Maof

Thirty-five years ago today the Six-Day War ended. It seemed like a new era. Indeed, I remember my rabbi some months afterward questioning whether or not we should continue to celebrate Tisha Be'av. Jerusalem had been reunited; the Temple Mount was ours; the land had been retaken. Perhaps we had entered a new age. 

The cruel lesson of the last 35 years is that we will always have Tisha Be'av and we will always need to. It is true that according to Maimonides one of the fundamental beliefs of Judaism is belief in the coming of the messiah. But that does not mean that we have to believe in the imminent coming of the messiah. In fact, the rabbis have long discouraged belief in the messiah's imminent arrival. Messianic speculation has not been good for the Jews. Many of our troubles today as a people and as a Jewish state are rooted precisely in messianic enthusiasm. 

The Jewish experience in messianic speculation is long and sad. First, the Bar Kochba rebellion of the 2nd century. It was not just a rebellion against Rome but against history. It was a messianic revolution. The greatest rabbinical authority of the time, Rabbi Akiva, proclaimed Bar Kochba the messiah. We know the story. We know how that messianic adventure ended in catastrophe: the destruction of the Jewish state, the loss of Jewish independence for 18 centuries.

A millennium and a half later we had an even more remarkable eruption of messianic expectation: Shabtai Zvi. He acquired hundreds of thousands of followers in the Jewish world promising return, redemption, and the imminent end of days. This episode ended even more tragically. Zvi was captured by the Turks and converted to Islam, thus not only destroying but also humiliating the movement that he had inspired. And yet, so deep was the belief in him that even this betrayal was seen as somehow part of the great, mysterious messianic plan. Shabtaism lasted centuries after his death. This led the rabbis to discourage messianic speculation. There is a rabbinical injunction against "hastening the end" presuming by human agency to bring about what only God can. And yet the messianic hunger never dies.

Indeed, you do not have to be religious to be a messianist. You do not need to believe in God to believe in the End of Days. The secularist temptation is the strongest of all and is surely exerting an influence far more powerful than its religious counterparts in shaping contemporary Jewish history and in bringing us to the terrible crossroads at which Israel finds itself today. Consider the following quotations: "The hunting season has ended in history." "War, as a method of conducting human affairs, is in its death throes." "The conflicts shaping up as our century nears its close will be over the content of civilization, not of territory." These words were not uttered by some religious fanatic under the spell of prophetic visions. These are words written and said by the current foreign minister of the State of Israel, Shimon Peres.

There is no way to characterize his vision of the new Middle East which underlay, powered, and indeed beguiled the entire Oslo peace process as anything but messianic. He is talking about a radical break in history occurring not in some far future, but right now. He was talking about a new era of human relations. Indeed at the Sharm e-Sheikh Summit in 1996 he declared, "We are at a watershed. Our region is going through a period of transition. The dark days are at an end. The shadows of its past are lengthening. The twilight of wars is still red with blood, yet its sunset is inevitable and imminent." Isaiah could not have said it better.

Most poignant to me is another observation that the foreign minister has offered: "The Trojan horse of war is obsolete." This turn of phrase is particularly ironic because Trojan horse is precisely the term used by the late PLO representative Faisal Husseini, a reputed moderate, to describe the Palestinians' objective in signing onto the Oslo peace process. The intention, Husseini admitted, was always to establish a Palestinian state from the river to the sea. Oslo was the Trojan horse that would give the Palestinians the foothold from which to carry on the struggle. And like the Trojan horse, the catastrophe would erupt upon the Israelis the same way it erupted upon the Trojans in a reverie of smug, self-satisfied, ultimately self-delusional victory.

In fairness, Peres was hardly a lone dreamer. This kind of hope beyond hope was in a more muted way abroad throughout the West. In the early 1990s, remember, the idea that history had turned forever was not unique to Israelis. When the Berlin Wall came down Francis Fukuyama's article: "The End of History?" was a sensation. Fukuyama did not of course mean that history, as we understand it had ended, but that political and ideological history had ended. The century that began with great battles against Nazism and Communism had ended with the triumph of liberal democracy and that this triumph was a permanent triumph. We had reached the end of the ideological evolution of mankind, and the history that occurred from now on would be different from the history that had occurred before: more narrow, more constrained, more purely commercial and economic, and more boring.

Some will say that it was just the intellectuals who went for this idea. Not so. It was prevalent in the West and in the United States in particular among the people and the government.

It is interesting to note that the three American elections of the 1990s: 1992, 1996, and 2000 had less discussion of foreign affairs than any election in the entire century. That's because we had a feeling that we had achieved a kind of Kantian permanent peace. Accordingly, the Clinton administration made the 1990s a kind of holiday from history. It made the work of foreign policy the work of accumulating treaties. It treated the first attack on the World Trade Center, the attack on the Khobar Towers, the attack on the embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, and the attack on the USS Cole as a form of crime and not as a form of war.

In the 1990s America slept and Israel dreamed. The United States awoke in September 2001. Israel awoke in September 2000.

In its reverie, the Left in Israel as in the United States was intoxicated with the idea that history had changed from a history based on military and political conflict to one in which the ground rules were set by markets and technology. They were infatuated with globalization as the great leveler the abolisher of such ugliness as power politics, war, and international conflict. The triumph of geo-economics was widely accepted in the early post-Cold War era. It was September 11 that abolished that illusion. It taught us in America that there are enemies. They are ideological. They care nothing for economics. And they will use whatever military power is at their means to achieve their ends. That is the old history, perhaps the oldest history: the warring of one god against another.

The other source of inspiration for the secular messianism of the Israeli Left was the success of the European Union. The model being offered for peace in the Middle East was the EU, turning Israel, Palestine, and Jordan into the new Benelux which have between them a common market, open borders, total friendship, total harmony.

There are, however, two enormous differences between the European situation and the Middle Eastern one. First is that the period of harmony, integration, and comity among the European powers happened only after the utter and total defeat of one party. It did not come from a long negotiation between France and Germany, compromising their differences over the years of the 20th century. These conditions don't apply in the Middle East. The only way that peace will come definitively is the peace of the grave with the defeat of Israel and its eradication. There is no way that Israel can ever utterly defeat the Arabs the way that the Allies defeated Germany and Japan in World War II. So the idea of some kind of harmonious Middle Eastern union drawing on the European model is drawn on a totally false historical analogy, one based on the surrender and accommodation of the vanquished the vision of Arab rejectionism.

Secondly, Europe is highly developed economically, politically, and technologically. The Middle East is still a cauldron of religious fanaticism, economic backwardness, and political tyranny. To look at the savage religious and secular conflicts going on throughout the Middle East and to believe that the most virulent of all these conflicts with Israel can find the kind of harmonious, open-bordered, sovereignty-renouncing coexistence of the European Union, can only be termed messianic.

This is not to say that messianism was the only impulse underlying the Oslo peace process. There was the messianic Left and there was the realist Left. The realists saw Oslo as a pragmatic way out of Israel's dilemma. I believe in retrospect and I believed at the time that they were utterly mistaken. But at least they were not dreaming. I think Yitzhak Rabin had a fairly coherent logic behind Oslo, which he thought would give Israel an opportunity to quickly settle the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and concentrate on the larger disputes coming in the longer run from the periphery, from the missiles and the weapons of mass destruction that might be aimed from Iran, Iraq, Libya and others. With the Soviets gone, Iraq defeated, the US ascendant, and the PLO weakened he thought he could get peace. It was one of the great miscalculations in diplomatic history, but at least it was a calculation.

For Peres, and his counterparts on the Israeli left, however, it was a leap of faith. And I mean the word literally. The faith of the secularist. Chesterton once said: "When a man stops believing in God he doesn't then believe in nothing, he believes anything." In the ideologically fevered 20th century, this often turned out to be a belief in History. For the messianic left, Oslo was more than a deal. It was the realization, the ratification, of a new era in history.

Rabin's Oslo was pessimistic: Peace with fences, separation, divorce, wariness, tenuousness. Peres' Oslo was eschatological: Benelux, geo-economics, the abolition of power politics.

This is not to say that peace is impossible. It is only to say that peace will always be contingent. And even that contingent peace requires the demonstration by the Arab side of its willingness, its genuine willingness, to live in acceptance of a Jewish state. Again that is not impossible. That is what Sadat offered. And he meant it. It is not clear that post-Sadat Egypt means it, although it has lived within the Sadatian parameters, at least for reasons of prudence, ever since.

But there's never been a Sadat among the Palestinians. And the idea that one could strike a deal with Arafat in the absence of a Sadat-like acceptance of the Jewish state was delusional. Until there is a genuine Arab and genuine Palestinian acceptance of a Jewish state within whatever borders, there will be no end of history. There will only be more and more history.

LET ME conclude by dealing with an objection to my characterization of the secular messianism of the Israeli left. One might ask: Was not the original Zionist dream itself messianic? After all, 100 years ago Zionism itself appeared to be a crazy dream. The idea of the ingathering of exiles, the reestablishment of Hebrew language and culture, the settling of the land, the achievement of political independence appeared to be, well, messianic. I would argue precisely the opposite. Zionism is the antithesis of messianism. Zionism argued against waiting in the Diaspora with prayer and fervency for some deus ex machina to come and to rescue the Jews. Zionism  rejected the idea of waiting for an outside agent, for the next Shabtai Zvi.
 

Zionism is supremely an ideology of self-reliance, of self-realization. It refuses to depend on others. It postulates no sudden change in the psychology of enemies. It postulates no change in human nature. It postulates no discontinuity in history. Zionism accepted the world precisely as it was. And decided that precisely because the world was what it was, the Jews had no future in the Diaspora and would have to build their future in Zion. Most of all, they understood that the building of Zion would depend on Jewish action, Jewish initiative, Jewish courage. They had to go out and to build the state themselves. And they did. Oslo the supreme expression of post-Zionist pacifism was entirely contrary to that spirit. Why? Because of its passivity, its reliance on an almost quasi-religious change of heart among Israel's enemies an acceptance of Israel by people who daily in their propaganda, in their sermons, in their pedagogy anathematized the very idea of a Jewish state; its reliance on a renunciation of terrorism by people who practice, support, fund, and glorify it; its reliance on entrusting the security, the safety, perhaps even the very existence of the Jewish state to the hands of sworn enemies.

We have now learned to our sadness and horror that one cannot contract out the safety of the Zionist experiment to others most especially to Arafat and the PLO. That was the premise of Oslo. It has proven a catastrophe. 

In the 1990s, America slept and Israel dreamed. The only good news is that Israel has awoken from that reverie the most disastrous messianic seduction since Shabtai Zvi. Shabtaism survived nonetheless for centuries. Osloism still has its cult of adherents. But the body of the Jewish people has awoken let us hope not  too  late, and  determined,  once  and  for  all, never  again  to succumb to the messianic temptation.

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