DAVID TWERSKY
623
portant fight against Kahane and right-wing extremism generally to
withdraw from the high ground of positive Zionism.
Professor Yosef Ben-Shlomo, an expert on Spinoza, is one of
the few intellectuals to have moved from left to right. He is now a
full-fledged Gush Emunim activist. In a recent interview with
Davar
he criticized "the new literature, theater, and films" as well as the
government-owned radio and television stations for "trying to prove
that there is nothing worth dying for. . . . They are convincing the
public that we conquered the country of an alien nation.... Most
Israeli plays concern themselves with the wrong we did to the Pales–
tinians and compare us to Nazis."
Two of the left writers who opposed the call for national unity
in 1984 recently provided another glimpse of their "the worse, the
better" worldview. Writing in the mass-circulation daily
Yediot Ahronot,
Nathan Zach and Dan Meron attacked Peres for his handling of the
General Securities Service (Shin Bet) affair, raising serious questions
about Peres's vacillating and indecisive leadership on this issue. (The
case involves a cover-up of the killing of two PLO terrorists by the
Shin Bet after they had surrendered for interrogation.) But for Meron
and Zach, Peres's "all out war" on the rule of law convinced them
that "the open hooliganism of people like Ariel Sharon and Yitzhak
Shamir now seems to us preferable from a public - and even from a
moral- standpoint than the hypocrisy of the Labor leaders ." Peres,
who, unlike some of his Labor and most of his Likud rivals, never
inquires into the number of divisions writers command, felt duty
bound to respond personally to the attack, and defended his record
in a subsequent article .
Zach has begun a weekly column in the leftist
Ra'olam Razeh,
whose editor Uri Avneri broke through Israeli lines to enter Beirut in
1982 and interview Yasir Arafat but failed to ask him the one ques–
tion which alone could have justified the rather questionable circum–
stances of the interview: will the PLO recognize Israel?
In his new column, Zach launched an attack on Amos Oz, not
only because Oz co-authored the unity call, but because he went to
talk things over with Yitzhak Shamir. Zach argued that Labor should
have formed a government with the communists (which, by the way,
still wouldn't have sufficed for a Knesset majority) pointing to the
precedent of communist participation in government in France and
Italy . But Israel's communists , like the old mum in the British film
Morgan,
"refuse to de-Stalinize." They aren't even Euro-communists,
not that
that
would mean much . Oz replied in
Davar
in an article en-
