THE HELLENIZERS (Continued from p.3) Although it had been self-understood that no Israeli government could rely for its majority in the Knesset on the vote of Arab parties, the Labor government unapologetically did just that, defiantly asserting the Western premise that the vote of each citizen is equally valid in a democracy. (It was apparently unaware of the many legal safeguards employed by more functional democracies, e.g. two thirds votes on important issues, that protect the state against the anarchic potentialities of this premise.) In any event, the Labor government was so determined to jettison the Jewish claim to the Land in favor of the principle of self-determination of peoples that, as Douglas Feith has pointed out, it determined to withdraw unilaterally from Judea, Samaria and Gaza, bringing in Arafat as a figleaf to pretend there was a quid pro quo of "peace" in exchange for territories. The government revolutionized "us" versus "them." "Us" were now the "partners in peace," Labor supporters within Israel and the PLO, while "them" were the so-called "enemies of peace," above all the religious Prime Minister Netanyahu recently noted that secular Israeli youth know more about Madonna than about Moses. "settlers" in Judea and Samaria, the most vocal and dedicated opponents of government policy. The Labor leadership threw up a screen of slogans such as "Land for Peace" to cover its effort to remake Israel into a Western (i.e. quasi-secular humanist, non-Jewish) state. Actions with high symbolic freight, some taken, some promised, some simply cast out as good ideas for the future by government spokesmen, frightened the Jewish majority in Israel. Among these actions was the government's adoption of an ethical code for the army that eliminated any reference to loyalty to the Land of Israel; educational "reforms" to eliminate Jewish history and Jewish religion as separate subjects in the curriculum; proposals to change the Israeli flag and the national anthem because Arabs could not identify with them and to eliminate the Law of Return. The large vote for the religious parties in Israel--many of them cast by secular Israelis who had never cast a vote for a religious party before--was a vote for preserving Israel's Jewish identity. But today's Hellenizers have a more complicated task than their forebears two thousand years earlier. The original Hellenizers could hope to "solve" the problem of Jewish particularity by merging into the dominant Hellenistic culture. Present day Israel is not surrounded by countries embodying universalist Western values, but by societies with stubborn particularist values of their own, a cardinal one being that Israel is a foreign body in their midst, unacceptable unless it "integrates" itself into the Middle East. The dilemma for Israel's most ardent Helleniz-

ers is that assimilating to Middle Eastern culture is the last thing they want to do. The Israel which the Hellenizers hope to create is a pluralist society on the American model. If Arabs eventually emerge as the majority by virtue of the democratic process, there would be no great cause for concern, for Arabs would have gradually participated in all aspects of government (Peres had already promised to include an Arab in his next cabinet) and all sectors of society would be committed to secular democratic values. The Israel of their imagination looks nothing like Syria or Egypt or Iraq or any of the other regional models. One need only imagine Shulamit Aloni sinking into silence, wrapped in a chador. Accordingly, Israel's Hellenizers came up with their own solution: strip the neighbors of their unacceptable particularity and having properly refashioned them, assimilate alongside them into Western culture. To friends and foes alike, over the last several years, Shimon Peres has seemed the ultimate conciliator, willing to bow to Arab demands to an extent inconceivable to previous governments. But from another point of view, Shimon Peres's call for a New Middle East -- his pronouncements that it is indeed inevitable -- represents the ultimate in hubris. When Peres insists, as he does in The New Middle East, that Israel will be part of a new Benelux in the Middle East, he is telling his Arab neighbors that they must transform themselves into Western-style societies. Given the opportunity to respond, the Arabs indig- nantly reject the proposed makeover. When Peres announced that Israel wanted to join the Arab League--which, he arrogantly declared, should rename itself the Middle East League -- the secretary of the Arab League announced that Israel would be welcome once its citizens had converted to Islam. Critics of The New Middle East have pointed out that there is no reference to a Jewish cultural flowering in the new Middle East, but by the same token neither is there any reference to Arab culture in Peres's book. Peres singles out only one cultural characteristic of the region and that is the villain of his piece: Islamic fundamentalism, which threatens fulfillment of his scenario. Otherwise the New Middle East apparently has no cultural individuality, Arab or Jewish -- it will be "democratic," "peaceful," "prosperous," "confederated," "technologically advanced." The original Hellenizers were routed by the Maccabees. Today's Hellenizers must fall victim to their impracticable target. To assimilate to the West, they must Westernize the Middle East, an absurd enterprise at a time when the Middle East is becoming ever more resistant to the West, with the future in doubt even in Turkey, for so long a bastion of Westernization. In the wildly successful new movie Independence Day, the president of the United States, after three major U.S. cities have been razed by aliens, tries to negotiate. He asks the invader, "What do you want us to do?" To which the monster replies -- "Die." The Arabs want the Jewish state to die. Israel will live only so long as it preserves its Jewish identity, for without that, there is no reason for its citizenry to defend it. Drs. Rael Jean Isaac and Erich Isaac are members of the executive committee of Americans for A Safe Israel.

July-August 1996               - 11 -               Outpost