PARTISAN REVIEW
II
and a confident, bustling, almost relaxed daily life; a feeling that the
Israeli-Arab conflict is insoluble along with a faith that it will be
solved; the Jewish luftmench side by side with the Israeli technocrat
- sometimes in the same person ; a majority with the soul of a minor–
ity. And there is the ever present tension between ultimate ideals and
what is thought to be possible now. The picture that sticks in one's mind
is one of old monuments and new cities.
It
is all a montage of Jewish
memories and Israeli dreams engraved on an ancient landscape of bald,
chalk brown hills and corrugated valleys, like some prehistoric, science–
fiction movie set.
But beneath these oppositions, kept from exploding by the needs
of survival and the unifying idea of the homeland, there is a deeper
contradiction, that of the nationalism of an international people. I
often had the feeling in I srael that it is as though the intellectuals of
the world decided to form a state of their own in some legendary and
primitive land, with nothing to lose except their roots. When you talk
to someone in Israel you feel you are talking at the same time to the
speculative, skeptical mind of a European intellectual and the purpos–
ive, empirical mind of a frontiersman. This is why so many Israelis,
including the leaders, are both tough and full of moral qualms about
the Arabs. And this is one reason why the Left in America and Europe
is
able to sympathize with the backward and demagogic nationalism
of the Arabs, yet is suspicious of the much more candid nationalism of
the Israelis, who are thought of as a western people poaching on alien
soil.
Most striking is the almost total absence of dissidence on the Left,
even among the most sophisticated, internationally oriented intellectuals
and students. Unlike the Left here, the most radical Israelis think of
Israel as their country and fighting for it as self-defense. And I must
say that while this identification with one's own nation deprives one of
the feeling of purity and alienation many radicals enjoy, I found it
quite instructive and appealing. For to connect only with an interna–
tional idea and cut oneself off from any national ties leaves one totally
uprooted.
All these tensions were remarkably personified in a gifted young
writer, Amos Oz, whom I went to see at the kibbutz where he lives
and works. He is a most impressive figure, who in his self-consciousness,
his anguish, his resignation is a modem writer, but whose experience is
that of a pioneer. As he talked about what it does to you to live all
your life in a "state of siege," and how hard it was to hold on to your
faith
in
the brotherhood of man while fighting off daily Arab raids–
as he explained what an Israeli was, I began to understand what so
many Israelis meant when they said the conflict with the Arabs could
be
settled only in time, not in theory. And I couldn't help thinking,
enviously, that Americans are forced to experience history vicariously,
that we relive the extreme situations of other peoples - which probably
accounts for our abstract and moralizing approach to politics.
w.
P.
