Jewish Press

Good evening:

Given the three options – lamenting together with everyone else, looking for the coin under the street lamp, or fooling myself into thinking that everything is all right – I chose a fourth option: touching briefly on several truths incorporated into my belief system over the course of the 81 years of my life.

These truths, which I learned at my own expense, go back to when I was a young girl in the Beitar Movement, demonstrating against “The White Paper.” They go back to when I was a Lehi member sitting in a British prison. They also go back to my years of fighting in the Knesset against the policy of concessions and withdrawals, my grassroots struggle to get the Jews out of Russia and Ethiopia, and my efforts to settle Jews in Judea and Samaria, liberated in the Six-Day War. I have particularly struggled on behalf of Kiryat Arba-Hebron, City of the Patriarchs.

And I experienced all of this amidst a tragic struggle against uprooting Jews from their homes. In its time, this was about Yamit, and more recently about Gush Katif. All of these experiences, and everything in between, occurred in one period to one woman, or perhaps to one country.

The first truth is that since the State’s establishment, we have been living here in Israel as “goyim” – in quotation marks, obviously. Yet if we are killed for our country, we are killed only as Jews, without quotation marks, and not necessarily with any religious connotation. Surely it is a historic truth that the Zionist Movement that established the State was cut off from religion, but not cut off from the unique meaning of the redemption process of the Jewish people. Life within this existential contradiction has a price tag, and we pay it in all walks of our lives.

The second truth is the continuing erosion of the code of life of our people. After our people wrestled with the angel of G-d, their name was changed from Jacob to Israel, and their destiny was determined – to prevail and to struggle. This meant struggling with G-d over His faith, in the sense of “I struggle, therefore I am.” It meant the struggle going back to Abraham to perfect the world. It meant the struggle down through history to discover our identity. It meant the unending struggle throughout the period of Zionist action for our survival here in Israel as a political state.

Every struggle has its price. Jacob emerged from his struggle limping. At one time, we were ready to pay the price of the struggle, but today no longer. Years ago Ahmed Yassin, founder of Hamas, asked Ehud Barak a question when the latter, as Army chief of staff, visited him in an Israeli prison. “Do you know why today’s Israel is weak? It is because you have lost the will to fight.” This erosion in the will to struggle has a price. Our enemies can discern that erosion. We all remember Hanan Nasrallah’s statement that Israel is “weaker than a spider web…”

But not all of us remember that the one who warned us against this erosion was Zeev Binyamin Herzl. True, he did say, “If you will it, it is no dream.” But the second part of what he said was, “If you do not will it, then everything I have said to you will turn into a mere dream.”

The third truth sounds like a Biblical parable, but it is the mathematical formula of our lives – “Where there is no vision, the people cast off restraint” (Proverbs 29:18). In a normal country – like Switzerland – normal social motivation is enough to make a person a good taxpaying citizen. Here in Israel, it is not. Our nation needs an out-of-the-ordinary Messianic motivation to achieve that; they need some vision that will provide meaning, reason, purpose and an explanation to our lives.

Otherwise, as our sages said, the people will dance around a Golden Calf and descend down to the dust; and in the larger scheme of things, that is what has happened to us. It didn’t happen overnight, but over the course of many years we became a materialistic, oligarchic society with an opportunistic policy of compromise on top of compromise, until we forgot the ideals from which we started to compromise, and the compromise itself became the ideal.

People with licentious tongues slander our people by calling them corrupt, but that is not so. This people is the same people that has been in this country since 1948, and perhaps today it is even better. It is just our political leadership and intellectual elite, devoid of any vision, who have led the people to knowingly lie to themselves in the face. A leadership that relates to the people (who by nature are out of the ordinary in the positive sense of the word) as if they were normal and average, thereby transforms them into an out-of-the-ordinary people in the negative sense of the word.

The fourth truth is the fact that with our people, only what is historic is also realistic. It is true that our history is full of complexities and complications. In that regard, Dr. Yisrael Eldad once said, “It is true that Isaac was saved from the Akeidah (his sacrifice by Abraham), but he entered the bramble from which emerged the ram that was sacrificed in his place, and from that day on we have been stuck in a bramble.”

Even so, whoever tries to outsmart history by way of shortsighted shortcuts, whoever impatiently tries to save time will pay a heavy price in cash up front – in line, perhaps with the saying, “Time is money…” A leadership that instead of looking at the great historic clock looks only at the watch on its wrist will never know what time it is.

It’s no wonder, then, that all the dozens of peace plans that they’ve tried to force onto the living body of this land have been spat out like foreign growths, one by one, and they lie buried in the Middle East Peace Plan Cemetery. Cause of Death: Attempt to force unreality on reality.

The fifth and last truthis the fact that the real distinguishing factor today is not between Right and Left, nor between those who want a larger Eretz Yisrael and those who want a smaller Eretz Yisrael. Rather, it is between those – either from the Right or the Left – who continue to believe in the justice of the Zionist process, to struggle for it and to pay the price involved, and those who in despair have jumped off the Zionist ladder.

In our younger generation, we have enormous potential for self-sacrifice for the Land and the country. This was revealed in our religious youth who struggled against the uprooting of settlements, as well as in our secular youth, who recently fought in Lebanon.

What we still do not have is a leadership of politicians and intellectuals who believe in this potential, and who are capable of transforming it into a practical force. What we are lacking is a leadership that will have the sense to restore to relevance the vision and meaning of our existence here in Israel, and to restore the meaning of “here” to our existence.

Send comments to Datya Itzchaki at datya@netvision.net.il

This entry was posted on Friday, February 23rd, 2007 and is filed under opinion. You can leave a response.