Dream into Nightmare?

By Melvin Maddocks

THE ISRAELIS by Amos Elon. 359 pages. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. $10.

THE SEVENTH DAY edited by Avraham Shapira. 276 pages. Scribners. $6.95.

American readers will turn these pages with wry signs of recognition. Beyond the particulars of its message, what The Israelis keeps saying is this: A fellow utopia has arrived at that ironical point where success and lost innocence coincide; the dreamers begin to complain about the Dream.

Amos Elon is a columnist for the distinguished Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz. He went to Israel when he was only two, but he was born in Vienna, educated in England as well as Israel, and as a foreign correspondent lived in Washington, Bonn and Warsaw. He is therefore a cosmopolite who believes that "it is extremely hard"--and extremely important--"for one man to understand the nationalism of another." As such, Elon is a tough assessor of his own visions.

His achievement is all the more notable because an arkful of poets and novelists--Amos Oz, Avraham B. Yehoshua, Yehuda Amichai, among others--have been there first with the agonies of self-examination. Despite them, The Israelis deserves Elon's own description: "The first critical analysis of Israel written from within." Together with The Seventh Day, an edited tape of young soldiers from a kibbutz discussing the Six-Day War, Elon's essay sardonically welcomes Israel into a new era--the era of public self-doubt.

Once upon a time, as Elon tells his disillusioned story, the early Zionists (circa 1882) were "secular rabbis of a new faith of redemption." The founders of modern Israel called themselves olim: pilgrims, "those who ascend." Generally, they were mystics with a "terrible sincerity," an "almost inhuman sense of rectitude," and "not a glimmer of doubt."

At the beginning of this century, the waves of immigrants from czarist Russia, Poland and the Austro-Hungarian Empire put a salvationist mark on Israel "as indelible," Elon suggests, "as that imprinted by the Pilgrim Fathers in the early stages of the American Republic." Counting 102 countries of origin for the 2,500,000 Israelis in 1970, the author writes: "Ethnically, Israelis may be a hybrid; as political creatures, they are children of 19th century Europe." Aglow with humanitarian socialism, Zionists also dreamed of a morally perfect society rather than just one more chauvinistic nation-state. They discovered their image of Utopia in the kibbutz. Puritans as well as prophets, they made physical labor "the beginning and end of morality."

Bandits in Eden. Elon quotes the letter Ben-Gurion wrote to his pregnant wife when in 1918, with the British organizing the Jewish Legion to occupy Palestine, he temporarily abandoned her for the cause: "I did not want to give you a small, cheap, secular kind of happiness. I prepared for you the great sacred human joy achieved through suffering and pain." From such moral heights as well as a rightful sense of wrongs endured, passionate Zionists could not take seriously the half-million Palestinian Arabs who were viewed merely as a harassment in Eden. Arab attacks, which began as early as 1886, were customarily described as "banditry." The Arabs were devoid of "an economic and cultural character of their own," pronounced Ber Borochov, the Marxist Zionist. Israel, Elon concludes, is still paying the enormous price for assuming that Arabs had no dream of their own. "The punishment of the Arabs for the sins of Europe," Elon argues, will "burden the conscience of Israelis for a long time to come."

A sense of "unspeakable trauma" hides beneath Israel's bustle of self-assertion. An excess of pride is matched by an excess of shame. The "urge to forget and suppress" is as compulsive as "the urge to remember" and to ask without ceasing: "Who is a Jew?" There is a mood of permanent danger, of being encircled and alone.

Agrarian Ritual. When Israel became an independent state in 1948, the dream of the Zionists seemed to be realized. But, Elon contends, the dream come true has strong elements of nightmare. A typical European Israeli is now 45 years old. He has been in and out of uniform since he was 17 or 18. He was a soldier with the British in World War II. He fought in the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948, 1956 and 1967. During peaceful intervals he has watched a land of "agrarian ritual" turn into an urban industrial society.

All this Elon sees as producing an old-fashioned nationalism and a "cult of toughness." The kibbutzniks, imbued with an agrarian-romantic zeal, probably never made up more than 8% of the population; now they total less than 4%. In the past they were influential far beyond their numbers. Between 1949 and 1967, about one-third of all Cabinet ministers had worked in a kibbutz. But now the kibbutznik is losing authority as an elite stylist. The "new glamour boys," says Elon, "are high-powered technologists, scientists, management consultants." The true believers have been replaced by "hardboiled 'pragmatic' politicians."

Elon is concerned by the spiritual risks. Will continuous war brutalize Israel? Will the self-concern of a nation defensively obsessed with its identity make Israelis narrow and provincial? Such questions--especially the first--are raised by the veterans whose memories of the lightning war in 1967 are presented in The Seventh Day. It is as if the grandchildren of the original messiahs had discovered the devil in themselves. Says one soldier: "People are horrified at themselves, at how they'd been able to kill."

Obviously the Israelis are adding a crisis of the soul to a crisis of the state. The introduction to The Seventh Day aptly labels the book "a generation talking to itself." The same label fits The Israelis. It is a deliberate act of self-awareness, exploring how a people got to where they are, calculating what moral options they have blocked off in the process, what options they have left.

Elon uneasily savors the saying of the founding fathers: "We came to rebuild the land and to be rebuilt by it." But what the result has been, Elon is not sure. Like an American, he likes to reassure himself that "everything is still fluid." But also like an American, he realizes that the question is no longer: Can his people survive their enemies? The question is: Can they survive themselves?

qed Melvin Maddocks

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