THE TREASON OF THE INTELLECTUALS Midge Decter (The following is Midge Decter's address at the recent International Zionist Convention.) There are two seemingly unrelated problems that have contributed to the weakening of Israel. The first of these problems, and the most decisive, is the fact that in those precious few years after World War I, when the Jewish people might have taken hold and occupied all of Palestine up to and somewhat east of the Jordan river, when the country was open to them, the Jews did not come. They did not even think of coming in any appreciable numbers until it was too late. Until that is, leaving Europe had become a matter of life and death, and the country that should have been their own was closed to them, as were most other countries. Imagine what would have happened if the second and third aliyot had consisted of hundreds of thousands, ready to take over, to bear arms, to develop a blooming society with a stable and growing economy. Would the British have been able to violate so bold-facedly the promises made by Balfour and company and Lloyd George? Would they even have imagined it in their interest to do so? Well, the Jews did not come. There are probably many reasons why they did not. Zion was, after all, a far-off alien country and Jerusalem a far-off alien city, about which they had dreamed, and over which they had prayed for so many centuries -- but far, far away, unreal and unobtainable. For those huddled masses in the shtetl, as well as in the isolated Jewish enclaves of the big cities of central and eastern Europe, a trip to the next village was often all they had the nerve and energy for. Uman, or

Lopatin or even Minsk may not have offered much in the way of a decent life, but their dead were buried there, their parents still lived there, and the devils in the place were the devils they knew. Those who were footloose or wanted to be, went off to America. It is true that America was far-off and even alien, but opportunity there was not an ideological intention but an established fact. And what was Zion -- a desert, good only for the very brave, the very energetic, or the foolhardy. Most people enjoy none of these characteristics in any marked degree. In the twenties and even in the thirties, when the handwriting was already on the wall, Jabotinsky desperately tried to organize Europe's, particularly eastern Europe's, Jews for aliyah. He begged them with all the affection and power at his command to get the hell out of there, immediately and without looking back. They seemed to have returned the affection but were mostly impervious to the power of his words. Thus, it was that the world, not unjustifiably, arrived at the impression that the Jewish people had neither the desire, nor the physical and spiritual means to take hold of the promise once held out to it. Who knows what might have happened had the Yishuv from the first become what it is now, one of the world's two leading Jewish communities. Would statehood for so long have remained a matter of inner debate, for instance? Might there not have been a brave and brilliant Israeli armed force without the enmity and feuds, betrayals and infighting that preceded the creation of the IDF, and that have left a costly legacy of bitterness to this day? Such speculation is bootless as, in matters historical, it always is. The Jews did not come, and paid an unimaginable price for it. A price that in a very different sense, Israel will go on paying for who knows how long. The second thing that went wrong was that the State of Israel gave birth far too early to a professional, (Continued on p.7)

Outpost               - 6 -               May 1996