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The Hebrew Republic 3684_H_Avishai_FM 2/7/08 10:28 AM Page i The Hebrew Republic _ _ 3684_H_Avishai_FM 2/7/08 10:28 AM Page ii ALSO BY BERNARD AVISHAI The Tragedy of Zionism A New Israel _ _ 3684_H_Avishai_FM 2/7/08 10:28 AM Page iii The Hebrew Republic HOW SECULAR DEMOCRACY AND GLOBAL ENTERPRISE WILL BRING ISRAEL PEACE AT LAST Bernard Avishai Harcourt, Inc. _ Orlando Austin New York San Diego London _ 3684_H_Avishai_FM 2/7/08 10:28 AM Page iv Copyright © 2008 by Bernard Avishai All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechani- cal, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be submitted online at www.harcourt.com/contact or mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777. www.HarcourtBooks.com Parts of this book have appeared, in somewhat different form, in Harper’s, Slate, Barron’s, Prospect, and Forward. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Avishai, Bernard. The Hebrew republic: how secular democracy and global enterprise will bring Israel peace at last / Bernard Avishai. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. National characteristics, Israeli. 2. Israel—Social conditions— 21st century. 3. Israel—Economic conditions—21st century. 4. Israel—Politics and government—21st century. 5. Civil society—Israel. 6. Arab-Israeli conflict—1993– I. Title. DS113.3.A95 2007 956.9405—dc22 2007034413 ISBN 978-0-15-101452-1 Text set in Spectrum Designed by Lydia D’moch Printed in the United States of America First edition ACEGIKJHFDB _ _ 3684_H_Avishai_FM 2/7/08 10:28 AM Page v For Sidra _ _ 3684_H_Avishai_FM 2/7/08 10:28 AM Page vi _ _ 3684_H_Avishai_FM 2/7/08 10:28 AM Page vii At the fringe of the sky, at the edge of the desert, There’s a faraway place, full of wildflowers. A small place—forlorn and deranged— A small place for worry. All-that-will-be is spoken of, And all-that-has-happened is thought, God sits there and shudders, guarding all He has created. “You are forbidden to pick the flowers of the garden— You are forbidden to pick the flowers of the garden!” And He’s worried. Awfully worried. —YONATAN GEFEN, from Matti Caspi’s hit album, Side A Side B, 1978 _ _ 3684_H_Avishai_FM 2/7/08 10:28 AM Page viii _ _ 3684_H_Avishai_FM 2/7/08 10:28 AM Page ix CONTENTS PROLOGUE The Situation 1 PART ONE JEWISH AND DEMOCRATIC 15 1. Basic Laws 23 2. West Bank Settler 59 3. “A Spade to Dig With” 85 PART TWO THE DECLINE—AND RISE—OF THE HEBREW REPUBLIC 119 4. The Center’s Liberal Demography 128 5. The Business of Integration 169 6. Hebrew Revolution 212 Conclusion: Closing the Circle 244 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 269 A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION 273 ENDNOTES 275 INDEX 281 _ _ 3684_H_Avishai_FM 2/7/08 10:28 AM Page x _ _ 3684_H_Avishai_FM 2/7/08 10:28 AM Page xi The Hebrew Republic _ _ 3684_H_Avishai_FM 2/7/08 10:28 AM Page xii _ _ 3684_H_Avishai_pt1 2/7/08 10:28 AM Page 1 PROLOGUE The Situation Jerusalem’s a place where everyone remembers he’s forgotten something but doesn’t remember what it is. —YEHUDA AMICHAI, Songs of Zion the Beautiful Six years ago, I moved to Jerusalem for the third time, to join my new wife, a professor of literature at the Hebrew University, and to teach at an Israeli business school. This was the winter of 2002 and not the best of times to move to Israel, for the Al-Aqsa Intifada had become a scat- ter of suicide bombings, and Ariel Sharon’s government was preparing the first of its fierce responses in Operation Defensive Shield. When I met one old friend, she put her hand to the back of my head and started feeling around through my hair. “I’m looking for the hole,” she said. I had spent the best part of the 1970s living in Israel, and the better part of the 1980s visiting and writing about the country, so the new distur- bances, and little ironic gestures of solidarity, were not unfamiliar. But something had changed, certainly among my graying friends, a sadder but wiser air, a sense of being unlucky—a barely suppressed hunger to speak in big categories about formative years. There have been dramatic turns since then, which raised spirits for a _ time, the way shock treatments are said to cure for a time: the fall of _ 3684_H_Avishai_pt1 2/7/08 10:28 AM Page 2 2THE HEBREW REPUBLIC Saddam, the Saudi peace plan, Arafat’s succession by Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas, Sharon’s blitz evacuation of Gaza, the launching of the centrist Kadima party. Hamas then won a majority in the Palestinian parlia- ment, refusing recognition of Israel, and Israelis elected a government sworn to unilaterally erecting permanent borders—each vote a relapse into the logic of vendetta. Then there was war again in Southern Lebanon, which took nearly all Israelis by surprise, though in a way that seemed to vindicate the working hypothesis. My wife noticed that even educated Israelis had begun to refer to the matzav, the “situation,” no longer to the “conflict.” And that is still the case. As I write, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) ex- changes periodic fire with Hamas-controlled Gaza, Tony Blair has assumed the post of Middle East envoy, and Secretary of State Con- doleezza Rice has convened a peace summit in Annapolis for later in the fall. If, by the time these words are published, peace talks are not in the headlines, then the consequences of their failure will be. But you listen to the talk shows, or have dinner with a colleague, and there is little about possible diplomatic openings. The conversation is rather about managing a chronic condition, like cancer, or earthquakes. Not that Israelis are stoic about people they think are insufficiently worried about them. During the Lebanon fighting, in July of 2006, I got in touch with an old friend who has lived in and around Tel Aviv since the 1970s. His parents’ big Hungarian family had been decimated by the Holocaust; I have known (and dearly loved) him since we were chil- dren in Montréal. I happened to be out of Israel at the time of the war, and I had called to express my concern. But I also wanted to share mis- givings about the Israeli Air Force bombing Lebanese ports, oil refiner- ies, and southern towns in response to Hezbollah provocations—not just instinctive misgivings about the deaths of so many Lebanese civil- _ ians (among them, children), but the fear that, by bombing in this way, _ Israel could only alienate the Beirut middle classes and inadvertently 3684_H_Avishai_pt1 2/7/08 10:28 AM Page 3 THE SITUATION 3 strengthen the prestige of insurgent groups it could not destroy. And how long before scenes of bloody rubble, broadcast on Al Jazeera, would prompt demonstrations in Cairo that the Mubarak regime would be unable to contain? These were not particularly shrewd misgivings. The Winograd Com- mission, later appointed by the government to look into the conduct of the war, restated most of them as if they were self-evident.1 But by the time I reached my friend that summer, Hezbollah missiles were falling by the hundreds on Northern Israeli towns, and our conversation grew fraught. I had missed, he told me, the “robust consensus” that had spontaneously developed in the country. He e-mailed the next day: I believe that you are profoundly out of touch with the realities of dealing with our neighbors; that you mirror the ideas which have made the left increasingly irrelevant to the great Israeli debate of how to disengage from the settlements and the Palestinians, on the way to rescuing Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, and finding some workable formula first for co-existence, and later for peace. The brutal and reactionary nature of the regimes and rul- ing élites involved, and the imperialistic interventionism of re- gional powers (now it’s Iran’s turn), continue as in the past to sabotage the effort to move us in a constructive direction. The new factor, which did not exist before, is an Islamic, jihadist impe- rialism with global aspirations and the mega-trillions of oil rev- enues to back it. I’m well aware of its non-homogeneous nature, internal contradictions and weaknesses. And I contend that to be- little or underestimate it is suicidal folly . I’m writing to confirm what my red line is, even though you know it very well. It’s the commitment to the two-state frame- work. It’s because I know how deeply you care about Israel, and _ about the Jewish people, that I can handle anything you say, no _ 3684_H_Avishai_pt1 2/7/08 10:28 AM Page 4 4THE HEBREW REPUBLIC matter how much I may disagree. What I can’t do is accommodate people like Meron Benvenisti, whom I respect, or Tony Judt (less so), who have concluded that the Jewish state is a lost cause. I don’t need to question their good intentions or integrity, and I don’t. But being under attack for merely existing is radicalizing, which makes middle grounds and moderate positions increas- ingly untenable...[No peace plan] has a chance if we don’t demonstrate once again that we have the will to exercise the force necessary to defeat attempts to undo 1948..
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