TOWARDS ZIONIST RENAISSANCE Moshe Shamir (The following is adapted from an article in Nativ [July 1996]. Moshe Shamir is one of Israel's most distinguished writers.) The concepts of renewal, innovation, change, have a seductive aspect that invites overhasty usage. Against the claim of Ecclesiastes that "There is nothing new under the sun," experienced experts counterpose: "There is only new under the sun!" and the global media industry waxes wealthy on the dramatization of the concept. The "political earthquake" rumbles through the media and the world is agitated by the right-wing landslide in that small, annoying Israel which has not ceased supplying agitating news from its very first day. However, one thing has remained the same and has not changed in the slightest, namely, the Arab War against us! We have in fact become so conditioned to being beleaguered, and to live under the sword that we no longer feel the mortal danger. Living on the edge of catastrophe has become normal to such an extent that our senses cease registering what happens routinely on airfields, highways, the entries of public buildings, school gates, etc. We are simply ready at any moment, any second, to absorb the next dreadful blow. Hence, the basic difficult problems of Israel have not changed at all. If such is the state of affairs regarding external security and national independence, how much more so is it true for internal problems. The low morale, the psychological malaise (akin to the emotions of a conscience ridden felon), have not been changed by Netanyahu's election as prime minister. The strengthening of the alliance with the religious parties has not suddenly filled the spiritual and intellectual vacuum. No one denies that the dissolution of the ideological core of Israel's society was and is the main factor undermining the pillars of the Zionist enterprise. The election victory of Netanyahu and the national camp were of course a serious defeat for Peres, his policies and his leftist camp. But it was not the victory of Netanyahu that caused the downfall of the left, which still labels itself the "Labor Movement." Rather it was the internal rot of the Left which caused Netanyahu's victory. The bankruptcy of the ideological principle happened first on the Left. There, ideology was primary and central. It involved the decline of the Kibbutz movement starting with the establishment of the state and evident in the desertion of its successive generations. The closing of the daily Davar marks the nadir in the disintegration of the entire party press in Israel. True, this began on the Right, but became a moral catastrophe on the Left as one after another of its publications ceased appearing. It involved all of them, beginning with the most prestigious, like Molad and Mibifnim and continuing through the weeklies like Hapoel Hazair and Mevo'o and the dailies, Lamerchav, Al Hamishmar and Davar.

In recent years, the Labor Party's return to power and renewed control of the state's finances meant, in effect, the liquidation of the economic, social, administrative and financial empire of the Labor movement. Before us lies a cadaver of institutions choked and sucked down by the weight of stifling bureaucracies. Yet Labor's prolonged death throes were entirely in the spiritual realm. But alas and alack, the Labor movement is not alone in needing intensive care in the realm of ideas. The entire people are in need of most urgent treatment of the entire moral and spiritual basis of its life. I emphatically stress the need for a Zionist renaissance. In the last 200 years, certainly in the 100 years since the birth of political Zionism, and above all since the Holocaust--there does not exist, and cannot be another framework which embraces all the requisite fundamentals of Jewish existence. Zionism alone includes all of them. The prerequisite for a Zionist renaissance is the renewal and strenghthening of the consciousness of belonging -- belonging in its plainest sense, belonging to the Jewish people, for there is such a people and it is the basis of our lives and we are the basis of its life. One can define this also by negation: All that the "post-Zionist," the anti-Zionist and pro-PLO Left destroy, erode and demolish must be revived and made to grow through the The calamity did not begin yesterday, but years ago. Zionist renaissance. The calamity did not begin yesterday, but years ago. In the intellectual and cultural areas, first in literature and theater, we have seen anti-Zionism rupturing every essential artery of Jewish national attachment. With arrogant self-righteousness, the left serves us daily with divorce papers, whose central argument is: Two peoples. Yeshayahu Leibowitz invented the phrase to describe the gap between the religious and the secular. His disciples-in-hatred make the gap unbridgeable. In the Leftist-Canaanite department of that school one denies that there is any tie between Israel and the diaspora. Another artery is ruptured. Lately, yet another dangerous breach has surfaced. Following the fall of the Left from power, the split between Right and Left has been inflated by local scribblers into a quasi-global rift between "North" and "South," or between Orientals and Ashkenazim. And as it happens sometimes through a slip of the tongue that some buried truth is revealed, so it was when that pitiful woman threw her pathetic demands in the face of the entire nation. You either accept my view (and my rule) -- or I leave this country. With the usual combination of snobbism and leftism, that lady informed us that as far as she was concerned, she no longer belongs. In the face of all this destructive subversion, the first task of the Zionist Renaissance is to strengthen the consciousness of belonging. Such belonging is not only a matter of self-identification, but also requires recognition of Jewish national (Continued on p.11)

September 1996               - 3 -               Outpost