538
PARTISAN REVIEW
personal involvement in the political and intellectual debates of their society.
While they were tentative and tortured, and shied away from offering simple
solutions, many of their American guests, some ofwhom had come straight
from Ben Gurion airport to the Hilton Hotel, a few of them for the first time,
and who outnumbered their hosts, offered to solve Israel's problems by
generalizing from their own carefully worked-out paradigms on topics such as
Holocaust mentality, protest movement psychology, obedience to authority,
cognitive values of democracy, national character studies, and more. Al–
though nearly all the Israeli participants also were of left persuasions, one
could see one or another of them flinch at some of the more naive and igno–
rant comments, at the underlying assumptions of questions being asked in
authoritative fashion. Comparisons among Mai-Lai, Nazi death camps and the
Intifada
sometimes included "the atrocities committed by Oliver North," or
"American obscenities in Latin America" -not as part of a debate but as
preambles to other issues. The Israelis, it seemed to me, did not challenge
these statements, either because they did not know enough about American
policy outside of its effect on Israel, because they were eager to debate their
own problems, or because they did not want to offend the Americans-whose
support, many Israelis are convinced, is crucial to the survival of their
country.
Still, those of the visitors who came to listen heard how complex the
issues are, how even every partial solution itself is bound to create new
problems that change the dynamics between Middle-Eastern and European
Jews, religious and secular Jews, Israelis and Israeli Arabs-whose self–
identifications now are in a continuous state of flux. We were told about ef–
forts to educate youngsters for tolerance, in a situation where very young
children, both Arab and Israeli, during the past decade, have been found in–
creasingly intolerant-members of groups which question the legitimacy of
other groups, because "each group threatens the values of the others." That
Arabs now must shun contact with Israelis or fear for their lives, and that
Israeli settlers in "the territories" want to take the law into their own hands,
can only increase the demonization. During my stay, the Shamir plan seemed
to be the litmus test. "Fifty-two percent of Likud voters support elections in
the territories," reported Elihu Katz, the head of the Israel Institute of
Applied Social Research, on June 23d in
The Jerusalem Post.
Extrapolating
from data on ethnicity, and from previous opinion polls, he maintained that
"if
elections in the territories may be considered a dovish initiative, it may be
accurate to conclude that. . .[these] attitudes correlate, but not strongly, with a
willingness
to
relinquish territories in return for peace."
One has to be in Israel to realize what it means to give up the West
Bank, to accept again a situation where the width of the country at some
