Reflections on an Anniversary

Three views of how a reality mirrors the dream

With parades and prayers, toasts and tears of joy, Israelis this week mil celebrate the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Jewish state. For many if not most Jews, the birth of Israel was a dream come true, a promise fulfilled. But how, since then, have the dream and the promise fared? After four terrible wars, Israel is only a few steps closer to peace with its Arab neighbors and must decide which is the greater threat to its survival: intransigence or conciliation. Facing serious social and economic problems, Israel has become a society policing more than I million Arabs in occupied territories. Has this affected the fulfillment of the founders' dreams?

Last week, TIME asked three leading Israeli intellectuals who hold quite different views to reflect on the contrast, as they saw it, between the dream of Israel and the reality. Novelist Amos Oz, 39 (My Michael, The Hill of Evil Counsel), is a dove; a member of a kibbutz in the Jerusalem corridor, he served in a tank unit during Israel's last two wars. Shmuel Katz, 63, was a comrade of Menachem Begin in the underground Irgun movement; a Herut Party member of the Knesset and an Israeli superhawk, he resigned as the Premier's foreign information adviser to protest Begin's moves toward peace. Former Major General Aharon Yariv, 57, was chief of military intelligence from 1964 to 1972; a middle-of-the-roader, he heads the Institute for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. Their responses:

OZ / UNIVERSAL REDEMPTION Shortly after the October Revolution, a Russian Jew, businessman and poet named Alexander Klausner fled from Odessa to Vilna. He was one of the early Zionists who believed wholeheartedly that the time had come for the Jews to return to the land of their ancestors. In his poems, he described the renaissance of the Jews in that beloved land of eternal sunshine, where streets are paved with emeralds and where there is an angel at every street corner and where God Himself, old but fit, strolls the streets of Jerusalem with his walking stick in the evening like a devoted senior citizen. In Jerusalem, so believed this businessman/ poet, the Jews would become a normal and healthy people of peasants and soldiers and then even surely an exemplary nation, "a light unto the nations," pioneers of universal redemption.

Yet, when fleeing from Russia, he did not turn to the Promised Land but settled down in Poland, because the living conditions in Palestine at the time struck him as un-European, uncivilized and even somewhat Asiatic. Alas, the Poles and Lithuanians turned out to be almost as bad as the Bolsheviks. "Go to Palestine, you sickness of Europe," they told him. And so, he finally settled in Jerusalem, while his elder son went on lecturing on comparative literature at Vilna University, until the Nazis came and slaughtered him and his family. In Jerusalem Alexander Klausner went on writing his Russian poems about the beauty of the emeralds with which the streets of Jerusalem were not paved.

When his grandson was born in Jerusalem, Alexander Klausner told him that one day Jewish Jerusalem would blossom into a true city, true probably meaning European, with a river and a cathedral and thick woods round about. This boy was expected to be a new leaf, an Israeli tough and simple, cleansed of

Jewish neurosis. The story has no ending because I am that boy.

For me, that long and sad love affair between Europe and ourselves, Christians and Jews, is over. My simplistic interpretation of Jewish liberation is this: I would prefer to live in a world with 100 civilizations and not a single nation-state. In fact, the Jews have demonstrated this pattern for thousands of years. Living in a little beleaguered nation-state makes me feel like an old man in a kindergarten. Yet I should stick to it for as long as every other nation does. As long as everyone else in the neighborhood is going to have a lock on his door, bars on his windows, guns, airplanes and what not, I am going to have the same and even more. I am determined to play the bloody game according to its bloody rules.

Israel, in reality, is a volcano in action. No longer a tribe and not yet a nation, no longer Orthodox Judaism and not yet a new civilization. Gone is the messianic belief in one redeeming formula; yet to be discovered is the gradual way toward recovery. The conflict with the surrounding Arab world helped, ironically, to establish, to strengthen and to integrate Israel as one community. But peace has become an imperative need, precisely for those Zionists whose vision consists, not of a miraculous messianic formula, but of a slow painful therapy for a very old and very sick nation.

That is as far as my Zionism goes; beyond that, holy ancestral tombs mean very little to me. And yet it would be stupid to say that the name of the game is survival or security: the name of the game is universal redemption. For as long as I live, I shall be thrilled by all those who came to the Promised Land to turn it either into a pastoral paradise of egalitarian Tolstoyan communes, or into a well-educated, middle-class Central European enclave, a replica of Austria and Bavaria.

Or those who wanted to raise a Marxist paradise, who built kibbutzim on biblical sites and secretly yearned for Stalin himself to come one day to admit that "Bloody Jews, you have done it better than we did."

I would not like to produce the impression that Zionism is a mystical poetry--far from that. Zionism has been a diagnosis, a prescription and a therapy. It is a slow and painful process, nevertheless enchanted, precisely because of the tensions, the ambivalence of the Israeli condition, the variety of visions and the pain of realities. The Israelis' demand is absolute: either they have the best country in the world, the purest, the fulfillment of the highest moral standards, or else there is a total disillusionment.

Paradoxically, the outside world tends to view Israel with much the same perspective. Either you perform an eternal miracle to be the best of us, to show us the way, or else the show has failed, and we want our money back.

KATZ / KEEPING A BALANCE Dr. Chaim Weizmann, like all the idealists of his generation, would be most unhappy at some of the standards in today's international relations. He would be appalled, for example, at the way great Western powers dance to the political tune of their Arab oil-suppliers. He would certainly be unhappy at the tremendous burdens placed on his people in Israel in withstanding the intransigent and unscrupulous determination of the "Arab world" to eliminate the Jewish state.

But there is little he could fault in the measures Israel has had to adopt to ensure her survival. He would recall that Israel's problems since her birth have been compounded by his own error in assuming that giving away territory to the Arabs would bring peace. Weizmann in 1947, in proposing the partition of Eretz Israel, failed to grasp that the Arab purpose was not to make a deal of land for peace but to eliminate the Jewish state.

The response of the Arab states was the invasion of 1948 (after they had persuaded most of the Arab population in Israel to evacuate--and thus made them "refugees"). Only by a superhuman effort and monstrously heavy casualties did the Jewish state survive its birth. The Arabs continued to harass her, by organized economic boycott, by diplomatic pressure, by unbridled propaganda, by systematic indoctrination of their populations with the theme of Israel's extermination as a patriotic and moral imperative.

By 1967 the Arab states were ready to attack again. [After the Six-Day War&], the Arab states began their campaign to get Israel to withdraw once more into its ten-mile-wide deathtrap, the 1949 armistice lines. Their pressures are worldwide, they exploit the oil weapon and promote a many-pronged campaign of terror by the P.L.O., whose most famous initiatives--from across the borders--have been the murder of civilians.

Jewish settlements are perfectly legitimate and legal in all of Western Palestine--Judea and Samaria which Jordan had renamed the West Bank--indeed also on the Golan Heights and in Sinai, even if Israel's rights were only those of an occupying power under the Geneva Convention. In Judea and Samaria, Israel's rights are incontestable. Israel has the right to sovereignty over the whole of Western Palestine. She derives this right from the exclusive association of the Jews as a people with their homeland in Palestine, sustained by a continuous and unchallenged claim, by a continuous presence even during 1,800 years of exile. The right is also enshrined in modern international law, beginning with the mandate in 1922 created for the purpose of "reconstituting" the national Jewish home in Palestine.

The huge Arab Moslem empire contains many minorities--non-Arab or non-Moslem. Why then should it be impossible for 1% of the Arab nation to live as a minority in the Jewish homeland, where history has thrown the two peoples together? Many Jews do not like the idea of a large Arab minority; it is certainly no ideal solution, but for the Arabs it is no tragedy. They could enjoy the full rights of citizens, with a high degree of ethnic autonomy and with any one of five Arab states within a few score miles of their homes.

The notion that there has been a "militarization" of the people of Israel is a convenient refuge of armchair theorists. Despite the burdens of military service and heavy taxation, perhaps because of these burdens, the Israeli has refused to become militarized. There is nobody who does not see military preoccupations and manifestations, except as an unfortunate necessity, and who does not pray for their earliest possible end.

No doubt, Hebrew cultural values would have flourished to the higher degree made feasible by their natural habitat if the nation were not distracted by the dictates of the Arabs' intransigence and territorial greed. But as a nation, we have kept our cultural balance. I believe we have the spiritual resources to do so until the Arabs realize that peace is their best policy as well as ours.

YARIV / PEOPLE OF PURPOSE Thirty years ago, armor columns smashed a kibbutz in the Negev. The only surviving sign, which hung from the top of the ruined water tower, stated: NOT THE TANK WILL WIN --BUT THE HUMAN BEING.

Israel still faces the same problems she faced on the eve of independence: the need to establish an advanced society, where the individual will find happiness and satisfaction, a Jewish society where human beings will not suffer from dehumanization and depersonification, a community where people will not only be bearers of the Star of David flag, but will be the purpose of the state's very existence--all this accompanied by a constant effort to ensure our survival.

For thousands of years we had a romance with God while strolling in the deserts of the Middle East. For thousands of years we had a love affair with Eretz Israel--the land of Israel. During all our history, we Jews enshrined the value of the human being. Israel's main problem remains how to fulfill those values in a Jewish community living independently on the soil of her ancient homeland.

Despite Nazi genocide, the struggle to survive in the Middle East and the absorption of millions of refugees, Israel's balance sheet after only 30 years is very positive. No doubt it is not the balance sheet we expected or wanted. If Israel's first President, Professor Chaim Weizmann, were alive today, he would be disturbed and disappointed, even though our achievement is of great historic meaning.

A sometimes too rapid development without proper planning created a gap between what was vital and necessary for the national existence and what people wanted to improve their standard of living. It is no sin for a human being to long for better living conditions, but Israeli society, as a whole, grabbed at materialistic symbols while establishing a moral justification: "We who are ready to sacrifice our lives for the state should enjoy life."

The state was cornered into granting its citizens all the privileges that this century can offer; it caused us considerable damage. Mainly, we lost the old spirit of pioneering, and we did not succeed in replacing it with a new spirit of pioneering suitable to circumstances of present-day society.

In 1948-49 it almost looked as if the basic goals of Zionism had been carried out when the state was born. Reality taught us all that the struggle for survival as Jews as well as Israelis did not come to an end in '48. To face external dangers, we established, out of pure necessity, an industrial-military complex, and we had to rely on foreign aid. From an intimate, small society we tried to establish an advanced, sophisticated, technologically minded community. The political internal structure left the main role of governing the state in the hands of small, powerful, political-economic groups.

After 30 years we are 3 million Jews. We have advanced industry and agriculture and a highly developed labor force. This brought even our neighbor, President Sadat, to the conclusion that there will not be a military solution to the Middle East problem but only a political one. We have to make a maximum effort to sign peace treaties with our neighbors, at least with Egypt. Still, it should not be peace at any cost. We need vital elements of security to save us from future threats, though we should be prepared for territorial concessions on all fronts.

Israel has the power--not only military power--that will give her the strength to face the perils of a unique, independent Jewish society trying to survive in the Middle East while living in peaceful relations with its surrounding neighbors. Will we manage? It depends mostly on our national leaders, who should know how to determine the right priorities and to act accordingly. They must make use of the chances for peace that are arising above the battlefields' horizons.

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