Lingering Questions : The ambivalence...

Just 100 years ago, in late 1894, a French army officer of Jewish extraction was arrested, tried and falsely convicted of treason. The trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, and his formal degradation on a barracks square in front of a mob that shouted “Death to the Jews!” was witnessed by the Paris correspondent of a Vienna newspaper. Months later, Theodor Herzl wrote “The Jewish State,” his clarion call for resolving the apparently irresolvable “Jewish problem”: the misery of the poor Jews living in eastern Europe under the Tsar, but also the false and humiliating--and, as the Dreyfus Affair suggested, precarious--position of supposedly emancipated Jews in the West.

Did Herzl really believe it would happen: that within little more than half a century--though only after the Jewish people had endured their most terrible catastrophe--a Jewish state really would be established on the ancient Land of Israel? It did happen, and by any standards, it was a most astonishing achievement. But as the Greeks teach us, history is ironic, and consequences of events are unexpected and unintended. In her visionary, quasi-Zionist novel “Daniel Dronda,” George Eliot had foreseen a Jewish homeland in Palestine as a symbol of peace between the nations. Herzl himself had said that the Arabs living in the Holy Land would welcome Jewish settlement bringing prosperity and order. And all Zionist advocates, from Moses Hess 30 years before Herzl, had believed something else, that a Jewish state would resolve the Jewish Question and simplify the position of those Jews (the majority, as both Hess and Herzl rightly guessed) who continued to live in the Diaspora.

As Glenn Frankel and Mordecai Richler both make clear in their complementary and absorbing books, it didn’t work out quite like that.

Both authors are North Americans. Frankel is a Washington journalist who first visited Israel in 1970, spent three years there in 1986-1989 as the Washington Post’s Jerusalem correspondent, and then another year in 1992-1993 writing this book; Richler is a Montreal novelist who first visited Israel in 1962 and returned in 1992. They both found the country at a critical moment in its history. The euphoria of 1967 had ebbed away, and the character of the country had changed. In 1977, the conservative Likud Party had broken the 30-year-long monopoly that the Labor Party held on power; in 1982 the Lebanon adventure had turned had sour; in 1987 the intifada had erupted.

Israel was still living in a state of psychological as much as military siege; it was spending twice as much of its domestic product on defense as the United States; “its unifying historical myths were the twin traumas of Masada and the Holocaust,” as Frankel puts it; the Israelis were always waiting to fight again; they “had not reconciled the innate contradiction between living in a Western-style democracy and in a Jewish state.” Whereas in those first Labor decades Israel had been ruled by Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir, whom the rest of the world--and especially American Jews--took to their hearts, now the prime minister was Yitzhak Shamir. Frankel traces his background as a notably ruthless terrorist, who had been vetoed by Ben-Gurion as even a junior state functionary. A man whose early career included killing Arab civilians, assassinating British statesmen and even whacking (as they say in Scorsese movies) troublesome colleagues in the Jewish underground was a different kettle of fish indeed for the American government and people.

Frankel takes us over territory familiar from television and newspapers at the time, but which falls into shape when told here as a consecutive narrative. Israeli policy was sometimes cunning but sometimes foolish: the militant Islamic movement in Gaza was actually, if covertly, encouraged in the first place by the Israelis as a counter to the secular PLO, a particularly rich example of the law of unintended consequences. Many Israelis--as well as many outsiders who had been sympathetic to Israel--were shocked by the intifada and its repression: the bone-breakings, the buryings alive, the killing in 18 months of 90 Palestinians under 17, 20 of them 12 or younger.

The psychological effects of this weren’t as obvious to Shamir or to Yitzhak Rabin--who urged Israel Defense Forces draftees to use “force, power and blows” on demonstrators--as they might have been. As Frankel says, the damage done to the army by setbacks in the Yom Kippur and Lebanon wars had been external; “the intifada caused a different kind of internal damage . . . like gangrene, eating away at the IDF’s moral core.” Frankel rightly says that “by the standards of war” the repression was not exceptionally brutal. The trouble was that Israel had always asked to be judged by different standards than its neighbors.

Sometimes Frankel’s rhetorical flourishes are slightly comical: “Israeli politics were a cauldron of grand schemes and petty ambitions in which the main ingredients were greed, egotism, willfulness and betrayal.” You don’t say; how unlike politics anywhere else. But he does put his finger on the increasingly vehement tone of Israeli politics, and--what was not unconnected--the increasing strain on Israeli-American relations. President Bush was sometimes called hostile to Israel, and even anti-Semitic by a couple of Israeli cabinet ministers. But as Frankel explains, all through 1991 Shamir was assuring the Americans that no large-scale settlement program was proceeding on the West Bank--the crucial question at issue--while Washington’s own intelligence, including satellite data, told them that it was. It was hard to imagine any politician in any country at any time who would not have resented this.

Nearly Frankel’s most interesting chapter, “We Are One,” describes the all-important relationship between Israel and Jewish America, which underwent a sea-change in this period, with growing estrangement on both sides. American Jews had been famously loyal to Israel, but found their patience more and more tried and their loyalty more and more strained: by the Pollard case, by the “Who is a Jew” affair, by the intransigence and sheer chutzpah of the Israeli government. It was not only that most American Jews stood “far to the left of the Shamir government,” in Frankel’s words. Israel’s very success had paradoxically been its undoing vis-a-vis American Jews, whom it had given “something crucial as well: a way of preserving their Jewish identity even while participating in the freewheeling assimilationist American culture. . . . Israel, which was supposed to rescue Jews from the Diaspora, instead made it easier and more attractive for Jews in America to remain where they were.”

Which is where Richler comes in. Growing up in Montreal in the 1940s, he was a keen Zionist, a member of the socialist Habonim, a potential candidate for aliyah, a secret admirer of Menachem Begin and his Irgun terrorists. (“He, not Ben-Gurion, was our gutsy street-fighter, our James Cagney.”) He never did make aliyah but sailed for Paris instead of Tel Aviv, spent 20 years in London, married a beautiful Protestant and then returned to his hometown for good. On his previous visit to Israel 30 years earlier, he hadn’t looked up those of his Habonim chums who had made aliyah, “feeling that I had failed them somehow, disembarking at the wrong port years ago.”

Now he returns to find that Israel has changed and so has he. “This Year in Jerusalem” is an intensely personal book, with most of the qualities of Richler’s fiction: it is salty, sardonic, irritable and hugely readable. He isn’t an objective political reporter like Frankel but a novelist with the novelist’s eye for telling detail. He finds that very large numbers of Israelis want to leave the country, that 500,000 do in fact live abroad, that Rabin denounced these yordim (those who have gone down rather than up--aliyah in reverse) as “the dregs of Israeli society.” He notes the conflict between the ultra-Orthodox haredim --some of whom reject the Israeli state, a few of whom think that Auschwitz was divine punishment of impious Zionism--and a secular society. (He also notes that the black-coated haredim are known as shvartze --not quite the same meaning as in America--and are widely disliked because of their smell.) He finds a cartoon in the Jerusalem Post showing Jews in the death camp in one frame, alongside another of a mixed marriage in a church, over the caption “Final Solutions”; he does not wake his wife to show her. He finds an old Montreal friend, now an Israeli, who tells him “ ‘The dream has gone sour,’ but he didn’t elaborate.”

But the real point of his visit is a voyage of self-discovery. Though he is an exceptionally gifted writer, there is nothing exceptional about the process he has been through: ardent Zionist youth in the shadow of Hitler, passionate involvement with Israel in the great hour of peril of 1967, then a sentimental attachment, which gently cooled, latterly a growing sense of the other side of the question: “There is no denying Jewish accomplishment in Israel, but much of it was achieved in a land where another people, however unambitious, was rooted. Their failure to cultivate their gardens does not justify their displacement by a stiff-necked people turning up with a book saying, ‘This is the turf God Almighty promised me and mine thousands of years ago. We took it by force of arms from the Canaanites in the first place. . . . Now we’re back, what’s left of us, so move over or get out.”

Richler’s disenchantment is exacerbated by the mixture of hectoring cajolery and moral blackmail to which he is subjugated as a Diaspora Jew. It is one thing to put up with the well-known vexations of Israeli life (hotel staff “are unique. They are unobliging at best and, given any opportunity, downright rude”). It’s another to be called a kind of traitor to his people; to be told by another writer that “for any Jew in this day and age who cares seriously about being Jewish, the only honest place to live is Israel.” In the end, he bursts out, “I’m not only Jewish but also Canadian, and Montreal just happens to be my home. . . . I am a Canadian, born and bred. . . .” He remembers the excitement he and his friend, felt in November, 1947, when the U.N. General Assembly voted for a Jewish state. But when one of those friends who did make aliyah tells him how much at home he feels in Israel, Richler replies: “I too continue to feel a part of something, and at home, right here in Canada.”

The Jewish State of Herzl’s dream had been created, in many ways triumphantly. But it had not been a beacon of peace and understanding; it had not been welcomed by those already living there and it had not, in a simple sense, resolved any social and psychological predicament of Diaspora Jewry.

The Jews of the West had in any case existentially resolved their “question” in a society where they flourished. They had also existentially rejected Zionism, whatever sympathy they felt for Israel. Richler discovered this in the Land of Israel. In his characteristically blunt way, Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder of right-wing Revisionist Zionism, had told his fellow Jews that in their degrading exile they had become “Yids” and that they should now become Hebrews once more. Richler is happy to be a Jew. He is not in Jabotinsky’s sense a Yid; but he isn’t a Hebrew either. How many others does he speak for?