Hal Draper, Zionism, Israel & the Arabs, pp. 107–119.
New Politics, Winter 1967
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This article is a somewhat condensed and edited version of a talk given in Berkeley shortly after the outbreak of the Third Arab-Israeli War, dealing with the historical background of the conflict but not with the current situation, which was discussed separately. |
We have just seen War No. 3 in the tragedy known as the Israel-Arab conflict; and we find ourselves in the position of being unable to cheer for either side in this clash of chauvinisms. At this time I am going to devote myself mainly to the myths and illusions about the Israeli side of the story, for the simple reason that it is these myths and illusions that you mainly read and hear about.
It is not possible to understand what has happened merely by looking at what happened in the last couple of weeks. Behind War No. 3 is a closely connected chain of events and issues going far back. The main link in this chain is the story of a nation that has been destroyed.
That sounds like an echo of what we hear all around, viz. the threat of the Arab states to destroy the state of Israel – the threat which is the hallmark of Arab chauvinism. But while this is a threat, there was a nation that was destroyed in Palestine – already. It is this destroyed nation whose fate has been the crux of the Middle East tragedy, for its fate has been used and is being used as a football by each side.
When I was born, there was an Arab nation in Palestine, in whose midst Jews had lived for 2,000 years in relative peace. Where is this nation now, and what has been done to it? The answer is at the heart of the program which we face now.
Today the leaders of the Arab states are saying, “We aim to destroy the nation which inhabits Palestine,”and they are rightly denounced for this. But toward the end of the 19th century, a movement arose which did in fact set itself the aim of destroying the nation which inhabited Palestine then; and, moreover, it did so. That movement was the Zionist movement.
Everyone talks nowadays about “the Jews” and “the Arabs,” with doubtful justice. There are Jews and Jews, as there are Arabs and Arabs; and right now I am talking not about “the Jews,” but about the Zionist movement. Israel today is run by the old men of the world Zionist movement, and it is still the Zionist ideology which rules Israeli policy. The European survivors of Hitler’s death camps are not the Jews who run Israel; their terrible fate has been a tool used by the men who run Israel, so that the crimes of the Nazis have been used to deflect the attention of world public opinion from the crimes committed in Palestine.
For present purposes, there are three things to understand about this Zionist ideology, which still rules the rulers of Israel. To present the first, I quote a typical example of anti-Semitic literature:
The converted Jew remains a Jew, no matter how much he objects to it ... Jews and Jewesses endeavor in vain to obliterate their descent through conversion or intermarriage with the Indo-Germanic and Mongolian races, for the Jewish type is indestructible ... Jewish noses cannot be reformed, and the black wavy hair of the Jews will not change through conversion into blond, nor can its curves be straightened out by constant combing.
There is more of the same where this comes from. Obviously from the Nazi commentary on the Nuremberg Laws, or from Streicher’s Sturmer, or perhaps from Gerald L.K. Smith? Not at all: it is from a classic of Zionism, Moses Hess’ Rom und Jerusalem. It is easily possible to quote pages and pages more of this same mystical blood-tribalism from the best Zionist sources, all sounding as if it came from the arsenal of the anti-Semites.
For Zionism is, first of all, a doctrine about a tribal blood-mystique which makes all Jews a single nation no matter whey they live or how. It asserts that Jews are inevitably aliens everywhere, just as the anti-Semites say they are; and that anti-Semitism is correct in feeling this. This is the first element in Zionism.
Secondly: it follows that the Jews must reconstitute their “nation” in a state territory; but not just any state territory. In fact there is a point of view called “territorialism,” as distinct from Zionism, which looked for the establishment of a Jewish nation in a land other than Palestine. But Zionism demands that the Jewish “nation” take over Palestine – only Palestine; and by Palestine it means the ancient Jewish state and its boundaries, Eretz Israel, no less. This is what the tribal mystique demands.
Thirdly: the Zionist ideology dictates that this Jewish state must be set up not only by Jews who want to live in such a state. One of the tasks of the Zionist movement is to move all Jews, from all countries of the world, into Palestine, now Israel. In Zionist slang, this is called the “Ingathering of the Exiles”; for it is an article of basic faith that all Jews living outside this territory are living literally in exile, and always will merely be exiles, nothing else. It was not very many years ago that a writer in Davar, the organ of the Israeli ruling party, made the suggestion that a good way of uprooting all those American Jews who declined to go to Israel was to send a gang of anti-Semitic agitators there to make the ground hot under their feet so that they would move. This, of course, is not usually the course recommended on paper, as against persuasion. But how persuasion graduates into denunciation and arm-twisting was seen in the early fifties when David Ben-Gurion, on a visit to the U.S., denounced the Zionist Organization of America as traitors to Zionism because its leaders were not working actively to get the entire Jewish population of the U.S. to move to Israel. It must be understood (though American Zionists systematically obfuscate it to the best of their ability) that the Israeli leaders and world Zionist leaders sincerely believe in their mission to “ingather” all the Jews of the world to the state of Israel, and that they have devoted their lives to this mission.
The Zionists have always been fond of saying that they are tired of the Jews being a “peculiar people,” that they have been “peculiar” long enough. They want (they say) the Jews to be a people like any other, and to have a state just like any other state. In Israel. I would tell you, they have succeeded notably in this aim: Israel more and more has become a state like any other state. In this stridently militarist Zionist state, the current of Jewish humanism which was one of the glories of the Jewish people from Maimonides to Spinoza and after, is today represented only by a minority – a minority whose voices are rarely heard abroad, and hardly at all in the U.S.; but it is this minority which represents the only Israel with whom one can identify.
Soon after the creation of Israel the press was full of enthusiastic reports by American Jewish tourists who went to Israel and came back to relate the wonders that they saw there (and there are many to see). One that I remember most vividly was a tourist who was quoted as follows in the course of his burbling: “Why, you walk around Tel-Aviv, and you know what? Even the policemen are Jewish!” That’s true, naturally. The cops are Jewish in Israel – and they are still cops. The militarists in Israel are Jewish – and they are militarists. And the people who destroyed the Arab Palestinian nation which I mentioned were, alas, also Jewish – though I do not believe that they will go down in the annals of history alongside Maimonides and Spinoza.
The destruction of that Palestinian nation went through four periods. The first period goes from the beginning of the Zionist movement up to World War I. This was a period of slow immigration of Jews into Palestine and of gradual land-buying. By the time it ended Jews constituted something under 10 percent of the population. Despite Zionism’s profession that this was the thin edge of the wedge in its long term aim to establish a Jewish state in the land inhabited by the Arabs, it was not taken seriously enough to occasion much resistance until the second period, inaugurated by the 1917 Balfour Declaration.
It was in this period that British imperialism, taking over the area, started its decades-long policy of playing Zionists against Arabs in order to maintain its imperialist control. The Zionist leadership willingly and knowingly collaborated with the British. They knew that, at this stage, it was not they who could control the Arab people living in the land; only British imperialism could do it for them. To be sure, they were not puppets of the British: they were junior partners, in an enterprise in which each partner considered that it was using the other for its own ends.
This was also the period of the beginning of Arab nationalism, of an Arab national-liberation movement. This movement had every right to fight for liberation from Britain (or in other parts of the Middle East, from France). To supporters of Arab freedom, the Zionist movement could have appeared only as what it actually was: a partner of the European imperialists. It makes no difference whatsoever that the Zionists played this baneful role not out of love for Britain but in pursuit of their own expansion. The fact is that Britain used the Zionist tool to increase the number of Jewish settlers so as to play them off against the indigenous Arab population. Thus it was inevitable that Jewish immigration should appear to the Arabs as a tool of imperialist domination, for it was so.
It was therefore during the 1920s that, for pretty much the first time in Palestine, there began sporadic Arab attacks against Jewish settlers. On the one side, these were the first stirrings of an Arab national liberation movement, directed not only against the British but also against the allies of the British who were at hand, viz. Zionist infiltrators into the country. On the other hand – and here you get the typically tragic element in this story which goes through it from beginning to end – these stirrings took on strong overtones of the backward social and religious aims of the Arab movement; for progressive social elements were weak, working-class formations were incipient. But this hardly can change the fact that there was a legitimate nationalist movement under way.
The third period – which was to prove decisive to the outcome – came with the onset of the Nazis’ anti-Jewish drive, first in Germany itself, and then in the course of World War II in the rest of Nazi-occupied Europe, up to the mass extermination campaign and its death camps. It should be added that in the period immediately following the war, there was also the onset of Soviet anti-Semitism on a big scale, thereby boosting the impact of what had happened during the war.
This is the period that everyone knows about; some think it is all one has to know. But there is more to this than meets the myopic eye.
To be sure, for the Jewish remnant Europe represented burning ground: they had to get out – somehow, somewhere, anywhere. This plight of the Jewish refugees – one of the most terrible in the history of man’s bestiality to man – was what dramatically captured the sympathy of everyone decent in the world; it is this that is tied up in the public mind with the exodus to Palestine. This is entirely true as far as it goes; but one has to know something else too. This terrible plight and this great world sympathy were not enough to open the gates of a single Western country to those Jewish refugees!
During those years we independent socialists called for opening the doors of the United States to the Jewish victims of Hitlerism, those who were left. I can tell you that in this great “liberal” country, crawling with liberals, there was hardly an echo of such a notion, of opening the doors of this country to the poor Jews for whom everyone’s heart bled – in print.
One reason for this is clear and can be easily documented. Morris Ernst, the famous civil liberties layer who was involved at the time, has told the story, among others: about how the leaders of the Zionist movement exerted all the influence they could muster to make sure that the U.S. did not open up immigration to these Jews – for the simple reason that they wanted to herd these same Jews to Palestine. This is what their Zionist ideology demanded. White Christian America was only too glad to go along with this “solution”! Who wanted a few hundred thousand miserable Jewish refugees coming into the country? Not our liberal Americans, who were so heart-stricken by Nazi brutality. Not the British, who took in an inconsequential token number. Nor anyone else. These Jewish victims were people on the planet without a visa. Liberals in this country, as elsewhere, had a convenient way of salving their tender consciences; all they had to do was parrot the line which the Zionists industriously provided them: “They want to go only to Palestine ...”
Now there is no point in anyone’s arguing to what extent this was really true or not, or of how many it was true, because no one ever gave them the chance to decide whether they wanted to go to Palestine or to some other country that was open to them The doors were shut against them, with the help of the whole Zionist apparatus and of other “influential” Jews who were no more enthusiastic about “flooding” the country with poor Jews than their WASP neighbors. First it was made damned sure that Palestine was the only possible haven, and then they might possibly be asked where they wanted to go, as if they had a free choice! In my eyes, this is one of the basest crimes committed by the Zionist leadership.
In this way the Jewish survivors of the Hitlerite death camps were herded toward Palestine, to keep the U.S. and other countries from being contaminated by their presence (for some) or to make sure that they were properly “ingathered” (for others). Of course, Palestine was not really open either, being still under the control of the British, but here at least the Zionist movement was willing to go all-out to crash the gates, with heavy financing from many an American Jew who himself had no sympathy for Zionism but could be convinced that Palestine was certainly a more suitable haven than New York.
This turn brought the Zionist movement into conflict with the same British imperialism whose junior partner it had been. The partners’ paths now diverged. The Jewish refugees – fleeing from a horror behind them, and rejected on all sides – became the human material the Zionists needed to carry out the goal they had set a half century before: to dispossess the Arab nation of Palestine and install a Jewish state in its stead – and to do this with the sympathy of a good deal of the world.
The Palestinian Arabs, as well as their Arab neighbors, had a very simple comment to make on this situation: “Hitler’s extermination program was a great crime, but why does that mean that we have to give up our land to the Jews? It is the world’s problem, not just ours.” I should like to see someone refute this.
We must note that by this time the Zionist movement had finally come out openly with its proclaimed intention of taking Palestine away as a Jewish state. This had been done in 1942, in the so-called “Biltmore Program.” (Up to then, the Zionists had used doubletalk about a “Jewish homeland” to confuse the picture.) Now that the cards were on the table, there were even some Zionists – or at least people who considered themselves to be Zionists – who were outraged. It was around this time that the Ichud was founded in Palestine by Rabbi Judah Magnes. The idea of a bi-national state in Palestine was counterposed to the official Zionist program: instead of a “Jewish state” it meant a state in which both Jews and Arabs could live peacefully and tranquilly together; but it was rejected. Instead, the Zionists said, “We are going to take the whole country”; and they did.
Here I need only sketch how this happened. After a series of double-dealing maneuvers by the great powers (particularly the U.S., Britain, and Russia) which it would take too long to go into, by 1947 the United Nations decided on a partition plan. There were to be two separate states in Palestine, a Jewish state and an Arab Palestinian state. By this time, there was indeed a Jewish majority in the territory assigned to the Jewish state – something like a 60% majority – and therefore one could feel that this majority had the right to invoke the right to self-determination. I might as well mention that, at that time (1948), I did myself believe and write that the Palestinian Jews had the right to make this mistaken choice (for, of course, a right exists only if it includes the right to make a mistake). I mention this only to make clear that I believed and wrote at that time that the attack on the new state of Israel by the Arab states was an aggression and a violation of the right to self-determination.
But at that moment Israel was still new-born, and there were different ways in which it could defend itself – in a progressive and democratic way, and in a racist and expansionist way. The answer to that historical question was not long in coming: it was given right away by the same Zionist leaders who were also the rulers of the new state power. From its first hour the Zionist power took the road of a reactionary and racist purge of the Arabs as such. At this point I am not talking about the foreign Arab states, but of the Arabs of Israel themselves, the great mass of whom never took up arms against Israel or aided the aggressors.
A new act in the Middle East tragedy begins here; although it is a crime smaller in magnitude than Hitler’s against the Jews, it is still one of the most shameful in recent history. The Zionist ruler utilized the attack by the foreign Arab states to run the Palestinian Arabs off their land, by means of a series of laws and measures which were taken not only in 1948–49 but which went right on into the 1950s. The forty percent of the population which was Arab in the partitioned territory was reduced to about 10 percent in the new state of Israel. Immense proportions of Arab-owned land were simply robbed from them, by “legal” means. By 1954 over one-third of the Jewish population then in Israel was settled on land that had been stolen from the Palestinian Arabs. And the Arab state of Palestine which had been created by the partition never came into existence; by the end of the war, five sections of it had been grabbed by Israel and were never given up, and the West Jordan area was incorporated into the state of Jordan.
Thus the Arab nation of Palestine was destroyed, except as a discriminated-against remnant in Israel, and even the truncated Arab state of Palestine set up by partition was destroyed. I am entirely willing to denounce anyone who wants to destroy any existing state, including Israel; but some thought should be given to this recent history by those who are willing to denounce only the threat to destroy Israel.
The great land robbery of the Israeli Arabs was the despoiling of a whole people. It was carried out in various ways, but generally speaking the pattern was this: any Arab who had left his village during the war for any reason whatsoever was declared an “absentee” and his land was taken away by Zionist agencies. The Zionist myth has it that all these Palestinian Arabs left at the behest of the foreign Arab invaders and in cahoots with them. This is a big lie. There was a war on, and even if they fled from the Arab invaders and in fear of them, and even if they fled only to a neighboring village, they became “absentees.” They also fled from the British; they not only fled from the invading Arabs but also fled from the Zionist troops – the Haganah and the Irgun. This was especially true after the massacre at Deir Yassin.
Deir Yassin was the name of an Arab village in Palestine, whose people were outstandingly hostile to the Arab invaders. In 1948 a battalion of the Irgun (the right-wing Zionist force) attacked the village. There were no armed men in the village, and no arms. Purely for terroristic purposes, the Irgun sacked the village and massacred 250 men, women, and children. One hundred fifty bodies were thrown down a well; 90 were left scattered around. This massacre was deliberately directed by the Irgun against a village known to be friendly to the Jews, as an example. Although the dirty job was done by the Irgun, the official-Zionist Haganah knew of the planned attack; immediately afterward the Irgun, instead of being pilloried in horror by the Zionist movement, was welcomed by the Haganah into a new pact of collaboration. (The Irgun’s leader, Begin, by the way, was taken into the Israeli cabinet along with General Dayan just before the outbreak of the recent Third War.)
Of course, the Irgun was able to show the way to the Haganah because it was semi-fascist; but the Haganah leaders learned fast. Before the First War had ended the Haganah too was attacking and ousting unarmed and non-belligerent Arab villagers, although naturally not as brutally as the Irgun (since they were democrats and “socialists”). Especially after the Deir Yassin massacre, it was only necessary that any troops show up, and the Arab peasants got out of the way, as anyone else would do. They thus became “absentees,” and their land was taken away by a series of laws over the next several years. All of the Zionist parties, from “left” to right, sanctioned this robbery. There was even a legal category known as “present absentees,” who were very much present as Arab citizens of Israel but who were legally accounted to be “absentees” because they had been absent from their village on a certain date – and therefore could be legally robbed of their land. The largest portion of this stolen land went to the kibbutzim – not only the kibbutzim run by the Mapai (right-wing social democrats) but even more went to the kibbutzim of the Mapam (who claimed to be left socialists), whose leaders regularly made clear that their hearts bled for the plight of the Israeli Arabs. However, their hearts also bled for their land, even more.
Along the border areas, Palestinian Arabs were pushed over the line into the Gaza Strip, or into Jordan, and then they were shot on sight as “infiltrators” if they tried to come back. It was in ways like this – which I sketch here only briefly – that Israel’s rulers created the massive Arab refugee problem. Literally they surrounded the country with a circle of hatred – hatred which they themselves had caused – the hatred of the despoiled Palestinian Arabs looking over form the other side of the border and seeing their own lands being tilled by strangers whom the Zionists had brought from thousands of miles away to take their place.
This robbery is not transmuted into justice just because some of these strangers were Jewish refugees from Europe against whom another crime had been committed by someone else. The Zionist agencies welcomed these despairing refugees to their new life by putting them on the marches of the hate-encircled state so that they would have to defend themselves, their lives, and their stolen gifts, from the previous Arab owners. (Thus the “exiles” were not only “ingathered” but also very useful.)
Meanwhile in Israel, the 10 percent of the Palestinian Arabs left – who had not taken up arms but had not fled – were placed under military control like an occupied enemy people, and discriminated against in many ways. It is not without reason that they have been called the “niggers of Israel”; but as a matter of fact the American Negroes would not have taken lying down what the Israeli Arabs had to endure for two decades.
On the borders – for example, in the Gaza Strip – the dispossessed and robbed Arabs lived a wretched existence under the control of Egypt, but the Egyptians only used them for their purposes as pawns, while keeping their help to a minimum. They were not admitted into Egypt proper. They were forced to fester there so that their misery and hatred might make them a bone in the throat of the Israelis; at the same time Israel was as little interested as Nasser in arriving at a deal for the settlement of the Arab refugee problem.
Every now and then some of the refugees would “infiltrate” – that is, slip across into Israel to visit his own land or till his own soil or try to take back his own belongings – and would be shot to death by those same Jewish policemen and guards who so delighted the heart of the Jewish tourist mentioned earlier. As a result the Israelis complained bitterly about the “infiltrators” who were so evil as to do this. The terrible situation escalated. Infiltrators began to commit acts of sabotage on the property that had been stolen from them, or struck out more blindly at the robbers. The Israelis began to resort to organized military reprisals to terrorize them into acquiescence. In 1953 there was a massacre organized by Israeli armed forces in the Arab village of Kibya. In 1955 – a year that more or less marked a turning-point for the worse – there was a big attack by an organized Israeli military force on Gaza; more and more Israeli leaders oriented toward “preventive” war, since military force was their only answer to the problem created by their own crimes. This was the traditional and classic answer of the militarist and expansionist mentality; it is the same answer as was recommended by General MacArthur on how to treat Koreans and Chinese and other such “gooks” – you show them who’s master – that’s what they can understand, etc. The answer of the Israeli militarists was, similarly: kill and terrorize the “gooks” and “teach them a lesson” so that they won’t do it again.
There were negotiations over the plight of the Arab refugees but neither side was interested in a real settlement – not the Israeli side and not the Egyptian and Arab side. For Nasser, the Arab refugees leading their wretched existence were useful tools to harass the Israelis. As for Israel, at the same time that they argued that they could not restore the land to the Arabs they had robbed, they were industriously bringing in whole Jewish populations, from Yemen and Morocco, for example (not to speak of the whole Jewish population of the U.S. which Ben-Gurion was so vainly anxious to move to Israel). There was plenty of room in Israel for such hundreds of thousands of Jews, but in the negotiations over the Arab refugee problem there was not a dunam of land that could be spared. The decisive thing to remember is that, from the Zionist viewpoint, for every single despoiled Arab who would be readmitted to Israel there was a Jew who could therefore not be “ingathered.”
The problem was not how Israel and the Arab states could have made peace; the problem was that neither side wanted to make peace, except of course on capitulatory terms. They did not then, and they do not now.
For Nasser, the Israel issue was a pawn in the inter-Arab struggle for power. It was also a useful distraction from the internal failures of his bureaucratic-military regime, which lacked any progressive domestic program. In both Egypt and Jordan, the pressure of the refugees within the country was relieved only by pointing them outward, against Israel. As for Israel, it must be remembered that Zionism still did not rule the “Land of Israel” as the Zionist program demanded; the “Land of Israel” still included territories outside of the state of Israel. Israeli expansionism was implicit in this, and also in the fact that, if room was going to be made for the millions of “exiles” who were to be ingathered, more land was needed. In 1955 Israeli leaders (some eagerly convinced of the necessity of “preventive” war, some dragging their feet) were looking for some pretext to launch a war against Egypt and the Arab alliance. As it happened, British and French imperialism brought them to launch that aggression themselves. In 1956, openly and in the sight of the whole world, side by side with the two leading European imperialisms (of which it was once again a junior partner), Israeli invaded Egypt as its partners struck at the Suez Canal.
The point is not that Nasser is or was a dove of peace, himself, as has been made clear. One of the reasons why Nasser was not in a position to give warlike substance to his blowhard threats was that he was too preoccupied with internal difficulties and too weak. But if Nasser was no dove, it is still true that Israel exposed itself to the whole world as an open aggressor in alliance with European imperialism. Every dirty expansionist plan it had been accused of turned out to be true. Even after the British and French enterprise failed, Israel fought to retain the land it had grabbed in Egypt and gave it up only after immense international pressure.
This pattern must be remembered in the light also of the way in which the recent Third War was initiated: i.e., with Nasser taking the situation to the brink, talking loudly about destroying Israel, while the Israelis went straight to the business at hand by precipitating the shooting war.
There is one other story to be told for this period – the story of a pogrom. This pogrom was directed against an Arab village in Israel named Kfar Kassem. On the day that Israel attacked Egypt in 1956, the Israeli government declared a new curfew for its Arab citizens (who, remember, were under military control anyway, even without a war). The new decree advanced the curfew from 11 p.m. to 5 p.m. Israeli officers showed up in Kfar Kassem, as well as other places, to make known the change on that day. They were told that the men had already gone out to the fields; the officers’ reply was, roughly speaking, “Don’t bother us with details.” In the evening, when the men of the village returned from working in the fields after the new curfew hour, they were shot down in cold blood by the Israeli soldiers – for violating a curfew that had never been told them. The government admitted that 46 men were thus killed; the number wounded was not made public. The government admission applied only to Kfar Kassem but it was reliably reported that the same thing happened that day at other Arab villages. Even this much was admitted by the government only after a week had passed and the reports could no longer be hushed up. All of Israel was appalled. Some underlings were made the scapegoats.
It was clear, then, that the Zionist program of making Israel a “state like any other state” had come true: it had its own Jewish policemen, it had its own soldiers, it had its own militarists, and now it had its own pogroms.
In 1967, the road that started in Deir Yassin and goes through Kfar Kassem has now reached the bank of the Jordan, where Arab refugees are once again being pushed out and around by the Israelis, as they have been for the last 20 years. It would be useful to go through the whole chapter subsequent to 1956, leading up to the Third War, but, aside from time considerations, we would only find that it is more of the same thing: the tragedy of one reactionary chauvinism versus another reactionary chauvinism.
There is an image that haunts me, about this whole tragic embroilment in the Middle East. Buck deer in the mating season will fight each other, and now and again it has happened that they will entangle their antlers and be unable to disengage. Unable to break loose, unable to win, locked in a static hopeless combat until they die and rot and their bleached bones are found by some hunter in the forest, their skeletons are grisly evidence of a tragedy which destroyed them both, ensnarled.
It may be that, in the Middle East entanglement, the Arabs, or some of the Arabs, can survive this conflict. But it is doubtful whether, in the long run, the Jews of Israel can. What the Zionists have made out of Israel is a new ghetto – a state ghetto, a ghetto with state boundaries. That’s not a new life for the Jews; that is more of the old life of which the Jews have had more than their share. This generation of Zionist hawks ruling Israel is a curse. No matter how many more great military victories they win, the sea of Arab peoples ringing them cannot be eliminated from the picture, and hatred grows. It may be another decade or two before the Arab states become modernized enough to wage war effectively; and then it will take more than euphoria over military heroes to point a way for Israel.
There are some in Israel who know and say what has been said here – more who know and fewer who say – and it is to be hoped that the next generation will be more willing to listen to their kind, to the kind of Jews who represent what is best in the history of Jewish humanism and social idealism rather than those who worship the Moloch of a “state like any other state.”
Last updated on 27 August 2020