The Blindness of the Israeli Intellectual Left
A writer’s political and religious beliefs are not excrescences to be laughed away.
— George Orwell, Critical Essays
There is no question that Abraham Yehoshua is one of the premier Israeli writers of modern times. Such works as Mr. Mani, A Journey to the End of the Millennium, Five Seasons, and The Liberated Bride stand out as major accomplishments, not only in Israel but on the international stage as well.
His most recent novel, Friendly Fire, for which he was awarded the 2008 Premio Roma Prize, is a typically rich Yehoshuan product, delving into the “friendly fire” debate between Israelis as to the nature of Jewish history and the purpose of the Jewish state. It is an incendiary subject, for friendly fire, as we know, can be lethal, although in the novel the major characters emerge unscathed and the pivotal issues remain unresolved. Should Jews forget or remember? Can they find solace in the diaspora or must Jews work out their destiny in the Holy Land? These are important questions and Yehoshua is to be lauded for raising them.
Politically, however, given the influence that accrues to his celebrity, he has in my estimation done much harm to Israel’s prospects for an integral future, not so much in his fiction — though his A Woman in Jerusalem reconsiders the status of Israel’s capital — as in his newspaper articles, interviews, public activities, and doubtlessly in his lectures at Haifa University, where he is a professor in Near Eastern studies. Yehoshua is (or was) convinced that the Palestinians do not wish to destroy Israel but only to live in harmony and justice within and alongside the Jewish state and that Israel must surrender territory to achieve the elusive goal of mutual accord. He is an ardent supporter of the various peace movements — including the so-called New Movement that endorsed the electoral prospects of the left-wing Meretz party — parties which, fueled by noble but impracticable sentiments, have been clearly detrimental to the well-being of the country. Yehoshua had no compunction against publishing an op-ed in Italy’s La Stampa (January 20, 2008) calling on the U.S. to withdraw its ambassador from Tel Aviv and deploring the power of the “Jewish Lobby.”
I devote some time and thought to Yehoshua because I know him personally and grew enormously fond of him during our encounter at the New Writing Worlds symposium held at the University of East Anglia in Norwich in the summer of 2005. Our relationship prospered over the next year via email and telephone as we embarked on a “friendly fire” exchange of views, until the eruption of the Second Lebanon War in the summer of 2006, of which our budding friendship was one of the lesser casualties. The fire was not so friendly. Our disagreement over Israeli policy was decisive, Yehoshua lobbying strenuously for an immediate end to hostilities, leaving Hezbollah in place, while I believed that Israel should take advantage of the opportunity to finally crush the terrorist mini-regime which would otherwise continue to threaten the country’s security.
I have long felt that many of the finest creative minds in the literary world, whether poets, dramatists, or novelists, must be taken cum grano when they see fit to pronounce on political issues. Not all, of course, but perhaps most. It is as if they are occupationally prone to conceiving the political arena as part of an aesthetic framework, susceptible to snug resolutions, rather than the messy and often insoluble dynamic that it is. They tend to confuse, in the words of E.M. Forster, plot with story, the necessarily coherent with the unsatisfactorily inconclusive. The imagination seeks to dominate the empirical domain, especially when the former coincides with an unflinching and tenderly nurtured ideological commitment. It strives to impose an ideal order upon a resistant world and, in so doing, reaps the consequences of a fatal disjunction.
One thinks of literary frivolents like Louis de Bernières or José Saramago, whose condemnations of Israel are founded on neat, Manichean dichotomies that have no bearing on reality. More recently, Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, who accepted the 2009 Jerusalem Prize for foreign writers, delivered a reception speech implicitly comparing Israel to a wall and Palestinians to eggs broken against it. In this tidy, fabricated scenario, Murakami, apart from churlishly insulting his benefactors whose award he should honorably have refused, forgot that there were 20,000 “eggs” in Sderot broken against a “wall” of Palestinian rocket fire and that thousands of Israeli “eggs” were smashed post-Oslo. He emerged from this simple-minded fiasco with egg on his face, plainly unable to differentiate truth from fiction.
But Yehoshua represents a different case in point. He is not a foreigner but an Israeli writer whose ancestry, political engagement, and proximity to actual events should, one might assume, have freed him from the web of fantasy in which the literary mind is so easily snared and served to alert him to the structure of reality.
Good, eloquent article; goes to easy on Yehoshua, I think. It’s not enough to say an artist seeks neatness and order and confuses this with the real world; of course, there are nonartists among Israelis and others who are no less perverse leftists. There’s no excuse anymore (the Fatah congress should have been the last, last straw) for a prominent intellectual like AB Y to keep spouting the same nonsense–if we’re just nicer, our neighbors will accept us. Inexcusable irresponsibility for someone who is somewhat influential as his statements get widely quoted.
You touch on one of my struggles I have with my colleagues in academia, and make the same mistake I think we are all inclined to make: that there must be a rational explanation for such irrational behavior. To a certain extent we can argue, correctly, that the insular lives Israeli (and all western) intellectuals live creates a capacity to “see” the world as it isn’t. But that is not enough. The level of cognitive dissonance all western intellectuals have attained is much scarier and deadly in that there is no rational explanation for it. It stems from the same dysfunctional and destructive part of human nature our history has documented so well. There is no excuse, but that is the central tenet of human nature. Psychologically there is no difference between them and the Islamic (or any other) extreme fundamentalist. They are leftist fundamentalist, and have gone so far down the rabbit hole they will never come out. I have often wondered how my colleagues in America would respond to an all out war on our soil. I have come to the conclusion that they would apologize and express their confidence in the innocence of Islamic radicals even as those same radicals went office to office killing them. This hypothetical may some day become reality for Professor Yehoshua.
interesting artical. I would venture to say that the left in Israel are like gamblers ..the next card or roll of the dice will bring peace.
WAKE UP ….they will push you into the sea !! there is NOTHING ISRAEL CAN DO WITH THIS PRESENT GROUP IN GAZA THE WEST BANK and ESPECIALLY WASHINGTON.
the Arabs are daily being indoctrinated …there are now several generations who know only the lies they have been taught in their schools. There is no light at the end of this tunnel.
ISRAEL SHOULD STOP ALL TALKS ABOUT PEACE UNTIL THE ARABS SHOW THROUGH DEEDS THAT THEY WANT PEACE. it is that simple.
As a non-Jew, let me make this observation: Leftism for a very long time has been a hotbed of anti-Semitism. If you doubt me, look no further than your nearest college campus, or the current occupant of the White House. Yes, I know that Axelrod and Emanuel are pulling BO’s strings, but that’s because he needs them. Without a teleprompter, the man is a blithering idiot who wants to visit all “57 States in the Union.” Fortunately for Israel, the people in power and most of the population have figured out Obama already. Unfortunately, a large majority of Jews in America still love the emperor without clothes and without underwear. Didn’t someone write somewhere: “Know thine enemy.”
Those who are identified politically by others as being left-of-centre, and those who identify themselves as being left-of-centre politically, have ceded ground to Antonio Gramsci, instead of people like Teddy Roosevelt after the former President got back from Europe.
Those following in the footsteps of Gramsci are still at war with C.S. Lewis, Mortimer Adler, and those who follow in their footsteps. For the calling card of these folk is simply this: there are objective truths communicated via ethics.
The Israeli left is no different than the left anywhere else in this regard. Which is a shame, because the ground that a Jew is a Jew via the “I
and Thou” relationship that Martin Buber wrote about, that ground is very solid.
As usual, Mr Solway is right on the money, and eloquent to boot.
The need to view the world as one wishes it were rather than the way it is is grounded in the inherent inner-conflict between being true to self vs. needing/desiring to fit in, originally with family, ultimately with one’s society. This is a universal Gordian knot. Those who choose fitting in — being liked — are neurotic; those who choose self-interest are narcissistic.
The cure is, as usual, balance between the two extremes. Balance requires both seeing the motives of those around us for what they are, on the one hand, and recognizing and acknowledging one’s own intentions, both creative and destructive, on the other.
Being enamored of ABY for his literary talents is one thing; understanding his political views is quite another — and it’s here that Soloway fails, utterly. ABY, and most other Israeli writers are devoid of Jewishness, so for them, being an Israeli is a nationalism that has no meaning. Guilt-ridden and self-obsessed, they have no insight into the dynamics of Israel and therefore idealize “the other,” the perpetual victim, Arabs who call themselves “Palestinians.”
Desperate for acceptance, these self-styled elitists have turned their back on defending Israel, telling the truth, Jewish pride; they offer nothing of vision. As a Canadian, Soloway shows little understanding of why Israeli leftists writers live in unreality.
More asinine bs. Israel blockades Gaza on one side, controls air space and ocean. Egypt has an agreement with Israel to monitor immigration and passage on its border. Gaza is no more free than the bantustans of S. Africa. As for Sderot: You want me to feel sorry for a country at war? A country winning that war? Why? Because its inhabitants are Jews? Why the hell should I care what happens to Sderot. Talk about Manichean–jews good and arabs bad. There’s a reason why these articles have the fewest responses on Pajamas Media. The readers may have their heads completely up their asses, but they can sure see that there is absolutely no good reason they need to give a crap about Israel. If they had half a brain to share between them, they’d be fighting the Obama administration and every one before and after it, to completely disengage from that conflict. Especially, for no other reason than they could have spent the 105 to 300 billion that we threw away there over the past three decades on our own deficit.
The essential dynamic here is that of the hyphenated, assimilated Jew.
These artists represent a secular Israeli elite whose insecure Zionism always looked over its shoulder – and attempted to remold the Jewish people so as to be more acceptable to the larger world.
Like their left-leaning Jewish American counterparts, these “Zionists” shed anything uniquely Jewish while desperately clinging to the dream of acceptance offered by one-world socialism.
At least Ben-Gurion and Golda were salted through with old-time ethnic Jewishness that could not be shed – and the plight of the Jews was still very real.
But their children and grandchildren – raised on a scorched-earth policy towards anything Jewish, and purposely distancing themselves from the core of Jewish national identity – cannot justify the Zionist enterprise their parents founded. Without any real knowledge of their history, they cannot defend themselves against the false claims of the newly-minted Palestinian identity.
This explains their blindness – and their blind fury at those elements of Israeli society that are still connected to their Jewish roots.
They have nothing else to rely on but the empty promises of one-world socialism. John Lennon’s “Imagine” is a great song – but an awful life’s creed.
I think the problem is, as DS suggests, partly in the nature of literary production: the work of art, perhaps especially narrative, requires formal closure. However, a truly great work of art will provide us a vision of reality that transcends the work’s formal reliance on sacrificial closure. Inevitably, the hero must die, or the story must somehow end, but the truly great work finds its meaning not in that ending, in some glorious death or cheaply satisfying revenge, but in how the practice of the hero has acted, through the story that has held our interest in time, to defer the violent final closure. It is through the deferral of violence (including the deferral that one wields through a minimized violence of defensive security and tit for tat ethics) that reality is constructed. The reader acquires meaning that transcends the story by modeling this practice of deferral and not becoming unduly interested in the sacrificial closure of the story.
It would seem, today, that a religious narrative that posits a Messiah who is always postponing the day He will come has certain advantages in focusing the mind on the work of deferral, on building up human reality, than does the secular nationalist who wants to realize the eschatological meaning in his story in the here and now.
In the postmodern context, in any case, there are far too many incentives to sacrifice a fuller understanding of reality to the formal demands of narrative and rhetoric, as Moho does above. To the extent the postmodern is formed by the revelation of the possibility of the extreme evil of the modern state and national narrative in the Nazi-Jew relationship, the pomo student becomes enamored of a reduction of reality to this unquestionable (in PC think) victim/oppressor binary that is true to reality only in the most extreme (i.e. original Nazi) context.
Whether one now identifies with the Jews as Jews, or the Jews as “Nazis”, if one is identifying with the revelation of the Holocaust one is prone to sacrifice to the formal integrity of this revelation the means to understand the larger human reality one is supposedly trying to preserve. In taking an absolutist antagonism to any formal difference in status (military, economic, ethical) of two groups or people, always tending to reduce formal difference to the Nazi/Jew relationship, seeking some ultimate reconciliation or “justice”, one becomes addicted to forms of closure, to sacrificial hopes and dreams.
Reality, on the other hand, is constructed through mundane negotiations of difference that develop prior to the formal closure of their story, a closure that is best postponed indefinitely if that reality is to be sustained. When one forgets that differences are necessary to any realistic negotiation, to reciprocity, and hence to movement towards greater equality, to a trading of positions among our descendants in the free market of the future; when one always wants to denounce existing differences in addiction to the oppressor/victim framework, then one sacrifices true understanding and true equality to formal addiction. One champions “equality” but fails to understand the human basis for its greater realization in the exchange of differences, an exchange which must begin, where it is otherwise denied, in the most primitive forms of tit for tat. One has become an idolater because the various iterations of Nazi/Jew makes, today, for a more marketable story than teaching tit for tat to impoverished Islamic Utopians who don’t want to recognize a Jewish presence in any shape or form.
This is not just a problem of secular Jews. Most novelists, of any nation or religion today show similar political/literary pathologies. If Jews are however particularly confounded by the postmodern condition it is because the sign of “the Jew” is central to it.
Surely part of this stems from the age-old academic conceit that they are “above” mere nationalism.
This was true of the “bespectacled intellectuals” of 1939, to use Orwell’s term, who sneered at the suggestion that there was any discernable difference between the oppression of Czechlovokia and Poland by Nazi-era germany and Britain’s treatment of India and Singapore. It was true of bearded academics who were unable to perceive a difference worth noting between the US and the USSR.
Nationalism means embracing messy and repellant things that academicians detest: parades, pride in marital strength–and the undeferential and robust participation of people unlike themselves–pipe fitters, pushy lawyers and businessmen. Then there are motivations they do not understand: sharp distinctions between right and wrong that academics perceive as hopelessly retrograde or prejudiced. These existed as civilization emerged from midieval times, when academics recoiled from rude tradesmen, pushy traders and the use of language other than Latin.
By insulating academics from real life, we bring this on ourselves: we elevate them, insulate them and then, like a spoiled child that matures with no work ethic, no honor and no empathy, we get academics, who have no such feelings either (except to the extent they can use someone else’s taxes to solve “problems.”
Academics ridicule the desire of working families ot live apart from bums, welfare families and drug dealers. They cannot grasp the mind set that motivate men to fight wars for a country, regarding them as naive or stupid.
It cannot be a surprise that this one sits in the safety a western democracy, with security gained and maintained by a distant world war and the omnipresent US arsenal, only to ridicule a far away country, the only one where he might safely land in that part of the world, while glorifying those who would exterminate him.
Let’s face it. Goats have done more for Gaza through their fertilizing excrement than the stupid people who claim to be Palestinians have done. If the so-called Palestinians can’t compete with goat shit, they are in deep do-do.
Still Bill: Thank you for adding to my collection of insane racist rants at Pajamas Media. You’ll be happy to know that I intend to use this and others collected over the last months to demonstrate the disgusting manipulative hypocrisy in the claims by writers here that accusations of racism are uncalled for on the right. I will also note the lack of any sort of opprobrium from your peers on the statement. In fact, I’m going to go over to the whining article called: “I’m Tired of Being Called a Racist” and post your link right now.
Moho, someday a fresh wind will blow and a sweet change will have come and no one will ever hear from you again.
I always skip your comments, but in a forum such as this where the participants are trying to understand one of the most complicated dynamics that exist between any two peoples you trot out your typical putrid rubbish.
To quote George Baily: “Why don’t you just go bother somebody else?”
Not that you had a legitimate question, but to answer for my own part: I would not have submitted a comment because the people who were taking part in the discussion all seemed to have a deeper grasp of the subject. I was *listening* instead of *blabbing*.
For whatever sick reason you like to be a troll I hope you know that things will not end well for you.
So let me see… “stupid people who claim to be Palestinians”: this is racist against whom? The “so-called Palestinians” I would think. Still Bill indicates that he does not respect the premise of a political maneuver to create a false claim to land. He feels that people who do that are a) “stupid”; and b) not “Palestinian”. So his comment could not have been racist.
Inherent in his next sentence is the idea of competition. I’ll explain this one to you Moho – competition is the only possible method of determining merit (outside of God). There are many books in libraries that deal with the subject. Still Bill’s sentence that discusses goat shit actually reflects back to his first point that he was making about how people are faking a claim to territory that does not belong to them. Territory that has belonged to the Jews for several thousands of years.
Still Bill – can I make a small suggestion? Since your comments were directed at stupid people, instead of saying “stupid people who claim to be Palestinians” perhaps it would be clearer to say “Moho-like people who claim to be Palestinians”.
To the rest of the people who are trying to have a conversation, I apologize and will not add my own idiotic comments which do not deal with this extremely well written article (which I read because as a Southern non-Jew I see the extreme importance in the success of Israel and am concerned about the state of its well being).
So let me see… “stupid people who claim to be Palestinians”: this is racist against whom?
Yes, you stupid person claiming to be American. Its not racist at all you dumber-than-a-turd claiming to be white man dumbshit. Not racist at all.
No wonder none of you are racists.
Leftists are leftists are leftists. They all live in fantasy land and no amount of reality will alter that. Israeli Jew or American college professor; makes no difference in the grand scheme, they’re not going to wake up to reality, because the reality they live in isn’t the real world.
They can be fun to talk to, when they’re not frothing at the mouth crazies, but you’ll never get anywhere with them. Heavens knows I like a good intellectual discussion, but I’ve never kidded myself about changing minds. For all the talk about curiosity, they’re no more curious than a hybernating bear, and only true curiosity can bring about true change in one’s worldview.
(1) Reply to #15, Shawn: The Arabs who live in Gaza and Judea and Samaria are not “Palestinians.” “Palestinian” has always – until 1964 – been synonymous with “Jew” since the Roman Emperor Hadrian renamed Judea “Palestina” in 135 A.D. in order to eradicate any memory of Judea and the Jews, after he had defeated the last Jewish uprising under Bar Kochba. “Palestine” then became synonymous with “land of the Jews” or “the Holy Land,” which is why the Zionists wanted the “Palestine Mandate.” In 1964 the Soviet Union through its representative met Nasser in Cairo and invented the “Palestine Liberation Organization” (P.L.O.) It is Soviet propaganda which led to calling Arabs “Palestinians,” as if they were the ancient inhabitants of Gaza, Judea and Samaria, and indeed, present-day Israel.
(2) The “left,” socialist and communist, are loyal only to socialism and communism, facts do not matter. The enmity of the Arabs against Israel is solely religious, Muslims (and some Christians) against the Jews – which the Israeli “left” do not want to admit, since they do not believe that religion is serious.
Pathena: You wrote this before, but its simply untrue. I could proffer many reasons, but the text of the Balour Declaration will do:
it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,
I’m an Israeli Jew, living in Tel Aviv, originally from the Diaspora, and yes these people are crazy and there are so many of them – a fifth column. They will get us all killed, I could care less about them, but the rest of us who do “get it” will have to pay the price as will our children.
These Leftists are indeed not Jewish in any meaningful sense, they are actually insance and I do not use that word lightly. Beyond absurd, words fail me really.
Amazing how geniuses can go so wrong: they think themselves into unwise boxes so often. Common sense and clear thinking are too often sacrificed for nuanced, enlightened,compassionate — and suicidal — thought.
Tocqueville letter to Lord Hatherton 1858–
A race, inferior by nature or by education, can tolerate the government of a superior race. The only sensible effects of this superiority are good : if the government manages well, it may be preferred even to that of the native princes; but a private individual, more civilized, more rich, more clever, and more influential than his native neighbours, is always an object of hatred and of envy. Government by foreigners is opposed only to national feelings, which are weak- The foreign settler injures, or appears to injure, in a thousand ways, private interests, which are strong. He is supposed always to use his superiority, his knowledge, his wealth, and his influence, for the purpose of growing rich at the expense of his neighbours. These little personal hatreds swell the national hatred. I have no doubt that in Algeria the Arabs and the Kabyles dislike the presence of our settlers much more than that of our soldiers.
I think you might be interested in what A.B. Yehoshua has to say about Americans for Peace Now…a pro-Israel pro-Peace organization. http://peacenow.org/entries/a_letter_from_ab_yehoshua