DAVID TWERSKY
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to the Israel-Arab dispute based on "compromise and partition." He
even rejects the "illogical and politically blind stubborn refusal to ne–
gotiate with the PLO." But he is not comfortable with the left, even
though he identifies with its struggles "against racism, religious coer–
cion, oppression of the Arabs and for social justice and peace." In a
television interview shortly after the publication of his article, he de–
nied having changed his views: rather, "The left," he said, "has left me ."
The left, continued Megged, reserves its hatreds for "enemies
at home" and has nothing left for those outside. They use their art to
deepen the sense of "self-guilt not only as regards the West Bank but
as regards Israel altogether."
Megged's article unleashed the debate over which intellectuals
were guilty of betrayal- and of what sort. Marak Gefen, an old/new
leftist and veteran journalist, accused Megged and other writers of
his "Palmach [1948] generation" of weakness and exhaustion. What
does Megged want? -Gefen wants to know. "Megged should admit
openly," Gefen said, that he wants the left to reconcile itself to the
settlement of the West Bank and Gaza, that is to the annexationist
program of the right. Megged's critique, concluded Gefen, is "unjust,
unfounded, and unfair."
Emboldened, Megged embroidered his thesis, in the mass cir–
culation
Yediot Ahronot
(April 23, 1986). This time, he accused the in–
tellectuals of undermining the people's faith in itself and in the essen–
tial justice of their corporate existence.
"Large parts of Israeli society are suffering a failure of nerve .
. . . A wave of studies, polls, plays and films have engulfed us . . .
with the goal of proving that our being in this country is founded in
sin, sealed in sin, and that we shall receive our due punishment."
He listed six accusations against Israel: that the Jews stole the
Arabs' lands rather than redeemed it, acre by acre, in the slow and
heroic process which saw
kibbutzim
and
moshavim
go up all over the
country, from swamp to desert; that Hebrew-labor was intended to
destroy the Arab economy, rather than to create a "normative" Jewish
one; that the leaders of the labor movement were interested (Kahane–
like) in ridding the country of the Arabs; that the Palestinian refugees
from the 1948 war were expelled by the Israeli army; that the main
Jewish undergrounds, the Haganna and the Palmach, were cruel to
the civilian Arab population; that every Israeli government rejected
the peaceful hand extended from Egypt, Jordan, and the other Arab
countries .
What is most upsetting, writes Megged, is that these accusations
