Isreal: How Much Past Is Enough?

By Roger Rosenblatt

The ingenuity of President Reagan's Middle East peace plan, as several observers have noted, is that it seeks to make a distinction (a chasm, more likely) between Prime Minister Begin and his annexation policies on the one hand, and the enduring safety of Israel on the other. But the Prime Minister and the issue of Israel's safety are not so easily separated. Begin gained much of his power by appealing to his people's fear of national annihilation, a fear that is genuine in him, and not a political expedient. Indeed, the reason its expression carries such weight in Israel is that it is not an idea of the moment, but one that lies so deep in Jewish thought it is often inexpressible. Begin understands Jewish thought. What he understands specifically is that a great many Jews live with their eyes fixed on the past, for good reason; and when they are called upon to make fundamental choices, they will turn to the past for guidance, though it contains all the hell of their history.

But the question is, How much past is enough? At what point does a devotion to history cease to be a weapon against present and future error, and begin to cripple those who seek its protection? This is hardly a problem for Israelis alone, but at the moment they are stage center in the world, and until they begin to find a solution it will not make the slightest difference whether Begin is ousted from office or whether a few more West Bank settlements go up or down, or even whether the Palestinians gain autonomy. It is no easy matter. The past is absolute, adamant, like Begin himself. Anyone who wishes to control it is taking on an adversary that grows bigger by the second.

Of course, one can always try the American approach and pretend to ignore the past entirely. Jews have generally taken the opposite tack: to yank the past into the present so forcibly that time has virtually no demarcations. Part of the Passover ritual is the exhortation that everyone in each generation feel he personally has just gone out of Egypt. The presentness of death is a central element of Judaism. The various prayers of lamentation, the practice of shivah (the seven-day period of mourning), the published announcements of grief, all lie at the heart of a faith that looks solely to this world for redemption.

The trouble is that this world has not provided the Jews with much redemption. Instead, the main events in Jewish history, until the founding of Israel, consisted mostly of disasters: the destruction of the Temple, the Diaspora, the Holocaust, each devastation considerably more terrible and unimaginable than the one it followed. These days Begin cites Genesis as the font of his politics, but his abiding source is the Holocaust, as it is for much of Israel. To the importance of individual death in Judaism, the Holocaust added a national significance. Here was the death of deaths, 6 million gone. Just as the past becomes the present, so did the image of the Holocaust enter the soul of the country. It was like the Resurrection: the Jews arising from the grave that had been dug for them, inspired by the Holocaust as are Christians by the agony of the cross.

All this attention to the past makes perfect sense, to a point. How is one to deal with the unimaginable if one forgets that it actually occurred? Surely the Arab states' initial response to Israel's nationhood did nothing to encourage Jewish forgetfulness, nor does the recent Fez conference suggest that the Arabs are less ensnared by the past than the Israelis. What is to prevent Israel, one bomb wide, from becoming the worst disaster yet in Jewish history? So goes the question, still reaching toward yesterday. Yet the answer lies in the present, in what Israel is right now. For all the turmoil it suffers, the country remains a miracle. Read some 19th century accounts of Palestine by travelers like Mark Twain and note their dismay at the dreariness around them. Then look at the Hula Valley in the north, with its plums and avocados springing from a former swamp; or at the universities and concert halls; or, abstractly, at the only working democracy in the region. The cause for outrage at Israel's undemocratic practices on the West Bank is that they violate the country's own standards, not those of the Arab world.

Could such a place have been built on memories of the dead alone? Hardly; the mind does not function that way. The past, well used, strikes a somber chord in everyone. The sound is both lovely and necessary, as it reminds us where we are and have been, gives us heroes and prototypes, our models and cautions. But the past contains the future as well; that is, whatever was once wished for and realized now resides in the past. One looks back in order to recollect one's hope, not only the defeat of one's hope. Otherwise there would be no new nations anywhere.

The problem is where to draw the line between common-sense reliance on experience, and faith, which ought not to be blind. One would think that this might be less of a problem for Jews, who adopted belief over reason on the grounds that there was a God to look out for them. But events have either called the beneficence of that God into question or perhaps have suggested that the God of vengeance ought to be imitated to the letter. Not being gods, however, people don't master vengeance very well. More often it masters and consumes them. The matter of line drawing remains, and as an act of courage is far more demanding than bearing the past on one's back.

Of such courage Israel is patently capable. To enforce that courage it needs the world's real assurances, Arab assurances in particular, that "Never again!" is not a cry of anguish limited to Jews. To enforce it from the inside requires something more, a sense of Israel's own worth, not militarily, which is already too well proved, not as an outpost in the bipolar diplomatic wars, but of its and interior value as a civilization, as a structure built and enhanced not only by those who honor history but by those who know when and how to take chances. There may be another side to Santayana's excessively quoted aphorism, that those who only remember the past are also condemned to repeat it. To live exclusively with the past is to become the past, to launch pre-emptive strikes, as one's enemies did, out of fear and hate and nothing reasonable.

For Jews the holiest place in Jerusalem is not there. It is the site of the destroyed Temple, and the Temple is not there. Nor is anyone sure exactly where the tabernacle was located within the Temple. Yet the spot is so sacred, no Jew will walk in the grounds for fear of treading on it. If it is possible, as an act of imagination, to believe that strongly in a place no longer there, it should be equally possible to believe in a peace with the Arabs that is not yet there either. For too long now Israel has peered into a vacated grave for proof of its life. That life is aboveground, and straight ahead.

-- By Roger Rosenblatt

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