A Jewish Affair

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World Policy Institute

Review: A Jewish AffairAuthor(s): Dov WaxmanSource: World Policy Journal, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Winter, 2000/2001), pp. 75-82Published by: The MIT Press and the World Policy InstituteStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40209721 .Accessed: 16/06/2011 13:42

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B##KSDov Waxtnan s a Ph.D. candidate at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced nternational Studies, TheJohns HopkinsUniversity. He is currently visiting lecturer t the Middle East Technical University n Ankara.

^^^ A Jewish Affair^^^^H Dov Waxtnan

The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel's SoulYoram HazonyNew York: Basic/New Republic Books, 2000

To many observers, he recent wave of vio-lence in the West Bank and Gaza, and with-

in Israel proper, was an abrupt and shockingoccurrence hat shattered the relative calmthat had descended upon the region in re-cent years. Until the sudden outbreak of the

"al-Asqa Intifada," peace finally appeared obe coming to a region long torn asunder byconflict and hatred. Israel, it seemed, was atlast finding security, its existence assured

through its overwhelming military domi-nance in the Middle East, its close relation-

shipwith the world's

only superpower,and

the growing (albeit reluctant) acceptance ofit by the Palestinians and the surroundingArab states. Israelis themselves, reared ordecades on a sense of existential dread, realor imagined, had started to relax and concen-trate their energies on more mundane mat-ters. With the national dream secure at last,Israelis could begin to tend to their personaldreams.

That this semblance of peace was frag-ile and insecure is now brutally apparent.That its fruits were not enjoyed by allleast of all by the Palestinian inhabitantsof the West Bank and Gaza is also nowobvious. What is far less obvious, however,is the claim that Israel's existence was neversecure, that the Jewish state remained im-

periled. This is precisely the argument ad-vanced by Yoram Hazony in The ewishState: The Struggle or Israel's Soul. Contrary

to those who emphasize Israel's materialpower and success, and hence view the Jew-

ish state as indestructible, the central mes-sage of Hazony's book is that the future ofthe Jewish state is in serious jeopardy. Infact, Hazony, director of the Shalem Center,a neoconservative hink tank in Jerusalem,and former advisor to Benjamin Netanyahu,argues that not only is Israel still at risk,but it faces perhaps a greater danger thanever before.

But this is an argument with a twist.The reader would be forgiven in thinkingthat those who warn of the threat to the Jew-ish state have in mind the Palestinian andArab masses whose hatred of Israel has beendisplayed nightly on our television screensas they burn Israeli flags and call for jihad,for a holy war. Or perhaps they refer to ourfamiliar enemies Saddam Hussein, ColonelQaddafi, or the ayatollahs in Iran who re-main steadfastly opposed to Israel's exist-ence. In fact, the threat of which Hazony

writes is of a different nature entirely. Ac-cording to Hazony, the danger that Israelor more precisely Israel as a Jewish statefaces today does not come in the form ofgenocidal Arab masses or despotic, villain-ous leaders. Instead, the danger is closer tohome: in fashionable Tel Aviv coffee shops,theaters, art galleries, university lecturehalls, and school classrooms. For Hazony,the enemy is within, and the weapons being

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used are not bullets, tanks, and missiles butnewspaper editorials, novels, poems, plays,and school textbooks. These pose no less athreat to the existence of the Jewish state.As Hazony puts it, "the state need not be de-feated militarily to be defeated utterly. The

entire job may be done on the battlegroundof ideas."

The adversaries of the Jewish state inthis battle, according to Hazony, are Israel'svery own intellectuals, a small group ofacademics, journalists, writers, and artistswho "form a tight-packed and intellectuallymonochromatic clique whose cynicism withregard to the idea of a Jewish state has beena fixture of public discourse for decades." In-

sidiously, theyhave worked to dismantle Is-

rael's Jewish character hrough constantvilification of Zionism, its history and he-roes. They are motivated by a desire for Is-rael to shed its Zionist past and embrace amulticultural future, in which it will nolonger be "the Jewish state" but rather a"state for all its citizens." Hazony labels thispost-Zionist political agenda "anti-Zionist"since it is meant to turn the country awayfrom serving particularistic Jewish intereststoward addressing universal interests andnorms. Hazony regards estrangement fromand distaste toward Zionism as the commoncharacteristic of much academic, literary,and artistic production in Israel today. Suchwork critically undermines the Jewish stateand must be countered, he argues. For Ha-zony, the pen is indeed mightier than thesword: Zionism fought its first war withthe sword, but while doing so it was poten-

tially fatally weakened by the pen. Zionism'snext war must be fought on the battlefieldof ideas.

A Zionist Call to ArmsHazony s book therefore represents a Zi-onist call to arms in a new war of ideas. Itmarks the beginning of an intellectual coun-teroffensive against post-Zionism. But thebook does not itself offer an intellectual de-fense for the idea of the Jewish state. Read-

ers looking for a persuasive argument infavor of the continued utility and purposeof Zionism for a maturing Israel will be dis-appointed. On the other hand, readers whoregard criticism of Zionism's tenets, deni-gration of its idols, and de-mythologizationof its historical narratives as heretical, trea-sonous, and dangerous behavior will relishHazony's sustained and vigorous (somemight say, hysterical) attack against Israel's"post-Zionists."

Those who have watched in horror assome Israeli academics (the so-called newhistorians and critical sociologists) have setabout ruthlessly slaughtering Zionism's sa-cred cows will find their worst fears con-firmed in the book. These are not

justesoteric issues of historiography and post-modern theory, Hazony argues, but politi-cal arrows aimed at the heart of the Jewishstate. Moreover, according to Hazony, thepost-Zionist academic trend is just the tipof the iceberg. He detects post-Zionism'spernicious influence in numerous areas ofIsraeli life: the entire educational system,literature, the arts, media, the judiciary,even in the military and foreign affairs.

Like a virus, post-Zionism has spreadthroughout Israel's body politic, into theheart of the Israeli cultural and intellectualestablishment, and into the central organsof government. It has assumed such threat-ening proportions that, in Hazony's words,"the idea of the Jewish state is under sys-tematic attack from its own cultural andintellectual establishment."

Thus, it turns out that it is not so much

the self-proclaimed "post-Zionists," who, herecognizes, are a distinct minority, that re-ally worry Hazony. Rather, it is the "closet"post-Zionists, those who still profess nomi-nal allegiance to Zionism yet display little,if any, respect for, or understanding of, itsaims and actions, who are the main focus ofHazony's concern. These people are bothmore numerous and more influential, regu-larly airing their views in newspaper nter-views, television talks shows, and the like.

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They are Israel's "culture makers," he dis-seminators of opinions and ideas, the pur-veyors of "political correctness."

According to Hazony, it is the "estab-lishment cultural figures, even more thanthe circles of self-professed post-Zionists,

who are today paving the way to the ruin ofeverything [Theodor] Herzl and the otherleading Zionists sought to achieve." Whoare these people? Leading academics such asAvishai Margalit, Moshe Halbertal, YaronEzrachi, and even the eminent Jewish phi-losopher Eliezer Schweid; Israel's oremostcontemporary novelists, Amos Oz, A. B.Yehoshua, Aharon Appelfeld, David Gross-man, and Meir Shalev; poets Yehuda Ami-chai, Nathan Zach, and Dalia Rabikovitch;playwrights Hanoch Levin and YehoshuaSobol; and artists like Yigael Tumarkin andYosl Bergner. Reading Hazony's survey ofIsrael's cultural and intellectual landscape,one wonders at times if there are any Zion-ists left at all.

There are very few prominent Israeli in-tellectual and cultural figures who are not

put in the dock and found guilty by Hazonyof undermining attachment to and identifi-

cation with the Jewish state. In most cases,however, their guilt rests not on their direct

opposition to Jewish statehood, which few,if any, espouse, but rather n their critical in-tellectual and artistic engagement with Is-rael's manifold dilemmas, misdeeds, and

failings, past and present. Unlike Hazony,they are preoccupied, not with the idea ofthe Jewish state per se but with the con-crete reality of the Jewish state. In many

cases, it is precisely the gap between thisidea and reality that stimulates their criti-cism. No doubt, such criticism, as Hazonydemonstrates, can be ruthless and excessiveat times, but what is important is that thiscriticism frequently emanates from a senseof anguish and disappointment with theJewish state's failure to meet the expecta-tions of its idealistic advocates.

The yawning abyss between Zionistrhetoric and Israeli practice is at the heart of

many of the critiques put forward by Israeliwriters and artists (just as it is in the workof many writers and artists in postcolonialstates who highlight the discrepancy be-tween the earlier promises of freedom andredemption, and the corrupt and authori-

tarian regimes that arose in the wake of theanticolonial struggle). Hence, contrary toHazony's argument, it is not lack of beliefin the ideals that Zionism represented butperhaps too much belief in these ideals thatunderlies much artistic and intellectual pro-duction in Israel.

After imbibing the dreams of Zionistideologues in youth, the subsequent en-counter with the stark realities of life in Is-rael can come as an

abrupt,at times shock-

ing, awakening. It is the process of thisawakening, and the disillusionment it en-tails, that is often conveyed in Israeli litera-ture, art, and cinema. Hazony is clearly un-comfortable with this. "One gets the im-pression," he writes about Israeli novelists,"that they feel little obligation to say some-thing positive about the history or idealsor achievements on which the Jewish stateultimately rests, but they do feel at libertyto ridicule or disparage these virtually with-out limit." Hazony, it seems, would likethem to feel an obligation to act as thepublic relations spokesmen of the Jewishstate. This appears dangerously close to theview that prevailed under the totalitarian re-gimes of the first half of the twentieth cen-tury, which held that literature and art mustbe mobilized on behalf of the state and itsofficial ideology.

Exaggerating Post-Zionist InfluenceAlthough Hazony is correct in depictingpost-Zionism as a rising cultural and intel-lectual trend in Israel, he grossly exagger-ates its present influence and scope. Byindicting Israeli culture as "a carnival of self-loathing," he displays a total lack of appre-ciation for the Zionist wellsprings of muchcontemporary cultural and intellectual criti-cism in Israel. This ultimately stems from

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his failure to provide an adequate definitionof post-Zionism, or even of Zionism.

Hazony s conception of post-Zionism istoo wide, while his conception of Zionismis too narrow. The latter is simplisticallyequated with support for Jewish self-deter-

mination and statehood, and the former isequally simplistically equated with opposi-tion to such statehood. This crude dichot-omy woefully misrepresents the many shadesof Zionist and post-Zionist thought. Zion-ism was always more than just the aspira-tion for Jewish statehood, and indeed manyleading Zionists (most notably the cham-pion of "cultural Zionism," Ahad Ha'am)were ambivalent about Herzl's project of at-

taininga state for the

Jews. Similarly, bylabeling post-Zionism as "anti-Zionism,"Hazony distorts the views of those whoargue that Zionism has successfully com-pleted its task and should now be set aside.For these "post-Zionists," Zionism was anadmirable endeavor that is no longer neces-sary. As the Israeli writer Amos Elon put it,Zionism was a form of "affirmative action"for the Jews that served a useful purposebut is now redundant.1

Hazony s "catch-all" haracterization ofpost-Zionism basically seems to include allthose on the political left in Israel. Whilethis may serve to stigmatize the Israelileft, it misses an important division thatis emerging within its ranks. The left inIsrael is actually split between Zionists andpost-Zionists, and the fiercest exchangesoften occur between these two groups. Theformer are highly critical of post- 1967 Is-

raeli policy and conduct toward the Arabworld in general, and the Palestinians inparticular. Their criticism stems from theirconcern over what they perceive as Israel'smoral "corruption" ince 1967. In effect,they want Israel to return to its pristinemoral condition before 1967.

They also oppose Israeli annexation ofthe occupied territories on the grounds thatthe inclusion of a vast number of Palestini-ans within Israel would pose a grave demo-

graphic threat to the perpetuation of Israelas a Jewish state. It is thus precisely Israel asa Jewish state, and the perceived politicaland moral implications of such, that the Zi-onist left seeks to safeguard. The post-Zion-ist left, by contrast, rejects the rosy view of

pre-1967 Israel and challenge Zionist behav-ior and attitudes from the beginning of themovement onward, often questioning thevery validity of the quest for a Jewish nation-state in the former Palestine. In place of aJewish nation-state, they advocate a secular"state for all its citizens."2

In reality, post-Zionism is limited to asmall but vocal group of intellectuals andactivists. They tend to be of European orAmerican

origin (Ashkenazim), highlyedu-

cated, staunchly secular, and middle class.Together, these characteristics et them apartfrom the majority of Israelis, especially thepoorer, less educated, and more traditionalIsraelis who tend to be of Middle Easternand North African descent (Sephardim).What post-Zionists share with the majorityof Israelis is that they are Jewish. The debatein Israel over post-Zionism is entirely an ar-gument between Jews. There are no post-Zionists among Israel's Arab population.

But Hazony does not pay this any atten-tion. This is unfortunate since its sheds adifferent light on the nature of the debate.It suggests that for all the willingness ofpost-Zionists to engage in critical think-ing and shatter longstanding Israeli mythsand taboos, cultural and political discoursein Israel is still conducted within Zionistboundaries. That is, the producers of this

discourse are Israeli Jews, while IsraeliPalestinians are largely mute (a notable ex-ception is the Palestinian Israeli writer An-ton Shammas). They are silent observersto an intra-Jewish debate. That this is astruggle between Jews is recognized byone of its participants, Amos Oz: "Thestruggles in Israel are not being waged be-tween the 'keepers of the Bible' and thosewho renounce it, or between 'good' Jewsand 'tainted, Europeanized' ews. They are

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being waged between differing concepts ofJudaism some of them humanitarian, oth-ers tribal and primitive, and still others mid-way between."3 Thus, post-Zionism is lesssubversive than it may at first appear. It doesnot really transgress he bounded nature of

cultural and political discourse in Israel. Itis instead a "family affair," although no lessvitriolic perhaps even more so for that.

That Hazony fails to recognize this, how-ever, is hardly surprising since his book com-pletely ignores the presence of Israeli Pales-tinians and other members of the large andgrowing non-Jewish population in Israel.But any discussion of Zionism and post-Zionism in contemporary srael cannot failto take account of this

population.The dem-

onstrations and riots involving Israeli Pales-tinians during the al-Asqa Intifada providea stark illustration of the potential dangersof disregarding their needs and interests.Their protests were fueled not only by their

profound sense of allegiance to and sympa-thy for their Palestinian brethren in theWest Bank and Gaza, but also and perhapsmost of all by their own grievances towardthe state of Israel.4 These grievances center

upon their sense of alienation and estrange-ment from a state that they perceive as repre-senting and promoting only the interests ofits Jewish citizens.5

Clearly, urgent action is needed to nar-row the growing rift between Israeli Jewsand Israeli Palestinians and allay the latter'sfeelings of bitterness and frustration.6 Post-Zionism's political agenda is explicitly based

upon the need to come to terms with the di-

lemma that the presence of non-Jewsin Is-

rael poses to the Jewish state. How can astate be Jewish when at least 20 percent ofits citizens (excluding the large number of

immigrants from the former Soviet Unionwhose Jewishness is in doubt) are not Jew-ish? If one national group receives preferen-tial treatment from the state, does that notcontradict its liberal democratic character?Can Israel accommodate the needs of its non-

Jewish inhabitants while maintaining its

Jewish character? What are the risks in-volved? These are the questions that post-Zionists have been grappling with, ques-tions that Hazony fails to address.

It is the post-Zionists' awareness of theinsoluble tensions and conflicts that arise

from Israel's official status as a Jewish statethat propels their demands for Israel to be-come a "state for all its citizens." Only bysevering the link between Judaism and thestate, post-Zionists argue, can Israel trulybecome a liberal democracy along the linesof Western states. This does not mean thatpost-Zionists want to rid Israel of its Jewish-ness, as Hazony claims. Since the majorityof Israelis are Jewish, this is bound to havean

impact uponsocial and cultural life in Is-

rael, just as Protestant Christianity has aninfluence in the United States, and Catholi-cism in Italy or Spain.

An Exhausted PeopleIf the identity of the participants in the de-bate over post-Zionism is anything to goby, then, it would appear that Israel's Jew-ish character s less endangered than Hazonyportrays t to be. Indeed, the stridency of

militant religious Zionism, the increasingassertiveness of Israel's ultra-orthodox popu-lation, and the popularity of neo-traditional-ism in the form of the Shas Party amongIsrael's Sephardi population, suggest that Is-rael is becoming more, not less, Jewish. Manysecular Israelis are more worried about thesegrowing manifestations of Jewish religiosity(some would call it fundamentalism) in Is-rael than they are about the work of a few

post-Zionistintellectuals. For

them,it is

the prospect that Israel will one day becomea theocracy, not cease to be a Jewish state,that they fear.

Where Hazony's diagnosis of life in Is-rael seems to be more accurate s his asser-tion that Israelis are "an exhausted people,confused and without direction." This obser-vation of Israelis has been frequently madein recent years, both in Israel and abroad,particularly by those on the right who decry

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what they perceive as Israeli society's loss ofnational willpower and fortitude. It implic-itly contrasts the present generation of Is-raelis, particularly the young, with theirforebears who, it is claimed, were imbuedwith nationalistic pride and zeal, who were

idealistic, self-sacrificing, and highly moti-vated toward the pursuit of collective na-tional goals. Regardless of the accuracy ofthis depiction of earlier "heroic" enerationsof Israelis (many post-Zionists dismiss thisimage like many others as mythical), Ha-zony's explanation for the failure to transmitsuch sentiments to the present generation ofIsraelis is seriously inadequate.

If Israelis have today grown tired andeven disillusioned with

Zionism,if their at-

tachment to the Jewish state is wavering,Hazony would have us believe that this hasnothing to do with the immense sacrificesthey have had to make in its name, with theconstant wars, terrorist attacks, and condem-nations they have endured, or with the pallof insecurity and anxiety that has hung overtheir lives.

Nor is it related to the excesses of messi-anic nationalism that gripped parts of thepopulation and government in the wake ofIsrael's victory in the 1967 war, to the bru-tality and callousness that have at timesbeen carried out in the name of Zionism, anideology that saw itself as enlightened andhumane. Nor it is merely a product of suc-cess, of Israel's economic growth and inte-gration into global markets and the con-comitant desire for a Western lifestyle gearedto the pursuit of individual prosperity and

self-fulfillment.All the political, social, and economic de-velopments within Israel, as well as thoseoutside it that have had an impact upon thecountry, are almost entirely absent from Ha-zony's account. He ignores the effects uponthe body polite of the Israeli occupation ofthe West Bank and Gaza (perhaps not sur-prisingly, considering that he is himself asettler in the West Bank), the peace treatywith Egypt, the disastrous war in Lebanon,

the Intifada, and, more recently, the peaceprocess and globalization.

Laying BlameInstead, Hazony concentrates his argumenton tracing the intellectual lineage of post-Zionism and lays the blame for public dis-enchantment with the idea of the Jewishstate solely upon a small group of German-Jewish intellectuals who taught at the He-brew University of Jerusalem during theBritish Mandate era in the 1930s. At thehead of this group is the renowned Jewishphilosopher and theologian Martin Buber,who together with Judah Magnes (the firstchancellor of the university) and professorssuch as

Hugo Bergman, YeshayahuLeibo-

witz, and Gershom Scholem were highlycritical of the Zionist leadership underDavid Ben-Gurion.

They opposed mainstream Zionism'sgoal of attaining Jewish statehood, favoringinstead a binational Arab-Jewish state. Theystressed Jewish spiritual power, rather thanpolitical and military power, and warnedof the corrupting influence that statehoodcould have upon the Jewish people and its

universalistic moral mission. Although mosthistorians of the period have regarded heseideas as marginal and inconsequential, Ha-zony argues in a novel fashion that in thelong run they were immensely influential.

Through their base at the Hebrew Uni-versity, these intellectuals were able to con-vey their "anti-Zionist" deas to their stu-dents, who in turn passed them on to thenext generation today's post-Zionists.

Hazony, therefore, describes post-Zionistsas the "intellectual grandchildren" of Bu-ber and his associates. Although unable toprevent Jewish statehood in their lifetime(in no small measure due to the cataclysmicevents in Europe culminating in the Holo-caust which, as Hazony shows, overwhelmedmuch of the earlier Jewish opposition to aJewish state), the "anti-Zionist" German-Jewish intellectuals were successful in layingthe intellectual seeds for its eventual demise.



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This success, however, was more theresult of Labor Zionism's intellectual fail-ure. Hazony castigates the movement forits "blindness to the power of ideas." Heargues that Ben-Gurion and his Labor Zion-ist colleagues concentrated their efforts on

building the state's physical infrastructureat the expense of developing its ideationalinfrastructure. They emphasized the mate-rial, physical components of nation buildingand national power, and neglected the cru-cial cultural dimension. They thereforefailed to bolster the national idea amongJews. This failure left: a "conceptual and cul-tural vacuum" n Israel after Ben-Gurion'sexit.

Althoughthe

religiousZionist move-

ment after 1967 attempted to fill the vac-uum left by the dissipation of Labor Zion-ism, it replicated the mistake of the LaborZionists by adopting the latter's material-ism and focusing its energies on settlementbuilding. The religious Zionists were thusequally unsuccessful n promoting the na-tional idea. Intelligent children of Zionistfamilies, lacking a compelling answer to

why they should live in, defend, and even

die for the Jewish state, gravitated towardanti-Zionist/post-Zionist ideas and atti-tudes. In short, post-Zionism won bydefault.

This is an original thesis, and Hazony'spresentation of it is clear and compelling.Hazony re-narrates he story of Zionism interms of the rise and fall of the idea of the

Jewish state. In this intellectual narrative,the main protagonists are not Labor Zionists

led by Ben-Gurion and Revisionist Zionistsled by Vladimir "Ze'ev" abotinsky (thecharismatic ounder of the staunchly na-tionalist right-wing brand of Zionism thatstressed Jewish militarism and heroism and

adopted a noncompromising position on ter-ritorial issues). Hazony minimizes the differ-ences between these two Zionist "camps"since both were supporters of the idea of a

Jewish state (they differed primarily on the

question of how best to attain such a state).

Instead, the protagonists are the Zionistsled by Herzl (and later Ben-Gurion) and thenon-Zionists led by Martin Buber and Ju-dah Magnes.

Hazony describes the staunch oppositionto the idea of Jewish statehood, an opposi-

tion that at times posed a serious threat tothe achievements of "mainstream" Zionism.In doing so, he sheds light on a hithertoneglected aspect of Zionist history. For thisalone, his book is worth reading as a fasci-nating and novel intellectual history of Zi-onism. But for anyone looking for an explan-ation for the rise of post-Zionism, or evenan understanding of its intellectual origins,Hazony's book falls dismayingly short. Theideas of the

German-Jewish philosophersHermann Cohen, Martin Buber, and otherJewish thinkers opposed to Jewish statehoodwere no doubt important in fashioning thethinking of contemporary post-Zionists.But so were those of French deconstruc-tionists Michel Foucault and Jacques Der-rida, recent theorists of liberalism and multi-culturalism like Michael Walzer and CharlesTaylor, and a host of other writers like Ed-ward Said, the Palestinian-born author of

Orientalism. ost-Zionism has been heavilyinfluenced by Western intellectual fashions,particularly those originating on Americanuniversity campuses, where many of today's"post-Zionist" Israeli academics studied.7Hence, post-Zionism, like much of contem-porary cultural life in Israel, is as much offoreign (largely American) origin as it ishomegrown.

Nevertheless, Hazony's central messageresonates

powerfully:The Jewish state is undergoing a cul-tural disintegration, the result of de-cades of neglect ancl hostility at thehands of its own intellectual and cul-tural leadership. If we wish for the Jew-ish state to end otherwise than did theSoviet Union, then we must turn ourattention back to the motivating ideathat has grown faint and unintelligible.

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Only an idea can move a people. But anidea can move a people and this meansthat the present, difficult circumstancesof the Jewish state may be altered bythe same kind of effort that originallybrought them about.

Hazony's belief in the power of ideas,the fundamental premise of his book, is cap-tured in this passage. It is a courageous be-lief in a materialistic age, when economics,not political philosophy (the subject of Ha-zony's doctorate), guides much political deci-sionmaking. His analogy with the fate ofthe Soviet Union is an interesting one. Theerosion of belief in its guiding idea com-munism was without doubt a contribut-ing factor to its demise. But it was surelynot the only factor. So too, the erosion of be-lief in the Jewish state as catalogued by Ha-zony, will not by itself lead to its collapse.Rather, a far more likely cause lies in the po-litical blindness of those like Hazony who,while championing the cause of the "Jewishstate," continue blithely to disregard thepresence of non-Jewish citizens in it.*

Notes1. Amos Elon, "Israel nd the End of Zionism,"

New York Review fBooks,December 19, 1996, pp.22-30.

2. For he distinction between he Zionist and

post-Zionist r "non-Zionist" eft, see Ilan Pappe\

"Post-Zionist ritique on Israel and the Palestini-ans," part 2,Journal f Palestine tudies, ol. 26,(spring 1997).

3. Amos Oz, "A New Heart," n The Slopes fLebanon London: Vintage, 1991), p. 205.

4. Significantly, ioting Israeli Palestinians t-tacked emblems of the Jewish state, such as post of-fices and police stations.

5. See Zvi Bar'el, "It's Not About the TempleMount, Say Israeli Arabs," Ha'aretz, October 3,2000.

6. In the wake of the Israeli Palestinian iots,this is now increasingly eing recognized, lbeit be-

latedly, n Israel. See, for nstance, Danny Rabi-nowitz, "Recognizing he Original Sin," Ha'aretz,October 17, 2000.

7. See Uri Ram, TheChanging genda f Israeli

Sociology: heory, deology, nd Identity Albany: tate

University f New York Press, 1995).


A Jewish Affair

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