Herbert Zweibon

Since the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, while Israel has moved forward to become a world leader in such fields as technology and stem cell research, it has moved steadily backward when it comes to fulfilling its basic tasks – securing a safe haven for the Jewish people in its ancient land and maintaining the will to preserve the state .

To be sure the delusory notion that the state could obtain peace for land did not begin with Oslo; in 1967, in the immediate aftermath of the Six Day War, the cabinet made the offer (promptly rejected) to return all territory taken in the war for peace. A decade later Prime Minister Menachem Begin returned the entire Sinai to Egypt for a peace treaty which Egypt soon violated clause by clause.

But as Yoram Hazony has pointed out in his fine book The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel’s Soul, what happened following the Labor Party’s return to power in 2002 was qualitatively different. There was a combined cultural and political collapse with the two feeding upon one another. In October 1992, Shimon Peres, then Foreign Minister of Israel, made a speech to the UN in which one can hear the fantasies that would power Oslo: “The end of conflict is no longer a utopian fantasy….The forces of change have pushed aside the pillars of conventional wisdom, which proclaimed that military power is the source of national strength and prestige.” In a cabinet meeting where the IDF’s head of intelligence argued for greater military preparedness, Peres told him: “There is economics and there is the military, and only a country which goes over to economics will win. Choosing between ten army emplacements and ten hotels, the ten hotels also constitute security.”

Among Israel’s academic, journalistic and cultural elite “post-Zionism” replaced Zionism, which was waved away as a parochial outdated nationalism. It is as if the political and cultural elite of the United States were to throw out the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence as useless relics. Hazony quotes Israeli author David Grossman, who argued that the Jews of Israel must not only give up geographical territory: “We must also implement a “redeployment” or even a complete withdrawal – from entire regions in our soul….Giving up on power as a value. On the army itself as a value…. We will discover how we are refining a new existence for ourselves. One which is no longer drenched to the point of suffocation with the myth of our exile from the land, or with the myth of Masada, or with a one-dimensional lesson of the Holocaust.” As Hazony says “the redeployment of which David Grossman speaks is the destruction of the Jewish state in the mind of the Jewish people. It is the return to exile. It is a retreat into the void.”

The cultural collapse has made the political collapse possible, a collapse that was underscored by then Prime Minister Barak’s offer in 2000 to give up almost all the territories and redivide Jerusalem. The collapse has now extended to Ariel Sharon, who has endorsed the Palestinian state he had earlier said spelled the end of Israel. Sharon has gone further than his predecessors in forfeiting territory in anticipation of pressure. He is giving up Gaza with no prospect of anything but more lethal terror. Chief of Staff Moshe Yaalon makes the ludicrous announcement that Israel will be equally secure without the Golan.

Abba Eban famously said that the Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. The truth, as we noted in an earlier Outpost, is that Israel never misses an opportunity to give the Arabs a new opportunity. And the Arabs need only bide their time. Each offer to truncate the state becomes the baseline from which the Arabs make new demands. Unless there is a radical rethinking – a return to Zionism, a restored belief in right to the land and determination to defend that right – the future is bleak indeed.