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PARTISAN REVIEW
In their rush to oppose the symbols and myths of the right, many
intellectuals chose to abandon the middle ground. And the right,
which took over the old left's settlement strategy and symbols, only
to apply them with a vengeance in the West Bank, also captured the
fallen flags of "security" and "nationalism."
When Meir Kahane's radical right Kach party began to show
increased support in the polls last year, the political establishment
rushed to declare a year of "Education Toward Democracy" in order
to encourage tolerance towards Israeli Arabs and a deeper apprecia–
tion of democratic values and institutions. But many on the left saw
this campaign as an excuse to order a retreat from the central value
of Zionist nationalism which was a core commitment for the old la–
bor movement. Rather than refute Kahane's charge that the Jewish
and democratic aspects of the state were incompatible, many on the
left, including Meron Benvenisti, preferred to agree. But whereas
Kahane argued for the abolition of the pluralistic democracy, Ben–
venisti argued that democratic commitment required an end to the
Jewish/Zionist character of the state.
The tendency to blame Israel also served as a global passport to
progressive culture. Like many Western intellectuals, Israeli leftists
were no longer able to share a belief in socialism, and were blocked
by both Israel's preoccupation with self and dependence on America
from linking up with "progressive" Western circles around anti–
American nuclear and human rights issues. But progressive Israeli
intellectuals could still feel like citizens of the world by giving expres–
sion to the late twentieth-century version of the white man's burden.
If
Western liberals see the West as fundamentally guilty of original
sins against nomadic and "third world" peoples, Israel could be seen
as having been conceived in sin against the Palestinians.
The unanimous opposition to Likud broke up over the fractious
debate on entering the national unity government. It led to the break–
down of the intellectual consensus, and the re-emergence of its natural
dazzling diversity made literary life during the past two years so
interesting.
Given the diminutive size of the Israeli literary marketplace,
many writers also have regular newspaper columns on public affairs.
This means that the new debates are conducted in the dailies - rather
than in the shadows of the literary and political monthlies and quar–
terlies alone.
In 1983, during the worst year of the intellectuals' alienation–
the year after Sabra and Shatilla and the murder of a Peace Now ac-
