "outsider," an "oppressor" of Palestinians and the cause of Palestinian "suffering." Here were Israel's own leaders confirming that Palestinian barbarism and atrocities were ultimately the fault of Israeli "occupation" and Jewish insensitivity.
While Jewish assimilationism in the Diaspora has often been termed "self-hatred", the expression is misleading. Diaspora assimilationists are generally people who are simply indifferent to their Jewishness and want nothing to do with Judaism. They generally do not actively wish Jews harm (although there are some exceptions). Going further back in history, Jewish assimilationists were in general simply socially-mobile people, willing to jettison their Jewishness in exchange for opening of career doors and gaining access to positions of status closed to Jews. By and large, these were not people who hated other Jews, although of course there were always some exceptions among these as well.
The Oslo era in Israel, however, saw the emergence, perhaps for the first time in history, of virulent and literal anti-Jewish bigotry among the intellectual, media and political Jewish elites of Israel. Israeli universities became petri dishes for Jewish anti-Zionists and anti-Semites, "Post-Jewish" leftist extremists openly collaborating with the enemies of their own country in time of war, people openly advocating the elimination of their own country and its merger into some sort of Palestinian state. Israeli campuses became in large part the occupied territories of the Leftist Ascendancy. There are today Israeli professors and lecturers who openly serve as Court Jews for the worst anti-Semites on the planet, including Islamist fundamentalists, neonazis and Holocaust Deniers. Israeli leftist faculty members tour the world, denouncing Israel before audiences of anti-Semites as a nazi, fascist, terrorist, criminal, apartheid country, engaged in systematic human rights atrocities.
Increasing numbers of self-hating Israeli academics openly call for Israeli national existence to be ended and for Israel to be replaced with a single state with an Arab majority and PLO hegemony. Israeli left-wing professors turn out mountains of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish political propaganda, often passing it off as "scholarly research." It is an open secret that on campus, leftist extremists with laughable and ludicrous publication records get hired, tenured and promoted, as acts of solidarity by other leftist faculty already inside the system. Israeli university governance is notoriously corrupt and politicized.
Some of these tenured leftists then tour the world urging anti-Semites to boycott all of Israel, including the very same academic institutions in which they are employed and from which they draw salaries.
The campus was not the only headquarters for Jewish self-hatred. In the 1990s the Israeli public school system was also conscripted into proliferating anti-Israel pro-Arab ideology. Israeli politicians from the Left and some leftist "academics" seriously proposed that Israel create a
National "Naqba Day," in which it atone for the very fact of its creation and the "catastrophe" that this creation caused to Palestinian Arabs. "Naqba Day" events are increasing common on Israeli campuses and occasionally in Israeli public schools. Israel is the only country on the planet in which schools and colleges regularly hold symposia devoted to expressions of mourning and remorse that the country in which they live exists at all, and in which they barely hide their desire to see their country annihilated.
The Israeli media has long operated under the nearly complete hegemony of the Far Left, a unique form of quasi-totalitarianism operating within the overall framework of a country with democratic institutions. The Israeli media have by and large taken their cues from the Academic Left, and campus Newspeak, including "postmodernist" gibberish, is now a regular part of the daily journalistic dose. Israel's daily newspapers have served as regular bludgeons against the country, promoting Arab propaganda as editorial and Op-Ed opinion and often even as news, blaming Israeli obstinacy and mistreatment of Arabs for all of the problems of the world.
Haaretz long ago ceased to be a newspaper or an organ of political pluralism, and operates as an instrument of far leftist political indoctrination. Yediot Ahronot is only slight less biased. Maariv is the only Hebrew newspaper that maintains any semblance of pluralism, and even it is often much more often a platform for the Left than for the Non-Left. The three Israeli television stations compete against one another over which is the furthest to the Left and which can employ the largest number of leftist political commentators. The main form of political pluralism in radio broadcasting ended when the Sharon government shut down Arutz 7.
The main manifestations of the Leftist Ascendancy have been the universities and the media, but other institutions, such as the Supreme Court, the intelligence services, and much of the officer class in the military, have also come under its sway. A large part of the secret of the success of the Ascendancy is the enormous funding it openly receives from institutions and people outside the country, those for whom Israel's best interests are decidedly NOT part of their agenda. Picayune "organizations," some of them communist front, are flooded with funding and fill the press and billboards with large political ads.
And Jewish anti-Semitism is more and more openly the driving force behind the fundamentalist theology of the Leftist Ascendancy. This obsession with self-flagellation among the ascendant leftists has produced a situation whereby each and every atrocity committed by Arabs, without exception, is greeted with calls from the Israeli chattering classes for more concessions and appeasements. Some, including the tenured extremists at the universities, go so far as to justify and celebrate Arab acts of terror as necessary to force Israelis to come to their senses and make peace.
For the past 12 years the Israeli elites have lived in a
make-pretend world in which Jews are to blame for everything and Arabs are merely expressing "frustrations" at being "mistreated" for so many years by Jews. The fact that no Arabs ever launched any intifada in Arab countries, wherein their treatment by Arab regimes has always infinitely worse than by Israel (even if all Arab accusations against Israel are accepted at face value), never seems to matter to any of them.
The psychological war by Israel's elites against national pride, dignity and self-respect, indeed against national existence, has long been accompanied by a set of diplomatic policies expressing little more than self-loathing. Every atrocity by the Palestinians is greeted with new offers of concessions and goodwill gestures from Israel, which has been pursuing a policy holding that no act of Arab violence should go unrewarded. Ehud Barak surrendered to Hizbollah terror and withdrew Israeli troops from Lebanon, and, in so doing placed all of northern Israel, including the Haifa Bay and its refineries, within range of Hizbollah rockets. Israel rewarded decades of Syria's aggression, Holocaust Denial, harboring of German war criminals, and terrorism through its Hizbollah surrogates by offering to grant Syria not only the Golan Heights but also parts of pre-1967 Israel, with access to the waters of the Sea of Galilee.
The national policy of self-abasement was accepted with equanimity by much of the Israeli public, hoping against hope that the Osloid politicians promising light at the end of the appeasement tunnel would prove correct. The very same nation that had defeated the Arab hordes in 1948-9, in the Suez Campaign, in the Six Day War and in the Yom Kippur War, now morphed into whining defeatists.
The one avenue for making peace that was declared by the elite as unthinkable was "Peace through Military Victory"
over the country's tormentors. And all the while Israel's own government was subsidizing the venomous anti-Zionist extremists at the Israeli universities and elsewhere.
For thirty years or so after Israel's creation, few would have challenged the idea that secular Zionism had achieved an unqualified success in its begetting the "new Israeli." Israeli Jews were at last "normal" citizens of their own country, patriotic to the point of being insufferable, proud to the point of hubris, confident in themselves and in their military, sure of their moral justifiability. And then, just a few years later, these same Israelis were reduced to begging Yassir Arafat to allow his terrorist squad leaders to meet with Israeli army officers in order to maintain the facade of a "peace process" still operating. Israeli politicians were abandoning any pretense of conditioning further concessions to the Arabs on their abstaining from violence. Israeli leaders and intellectuals were endorsing the principle of Israel paying reparations and tribute to the very same Arabs who had attacked them and lost.
The 1990s were the era in which it became evident that a great many Israelis and most of the Israeli elite had lost their will to survive as a nation. After centuries in which Diaspora Jews maintained the most militant sorts of pride and self-assurance even while being mistreated, despised and humiliated, here were the Israelis of Oslo, possessing one of the great armies of the world, abandoning all pride and explicitly promoting self-humiliation.
The same Israeli military that had rescued the Jewish hostages in Entebbe, Uganda, was suddenly incapable of rescuing a wounded IDF soldier bleeding to death in Joseph's Tomb in Nablus or protecting children under fire in Jerusalem neighborhoods. McClellenism had replaced audacity as the calling card of the Israeli Defense Forces. Here was an Israel unwilling to use force to prevent Palestinians from firing rifles, mortars and rockets into civilian homes, and instead asking to hold talks with those doing the shooting, to work out differences and reach understandings.
An Israel less than two generations after the Holocaust was suddenly willing to hold "peace talks" with people who deny there ever was a Holocaust and who insist that Jews use the blood of gentile children to make Passover matzahs. The same Jews who fought against enormous odds and won in 1948 were acquiescing in a "peace process" that involved unilateral peace gestures from Israel in exchange for the Arabs continuing to make war against the Jews.
Part II: Jewish self-hatred and the Oslo debacle
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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