A pair
of events, neither of which occurred at a chronological midpoint in
Israel's history, nevertheless divide that history in two. The first was
the Six Day War of 1967. The second was Menachem Begin's electoral
victory of 1977. Both came unexpectedly, both launched Israel on
unforeseen trajectories and both had immense consequences that the
country is still struggling to cope with.
These
events, though 10 years apart, were closely connected. Begin, a loser in
eight prior national elections, would never have won the prime
ministership on his ninth try without the '67 war. It bestowed on him-a
right-wing leader despised and shunned by Israel's ruling establishment
until asked to join a national unity cabinet as war threatened-a
political respectability he hadn't had before. It transformed his Herut
Party's platform, which called for Jewish rule in all of Palestine, from
an apparent fantasy to a reality. It awakened a wave of repressed
sentiment for places-the Old City of Jerusalem, Hebron, the hill country
of Judea and Samaria-that, though an integral part of the Jewish
people's biblical heritage, had been written off as permanently lost by
all but Begin's most fanatic followers. And it led directly to the
surprise Egyptian and Syrian attack in 1973, whose initial debacle and
terrible losses turned Israelis against the Labor Zionist leadership
they had trusted since the nation's founding in 1948. It made them ready
for a change.
In his thoughtful and well-written new biography of Begin, the
American-born Daniel Gordis, who moved to Israel in 1998 and has become
one of its most articulate explainers and defenders to English-speaking
audiences, addresses the question of what, at its deepest level, this
change was about. Menachem Begin: The Battle for Israel's Soul doesn't
break new investigative ground. Relying on previous studies, it tells
the story of Begin's childhood and adolescence in a Polish shtetl; his
rise to the top of Betar, a youth movement affiliated with the
Revisionist Party founded by the right-wing Zionist leader Vladimir
Jabotinsky; his years as commander of the Irgun, the Revisionists'
underground fighting force in Palestine, following his arrival there in
1942 and the death of his family in the Holocaust; his two decades of
languishing in the political wilderness after Israel's establishment in
1948; his 1977 triumph; his historic roles in the 1979 peace treaty with
Egypt and the 1982 war in Lebanon; and the physical and psychological
decline that led to his resignation in 1983. All are given their due.
What
interests Mr. Gordis most, however, is Begin's Jewishness. Momentous as
they were, Begin's opening of the West Bank to intensive Jewish
settlement, his relinquishing of Sinai for peace with Egypt and the
liberalization policies that hastened the end of Israel's semi-socialist
economy aren't, in Mr. Gordis's opinion, his most important legacy.
That, rather, was his restoration to Israeli public life of a
fundamental sense of Jewish purpose that was missing from it during the
long years of Labor hegemony. Though a politician like all politicians,
Begin, Mr. Gordis writes, was "infinitely more than that . . . a person
whose Jewish soul dictated virtually everything he said, every decision
he took. . . . [He] was, and remains, the most Jewish prime minister
that Israel has ever had."
On the
face of it, this is a challengeable assertion. Begin, it is true, grew
up in an Eastern European home suffused in Jewish knowledge and values,
which can't be said of Israeli-born (or almost-born) prime ministers
like Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak or Ariel Sharon. But
Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, Ben-Gurion's successor,
Levi Eshkol, and Begin's successor, Yitzhak Shamir, were raised in
similar homes-and while Begin, unlike them, continued irregularly to
attend synagogue and partake in religious rituals throughout his life,
he was by no means a traditionally observant Jew. Both Herut and the
Likud Party that grew out of it, moreover, were secular parties with no
such Jews in their leadership, and Begin's great hero and ideological
mentor Jabotinsky didn't have a religious bone in his body.
Yet Mr.
Gordis is right that Begin "was different." One of the features of the
Labor Zionism that dominated Israel politics before 1977 was its revolt
against, and often hostility to, Jewish religious tradition, which was
perceived as parochial, passive and an obstacle to the Jewish people's
return to a healthy existence in its historical land. Ben-Gurion, though
more obsessively concerned with Israel's Jewish identity than was
Begin, who took this identity as a given, conceived of a Jewish state as
the breeding grounds of a new type of Jew. Traditional Judaism was for
him a relic from the past with no positive role left to play in Israeli
life.
Begin
shared none of this. Neither Revisionism, Betar nor the Irgun had ever
been anti-religious, and Begin related to Zionism as a historical
movement that was in harmony with the religious past rather than at odds
with it. He had, as Mr. Gordis puts it, "a finely honed appreciation
for the rhythms and priorities of Jewish life and tradition, which had
never yet been represented in the prime minister's office." What was
more, he was intent on expressing it, whether this took the form of a
quasi-religious devotion to the land of Israel (which, ironically,
enabled him psychologically to surrender all of Sinai, a territory that
was not, for Judaism, sacred) or the coalitions he formed with Israel's
Orthodox and ultraorthodox parties or his support for policies like the
financially inadvisable banning of Saturday flights by El Al, Israel's
national airline, because the Sabbath was "an eternal value" of the
Jewish people.
Begin's
love and respect for Jewish tradition were a significant factor in the
love and respect that much of Israel felt for him. As opposed to
Israel's old, largely Labor-voting elite, the children and grandchildren
of the masses of Jews from Arab lands who immigrated to Israel in the
1950s and '60s had retained, if not the Orthodoxy of their parents and
grandparents, a warm feeling for it. This population, which resented its
low economic status and felt excluded from power and influence, was
Begin's most enthusiastic constituency. Israel's have-nots had an
attachment to Judaism that its haves did not.
If
secular Zionism was a revolution in Jewish life, perhaps the greatest
ever, Begin belonged to the counterrevolution that all revolutions
produce in their wake-one that saw the old secular elite lose much of
its cultural and political power and a more stridently nationalistic
society, more dominated by religious discourse, emerge. How much Begin
propelled this development, and how much it propelled him, is debatable;
sooner or later, it would have happened without him, too. Yet when
conditions for it first ripened, he was the Israeli politician best
equipped to take advantage of them. In this sense, he was indeed their
catalyst.
From
the time of the Bible, the Jewish people has existed in a state of
tension between its universalistic and particularistic sides, one
emphasizing its calling in the world and the other its apartness from
it, pulled now this way, now that. This tug of war, which continues in
full force in Israel today, is the battle to which the subtitle of Mr.
Gordis's book refers, and the years that have passed since 1977
represent a swing back toward the particularistic. If there is one
assertion of Mr. Gordis's that I find it difficult to agree with,
therefore, it is his characterization of Begin as an ideal balance
between the two halves of the "Jewish soul," a man who harbored in equal
proportions "both deeply humanist convictions and a passionate
allegiance to [his] own people."
That
Begin was a decent and humanly sensitive man there can be no doubt, but
his allegiance to his people, it seems to me, was far stronger than any
humanist convictions he may have had. Perhaps the most telling example
of this was his reaction to the Sabra and Shatila massacre in September
1982, when an armed force of Lebanese Christian Phalangists entered two
Palestinian refugee camps with the logistical support of the Israeli
army and killed close to a thousand of their residents. Israel, not
entirely fairly, was held responsible for the incident by an outraged
world-although there was no evidence that it had anticipated the
massacre, much less wanted it to take place, it did encourage the
Phalangists to enter the camps and flush out their PLO fighters-and
Begin's response, as quoted by Mr. Gordis, was to remark to his aide
Yehuda Avner while they were on their way to synagogue for Rosh Hashana
services the next day: "Goyim kill goyim and they hang the Jews."
Humanistically,
this left much to be desired. Many Israelis, at any rate, thought so,
because that same week hundreds of thousands congregated in Tel Aviv to
protest and call for Begin's resignation. (I was one of them.) To his
credit, the deep depression that caused him to resign a year later was
partially brought on, it would seem, by his recognition that the war in
Lebanon he had ordered had become a moral as well as a political mess.
Menachem Begin had an exacting conscience, far more than did most other
political leaders of the age, Israel's included.
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- Mr. Halkin's life of Vladimir Jabotinsky will be published in May.
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