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| The man whom Franklin Roosevelt relied upon for service at America’s very highest level of foreign diplomatic and strategic policy-making and cooperation with allies during World War II was not his Secretary of State Cordell Hull or even (except sporadically) Hull’s deputy Sumner Welles. Least of all was it his otherwise much respected and in his own realm fully effective War Secretary Stimson. It was Harry Hopkins, a man with no expertise in foreign affairs to speak of and no fixed or clear status in the Administration’s hierarchy either.Was this, nevertheless, in some ultimate summing up, to the good?Was it—as appears to be the case—the onlyway Roosevelt himself could operate, being theman he was and having made his way politically in the way he had? These are tricky questions and if the answers may be rated positive in theAmerican case and sympathetic account is taken of the peculiarities of presidential rule under Roosevelt—or any other modern president, for that matter—they do not, by any means, lend themselves to easy application by all leaders in all conditions. All that can be asserted with any confidence as a general proposition is that best of all is the case where the leader’s adviser is at one and the same time the holder of a constitutionally established post and personally a man or woman who can be relied upon absolutely by his or her master—which means: as much for telling him truth as for personal loyalty. But then, to be sure, much will depend upon whether the master of the machinery of government wants to be told the truth. Roosevelt, famously, did notwant to hear the truth about the Soviet regime, for example.He much preferred to stick to the absurdity of Stalin being not much more terrible than a sort of Russian version of the political bosses he himself was familiar with at home—not by any means the monster dictator of the USSR he had heard some reports of, only the admittedly tough, but not impossible, even rather likeable ‘Uncle Joe’—and Russia itself as the Chicago of the 1920s and 1930s writ very large. Nor did Harry Hopkins himself want to think otherwise, or if he did so fromtime to time, he kept his thoughts to himself—all thiswith what we now know to have been near-catastrophic consequences for the post-war structure ofworld politics asRoosevelt insisted on envisaging them, but in practice rather than intention left Truman to deal with. It may seem even more extravagantly remote from the affairs of contemporary Israel and Roosevelt’s United States to recall that when Queen Elizabeth I appointed William Cecil (later Lord Burghley) as her Principal Secretary in 1558—making him the man who for decades thereafter would be the king-pin of her administration—she is reputed to have said to him: ‘This judgement I have of you, that you will not be corrupted by any manner of gift; and you will be faithful to the State; and without respect of my private will you will give me that counsel that you think best.’16 But it is not nearly as remote from the present subject as one might be tempted to think. What is true, nonetheless, is that the style and ethos of politics in modern Israel—when matched to the actual issues and complexities which, like any modern government, but more acutely than almost any other, Israel must face—leave small prospect of change to those fuller and deeper and altogether more responsible forms ofmajor policy-making of whichWilliam Cecil was the great pioneer, but which are so rare today the whole world over. Nor were they common, it must be said, in Gloriana’s day. But she and her Principal Secretary do serve as talking points—if not, strictly speaking, as models—precisely because they were exceptions to the messy and hugely inefficient ways in which state business was mostly handled elsewhere. In any event, what was on display in Israel immediately prior to the Second LebaneseWar—and equally evident a quarter of a century earlier in the lead-up to the longer and still more costly war begun in 1982—has been that issues facing the country’s successive governments are now vastly more complicated than in the state’s earlier days; that society is divided on major issues in ways and with a ferocity that were once hardly known; and that the risk of irreversible and fatal error in strategic navigation is now almost too high to contemplate. That all concerned are therefore tempted to hold fast to the short term and to what those involved in central decisionmaking are apt to think of as a just manageable status quo is perfectly human and natural, therefore, even if hugely wrong-minded. That they might choose instead to apply implacably rigorous analysis to the process of political and strategic navigation is most probably, unfortunately, too fanciful to contemplate. And that that is the case, is chiefly, as the Appendix to this essay may serve to illustrate, because the conclusions to which such analysis is likely to lead will in themselves be unwelcome. Still, it would be wrong to end on an entirely dark and pessimistic note. And not merely because while these are indeed hard times, they mark an anniversary of a stupendous event, the major consequences of which continue to command serious and continuing attention in all parts—which, to be sure, does not mean unanimous sympathy and approval. The swirl of controversy that has enveloped Israel since its inception is indeed unrelenting. Some hold the view that the Zionists did not, after all, sweep the ‘Jewish Problem’ as this was understood in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries into history’s dustbin. They have done no more, it is said, than transmogrify it. But that is not merely an uncharitable view, but a shallow one. The impact of the re-creation of Jewish sovereignty on the Jews themselves—in all parts—has, as the braver spirits among the Zionists always predicted, been revolutionary. And to the good. The changes wrought in the overall condition of Jewry—in internal structure no less than as one people among others—have not only been immense in themselves, but apposite, necessary, just, and far too long delayed. This is not to say that they have been complete—nor that it would be possible to posit in what completeness would consist. Unlike their ancestors, the Jews of Israel are a restless and impatient lot. On the other hand, a new, rather earthy sobriety has begun—just begun, to be frank—to eat away at two of the presumptions that had been rather too hastily intercalated into the Zionist programme: the applicability of simplistic universal principles first to the Jewish case, then to Israel’s; and, probably with more important long-term consequences, that category error that links national needs and national ambitions as lay and religious leaders have defined them to the notion that the destiny of the Jewish State had been divinely and favourably ordained. This scaling down of outlook and purpose has had a good deal to do, of course, with the long-drawn-out consequences of four decades of military occupation of territories that were once under Egyptian and Jordanian rule. But it can be argued that it has had even more to do in the final analysis with the failures of successive governments not only to manage Israel’s security and diplomatic affairs in an effective and competent manner, but to operate properly—in some cases to operate at all—in fields which might be supposed to be much more comfortably, or even totally, under their command. In the realm of public education, for example; or as regards ever less tolerable social and economic inequalities; or their own positively craven refusal to impose equal military and national service on all; or their tolerance of the iniquitous (alas halakhic) treatment of women as opposed to men by the rabbinical courts; or to meet the decline in public regard for law and order and common respect for those who administer both the one and the other by truly tough measures; or, finally, to cleave to proper standards of personal conduct themselves. To all of which there needs, of course, to be added the failure thus far to restore full confidence in the efficacy of the Israel Defence Forces—a component of the whole to which most citizens have belonged at one time or another in their lives and on which, as every child in Israel understands, the nation will continue to depend absolutely crucially for as long as anyone can conceivably foresee. The general point to be made here is that this complex of interconnected subjects has ceased to be one to which only specialist journalists and academics pay serious attention and are anxious to deal with. The efficacy and quality of government—or more directly the efficacy, quality and integrity of those engaged in it—are now matters of ever louder discourse and high feeling at every level and corner of society. There is, in short, a stirring. And the present discontent is coupled to rising, fully explicit disbelief in the capacity of the existing political class to work those changes for the better that people want to see. The mood among members of the Israeli political class itself tends therefore, properly so, to be one of rising anxiety. Its members’ confidence in their capacity to maintain themselves in power and office; and to manage the trick before both the one and the other slip away from them irreversibly has never been at lower ebb. If some among them are apt, subliminally, to rely on the historical truth that the Jewish people tended, on the whole, to be loyal—not to say submissive—to those whom for one reason or another they had accepted as their leaders, others are aware that what was once the case is the case no longer. And this, it is worth noting, has had everything to do with the ethos of the movement that brought Israel into being. For what was unique about the Zionist movement in its glory days—over and above the daring, unprecedented essentials of its public programme—was that before all else it was rebellious. And that the rebellion it mounted was not only against the condition of Jewry as the outer, gentile world had defined and enforced it in the course of almost innumerable centuries, but implicitly—and often explicitly—against the Jews’ own ruling classes within. It follows that what most especially defines modern Jewry is that the day of grandees who derived their authority from a combination of personal wealth and the support of the rabbis is past. The sources of social and political authority within Jewry and the instruments of suasion amenable to use by those who seek to influence public opinion are now of a very different kind. Crucially, they hinge not on imposition, but on what wells up, naturally and autonomously, from within the Jewish public itself. Or so it should be if the governance of Israel is to be to good purpose. What one wants to know most urgently, therefore, is what, if anything, is now left of the great wave of the energy, self-confidence, and independence of spirit that carried the sovereign State of Israel into being 60 years ago and sustained it through its initial decades; what form it is now about to take; and at what those who retain anything at all of the old rebellious spirit are most likely to direct their attention. These are very hard questions to answer. But a new, more critical climate of political opinion can, I think, be detected, just; and something in the nature of a fresh start may therefore be possible. Will it occur? Social and political initiatives for change in Jewry have rarely if ever come from below. Top-down has been the form and direction. Such, of course, was the case of Zionism itself, initially. Will the direction change? Will a new and more effective and above all more direct form of political democracy emerge? It is very badly needed. But of course nothing is assured. All that is reasonably certain is that in modern Israel itself, possibly with implications for Jewry as a whole, power does lie now with the people. But that being the case, so too does responsibility; and the decision how and when and if and to what purpose it will be applied—if applied at all—will be theirs as well. AFTERWORD This essay was begun towards the end of 2007 and completed in March 2008. On 30 January 2008 the commission of inquiry into the origins, handling, outcome and responsibility for the so-called Second Lebanese War of 2006 delivered its long-awaited final report. As we waited for its publication I wondered whether, in the light of the report and what might prove to be the aftermath of publication, the general argument underlying this essay would need to be revised. In the event, however—I say this with regret—nothing in Judge Eliahu Winograd’s and his fellow colleagues’ findings caused me to change my mind or alter my text on any of the points at which their remarks and mine may be said to have overlapped. On the contrary, if change at all then one that would take the form of striking a substantially sterner note than the one I thought (and still think) appropriate to the subject and to the occasion and to the limits to which a purely personal opinion may legitimately be taken. But I will say this about the Winograd Report itself: that over and above the precise terms of their remit, the circumstances were such that the commission had been handed a massive lever of change and the question that continues to hover concerns what they proceeded to make of their opportunity. For theirs was a unique opportunity not merely to inquire, but to instigate reform. National morale had rarely been lower, hope and expectation of radical reform in all arms of government never higher. A clear, uncompromising and unforgiving assignment of both responsibility and irresponsibility undiluted by court-room-like attempts to note all sides of all questions—this, one feels might finally have upset the applecart on which Israel’s destinies have been so recklessly loaded these past five or so decades. Nothing of the kind was done. Whether it was so much as attempted we do not know. In more explicit language: Judge Winograd and his colleagues, whether they knew it or not, had been presented with the power—augmented by huge public support—to cause not so much a wind as a gale of change to blow through the country’s political, administrative and military systems. This was the challenge facing them. They fluffed it. Whether these five unquestionably honourable people failed what so many of us took to be their public duty out of short-sightedness, or lack of civil courage, or failure of imagination, or an excess of formalism and quasi-judicial temperament hardly matters any more. A golden opportunity to spark that hugely needed movement for radical reform from without the party-parliamentary system—at a time when those ensconced within it have repeatedly proved themselves either unwilling or unable to undertake anything of the sort themselves, by themselves—was lost. Which leaves us, once again, and not without trepidation, on the lookout for rescue from elsewhere and by others. APPENDIX One of the immediate consequences of the 1967 war was an unprecedented proliferation of private and public debates on public policy—most particularly, as was natural, on what was to be done about the newly, unexpectedly occupied territories. Some debates were platform affairs before large audiences. Some took the form of round table discussions in which people who were thought to have something valuable to say on the subject were invited to air their views. So long as the post-war situation and the question of the ‘territories’ as they came to be called were thought to be fluid the debates were popular: well attended and imbued in most cases with a sense that history was in the making and that all could contribute something to it. Once the Arab leaders at Khartoum declared their opposition to a deal of any kind at all with Israel and, on the other hand, a little later, mounting pressure to effect a real return to the Jewish people’s ancestral lands by means of actual settlement began to yield its first fruits, the wind that had filled the sails of these debates and discussion circles dropped and equable exchanges of view were replaced by demagogy. While they lasted, however, these discussion and debating circles turned out to have had other uses. Academic self-advertisement was one, as might be expected. Professional specialists in international and Middle Eastern politics being a dime a dozen in Israel there were a great many people who felt they had—and, indeed, did have—something to say and were intensely anxious to say it. But it was the politicos who were drawn most powerfully to these occasions, Shimon Peres among them. Peres, at the time, was in the doldrums politically and in serious danger of finding himself in the wilderness altogether. He had followed Ben- Gurion out of the Labour Party and into the Old Man’s RAFI Party only to find himself marooned and alone once Ben Gurion himself had departed definitively for semi-isolation in Sde Boker and Ben-Gurion’s other notable prote´ge´, Dayan, had re-invented himself politically by joining Levi Eshkol’s government when war was imminent. Meanwhile, Eshkol himself had gone the way of all flesh (February 1969) and the question Peres now faced was whether to seek to make his peace, if peace were possible, with Golda Meir and the other Old Guard masters of the Labour Party. He knew they disliked and distrusted him, that they might refuse definitively to welcome him back, and that if they did allow his return it would be with his tail between his legs. But the alternatives were narrowly circumscribed. He could either attempt the almost hopeless project of reconstituting what would, in effect, be the crumbs of RAFI—or resign himself to final failure. His interim solution, while minds on all sides were being made up, not least his own, was to gather people round him, so far as that might be possible and on an ostensibly non-political basis for the time being. To that end, towards the end of 1968, he initiated what became known informally as the Hotel Samuel Circle, after the small Tel Aviv hotel in which it was to meet at regular, fortnightly intervals in the months that followed. The participants, all Peres’ personal invitees, could be categorized, roughly, as first or second level members of what passed in those days for the ‘establishment’: generals-in-retirement, other senior retired members of the defence and intelligence community, leading figures in industry and finance, a lawyer or two, a handful of university professors, and a pair of politicians who, with Peres himself, formed the rump of the virtually defunct RAFI. Looking forward a decade or so, these would be of much the same sort as those who were to gather round Yigael Yadin to form the socalled Democratic Party,17 the only (unintended) consequence of which was to help finally pull the Labour Party down from its perch and, to the horror of most of its members (Yadin himself, apart), make it possible for Menahem Begin and his lot to assume power in their stead. But that was for a future and in 1968–1969 a still inconceivable reversal of opinion and alliances. The sessions of the Hotel Samuel Circle were chaired by Peres himself— a function he performed with the efficiency and confidence that had won him his spurs years earlier as the effective administrator of the Ministry of Defence (as distinct from the armed forces over which he had no authority whatever even in those, his glory days, and in whose ranks, as it happened, he had never served). It was Peres too who set the agenda, naturally enough. But each of the participants was free—and felt free—to speak his mind. What was intended to count as the engine by which the Circle was to be driven forward to some good general, public purpose was the appointment of small teams of two or three members, each of which was asked to prepare position papers on outstanding issues. These would serve as bases for orderly discussion by the Circle at its full strength of about two dozen members all told (as best I remember). The topics allotted to these small study groups were all meat and potatoes: economic, social, constitutional, international-political. Three of us were invited to form the committee that was to prepare a position paper on the more particular and obviously much touchier issue of the occupied territories and what was best done about them. The three were Yehoshafat Harkavi, sometime head of the Army’s Intelligence Branch, Nahum (Herbert) Pundak, a journalist with strong family and professional connections in Denmark, and myself. We very quickly set up a series of meetings, some of them sub rosa, with people who were professionally close to the day-to-day management of the territories and willing to share useful insights with us on a confidential basis. But the main thing was our promising each other that we would set ourselves to think the issue through from a sound basis in contemporary reality to a rational and feasible end. We met at short intervals over a period of several weeks. We operated totally without parti pris and with every intention of providing the Circle as a whole with a paper its members could get their teeth into. At no point, I am glad to say, did we ever deviate from these self-imposed guidelines. Facing us at the end of our inquiries and investigations—all done with rapidity (but then each one of us was familiar with the scene as a whole and the political, social, ideological, and strategic issues to which the matter of the territories ineluctably gave rise)—was the question of how that paper was actually to be drawn up and which one of us, in practice, would serve as rapporteur. Here I have to say thatmyown experience in the civil service had taught me that in most cases of this kind it was the very first draft, inevitably the one the rapporteur had formulated, that—if it had not been binned at the outset—would almost inevitably form the basis, and largely determine the tone and thrust too, of the final document. And since, to be frank, I had ideas ofmyownthat I was anxious to bring forward, I volunteered for the job.Nor didmycolleagues object tomyserving them, being, for all I knew, relieved at not being landed with what, all in all, was bound to be an ungrateful task. They could, of course, propose amendments and excisions and did. In the event, however, the paper I drew up for our little group was accepted, so far as I can recall, with few changes, if any, not least, I think, because it followed our own discussions as closely as was possible. The final paper consisted of two parts. In the first we sought to lay down the governing principles on which policy needed to be based. The second sought to deal with what might be involved on the ground, namely with the strategic implications of withdrawal from this or that place on the map. There was no attempt to cover these matters in their entirety: it was an argument in general terms accompanied by examples. These have long since been overtaken by events. It is, accordingly, only the first, general—not to say philosophical—part of our paper that can be said to retain some interest. The main points, briefly, were that: a) Israel’s supreme national interest lay in its quality as a Jewish singlenation state being maintained. b) Territory per se must not be allowed to constitute a national interest— which is not to say, on the other hand, that it cannot be allowed to serve specific, instrumental (e.g. strategic) ends. c) It followed, therefore, that policy must be founded on a judicious balance being struck between strategic and demographic needs. d) But there being no present, nor, it would appear, readily conceivable prospect of compromise and co-existence with the Arab peoples and the Arab states, Israel’s own policy towards them had to be one of containment. e) Containment itself entails perpetual retention of both the military and the diplomatic-political initiative. This can be difficult. It means, in practice, that hard and unpopular decisions need to be taken. Yet to attempt to proceed on the basis of avoiding difficult policy decisions is in itself to define a policy—and inevitably a policy of immobilism is one that leaves the initiative to the adversary. In sum, fewpolicy decisions are liable to be as damaging in the long run as those that are founded on immobilism and the belief that the status quo can be cleaved to sine die. f) It follows, therefore, from all points of view, that where the occupied territories fail the test of demonstrable strategic value, but are, on the other hand, populated by people who for a host of historical, social, political, ethnic and of course religious reasons are hostile to the Jewish state and the Israeli public, it will be to our overwhelming advantage to withdraw from them—and to do so, moreover, in our time, on our own initiative, and sooner rather than later.18 After retyping (I was my own typist, being totally without secretarial help), the document was submitted to Shimon Peres and the three of us sat back, awaiting its distribution to the Circle for the full discussion that was to follow. We waited in vain. There was never any apology or explanation. Questions put to Peres were deflected. When, some months later he was re-admitted to his old party and given a minor seat in the government the Circle, having outlived its usefulness so far as he was concerned, promptly fell apart. But then, given what Peres had had most seriously of all in mind and given too what we had actually written, one may suppose that neither the specific policy content of our paper nor the approach to the making of national policy on which it had been founded could appeal to so hugely ambitious and impatient a politician. Still less would it have appealed to the old lady (for by this time Golda Meir rather than Levi Eshkol occupied the prime ministerial chair) or her closest colleagues, the mostly elderly gentlemen whose hands were still on the determining levers of power—if, that is, they would ever have had the patience to consider it or anything remotely like it. And then, finally, it may not be irrelevant that Peres himself, a while later, following his star, would be the man who would take some of the crucial steps towards the opening up of the ‘territories’ to Jewish settlement—blowing apart any likelihood at all of the government of which, by then, he had become a very prominent member indeed, moving mentally and intellectually in the direction that our paper had adumbrated. NOTES 1. Most explicitly, for the post-World War I period, in Roth’s vivid, if essentially journalistic report on the condition of Polish Jewry, Juden aufWanderschaft (translated as TheWandering Jews by Michael Hofmann, London, 2001). 2. Following the late Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish catastrophe, 1933–1945, New York, 1992, passim. 3. The Times, 18 January 1995. 4. Yiddish original cited by Esther Mark in ‘Arba’ te’udot me-Auschwitz-Birkenau: Be-zva’at ha-retsah’, Gal-‘Ed, Tel Aviv, vol. i, 1973, pp. 322–323; and see comments by Mendel Pikazh in Kivunim, 24 August 1984. 5. Ispravnik ¼ the superintendent commanding the police in a uyezd, the smallest of the administrative units into which the tsar’s empire was divided. 6. Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents, 1770. 7. As in Y.H. Brenner’s well-known story ‘Mi-kan u-mi-kan’, a tale, amongst other things, of the humiliation of impoverished Jewish settlers by a self-confident mounted Arab cast in terms which, as has been pointed out by Natan Schechter, are not unlike those employed by Bialik in his ferocious poem on the behaviour of Jews under the flail of the Kishinev pogromoshchiki in 1903. ‘Emet me-eretz-Yishmael: Post-zionut be-’Mi-kan u-mi-kan’’, Keshet ha-Hadasha, Vol. 9 (Autumn 2004), pp. 160–178. 8. Of which the best remembered to this day is the attack on the quite ancient, distinctly pre- and anti-Zionist Eastern European-style ultra-orthodox Jewish population of Hebron in 1929. 9. Or in the original Yiddish: ‘Ich vill mein ganzen leben moyre hobn? Genug hob ich moyre gehat’. Another section of that same lady’s letter is equally worth quoting: Generally it has developed into a guerrilla warfare, a partizanskaya voina. To bring it home to you, picture to yourself us, on Bilu Street [in Tel Aviv], kept awake most of the night by bomb explosions and the staccato of machine guns; or imagine [our friend] R. putting out the light on our balcony because of shooting which sounds too near for his nerves . . . [But] life goes on without interruption: ‘business as usual’. Streets are just as full, cafe´s just as crowded, shops open. Not because one is really safe. One is not. But because of a really wonderful greatness of spirit. Something has happened to the Jewish people. Or perhaps this stamina, this grit, was always there and at the first chance came to the fore. The resoluteness, the self-discipline, the level headedness, the inner serenity of spirit, are all miraculous. I know that what I write sounds enthusiastic; I assure you it is an understatement. This sense of a people sure of itself, this absolute lack of panic with which the whole town, the whole yishuv is permeated is truly great: all the qualities of which we always thought the Englishman had the monopoly and which we so wistfully envied him for possessing. I tell you I feel as if a rare experience was vouchsafed me to see what the Jewish people is really like. I have not heard one defeatist word, seen no quailing look. . . And then the great physical courage. To see Jews not running away from danger, but toward it. Both letters are in private possession. 10. Jakob der Lu¨ gner, Berlin, 1969; in English translation by Leila Vennewitz, as Jacob the Liar, New York, 1990, pp. 80–81. 11. ‘Das ju¨ dische Volk schied aus der Reihe der ka¨mpfenden Nationen aus und legte sein Geschick ganz in die Hand Gottes’. Yitzhak [Fritz] Baer, Galut, Berlin, 1936, p. 14. English translation (slightly revised) by R. Warshow (New York, 1947), pp. 18–19. 12. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter 13. 13. Ibid., Chapter 14. 14. It is of some significance that Franc¸ois Fillon, prime minister at the time of writing, is not a graduate of the ENA, but of the Institut d’e´tudes politiques de Paris (IEP) and, like President Sarkozy himself, a lawyer. 15. Yo’el Marcus in Ha’aretz, 7 December 2007. 16. Cited by Lacey Baldwin Smith, The Elizabethan Epic, London, 1966, p. 74. 17. Converted, after a while, much against the will and outlook of most of Yadin’s original supporters, into an enlarged ‘Democratic Movement for Change’ on the strength of which, in the 1977 elections, Yadin entered Begin’s government as deputy prime minister. Alas, his performance as such was lamentable—much the worst before or after of any of the generalsturned- politicians. 18. We pointed out, for example, that while it might be desirable, on security grounds, to maintain a military presence in the Jordan Valley and to consider retention of the Kalkilya/Tul-Karem area very carefully, the demographic argument in favour of withdrawal from Nablus and its environs was overwhelming. |
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