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PARTISAN REVIEW
and deformity that has allegedly overtaken daily life in Israel.
Thus, he writes: "Many of us, surely a majority of Israelis, want
the Palestinians
to
vanish physically from this region, want
them banished from our presence." The evidence for this and
similar statements is apparently derived from the tangle of obses–
sions, phantoms, and terrors in Timerman's own mind, which
"we Israelis" all share. Having confused the nation with his own
tormented and admittedly outsize ego, the author can indulge
freely in uncontrolled psychologizing: "I fear that in our collec–
tive subconscious, we may not be wholly repelled by the possibil–
ity of a Palestinian genocide."
Nor does Mr. Begin escape the author's highly developed
psychiatric intuition. "It is my belief that he is unbalanced,"
Timerman declares, wondering whether he, as a private citizen,
should file an insanity suit or whether qualified Israeli psychia–
trists should demand a clinical investigation.
If
Mr. Begin, a ter–
rorist and "a disgrace to his people" (to be fair, Arafat is similarly
labeled), is transparently "hysterical" and Mr. Sharon is a dan–
gerously irrational, ruthless military dictator pursuing a messianic
concept of geopolitics, what disturbs Mr. Timerman far more is
that they have apparently sucked the whole nation into a collec–
tive sickness of paranoid delusion. On the one hand Begin has
returned Israel to the ghetto, while General Sharon is busy turn–
ing it into a modern Sparta. Mr. Timerman evidently has some
conceptual problems in analyzing this ghettoized Sparta since
the analogies fall thick and fast without any obvious unity or
coherence. Thus at times Israel reminds him of the Peronist col–
lective madness, of semi fascist Chile and Uruguay after 1972, of
Argentina after 1976 (which released him thanks largely to Israel's
efforts); at other
time~
he wants
to
vomit for "This is South
Africa." No less categorical and unilluminating is the flat asser–
tion that "becoming the Prussia of the Middle East is now our
manifest destiny." Yet Mr. Timerman claims to be upset that his
fellow Israelis are reluctant to bandy about so flippantly words
like
fascist
and
totalitarian,
which come so readily to his own
mind as he gropes for a way of understanding Israeli reality. By
his own admission, Israel has an independent judiciary, a free
press, a free parliament, political parties, ideological pluralism,
a free academic life, and an independent labor movement-none
of which are considered to be normal features of fascist, totalitarian
regimes.
