My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (62 page)

Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Pan-Arab dream is in tatters, Anwar Sadat’s moderation has vanished, and the brutal Baath secularism of Sadam Hussein and the Hafez and Bashar Assad is gone. It is no longer clear whether countries like Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Libya can sustain their national identities. The enormous forces that challenged Zionism in the twentieth century dissolved shortly after the century ended.

Obviously, these momentous changes improve Israel’s short-term strategic standing. As the Jewish state proves to be the West’s only reliable Middle East ally, it regains some of its old legitimacy and is perceived once again as a valuable asset. As the military gap between high-tech Israel and its blighted neighbors widens, it regains its position as the leading regional power. As the disarray in Syria, Libya, Iraq, and Egypt continues, the old threat of an all-out conventional war diminishes. The violent struggle between Sunnis and Shiites is keeping the new religious forces busy. The preoccupation of most Arabs with the internal Arab malaise temporarily neutralizes their capability to endanger Israel’s existence. Some of them are actually looking to Israel to save them from radical elements that now pose an immediate threat to their future. So the vigorous Jewish national movement now seems to be much more coherent and effective than the declining Arab national movement that had been its rival for a hundred years. The declaration signed by Lord Balfour on November 2, 1917, has proven to be—thus far—much more viable than the agreement concluded by Mark Sykes and Charles François Picot on May 16, 1916, which divided up Arab land between the United Kingdom and France, thus defining the modern Arab nation states. Yes, Israel is a lonely rock in a stormy ocean. But sixty-six years after its astounding appearance, the rock seems to be far more solid than the tempestuous waters surrounding it.

And yet, in the long term, the New Middle East might prove to be even more dangerous than the old one. Now there is no hope for peace: no moderate Arab leader has the legitimacy needed to sign a new conflict-ending agreement with the Zionist entity. Now even deterrent-based stability is difficult to maintain: no Arab nation is stable enough and
strong enough to guarantee quiet borders and long-term tranquility. Now the risk is growing that eventually Israel will become the Arab world’s scapegoat: if political Islam fails to fulfill its promise and the masses rise up against it, the easy way out will be to turn this rage against the infidels living their outrageously prosperous and permissive life next door.

There is increasing danger that sophisticated weapons will fall into the hands of zealots who will be eager to use them against the Jewish state. In short, while the old threat of Arab military might is on the wane, the new danger is Arab chaos. The troubling scenarios are of Arab discontent and Islamic fanaticism knocking on Israel’s iron gates. The combination of popular Islamic-Arab resentment from without and desperate Palestinian upheaval from within might yet prove to be explosive. Israel’s ability to erect tall (technological) fences and mighty (physical) walls is formidable. As recent years have proven, up to a point, tall fences and mighty walls work. But in the future the besieged-island strategy may exhaust itself. One day the fortified rock might be struck by the angry waves of a regional tsunami.

New politics are the dramatic outcome of Israel’s 2013 elections. The phenomenal success of the charismatic television personality, the centrist Yair Lapid, and the young software entrepreneur, the national-religious Naftali Bennett, reshaped the country’s political landscape. Ironically, the anticapitalist sentiment of the 2011 social protest movement was transformed at the ballot boxes into an overwhelming anti-ultra-Orthodox vote. Middle Israel rose not against Israel’s financial oligarchy but against religious extremists and uninspiring politicians. And to everyone’s surprise, the shrinking Zionist majority suddenly galvanized itself, trying to fend off the expanding non-Zionist minorities and seize control over the misguided nation. A new force surfaced. A startling happening took place. New Politics is the new name given to Israel’s new political game.

Lapid ran his campaign by forming a new party, Yesh Atid (There Is a Future). His success has spawned talk of the Yesh Atid phenomenon, which is at the core of New Politics but has not been properly defined. Here are some of its features: rejection of the old Left-Right divide; a willful disregard of the Palestinian issue and the Iranian threat and the external challenges Israel faces; emphasis on the daily concerns of ordinary
Israelis (mainly the high cost of living and soaring real estate prices); aversion to special-interest groups and privileged minorities that do not contribute their share to the general good; glorification of the working middle class that shoulders the military and financial burden involved in keeping Israel afloat; adulation of a practical, pragmatic, and sane Israeli identity.

The political base of Yesh Atid is those hard-working, tax-paying, and army-serving Jewish Israelis that Dan Ben David spoke to me about some time ago. In Yair Lapid these productive, middle-of-the-road Israelis find a strong voice and a handsome icon. In the party he founded these reasonable Israelis see the locomotive that will pull the Jewish state out of the mud and lead it forward. Hence the hopes that the 2013 elections evoked, hence the invigorating feeling that change is in the air.

Indeed, change
is
in the air. Although Lapid, who was appointed finance minister, was criticized for a conservative belt-tightening budget, he remains a powerful agent of change. Reforms are everywhere. A flurry of social action and economic reconstruction commands the center stage of Israel’s contemporary public life. Attempts are being made to draft the ultra-Orthodox, to reform government, to limit the power of monopolies, to weaken the unions, and to promote a more just market economy. Some of the new ideas are brutally Thatcherite, others are egalitarian. Yet the new hyperactive attitude toward politics is often tainted by populism. Much of it is driven by the desire to please the wider public instantly. Much of it represents the bourgeois politics of self-contentment and self-interest. And there is more than a grain of anti-liberalism in the hostility manifested toward weak minorities. There is an undemocratic taint to the way party politics are run. The implicit acceptance of ongoing occupation is troubling. The lack of interest in the Arab world is alarming. Though New Politics has given the world a new image of a reinvigorated Israel, it is not yet clear what really lies behind the image.

The good news of the second decade of the twenty-first century is that Israel is growing stronger in comparison to its neighbors and that Israel is determined to reform itself. The bad news of the decade is that the Middle East is growing wilder and that Israel has turned its back on it. Military and technological supremacy have allowed the new Israelis to become strangely isolationist: as they look inward, they ignore the
world in which they live. The Palestinians are now the elephant in the room no one dares talk about. Neighboring Arab countries as well as the vast Islamic world are treated as if they were thousands of miles away. Dangerous geohistorical escapism and geostrategic complacency allow the nation once again to be extremely pleased with itself.

As Jews, we have never had it so good. The twentieth century was the most dramatic century in the dramatic history of the Jewish people. The first half of the century was our worst ever: we lost a third of our people, every third Jew. But the second half of the century was wondrous. In North America, we created the perfect Diaspora, while in the Land of Israel we established modern Jewish sovereignty. In Europe and in Latin America and in Australia Jews live well, too. The Jews of the twenty-first century have what their great-grandparents could only dream of: equality, freedom, prosperity, dignity. The persecuted people we were are now emancipated. The pitiable people are now proud. We acquired the ability to fulfill ourselves and live a full life. An unprecedented Jewish renaissance enabled three generations of Jews to believe they escaped Jewish fate. In America this was achieved by the remarkable project of establishing a well-organized, free, meritocratic Jewish community. In Israel, it was achieved by the remarkable success of Zionism. The Jewish national liberation movement gave the Jewish people the basic rights they had been deprived of and the life expectancy they had lost. It conquered a land and liberated a nation and carried out a revolution like no other.

Nowhere is the revolution more apparent than in the Tel Aviv port. Here, south of the Yarkon River, the first Jewish Olympic Games—the Maccabia—were held in the spring of 1932. Within a few weeks, a sports stadium was hastily constructed in which thousands gathered to watch the hundreds of athletes that traveled to Palestine from twenty-five countries to prove that the Jew of the twentieth century was a new Jew: athletic, muscular, and strong. Here, south of the Maccabia stadium, Tel Aviv’s first international exhibition, the Levant Fair, was held in the late spring of 1934. In only eight months a unique Bauhaus compound was erected in which thirty-six nations and twenty-two hundred firms showed their wares and displayed their faith in Tel Aviv’s modernity.
Some six hundred thousand visitors came to see the wonder: on the southern bank of the Yarkon, in the midst of the Orient, a flying camel, the symbol of the Levant Fair, attested to the architectural and commercial excellence connecting Europe to the Near East. West of the Levant Fair grounds, Zionism’s first port was inaugurated in the summer of 1936. Within weeks a customs building was built, along with warehouses and a wooden pier on which the first Hebrew stevedore carried the first sack of cement into the first Hebrew port of the first Hebrew city. The thousands that assembled around him sang the hopeful national anthem, “Hatikva,” with palpable emotion. Seven months later, they sang “Hatikva” again in the improvised hall in which the first concert of the Palestine Philharmonic Orchestra was held. When the antifascist maestro Arturo Toscanini conducted the sixty-five survivors of Fascism who played Brahms, Mendelssohn, and Schubert on the Tel Aviv shore, many in the audience were in tears. Two years later a former Russian revolutionary opened a monumental power station a few hundred yards to the north of the improvised hall. In only nine months the ingenious engineer Pinchas Rotenberg and his thousand men, working around the clock, managed to build the Reading power station that accelerated the electrification of the land and provided power to the fast-growing Tel Aviv. Simultaneously, north of Reading, the first runway of the first airport of the first Hebrew city was paved. In the autumn of 1938 the first international flight took off: Tel Aviv–Haifa–Beirut. In an area no larger than one square kilometer, six different events took place within six years, every one of them the stuff of legend. At the northern edge of Tel Aviv the foundations were laid for a sovereign, modern, creative, vital, and life-loving Jewish existence.

I choose to walk southward from the airport. On the promenade between the runway and the sea, a high-tech company is having a fun day out. Twenty rehelmeted men and women ride by on red-wheeled Segways. Behind them are cyclists in sleeveless shirts and Lycra shorts with determined expressions on their faces. The early morning joggers are more relaxed: married couples and male same-sex couples and female same-sex couples in their fluorescent running gear. I see willowy girls on skates, opinionated pensioners, amateur fishermen. Before me is an Israeli Central Park on the shores of the Mediterranean, a Hampstead Heath in the Middle East—with all the calm and tranquillity that
only free societies can accord their citizens. There is a sense of well-being here that the Jews have not had for nearly two thousand years.

The six enterprises that were inaugurated on these few hundred acres in the 1930s laid the foundation for contemporary Tel Aviv. They all shared initiative, daring, alacrity, inventiveness, ingenuity, and a can-do spirit, but they were not of one cloth. The first two—the Maccabia and the Levant Fair—were hopeful events. We came here, we were transformed here, we triumphed. But the latter four achievements—the port, the orchestra, the power station, and the airport—were achievements born of peril. They took place under the gathering clouds of the late 1930s, between the German threat and the Arab threat, between the catastrophe expected in Europe and the war beginning in Palestine. While the first two secular miracles occurred facing an open horizon, the latter four occurred facing the pincerlike movement of cruel history closing in.

The can-do spirit and the outstanding energy that characterized Zionism from the outset took a dramatic turn in 1936. From then on, Jewish life in Palestine was an uphill battle: to mobilize faith against fate, to wrestle with fate, to act. And so, digging its harbor and playing its Mendelssohn and erecting its power station and paving its runway, Zionism was already both heroic and tragic.

The power station fascinates me. In later years ugly structures were added, but the original 1938 edifice is all austere grandeur. The Monumental International style chosen by Rotenberg’s architects projects modern might. Despite all of the turmoil of the 1930s, the turbines that were about to electrify Palestine were ensconced in a shrine of progress that rose within months on the Yarkon’s northern bank. But the tale of the Tel Aviv port is even more significant. Exactly a month after the Arab revolt cut off Tel Aviv from its Jaffa port lifeline, Tel Aviv constructed a wooden pier. It washed out to sea that very night, but it was replaced with a pier of solid steel. But that was not enough. Tel Aviv constructed a jetty and built more piers. Six months after it was besieged, the city sent out of its own port a first crate of oranges—to Buckingham Palace. In doing so, it articulated the Zionist mode of action against those trying to annihilate it. It responded to terror not with terror but with building. It expressed the élan vital of a young nation
fighting adamantly while believing that its will to live would overcome the death surrounding it.

I stand by the cascade of warm water falling from the electricity plant to the Mediterranean. As another group of cyclists passes by, I wonder if we still have within us the fortitude that erected the Tel Aviv power station and dug the Tel Aviv port. For to face the seven circles of threat closing in on us, we need the wisdom and energy and devotion we once had. We need the initiative, daring, alacrity, inventiveness, ingenuity, and can-do spirit. As individuals, we have all of these traits of the “yes-we-can” ethos; this is why our start-ups are so remarkable and our ingenuity unique. But as a collective, we seem to have lost what we once had. This is why our nation-state is dysfunctional and our politics dire. Today ours is a free yet polarized society. So the crucial question is whether the free society that emerged here will generate enough power to withstand the external and internal threats endangering it.