Israel’s Thermidor Moment

Emmanuel Navon

The upcoming anniversary of the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple and of the Jewish commonwealth occurs on the eleventh month of the Hebrew calendar. Three weeks of mourning culminate in a day of fasting during the hottest month of the year. Then the temperature goes down and Jews read the comforting words of Isaiah.
The eleventh month of the French Revolutionary calendar was also the hottest of the year. It was called Thermidor, after the French word "thermal" which itself comes from the Greek "thermos" (heat). In popular parlance, Thermidor has become synonymous of a period of cooling off after erring and tyranny. This is because on 9 Thermidor (27 July) 1794, Maximilien de Robespierre was guillotined and his Reign of Terror ended. The Thermidor revolt against Robespierre’s tyranny partially restored civil liberties and religious freedom.

Robespierre held on to his shaky power through terror and intimidation. Dissidents were systematically dubbed "traitors" and arbitrarily beheaded. Chopping off people’s heads is undoubtedly one way of making them abandon their ideas. But ideas live on when they happen to be successful, and eventually Robespierre himself was guillotined.

Just like Robespierre at the height of the summer, some of Israel’s academics seem to be feeling the heat. Last week, Eliya Leibowitz, an astrophysics professor at Tel-Aviv University (and a son of the late Lithuanian brainbox and sophistic maestro Yeshayahu Leibowitz) wrote a piece in Ha’aretz comparing some of Israel’s student movements to Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

The 10 years (1966-1976) of the Cultural Revolution in China brought the education system to a halt. Many intellectuals were sent to labor camps. Almost anyone with skills was made the target of harassment. Those identified as spies, "running dogs" or "revisionists" (such as landowners) were variously subjected to violent attacks, imprisonment, rape, torture, seizure of property and erasure of social identity, with unknown hundreds of thousands (or more) murdered, executed, starved or worked to death. In Mao: The Unknown Story, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday claim that as many as 3 million people died in the violence of the Cultural Revolution.

According to Leibowitz junior, this is what Israel is up to because some students are openly speaking out against their academic tyrants. Instead of relating to what they have to say, Leibowitz is "warning" us that he will end up in a concentration camp if we don’t shut them up. Similarly, Hebrew University historian Dmitry Shomsky wrote an op-ed in Ha’aretz on June 22 to dismiss the book of Ronen Shoval, Herzl’s Vision 2.0, as a fraud. But rather than addressing Shoval’s thought-provoking points, Shomsky’s critique boils down to "don’t listen to him."

Then there is Ha’aretz editor Amos Shoken, who personally called a friend of mine recently to try and convince him not to cancel his subscription. The conversation lasted for an hour, though Shoken did not manage to convince my friend.

The reaction of Shoken, Shomsky, Leibowitz & all is both pathetic and encouraging. They know that they are losing a power they artificially hold via manipulations. I do not wish them to end-up like Robespierre, of course, but I do hope that the post Tisha Beav cooling-off period will bring upon us the blessings of Thermidor.