Israele 60 anni - David Vital- 1a Parte 12/11/2008 un saggio di David Vital da Israel Affairs del 1 luglio 2008

No attempt to draw up a balance sheet of Israel’s achievements and failings as the state enters its seventh decade could be other than presumptuous. Still, a life-long observer (and inhabitant) of the scene may, perhaps, be allowed to draw attention to two aspects of the whole that seem to him to be cardinal: one because it is unquestionably positive, the other because it is—or, if it is not, should be—a source of concern. That first aspect of the great, multi-faceted complex that is the Jewish state is the fearlessness of its people. The second is the Israeli public’s ever-deepening loss of confidence in those who seek to lead it. Each in its way amounts to a cardinal feature of the transformative process that this particular segment of the Jewish people has undergone in the course of the past century or so, but most especially since Israel’s formal establishment in 1948. But that said, to go beyond the surface of things and to see something of their full significance, it is necessary to place them in the perspective offered by the past. Shai Agnon began his great novel Oreiakh nata la-lun with an account of what his narrator sees and hears upon his return to Poland in the immediate aftermath ofWorldWar I. In essence, he finds his native townlet to be desolate. The few Jews remaining there want only to leave. When the narrator takes it upon himself to warn the locals that if they did leave they would be abandoning certainty for the unknown they reply, in turn, that the only certainty they know is that life in situ is unbearable. Oh yes, the narrator responds impatiently, I know that. And I know why: because there were pogroms here some years ago. Quite true, they answer. Yes, indeed. There were pogroms here four years ago, but three years ago too, and a year ago, and no more than three months ago—the difference between one wave and another being that it was only the first that was reported in the press. Mind you, they continue, that was just as well. Suppose each and every occasion had been reported? Would not the Jews in these parts have been moved to still greater despair? And would not goyim who had been blameless heretofore, once they had learned from the newspapers what could be done to Jews so very easily and with such impunity—would they not have been moved to emulate those of their brethren who, from the first, knew of no reason to hesitate to strike us? The narrator refines his objections to their departure. Surely it would be unbecoming to leave the land where their fathers and forefathers (and his own) had lived and worshipped? Well yes, they reply, that may well be so. But are you asking us to listen to those who, from their comfort and safety in distant lands, tell us to stay put, here where we are, to die—and for what exactly? For the greater glory of God? To earn the admiration of the Gentiles for accepting suffering and death in so splendid a cause? The exchange between visitor and villagers ends with one of the latter summing up local opinion with the ultra-Hobbesian observation that what lay at the root of their condition was that ‘they slaughter us because it is the way of the strong to lay hands upon the weak’. Few have rendered the demoralization of East European Jewry in the decades prior to its final destruction as succinctly as Agnon, although in this grim literary department H.N. Bialik and Joseph Roth come to mind with equal if not greater force.1 Only unlike Bialik or Roth or others whose pre- and post-Shoah accounts and narratives were intended to bring hard places and terrifying times to life, Agnon speaks to us neither as omniscient and judgemental author nor as private, passionately engaged participant. Still less does he do so as sentimental bystander. What he offers us is, seemingly, a less personal view—that of a clear-eyed reporter, as it were. It is that, of course, that makes his articulation of the weariness of the Jews, their enduring fearfulness, and their longing for a kinder place to live out their lives so very powerful. But it is not to stress Agnon’s literary qualities that I have brought him up. It is because what these passages epitomise with great penetration and economy are no less than the ruling features of the condition to which the greater part of the Jewish demos in Eastern Europe had, by then, been reduced. And because what emerges from these lines most strongly of all is that these were not only a pauperized and set-upon people, but endlessly fearful men and women who had come to realize, with enduring bitterness, that they had been abandoned by those to whom they looked, even if distrustfully, to rescue them. Some, under the press of the daily battle for survival, would manage, as we know, to tuck their fears and feelings into the farthest recesses of their minds. Some smothered their thoughts in religious study and ritual. Some allowed despair to be deflected by the consolatory chiliasm that was still on offer to them. But the sense of abandonment was rife—and for good cause, as the horror and irreparable devastation visited upon them during World War II would soon show. There have been those among the bystanders—as we now tend to call them2—who in the long, still unfinished aftermath have sought to divert attention from what was central and exceedingly bitter to that which was marginal and somewhat less so. And in some cases, to do so even in terms that are plainly incompatible with what have for decades been the authoritatively established circumstances in which the destruction of Jewry was carried out. Sadly, here and there the results have proved to be no less than egregious. A good 50 years after World War II, a British rabbi and professor of theology, one Dan Cohn-Sherbok, went so far on one occasion as to tell the readers of The Times that as Jews loyal to the tradition . . . awaited the final sentence, they drew strength from one another to witness the God of Israel. In the camps these Jews faced death silently. When their last moments arrived they died without fear. They did not plead for mercy since they believed it was God’s judgement to take their lives. In heaven, they believed, they would receive their just reward, and by sanctifying God’s name they could bring forgiveness to the Jewish people.3 Readers of these lines will have had to decide for themselves whether to be more appalled by the curiously (dare one say somewhat Christian) sacrificial flavour imparted to the scene as Rabbi Cohn-Sherbok chose to imagine it or by the complacency with which he had allowed himself to report on how people behaved at the point of horrible death in a Treblinka or Auschwitz gas chamber. What authority he may have had for bearing witness on this subject, and in such terms, is unclear—other than that it could not possibly have been first-hand. For testimony of a higher quality, because while rare it is authentic, one does better to turn to what Chaya Halberstamm, the 85-year-old widow of the ‘Stropkower’ (Hassidic) rebbe had to say moments before her death to a member of the Sonderkommando detailed to handle her intake at Auschwitz in 1944. In the very precise language, which he was later to take down, she told him that I have seen the end of Hungarian Jewry. The government allowed great parts of the Jewish community to escape. [But] when people asked the rebbes for advice, their response was to call for calm. The Belzer rebbe said that Hungary[’s Jews] would suffer fright, to be sure, but nothing more. And then came the bitter moment when it was no longer possible for the Jews to save themselves. Oh yes! Heaven hid from them, while they themselves [i.e. the rebbes ] fled at the last moment to Eretz-Yisrael and left the people to be slaughtered. I beg you, good God, in the last moments of my life, forgive them their sacrilege!4 Ever larger questions come to mind as one reflects on Chaya Halberstamm’s devastating testimony—questions that span not only, and most bitterly of all, the very mixed behaviour of Jewish leaders in all parts of the world during Hitler’s war, but the conduct of those who counted as ‘leaders’ of the innumerable generations that preceded it. How, in general, did the dignitaries of Jewry customarily respond to the distress of their constituents—especially in extremis? What had the great men of Jewry to say to the people on whose behalf they claimed the privilege of speaking to sovereign authority if and when they dared to do so? What was it that they actually proposed to do in various given cases to alleviate the misery and still the fears of those who, for the most part, had no one else to turn to? And all this not merely at the immediate, micro-level of the individual and his or her family, but on behalf of entire communities or, indeed, of the Jewish people in its entirety? And if there was little or nothing that they could do, as was mostly the case, in what precisely did their ‘leadership’ then consist? Two millennia had passed since high theological authority locked the leaders and the led of Jewry into what became as hard and fast a hierarchical relationship as ever there could be. A socio-political pairing-off of a more usual kind—into rulers and subjects, elected and electors, lords and vassals, masters and men, and so forth—had been forgone. It is difficult, therefore, to tease out just what degree of responsibility bound upper to lower classes in any particular Jewish case thereafter. Ancient beliefs, established rules of conduct, lines of true or presumed ancestry, general notions of brotherhood, the model of shepherd and flock, and, to be sure, that of an ultimate, encompassing destiny shared by all—all these can be identified. But too much in this realm remains metaphorical, unstructured, even ineffable for anyone to work out what force or weight this or that factor carried in any given set of circumstances. This is not to say that it would be unreasonable to inquire into the conduct of those who wanted, or allowed themselves, to be singled out as leaders; or to consider to what actual use they proposed to put such influence and authority as they had been granted or had seized. And our freedom to ask these questions should apply even when it is admitted that in the past, at any rate, there was never a question of Jewish leaders of any sort and at any level possessing power in the rawer sense of that admittedly misty political term. What counted so far as any ordinary Jew in the street was concerned—men-in-the-street being almost always best judges of such matters—was that real power, as we may call it, had always been vested in others; and that these others, all the way down from the sovereign ruler himself to the meanest village constable, were alien. Whence, the profundity of the passage in Joseph Roth’s great novel Job in which the crushed and humiliated melamed Mendel, having finally turned against his God, denounces Him in the terms he, Mendel, understands best: as ‘a great and brutal ispravnik’5—namely, as a commander of policemen. But as always, it would be wrong to simplify. The leaders of Jewry in the modern period were never of one kind and never possessed of equal degrees of influence, let alone true social control. Still however they were drawn, or had emerged of their own accord, they fell, broadly, into two classes. This was most notably and importantly the case in the largest of pre-Shoah conglomerations, the East European. On the one hand there were the laymen: the financial, commercial and industrial grandees, the great merchants, the builders of railroads, the old-time maskilim, the secularized intelligenty, the Russifiers, Polonizers and out-and-out assimilationists, and the actual or potential revolutionaries of all stripes—Marxist, anarchist, peasant-oriented socialist, and so on—and then, of course, there were the Zionists themselves in their ever more numerous, often mutually uncommunicating varieties. On the other hand, but bound up very heavily in many cases with the authentically plutocratic lay leaders, there were, of course, the rabbis: some regular, i.e. orthodox ‘mitnagdim’, some the rebbes and ‘admorim’ who led schools and denominations of their own, some who, while theologically and socially respectable were relatively independently minded (like R. Yitzhak Elhanan Spektor of Kovno, for example), and some, at the bottom of the strictly rabbinical (as opposed to the public) totem poll, the government-approved, mostly Russified, partly salaried state rabbis (the so-called rabbanim mi-ta’am). All these people, laymen and clerics, possessed at least a mite—and often more—of personal, local influence that was theirs to employ and manipulate. All, when taken together, were, as we know, at sixes and sevens on virtually every item on the Jewish social, or better still societal agenda—which helps in turn to explain, if it does not excuse, how small the impact any single one of these strains and sub-classes may be seen, on inspection, to have had on the real lives and destinies of ordinary people. As for the one proven lever of large-scale social change and human relief— that of migration to the west—why it was never the work or desire, much less the declared purpose, of any of Jewry’s established leaders or claimants, lay or religious, or of any of the classes into which it is convenient to include them. The vast migratory movement out of Eastern Europe to Western Europe and, as in most cases, on to the Americas, that was to ensue, roughly, between the 1880s and the outbreak of the Great War, was never more, and certainly never less, than the totalized product of innumerable private decisions. At no stage was it the consequence of a person or organization of accepted prominence or influence initiating or even going so far as to urge it on. Those who sought to lead Jewry, a fortiori those of whom it may be said that they did actually lead significant segments of it, either ignored or misunderstood or, most frequently of all, opposed migration—and most hotly and particularly mass migration. It is true that some migrants were offered sustenance as they made for and passed through the north German ports, Bremen, for example, on their way to the west. But this was as much in the interests of hurrying them on (lest official German displeasure be incited by hosts of Ostjuden being tempted to remain behind on German soil) as doing the right philanthropic thing and coming to these largely impoverished people’s aid with warm food, temporary shelter and the like. And while it would be fair to add that proper reception committees were organized to cater for them on their arrival in the UK and, of course, in the US too, in no real sense (apart from the special, exceedingly limited cases of Baron Hirsch’s project in Argentina and Israel Zangwill’s ITO project in Texas) was there any attempt at systematic concern for this vast flow of people once they had been admitted to their new homes. The proto-Zionists of Hovevei Zion and their successors in the Zionist movement proper might, perhaps, be reckoned exceptions to this rule, but only up to a point. The immigration into Palestine they had set their hearts on led them into immediate conflict with the Ottoman authorities who, for their part, were quick to ban it. The managers of this still essentially embryonic movement had then to decide from day to day (from as far away as Odessa) just how far it might be politic for them and for the future of their project to defy the Turks by ‘infiltrating’ their people into what, fortunately, was a loosely administered and badly policed country. Even at the end of that magic year 1917 in which for one extraordinary, unanticipated moment the Zionists became rather more than the negligible segment of socially and politically conscious Jewry they had been until then, the movement’s leaders were to reveal themselves as being very much in two minds about mass migration—the only kind, of course, that could conceivably have transformed the face of the Jewish people, or that of newly constituted British Palestine itself for that matter. Only in the dying years of the British mandate, when the storm in Europe had begun to blow in earnest, did the official leadership of the Zionist movement change tack in this respect. By which time it was, of course, very late in the day. It may be asked whether matters would have been different and gone better for the Jewish demos had the various rabbis, grandees, intellectuals, revolutionaries, communal ‘askanim and, to be sure, the Zionist leaders themselves all been less immodest, less doctrinaire, more willing to pay closer attention—in important cases any attention at all—to what ‘amkha (the Jewish populace) thought, wanted and desperately needed. The question, at heart, is an old one and far from being limited to the Jewish people. Edmund Burke, that hugely intelligent Irish Englishman, observed on one occasion that while he himself was not one of those who thought ordinary folk were never in the wrong, he did wish to say, ‘that in all disputes between them and their rulers, the presumption is at least upon a par in favour of the people’.6 That the common run of rabbis and parnassim had never heard of Burke and would in any case have been unlikely to heed what he had to say is plain enough. To the question what they would have done had more of them at least ventured to think along such lines we shall never know the answer. More remarkable, however, is the fact that there are not all that many among us even today who would want to know just what these on the whole rather puffed-up individuals had in mind at critical moments and what mix of considerations moved them to act as they did, when they did, or as was so often the case, abstain from action altogether. What is known and generally recognized is that those who left Europe in good time and went on to make some small room for themselves in what was to become Israel were thereupon—rare exceptions apart—transformed. Sceptics were to say of them—many still say—that they were to do no more than exchange one land of entrapment for another. But even if this were the case, the immediate and, on the evidence, lasting effect upon those who had gone so far as to decide that it was the Mediterranean they would cross rather than the North Sea or the Atlantic Ocean was escape from the harshest of all the many curses inflicted on the Jews in their exile: fear. And where the shedding of old, ingrained timidity was less than complete, at least the desire to make it so was in evidence7—a series of European-style pogroms committed by Arab mobs on perfectly peaceful Jewish folk in the 1920s8 contributing mightily to the process. The sum of this process in toto was that the Jews of Palestine-later-Israel, like a long domesticated species allowed finally to lapse into the wild, turned feral. I do not think this latter process is as yet fully understood. And there is still much to be learned about its later, far-reaching social and psychological consequences for Israeli society—as there is about its impact on Israel’s neighbours, there being no room in Islam’s traditional hierarchy of peoples for Jews of such a particular kind to exist, much less constitute a challenge to members of the Muslim Ummah. Besides which, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, this rougher, less inhibited, at times distinctly wild behaviour has come to be looked at somewhat askance both within and without Jewry—Jewry taken as a whole, that is, but to a very limited extent, in Israel itself as well. But let me at least illustrate just what it is I have in mind when I speak of a transformation with a single anecdote, quoting from a letter written from Tel Aviv by an especially observant, articulate and stalwart middle-aged woman and a very long time ago as these things tend to be judged. In April 1936, just as the Arab Rebellion of that year was getting under way, she wrote to her husband who happened to be abroad: A few days after the beginning of the events [she wrote], I was walking on Nachlat Binyamin, when I became aware of people beginning to run, and all in one direction: pedestrians, people in cars, lorries, bicycles, others holding onto cars, on the running boards, etc. . .. I began to think that the Arabs [had] broken through [from Jaffa] and entered Tel-Aviv. And I was just going to ask someone, when I heard a woman at my elbow stop an elderly bearded man. ‘Reb Yitzchak, where are you running?’ she asked. ‘The Arabs have attacked the Shapiro quarter.’ ‘But Reb Yitzchak, God be with you, it’s dangerous.’ To which Reb Yitzchak replied in these very remarkable terms: ‘That is why I’m running, because it’s dangerous. What do you think? That I want to be in fear all my life? I’ve had fear enough.’9 Nothing will be understood about the change worked by Zionism on the mores of the Jews, reinforced in due course by the rise of the politically and militarily independent Jewish state itself, unless it is traced back to the sentiment epitomized by Reb Yitzhak’s passion to be rid once and for all of his ancestral fears—and his descendants’ remarkable success in doing so. It may be asked: had there not been feats of courage and resistance elsewhere—in German-occupied Europe in the course of World War II, even in the killing fields of Poland itself? There had been, certainly. But they have tended to be evaluated and held up for attention differently in each case, depending on the audience. It was not uncharacteristic of survivors of the European war to believe that the historical significance of armed Jewish resistance would lie in its being understood and valued in due course by both Jews and non-Jews. ‘I believe in a future Poland’, wrote the eminent Polish-Jewish poet Julian Tuwim in April 1944, on the first anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto rising, a Poland in which the star [of David] on your armbands will become the highest order bestowed upon the bravest among Polish officers and soldiers. They will wear it proudly upon their breasts next to the old Virtuti Militari. There will also be a Cross of the Ghetto. . .. And there shall be in Warsaw and in every other Polish city some fragment of the ghetto left standing and preserved in its present form in all its horror of ruin and destruction . . . [which] we shall surround . . . with chains wrought from captured Hitler’s guns, and every day we shall twine fresh live flowers into its iron links, so that the memory of the massacred people shall remain forever fresh in the minds of the generations to come, and also as a sign of our undying sorrow for them. It cannot be said of Tuwim’s vision that it was to remain totally unrealized. On the other hand, in no sense did it take on the drive and enthusiasm for change, or that depth of Polish–Jewish amity to which the poet had looked forward. And this, alas, he would discover for himself in the few years left to him to live, much as he would be witness to there being so very little left of the old Jewish commonalty of Poland he had wished to see honourably and ceremoniously reinstated. As for the desperately unhappy people found by Agnon’s narrator when, in Oreiakh nata la-lun, he set out to re-discover his landesma¨nner after World War I, why by the time World War II was over they were gone totally—their fate compounded with what a later literary image was to evoke. In the dark, unnamed ghetto in which the story of Jacob the Liar in Jurek Becker’s even sadder and tenderer novel of that name enfolds, the narrator-cum-anti-hero sums up, in unconscious counterpoint to Tuwim’s vision, what we may think of as among the most painful issues of all: And the resistance, I will be asked. Where is the resistance? . . . I can tell you that I have since read with awe about Warsaw and Buchenwald— another world, but comparable [to ours]. I have read much about heroism, probably too much. . .. I am not unaware that an oppressed people can only be truly liberated if it contributes towards its liberation, if it goes at least a little bit of the way to meet the Messiah. [But] we did not do this. I did not take a single step. I learned the rules by heart and adhered strictly to them. . . . Where I was, there there was no resistance.10 Fifteen centuries ago or thereabouts, the Jews, as the eminent historian Yitzhaq Baer once put it, submitted to the admonitions of their teachers, ‘left the ranks of warring nations, and put their fate altogether in the hands of God’.11 That was written a very long time ago and has been cited more than once—quite rightly so for it points to what has been crucial all along. But crucial as much for what it tells us, without mincing words, about our past as for pointing to the most fundamental of all ways in which the present differs from the past. The ancient, once deeply entrenched state of mind in which the determination of destiny was left to Providence has largely dropped away, even by most believers. But so too has the condition in which behaviour is so often and so desperately governed by fear—which goes a great part of the way to explain how this relatively new insistence on independence has been possible. But whatever the causes or consequences of this reversal to a still more ancient, pre-Exilic mode of behaviour, Reb Yitzchak’s wish finally to be rid of fear has been granted—so much so, indeed so swiftly, that his own grandchildren can barely understand what it had ever amounted to. Dedicated opponents of the Zionist project would argue, no doubt—in that rather mean spirit that is now a fixed and fashionable element of public discussion of the subject—that if fearfulness and self-abnegation have been washed away, arrogance and hubris have replaced them—the one unattractive, the other ill founded. And perhaps there is a mite of truth in that.The greater truth, however, ismore interesting and alsomore disturbing. That fear is barely to be detected in modern Israel is no small matter. That it marks, in some ways more than anything else, the passage from exile to independence is worth stressing and restating. But minds have not been swept entirely clear. The old endemic fearfulness has been replaced not by unreason, much less mindlessness, but rather, as people of all classes and conditions reflect on the country’s predicament, as they do, habitually, by an essentially sober undercurrent—better still: mood—of uncertainty. It is ill defined, but not unfounded. It comprises, on the one hand, doubts about the validity of the several, mutually incompatible roads along which the country has been made to move in recent years; and, on the other hand, one feeding into the other, a specific loss of confidence not only in the purposes and outlook of the elected national leadership, but its competence. No great, overall shift in general political or strategic direction or of character and quality of leaders has resulted. Not to any marked degree; not yet, at all events. But an ever sharper tendency to engage in overall selfexamination and articulate a critical, sceptical, and to some extent cynical view of government can be noted, albeit without any evidence, so far, of its conversion into a serious—meaning widespread—basis for action either in the parliamentary system or, fortunately, in the streets. It may even be thought—given the ferocity of the conflicts Israel is engaged in and the refusal or simple inability of successive governments to lay out and proclaim a firm, reasoned and viable national policy—that public criticism and anxiety are both in actual fact at a quite astonishingly low, not to say gentle level. Nonetheless, the critical spirit and the anxiety which fuels it are palpable and bound up as they are, indissolubly, with what lies at the very centre of public affairs and public welfare, are fated for that very reason to rise to dangerous heights of passion and discontent if left unaddressed. But a little more needs to be said about the sources of this ever more general, ever more reasoned and articulated dissatisfaction. To take the matter of the predicament first—cast here, necessarily, in abbreviated terms. Few citizens of Israel question the general proposition that they are fated to pursue their collective destiny in a world that is, in essence, ‘Hobbesian’. It might seem fanciful to say so, but there can be no doubt that most of the population would recognize it as such were the relevant passages in the Leviathan read out to them. And they would agree, too, that such is the case not merely in the twin, familiar senses that theirs is a world (or, as some would say, begging many questions, an ‘environment’) in which the final, proven determinant of life and limb and social existence is brute power; and that a war of each against all is the normal state of man’s existence. But that it is Hobbesian too, directly and vividly so far as they are concerned, in that Israel, almost uniquely in the contemporary world, offers a perfect illustration of Thomas Hobbes’ famous distinction between war and peace—and of the wariness with which those who contemplate agreements with their adversaries should approach all promises of the latter replacing the former. ‘War’, wrote the great English realist, ‘consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known’—time being understood in this context as, for example, it is understood when the reference is to weather: For as the nature of foul weather lieth not in a shower or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto of many days together: so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is peace.12 It follows in so dangerous a world that the key to prudent behaviour is assurance—assurance to the effect that ‘the known disposition’ to make war has truly lapsed, that the parties to the conflict have not only undertaken formally to abandon their hitherto deeper inclination to resume fighting whenever it was politic to do so, but that that was indeed their true intention. It was necessary, therefore, at such a point, to be exceedingly circumspect. Agreements, treaties, undertakings—whatever they may be called, however they may have been conceived, whether formally or informally entered into, and whether written down for all to note sooner or later or left unwritten as between ‘gentlemen’—all these, Hobbes tells us, whatever the form, must never be allowed to count in themselves. ‘The force of words being . . . too weak to hold men to the performance of their covenants, there are in man’s nature but two imaginable helps to strengthen it. And those are either a fear of the consequence of breaking their word, or a glory or pride in appearing not to need to break it.’13 The truths embedded in Hobbes’ scepticism have been borne out time out of number throughout recorded history—on some occasions in very nearly the same language. Thus in the case of the German imperial chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, who, astonished by Britain’s decision to go to war in 1914 on the grounds that it had undertaken to defend Belgium’s neutrality, exclaimed, notoriously: ‘Just for a word, neutrality. . . ! Just for a scrap of paper!’ Which brings one to the matter of the terms that successive leaders of Israel have thought from time to time to be adequate bases for a lasting peace, after all. In some cases these have been written down, in others written on the wind. Some are known, but have remained unspoken to this day, some are wholly unknown (to the public) or even unknowable properly speaking—as being precisely what Israel’s statesmen have had in mind or, in some instances, undertaken to engage in. Not surprisingly, each occasion and its details, when revealed, have been met with scepticism; in some cases outrage. In general, the Israeli public’s scepticism is hard-bitten and deeply ingrained even though—extremist opinion apart—it is largely free of what might be termed the Bethmann Hollweg type of absolute cynicism universally applied. Why that is the case, having the Jews’ long history in mind, is unclear. It may be because the public’s tendency to scepticism—call it clear-mindedness—is not, as one might have supposed, a function of the still quite fuzzy terms in which Israel’s own higher national interests are commonly perceived. It has much more to do with what its Arab and Muslim adversaries have taught it to recognize as their refusal to enter into final and equable agreements of any kind at all; that, on the contrary, their tacit (in important cases explicit) proviso accompanying such agreements as have been, or could be entered into with the Jews must never be more than tactical; never under any circumstances to be honoured in the long term. Implicitly (for the most part) in the past, but ever more explicitly in recent years, the underlying Muslim view of the matter of agreement with Israel, when stripped of all niceties, is that it is no less than a Muslim, a fortiori an Arab moral duty to violate whatever has been entered into with the Jews when, as is bound sooner or later to be the case, it will be safe to do so. All this on the now familiar grounds that the conflict with a specifically Jewish interloper, whether or not it is one that styles itself ‘Israel’, cannot be allowed to be predicated on any proposition other than that its existence is illegitimate and needs therefore to be rendered impermanent. Thomas Hobbes would have understood the full seriousness of this imbalance of purposes. For what this amounts to in his terminology is that the Arab ‘will to contend by battle’ is ‘sufficiently known’; that the dominant weather in the contemporary Middle East is ‘foul’; and, more generally, that the weather’s ‘known disposition’ is recognizably to war. The terms in which members of the general public in Israel commonly express themselves are, to be sure, less eloquent, but they differ little in substance. In the past, generally speaking, except here and there among declared, not to say congenital pessimists, the outlook was milder. Today, it is not only the case that hard questions are posed continually and ever more insistently by members of virtually all segments of the population, but that the intensity with which the actual and prospective ministerial handling of national affairs from day to day is called into question is entirely without precedent in degree. And, once again, that more than anything it is the failure of the nation’s governing elite to provide convincing answers to these questions and clear statements of their own intentions that has reduced public confidence in them to rock bottom. Those who are willing to look back on the Jewish people’s long history of mostly weak, ill-focused, and in many cases, alas, uncaring leaders might argue that Israel’s contemporary political class has more in common with those who sought to lead the Jews in the past than with the founding fathers of modern Israel who are supposed to be their proper model. True, some minor consolation might be found in our contemporary masters’ defining circumstances. One of the few reasonably well attested ‘laws’ of political history is that the successors to a revolutionary generation will be a less impressive lot than the tougher, more independently minded men and womenwhopreceded them, the revolutionaries themselves.Asecond saving grace is that so many of the problems our contemporary leaders are called upon to deal with are of truly exceptional difficulty. Some are literally without precedent, others, most probably, insoluble. Chief of these, of course, is that of being engulfed, leaders and led alike, in that ever-thickening Hobbesian ‘foul weather’. And one especially telling indicator of the anxiety engendered by ever wider recognition that such, indeed, is the ‘weather’ in which ordinary members of the general public are fated to live out their lives is the common, although by no means unanimous approval with which the arrival of men of confirmed military experience and authority in and around that pinnacle of political life tends to be greeted. There was a time—30, certainly 40 or more years ago—when generalsin- retirement who ventured or, more frequently, were invited into the political world were thought of by the professional politicians as outsiders. And there were always quarters in which their presence was resented and they themselves patronized. That is no longer the case. The public has welcomed and grown used to them. So have the politicos. Nevertheless, in a broader historical and sociological view of things, outsiders are, after all, what they are. At all events at the outset. Retired officers of lesser rank—colonels, majors, and so on—arouse less interest and very little concern. But they matter too, somewhat, in that the really senior officers who attain high political rank, the generals, are prey to the habit of surrounding themselves with old subordinates and cronies of a rank junior to themselves, placing them in such posts as allow for some circumvention of civil service rules—or, better still, are overtly political and therefore not subject to those rules at all. This helps to maintain the seniors’ own prestige as major military figures after retirement; and helps to set the ex-military apart all over again in numerous, if subtle ways. Taken together, these and other similar aspects of the phenomenon help to remind senior soldiers still in uniform, but on the verge of retirement, that central and even local government offer openings for a second useful and honourable career in which they may succeed in continuing to function in a manner not too remote from that which they had been used to. To be sure, the ex-military are not, sociologically speaking, the only easily identifiable closed or partially closed set in politics. There are the ultra-orthodox haredim; there are the more moderately orthodox, but ultra-nationalist, over-the-green-line settlement people; and it is interesting and telling that both these sub-classes of the observant community as a whole are happy to make themselves readily identifiable and separable visibly by display of more or less standardized dress. Then there is the looser, less easily definable, but in the long run more important category of those who identify themselves, or are identified by others, as members of the so-called eastern or oriental communities. There are the Israeli Arabs whose members of parliament, while they find it impossible to form a coherent party based on a common social or economic programme, do at any rate conduct an unremitting and uncompromising nationalist campaign that binds them together and marks them—as it is intended to do—as a group apart. There was a time when Central European, especially German Jews formed an identifiable, quasi-political sub-class of their own. So too did immigrants from the Yemen. These have long since vanished as political entities or even labels—actual or notional. The only group—and it is a very large and important one—that is identifiable both in the minds of its members and in the minds of others ethnically (if that is not the wrong term to use) and more directly still in cultural terms are the ‘Russians’ who, on inspection, turn out, however, to be more of a mixed bag than some among those who observed them on their arrival fancied them to be. But all this is really by the way. For it remains that it is the entry of the generals into politics—and into the higher ranks of public service and major private financial and industrial enterprises—that matters centrally. And that is because it stems less from what they themselves have in common than from causes that have to do with the condition of Israel generally. Theirs is not a case of parentage or belief (or disbelief) in the supernatural or standardized habits of personal conduct or even a common political outlook marking them out as a more or less coherent and identifiable set. None of these labels apply. What does apply is their profession—or past profession—but in all the major cases something that is rather more meaningful, namely a lifetime of experience in that very particular field in which the matters that are absolutely at the top of the list of public concerns are played out in actual, day-to-day practice. It would, certainly, be as interesting and almost as important a social phenomenon if physicians and surgeons were to make an appearance in politics—as medical men explicitly and in exceptionally large numbers— and by doing so, as the generals do, on the strength of their unique experience and skills. But the doctors have not done so, as we know, and are exceedingly unlikely to try. Nor have the engineers, or the lawyers (not as such, at any rate, although there are a fair number of lawmen in the Knesset), or the philosophers or the historians or the men and women specializing in the natural sciences. But then what distinguishes the very specific profession of arms from medicine or engineering or even the law is that it not only touches very closely indeed on the world of politics, but is in fact a constituent of it, inherently so. So has the profession been at all times and in all places—a fact which may be taken as additional, if indirect confirmation of the truths embedded in Hobbes’ philosophy of war and peace and the difference between the one and the other. But all that said, the phenomenon of senior soldiers—all retired, to be sure—in Israeli politics is as noteworthy for what it is not as for what it is. It is not the case, for example, that IDF officers, active or retired, senior or junior, have ever formed a junta or sought to seize power for themselves in either the Cromwellian or the Napoleonic manner, let alone in any of the forms long favoured in Latin America and the Middle East and attempted from time to time even in hyper-civilized France—successfully so under both Empires, with mixed results under the Third and Fourth, and triumphantly at the onset of the Fifth Republic, to say nothing of revolutionary times proper and between one regime and another. What is crucial here is something rather different. It is the presence of retired officers of general (and senior field rank too) in the Israeli political arena in exceptionally great numbers who continue to see themselves and to be regarded by others as such. And it is their being found even at the peak of established political and constitutional power. Of the full complement of 18 former Chiefs of the General Staff less than half steered clear of active politics altogether upon retirement. Most ministers of defence have themselves been generals in retirement, as have, in recent years, most (nominally civilian) directors-general of that ministry. Others have served as foreign ministers; some as ambassadors in major capitals; yet others as ministers in lesser departments. But most striking of all, with what, with hindsight, can be seen as political and strategic consequences of the very first order, is the fact that three of Israel’s 12 prime ministers have been of their number too. It was therefore characteristic of the political scheme of things—and of the mood and expectations of the country generally—that when General Halutz was appointed chief of the general staff in 2005 the question posed most urgently by journalists was whether, on retirement three, four or even five years later he did or did not plan to join the Likud. When Halutz resigned two years later, after his poor performance in the Second Lebanese War, what was promptly noted all round is that he seemed intent on keeping out of politics altogether—for the time being. There is, in short, a pattern to be descried: a rough one, to be sure, but one that is significant first and foremost because it is without precedent in the history of the Jews (except, of course, in ancient times) and is therefore inherently of a radical nature and liable to have unpredictable consequences. Moshe Dayan, Yigal Alon, Yitzhak Rabin, Yigael Yadin, Ezer Weizman, Ehud Barak, and Ariel Sharon—to take the best known generals-turned-politicians—all differed markedly one from the other in mindset, education and life-experience. But taken together, they differed still more obviously and to greater long-term effect from any of those whom we would accept as typical of Jewish leadership in the now almost forgotten past—the eminent rabbis, the financial and industrial grandees, the presidents and managers of communal and charitable organizations, and those very few, essentially private individuals who had no fixed and recognized place in the spectrum, but who in our own times would have carried that curious label ‘public intellectuals’. It is equally the case, moreover, and with greater and more palpable consequences, that the generals have differed quite as radically from people far closer to home, namely those who were prominent participants in the national political revival itself: all the way from Herzl, or Zangwill, or Weizmann, or Ben- Gurion himself, or his successors Sharett or Eshkol or Golda Meir or Begin, or, finally, from any of those whom one might pick out as typical of that great crowd of bourgeois and petit bourgeois, notably less inspired but in some ways more professional Israeli politicians of whom Pinhas Sapir and Yosef Burg, say, could stand as fair representatives. All of which raises questions of a more particular kind. Do the generals-turned-politicians as we know them today form a caste? How far (if at all) do they tend to be of one mind? Are they centrally directed? Do they promote each other’s purposes when called upon to do so? If they constitute a functioning class or set or group of any kind at all, is it a self-perpetuating one? But above all, are they—do they at least represent—the kind and quality of people who are destined finally to take command of a country when and if it is placed in what appear to be insuperable and inescapable difficulties? Or to put these questions less dramatically and in comparative terms: is their public role analogous to, say, that which the graduates of the E´ cole nationale d’administration (the ENA) play in France—a set of men and women who are notorious for occupying a staggeringly high proportion of plum posts in both government and industry on the basis of a uniquely wicked combination of personal merit, capability and intelligence on the one hand and old-boy networking on the other? Seven of the last ten prime ministers (up to and including the appointment of Dominique de Villepin to that post by President Chirac in mid-2005) were graduates of the ENA—as, of course, was President Chirac himself. And while at the time of writing it is conceivable that, under the new President Sarkozy, the e´narque ascendancy is about to wane,14 it would be brave to argue that it is approaching its end. Be that as it may, so far as Israel’s ex-senior officer corps is concerned, the answer to every one of these questions is negative—a fact that prompts a second set of questions. What of the generals’ actual record in national politics and in the higher administration of the state as ministers, directorsgeneral of ministries, mayors of major cities, and so forth? And there the answer, somewhat surprisingly, is that they have not done especially well, not even in fields in which one would have thought them especially equipped to shine. The best minister of defence, and by a very long stretch, was and remains the firmly civilian Ben-Gurion. Even the much maligned, profoundly civilian Eshkol did reasonably well, far better than most observers thought—or were encouraged to think—in his lifetime. And criticism of the civilian engineer Moshe Arens’ performance has come to be muted too. Dayan, in contrast, was a celebrated disaster. So too Ariel Sharon as Begin’s minister of defence. Few of the most recent crop—Shaul Mofaz, for example—have proved better than mediocre. Or, to take a cognate but telling example, five senior generals have been appointed at various times to the chieftaincy of the Mossad—an instrument of government to which former members of the General Staff might seem (to the innocent) to be especially well suited. Yet of only one of their number can it be said without any reservation at all that he retired from his post with his record unmarked by grievous error or crashing political or operational misjudgement—to which, however, it is fair to add that the current chief, another general-in-retirement, has earned golden opinions, so far. The admiral who took over the Security Service some years ago is thought to have been more moderately successful—much more so than he has proved to be in his subsequent career, still unfolding, in politics. A mixed bag, therefore, at best. And yet in a society in which trust in the competence and dedication of civilian functionaries of state has long been in decline, badges of senior military rank continue to strike the public as almost providential evidence of achievement—past achievement, of course, but at least proven. The IDF’s reputation for meritocratic internal management—and for its own normally earnest (if not always successful) effort to keep the politicians and their politics at bay—cannot be said to have been unfairly earned. The popular assumption that generals, by and large, are competent to handle large-scale managerial tasks is not unfounded. The most distinguished officers of general rank are precisely those who are reckoned to have demonstrated a positive capacity for taking hard decisions in conditions of uncertainty—as opposed to developing a skill in avoiding them in what we know to be the classic, civilian, bureaucratic manner. All senior officers have attended professional schools of one kind or another, some of a high order, some at home, some abroad. In short, given the fact that the political arena is now known and recognized by all to be much too heavily populated with men and women whom the public has had good cause to dismiss as mediocrities, it is no more than natural that men emerging from the higher ranks of the armed services should be thought of as standing head and shoulders above the ruck—as indeed they mostly do. And yet, alas, the best one can say of their actual record in public political life is that it has been of uneven quality; and the question why they continue to be brought into the political arena in such numbers will not quite go away after all. It may be supposed that once historians have been allowed to go to work on the relative state papers, perhaps in 20 or 30 or 40 years’ time, all three of the generals who have served Israel as prime ministers will be brought back to life less for their military successes than for their contributions to the collapse of their respective (original) political parties and for having plunged the country into crises for which they themselves were to prove incapable either of offering cogent public explanations or of freeing the country from their consequences. But my point is not that civilians—Ben- Gurion apart—have tended to do better than soldiers. That, taken all in all, is not the case either. It is rather that the answer to the specific question why the latter are so disproportionately on view in our political world cannot be made out on the strength of high accomplishment in political office. The echt civilian Ehud Olmert’s inept handling of the Second Lebanese War is now, at the time of writing, on its way to being digested by a profoundly dismayed public and laid to rest for the time being as very nearly par for the course. It will take longer for Amir Peretz’s display of unbelievable incompetence in the hugely important office of minister of defence to be so easily forgotten even by his closest political supporters, the relief registered throughout the country when he was finally removed in June 2007 having been palpable. But his replacement by the old, consistently controversial soldier—and former prime minister—Ehud Barak was met with mixed feelings at best all round. In the pitiless language chosen by one of Israel’s most forthright political commentators to sum up the whole sorry story, The difference between Sharon and Olmert is that Sharon was a much admired warrior and a minister of defence who misled his prime minister [a reference to Menahem Begin in the First Lebanese War], whereas Olmert, a novice prime minister with a grotesque minister of defence, was misled into a predictably bloody war by a chief of general staff, Dan Halutz, whose special glory lay in his posture as God Almighty.15 But Barak’s own brief, earlier occupancy of the office of prime minister had ended in a disaster of almost equal proportions and on all fronts: the political, the diplomatic, and that of the population’s plain old-fashioned safety as well. So if in some minds Charles de Gaulle was the model of what was needed—and it was, very specifically, so in the mid-1970s when Yigael Yadin was enticed into politics—that sort of expectation, generally speaking, would not have washed either—nor did it. Which prompts the question, why did the Labour Party elect Barak as their leader and candidate for the Defence Ministry all over again? Is the answer to the conundrum that what we have witnessed (in the case of Sharon, no less than that of Barak) is yet another instance of the triumph of human hope over human experience? Most probably, it is. But not that alone. Additional reasons and causes need to be advanced. There has been the collapse or even total disintegration of the old political parties. There has been the spectacle of each new ‘reform’ party in turn failing to make more than an initial impact before decline or oblivion have struck. Far too many obviously promising candidates for high office have refused to take so much as a step into the mire of politics. The demographic, cultural, and constitutional changes undergone by the country as a whole since its formal consolidation have been too intense and far-reaching not to have exhausted the two generations of would-be leaders who followed in the footsteps of the founders. And then, of course, there are the terms in which the conflict with the Arab, and to an increasing extent the Muslim world too, have now to be waged and which have changed beyond anything envisaged even a single generation ago, let alone two or three. Which is why, on working out how all these exceedingly difficult matters have impinged on the public mind, what must be factored into the relevant socio-political equation is a widespread public yearning for a national champion. In itself, the thirst for a genuine man-of-the-hour and the welcome that would be accorded him is not new. Some would go so far as to say that it was always present in Jewry if rarely or ever slaked. And disapproved of, on the whole, as sub- or proto-Messianic. And in any event, as a public phenomenon of genuine consequence, it has tended to surface only rarely and only, naturally enough, in times of extreme crisis. It burst above ground briefly, famously, in May 1967 when, to applause and relief all round (seriously misplaced, as we were later to learn), the general staff quite literally imposed Moshe Dayan on the then prime minister-cumdefence minister Levi Eshkol. It is the factor that in some shape or degree seems best to explain both the original rise to political prominence of Generals Rabin, Barak and Sharon and the ostensive oddity of their return to high authority after failure at the political peak the first time round. It goes quite far too to explain why the immediate, all but inevitable consequence of the fall of Shimon Peres as leader of the Labour Party in November 2005 was the strengthening of Sharon’s status (rather than that of Peres’ nominal successor Peretz) as all-round leader of the country. But that is not all. The very deepest roots of the lingering, periodically erupting anxieties with which substantial segments of the population are afflicted—and which, in turn, underlie the phenomenon of military commanders being disproportionately prominent in politics as a whole—are not really the contemporary ones at all. In part they are of ancient origin, having much to do with the conditions imposed upon the Jews by their Christian and Muslim masters and inculcated—perhaps indelibly—in their minds and memories. It is especially necessary to go back in time to Eastern Europe before the Shoah, although not there alone, and take the measure of the degree to which ancient Jewish insecurities survive among us, in the recesses of our minds, to grasp what it is that moves most citizens when they consider the state of the nation as a whole. So, fear after all? No. The public’s bravery—indeed, fortitude—has been amply and repeatedly displayed. But it has been touched of late, none the less, and as never before, by a great wariness; and it is deeply and increasingly disturbed by the evident functional and, to be candid, moral mediocrity of those who have presumed to wish to manage its affairs these past 30 years or so. Can it be, it seems to be asked, that statesmanship in the full sense of that term is beyond their competence? Some leaders on arriving at the peak of power are known to have trembled somewhat. Menahem Begin, on his accession to the premiership in 1977, promptly armed himself with two distinguished commanders: General Moshe Dayan as foreign minister and General Ezer Weizman as minister of defence—the latter, equally significantly, to be replaced in due course by the still more hawkish and perhaps in some sense more profoundly military general, Ariel Sharon. Alas, by that time the prime minister had ceased to tremble. What has been most disappointing about the general-prime ministers is not at all what might have been expected, namely that once in political office they would proceed to carry on as if they were still in uniform. It is rather that when in office, minor aspects of behaviour aside, each went on to behave much as their civilian predecessors and successors had done before them or were to do after them. For all their training, habits, and long experience of command over immensely large and complex formations in which and with which nothing effective could ever be done except on the basis of regular, systematic and free and attentive consultation with all senior subordinates—each, when in civilian office tended towards personal and personalized rule. None ever seriously saw to national policy being formulated, much less implemented, on the basis of a full and fundamental assessment of the totality of Israel’s positive and negative assets. Like the civilians who had reached the top of the constitutional pyramid, none was prepared to consider, much less countenance the proposition that long-term goals be founded on what, within reason, was attainable—as opposed, say, to goals that, however attractive or noble in themselves might not be attainable at all or, if at all, then doubtfully, ephemerally most likely, and at high, perhaps intolerable human, material and moral cost. All, in actual political, diplomatic, and strategic practice, floundered repeatedly from one inadequately thought-through, inadequately prepared, intellectually and socially timorous tactic to another—the cumulative human and material costs of which were to prove unpardonably large. It took well over an entire generation of leaders of civilian and military backgrounds alike for the Agranat Commission’s extremely modest proposal to set up a National Security Council to be acted upon—and then so grudgingly that it has still to be allowed to play the role for which it was nominally intended. Each one of the half-dozen directors appointed to run the body resigned his post well before his term had expired. Each did so, as we have come to know, in a state of silent or not-so-silent frustration. In each case the leader—i.e. the prime minister— preferred other ways of handling state business. Ariel Sharon, not an especially disciplined and loyal officer even in his great days as a soldier, preferred an admittedly gifted lawyer as his chief functionary for foreign and security affairs to any of the professionals. His successor, the supremely civilian, incomparably less confident and less experienced Ehud Olmert—a lawyer himself—treated his NSC director, the hugely experienced Ilan Mizrahi, with courtesy, but chose another lawyer to act as his principal diplomatic and security coordinator rather than any of the top grade professional diplomats or soldiers or foreign intelligence experts available to him. Only when the archives are opened in 30 years’ time will it be possible to judge just how far and in what precise respects the net result in each of these cases was one of the blind leading the blind. But it may not be possible to make a true judgement even then. Too much of what transpires at the pinnacle is intimate and verbal and has to do with men and the occasional woman at the top wanting before all else to keep their hands on the tiller—as opposed to sharing not responsibility, of course, but at least ideas with all officers of the watch. This is not to say that trusted cronies do not have their uses; nor that in some cases they may be held to be indispensable not only by their principals at the time, but by the historians in retrospect.