ABANDONING IRON WALL: ISRAEL “THE MIDDLE EASTERN …the Iron Wall served Zionism and Israel relatively well from the 1920s to the end of the twentieth century. Converging streams

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MIDDLE EAST POLICY, VOL. XV, NO. 3, FALL 2008

© 2008, The Authors Journal Compilation © 2008, Middle East Policy Council

ABANDONING THE IRON WALL: ISRAEL AND

“THE MIDDLE EASTERN MUCK”

Ian S. Lustick

Dr. Lustick is the Bess W. Heyman Chair of Political Science at theUniversity of Pennsylvania and the author of Trapped in the War on Terror.

Zionists arrived in Palestine in the1880s, and within several de-cades the movement’s leadershiprealized it faced a terrible pre-

dicament. To create a permanent Jewishpolitical presence in the Middle East,Zionism needed peace. But day-to-dayexperience and their own nationalistideology gave Zionist leaders no reason toexpect Muslim Middle Easterners, andespecially the inhabitants of Palestine, togreet the building of the Jewish NationalHome with anything but intransigent andviolent opposition. The solution to thispredicament was the Iron Wall — thesystematic but calibrated use of force toteach Arabs that Israel, the Jewish “state-on-the-way,” was ineradicable, regardlessof whether it was perceived by them to bejust. Once force had established Israel’spermanence in Arab and Muslim eyes,negotiations could proceed to achieve acompromise peace based on acceptance ofrealities rather than rights. This strategy ofthe Iron Wall served Zionism and Israelrelatively well from the 1920s to the end ofthe twentieth century. Converging streamsof evidence now suggest, however, thatIsrael is abandoning that strategy, posing

the question of whether Israel and Israeliscan remain in the Middle East withoutbecoming part of it.

At first, Zionist settlers, land buyers,propagandists and emissaries negotiatingwith the Great Powers sought to avoid theintractable and demoralizing subject ofArab opposition to Zionism. Publicly,movement representatives promulgatedfalse images of Arab acceptance ofZionism or of Palestinian Arab opportuni-ties to secure a better life thanks to thecreation of the Jewish National Home.Privately, they recognized the unbridgeablegulf between their image of the country’sfuture and the images and interests of theoverwhelming majority of its inhabitants.1

With no solution of their own to the “Arabproblem,” they demanded that Britain andthe League of Nations recognize a legalresponsibility to overcome Arab oppositionby imposing Jewish settlement and aJewish polity in Palestine.

By the 1920s, however, it was obviousthat Arab opposition to Zionism was broadand deep, especially within Palestine.Arab demonstrations and riots eruptedregularly. In addition to “Muslim-ChristianAssociations,” a number of clan-based

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IAN S. LUSTICK: ISRAEL AND “THE MIDDLE EASTERN MUCK”

nationalist organizations and partiesemerged, all opposed to the British Man-date and the growth of the Jewish NationalHome. Across the board, Palestiniansrejected the Balfour Declaration and theMandate that incorporated it and de-manded a plebiscite to implement Wilsonianprinciples of national self-determination forthe majority of Palestine’s inhabitants. Aseries of British investigating commissionsidentified the taproot of Arab discontent asZionism itself and the immigration of Jewsand land transfers to Jews that wereassociated with it. It was against thisbackground that Zionism found a way tocope with the unavoidable fact of intransi-gent Arab opposition to its objectives.

The policy adopted was that of the“Iron Wall,” famously advanced in anarticle published in a Russian Zionistjournal by Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky in1925 (“O Zheleznoi Stene”). The centrallines of its analysis came rapidly to beaccepted across the broad spectrum ofmainstream Zionist organizations andparties, from Jabotinsky to David Ben-Gurion, Berl Katznelson to MenachemBegin and Chaim Arlosoroff to ChaimWeizmann.2 The only way, Jabotinskyargued, that the necessary peace agree-ment with the Arabs could ever beachieved was if an “Iron Wall” were to beconstructed. This wall would be so strongthat Arab enemies trying to break throughit would experience a long series ofdevastating defeats. Eventually thisstrategy would remove even the “gleam ofhope” from the eyes of most Arabs thatthe Jewish National Home, and then theState of Israel, could ever be destroyed.Jabotinsky acknowledged that some Arabextremists would always maintain a violentattitude of resistance toward the injustice

they naturally understood Zionism to haveinflicted. Nonetheless, he predicted thatthe overwhelming majority of PalestinianArabs and Arabs in the surroundingcountries would eventually come to theconclusion that a practical settlement withZionism was preferable to unending andhumiliating defeats. Only then wouldnegotiations be productive, and only thenwould Zionism achieve its ultimate objec-tive: a secure and permanent peace, albeita peace based on resignation of the enemyto an unchangeable reality rather thanacceptance of the justice of the Zionistcause.

The Iron Wall strategy did produce along series of military encounters withPalestinians and other Arabs that resultedin lopsided defeats and painful losses. As Iand others have shown, it also produced afundamental split between those Arabswho were willing to negotiate based onaccepting the permanence of Israel andArab “extremists” who Jabotinsky had saidwould never be brought to settle for half-a-loaf, but who could be isolated by theproductivity of negotiations with the“moderates.”3 Where the strategy ran intotrouble was the expectation that, inside theIron Wall, the objectives of the Jewishprotagonist would remain stable. Instead,especially following the 1967 war, thecenter of gravity of Israeli politics movedtoward maximalist positions. Israel did notwelcome moderate Arab offers to negoti-ate (such as those of West Bank Palestin-ian notables in 1967 and 1968, KingHussein in 1972, Egyptian President Sadatin 1971-72, or King Hussein again in themid-1980s). Rather, successive Israeligovernments in the late 1960s, 1970s, and1980s adopted the view that the Arabs ingeneral, and the Palestinians in particular,

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were only advancing moderate-soundingpositions in order to deceive Israel andregain territories that would be used todestroy the Jewish state “in stages.”4

This expansion of distrust and demandsby the consistently victorious side of theconflict should be understood as just asnatural (“normal” is the word Jabotinskyused) as the contraction of the demandsand greater realism associated withrepeated and costly defeats. However, thiswas, in fact, not anticipated by Jabotinskyor the generally applied theory and policyof the Iron Wall. The result, from the Warof Attrition in 1969-70 through the firstIntifada, 1987-93, was a bloody andcomplex process by which both Arabs/Palestinians and Israelis used force toincentivize negotiations toward some sortof mutually tolerable settlement.5 The logicof “ripening” dominated thinking about howthe conflict might eventually be resolved.This was a well-established idea, related tothe Iron Wall theory but anchored in afundamentally symmetrical view of theantagonists” that only when both sides to aprotracted conflict feel themselves caughtin a “hurting stalemate” will realisticprospects for a negotiated settlement basedon painful and mutual compromises bepossible.

This progression of Zionist -Arabrelations — from increasing butuncalculated hostility (1882-1925) to theunilateral pedagogy of force (1925-68), tothe reciprocal impact of Israeli and Arab“Iron Walls” (1969-93) — appears now tohave entered a new stage. Foreshadowedby the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin,accelerated by the collapse of the Oslopeace process, and inaugurated by theoutbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada, this stageis marked by Israeli abandonment of

efforts to “teach” Arabs anything and byArab/Muslim rejection of the principle of aJewish state’s existence in the MiddleEast. While I will make some referencesto the radicalizing transformations thathave occurred on the Arab/Muslim side,my main concern in this paper will be toconsider the logical implications of Israel’seffective abandonment of the Iron Wallstrategy along with evidence that theselogical implications are indeed manifestingthemselves in Israeli thinking and behavior.

A CHANGE IN STRATEGY?Jabotinsky and others based the Iron

Wall strategy on their recognition that itwas not reasonable to expect that Arabswould consider what Zionism was doing tothem and to Palestine as just or right.Jabotinsky admitted that, for the Arabs ofPalestine, Zionist Jews were correctly seenas “alien settlers” making unjust andunacceptable demands. Thus a corollaryof the Iron Wall strategy was that Zionismwould not demand Arab recognition of thejustice of the Zionist project. It woulddemand only that eventually Arabs wouldaccept the reality and permanence of aMiddle East that included Jewish immigra-tion and a Jewish polity. With characteris-tic eloquence, Foreign Minister Abba Ebanput this point very clearly in a speech in1970, identifying the root cause of thecontinuation of the Arab-Israeli conflict as

the refusal or the inability of Arabintellectual and political leadership sofar, to grasp the depth, the passion,the authenticity of Israel’s roots in theregion….The crux of the problem iswhether, however reluctantly, Arableadership, intellectual and political,comes to understand the existentialcharacter of the Middle East as an area

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which cannot be exhausted by Arabnationalism alone.6

The direct implication of this position — ofrequiring existential acceptance of reality,not moral approval — is the rejection ofdemands that Arabs or anyone else “recog-nize” Israel’s “right to exist.” Indeed,Eban was explicit on this point:

There are some governments which ina benevolent spirit, offer to secure theconsent of the Arab states to therecognition of our right to exist. It issometimes my duty to say that we donot ask any recognition of our right toexist, because our right to exist isindependent of any recognition of it.7

This is the classic Zionist Iron Wallposition. Until recently, it had also been thestandard Israeli government position. Jewsneeded, and could eventually expect toreceive, not recognition of rights butacceptance of fact. To be sure, SecurityCouncil Resolution 242 does refer to“acknowledgement of the sovereignty,territorial integrity and political indepen-dence of every State in the area and theirright to live in peace within secure andrecognized boundaries.” For Arabs thereis, however, a crucial difference betweenacknowledging rights of an existing entityand recognizing that it was right for thatentity to come into existence. This distinc-tion is also present in Yasser Arafat’s 1993letter to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin,which did not recognize Israel’s “right toexist,” but rather its “right to live in peaceand security” (given that it does exist andno matter whether it originally had a rightto exist or not).8

In keeping with Israel’s abandonmentof the Iron Wall strategy, Israeli leaders

have shifted their discourse. Since themid-1990s, Israeli leaders have increasinglydemanded, not Arab reconciliation to thefact of Israel’s existence, but explicit Arabapproval of Zionism itself via demands torecognize the right of Israel to exist in theMiddle East as a Jewish state. For ex-ample, while Prime Minister Barak neverincluded Arab or Palestinian recognition ofIsrael’s right to exist in any of his lists ofIsrael’s “essential requirements” for peace,by late 2002 this demand had become aprominent feature of Israeli foreign policy.Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s December2002 speech to the Herzliya Conference onIsrael’s national-security posture includedthe following assertion: “Israel’s desire is tolive in security and in true and genuinecoexistence, based, first and foremost, onthe recognition of our natural and historicright to exist as a Jewish state in the Landof Israel.”9 In a joint 2006 news confer-ence with President Bush, Prime MinisterEhud Olmert listed a number of things thatwould be required of Palestinians whodesired to negotiate with Israel. One ofthem was that “(t)he Palestinian partnerwill have to…recognize the state of Israeland its right to exist as a Jewish state.”9

Olmert’s foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, hasused even more emphatic formulations:“The West,” she told a New York Timesreporter, “must not only recognize Israel’sright to exist but also ‘the right of Israel toexist as a Jewish state.’”11

This new official insistence on explicitrecognition of Israel’s right to exist as aJewish state is striking because Arabs andMuslims are now, if anything, much lessready to accept Israel’s “right” to exist asa Jewish state than ever before. Accord-ingly, the timing of the use of this formulain connection with negotiations with the

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Palestinians or the Arab world can be seenas directly linked to the abandonment of theIron Wall strategy and the political pedagogyit represented. Indeed this new demand isevidence of a fundamental withdrawal ofmany Israeli leaders, and of much of Israelas a whole, from the realities of the MiddleEast and from a commitment to engage andchange those realities, whether through forceor diplomacy.

Confusion, Escape and ViolenceMost Israelis consider the 2006 conflict

with Hezbollah, now officially named theSecond Lebanon War, to have been a failure.As such, the conflict corresponds to Israelimemories of the disastrous aftermath of the(first) Lebanon War (Operation Peace forthe Galilee), involving a bloody 18-yearoccupation of various portions of the country,hundreds of Israeli soldiers killed amidstinternecine fighting among Lebanese sectar-ian groups, the birth of a ferocious Shia“resistance” movement whose leadershipshifted eventually, from Amal to Hezbollah,and finally the abrupt and ignominiouswithdrawal of Israeli forces in May 2000.

The general image Israelis developed oftheir northern neighbor was of habotzhaLevanoni (the Lebanese muck). It is myoverall thesis that Israelis are coming to seethe Middle East as a whole the way theycame to see Lebanon in the 1980s. Insteadof haBotz haLevanoni, Israelis implicitly butpowerfully experience the region where theircountry is located as habotz haMizrah-Tichoni (the Middle Eastern muck). Themore they struggle, it seems, whetherviolently or diplomatically, to make sense ofor headway in the Middle East, the morethey sink into an unforgiving and debilitatingquagmire.

A natural feature of this overall outlook isan image of the Arab/Muslim world, andthe Palestinians in particular, as irrational,brutal and violent, imbued with intractablyanti-Semitic hatreds fortified by deeplyanti-Western, Muslim-fundamentalistfanaticism. Against such an enemydeterrence is only barely possible, and onlyby suppressing the natural human instinctsof Israelis. Consider, for example, thework of Efraim Inbar, director of theBegin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies atBar-Ilan University. Inbar is a much-published scholar and commentator onmilitary, political and security affairs whoidentifies with and has long reflected thethinking of right-of-center politicians,including the once and perhaps futureprime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.Referring to the Palestinians’ “psychotichatred of Jews,” Inbar has urged an end toIsraeli apologies for accidentally killingPalestinian civilians.

We are confronted by a societythat is mesmerized by bloody attacks,relishes the sickening sights ofPalestinian militias playing with thesevered limbs of dead Israeli soldiers,and savors gory images of maimedIsraeli bodies, victims of a busexplosion.

Tragically, Palestinian societyseems to enjoy even the sight of itsown dead. Rather than break awayfrom the psychological mold thePalestinian national movement haspropagated so successfully for yearsit seems to prefer the role of victim.Israel’s apologies only reinforce sucha dysfunctional preference….

The Palestinians do not deserveany apologies — just condemnationfor their outrageous behavior. These

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repeated apologies are also counter-productive in a strategic sense.Expressing sorrow and extendingsympathy projects softness, whenwhat is required is an image ofdetermination to kill our enemies. Onlysuch an image can help Israel acquirea modicum of deterrence against thebestiality on the other side. 12

Yossi Klein Halevi, a commentator whoprides himself on having voted with thewinner in every Israeli election since theearly 1980s, was a supporter of Sharon’sunilateral withdrawal from Gaza. But hisjustification of that move was not as a steptoward peace but as preparation for all-outwar against the “genocidal” threat posed byHamas, Hezbollah, Iran and Syria. This war,he predicted, having begun with Hezbollah inAugust 2006, would last for months or evenyears. If it did not result in the utter destruc-tion of these organizations and regimes, itwould “mean the end of hopes for Arab-Israeli reconciliation, not only in this genera-tion but in the next one too.”13 ProfessorYehezkel Dror of the Hebrew University,whose views as a futurologist and presidentof the Jewish People Policy PlanningInstitute will be discussed more thoroughlybelow, has urged Israelis to recognize theessential impossibility that Islam could evercome to terms with a Jewish state in theMiddle East.14 In that context, he advisesIsraelis to refrain from criticizing Turkishgenocidal policies against the Armenianssince somewhat similar techniques, using“weapons of mass destruction,” may wellhave to be used by Israel despite the inevi-table deaths of a “large number of innocentcivilians.”15

Benny Morris is the dean of Israel’s“new historians.” He laid the groundworkfor widespread recognition of Israeli

policies of Arab expulsion in 1948. Duringthe first Intifada, he went to prison forrefusing to serve in the army in the occu-pied territories . More recently, Morris hasjoined in the despair and fury that marks somuch of Israeli public commentary acrossmuch of the political spectrum. In alengthy interview with Ari Shavit, Morrisportrayed the Palestinian people as a wholeas a “serial killer” and called for them to betreated accordingly:

The barbarians who want to take ourlives. The people the Palestiniansociety sends to carry out the terroristattacks, and in some way the Palestin-ian society itself as well. At themoment, that society is in the state ofbeing a serial killer. It is a very sicksociety. It should be treated the waywe treat individuals who are serialkillers…. Something like a cage has tobe built for them. I know that soundsterrible. It is really cruel. But there isno choice. There is a wild animal therethat has to be locked up in one way oranother. 16

Dark and Cloudy Visions of the FutureForeboding, though not necessarily

apocalyptic, images of Israel’s futurefeatured prominently in a dozen extendedinterviews conducted between 2004 and2007 with Israelis from across the politicalspectrum. Each interviewee was asked todescribe a long-term future for the countrythat he/she regarded as both possible andpositive or at least acceptable. Israeliswho identified themselves as left of centerwere able, albeit with some difficulty, todescribe a two-state solution that theybelieved was both possible to achieve andacceptable for them. On the right, how-ever, interviewees were glumly willing toadmit that they no longer could hold out

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such a vision, while still ready to insist theyknew what they did not want or would notaccept.

In the wake of Hamas’s rise to powerand the disintegration of Palestiniangovernance in Gaza and the West Bank, itwould appear that this incapacity toimagine a future for Israel in the MiddleEast that is both positive and possible hasbeen spreading across the center into thedovish side of the Israeli political spectrum.In David Grossman’s passionate andwidely circulated speech at the annual rallycommemorating Rabin’s assassination, hepleaded with Prime Minister Olmert andthe government to at least try something,anything, to renew hope for peace. Hiswords reflected fear for, not faith in,Israel’s future. “Look over the edge of theabyss,” Grossman said in his conclusion,“and consider how close we are to losingwhat we have created here.”17

As noted by Grossman, Olmert’sappointment of Avigdor Lieberman as“minister for strategic affairs” was em-blematic of the striking absence fromIsraeli thinking of any vision of Israel’sfuture in the region as stabilized andprotected by peace agreements with itsneighbors. Lieberman himself claims a“new vision” for the future, but that visionexcludes both negotiations and peace. “Isuggest that we redefine our goals andfocus on bringing security and stability tothe Middle East, instead of setting oursights on unrealistic, unattainable fan-tasy.”18 A former head of Mossad, EfraimHalevy, rejected both roadmap-typenegotiations and the convergence plan.His vision of the next 25 years is anextension of the present, with Israel,fighting in the front lines in a “Third WorldWar against radical Islam. As he sees it,

the war began with the 1998 bombings inAfrica of two U.S. embassies, continuedthrough 9/11, and there is no end insight.”19

Nor do traditionally inspiring Zionistnarratives and images seem any longer towork for organizing Israeli thinking about apositive future. In January 2007, the GushEmunim-affiliated journal Nekuda devotedmany pages to the question of whetherZionism was any longer relevant. Mostcontributors argued that Zionism hadfulfilled its historical mission and was nolonger relevant to present realities or futurechallenges.21 According to Israel’s bestknown “futurologist,” Professor YehezkelDror, an effort to publish a book series on“Zionism in the 21st Century” founderedbecause, “despite much effort, only twoauthors willing to write on that subjectwere found.”22 Dror himself, as noted, isthe founding president of the JewishPeople Policy Planning Institute. Underthe imprimatur of that organization, hepublished two “realistic” scenarios forIsrael in the year 2050, one a positivevision and the other a “nightmare.” In thenightmare scenario, Israel is described asfading away or collapsing amidst endemicconflict, emigration, Europeanization andabandonment of Jewish-Zionist values.

What is instructive is that even in thepositive future, which does feature peacebased on a Palestinian state, Dror imaginesa successful Israel as one that dependsonly on itself and the United States. Nodetails whatsoever are offered as to theterms of agreements with its neighborsthat would, in his view, enable that successor Arab/Muslim accommodation to Israel’spermanent presence. Instead, Dror simplyasserts the existence of peace accords andpermanent borders that will protect the

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demographic preponderance of Jews insidethe country. He offers not one word onrefugees, the shape of the Palestinian state,the future of Jerusalem, the route of theboundary between Israel and Palestine, thedisposition of settlements, or the nature ofthe peace agreements with other Arab andMuslim countries. Instead, he simplystipulates, as part of the positive scenario,that in 2050 “(t)here are diplomatic,economic and cultural relations betweenIsrael and most Arab and Islamic coun-tries. There are no terror activities.” Whileacknowledging that the “stability of thepeace” will be uncertain, he portrays Israelas secure and happy, not because of itsrelations with its neighbors, but because ofits return to its true Jewish-Zionist voca-tion, its special relationship with the UnitedStates, and because of large increases inJewish immigration that produce a Jewishpopulation of 9 to 9.5 million (two thirds ofthe world Jewish population).23

In general, systematic Israeli thinkingabout the country’s long-term future isscarce, pessimistic and cloudy. Asreflected in Dror’s exercise, it is alsounsystematic, with a tendency to omitserious analysis of the Arab question in anyof its “political” forms. Consider ArnonSofer’s most recent study (with EvgeniaBystrov), The Tel Aviv State: A Threat toIsrael. The authors contend that anational disaster entailing the end of theZionist project is the probable, if notinevitable, outcome of current trends thatare concentrating increasing proportions ofthe Jewish population in a narrow areasurrounding greater Tel-Aviv. Contendingthat Israel must maintain its first-worldstandard of living to prevent the “strong”Israelis from leaving, they nonetheless see“Israel (as) hurtling toward a place among

the states of the third world.”24 Sofer andBystrov attribute some of the impetus forthe Jews’ flight from the periphery to thecenter of the country as an effort to avoidcontact with Arabs, and brief mention ismade at the very end of the book to theimportance of treating Arab Israelis moreequally if they are to develop a stake in thecountry’s future. However, neither thethrust of the analysis leading to the direprediction, nor the policies suggested aspossible remedies, have any relationship toan image of the resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict or Israel’s relationship to thePalestinians as a political community. Nordo the authors indicate how their categori-cal imperatives to “Judaize” the Galilee andthe Negev could square with their adviceto improve the treatment of the deprivedand discontented Arab populations who livein those regions.25

Indeed, whether it comes to specula-tion about paying millions of Arabs to leavethe country, or enlisting Jordan or Egypt tosolve the Palestinian problem by absorbingall refugees in the West Bank and Gaza,there is a striking element of dissociation,unreality and even fantasy in right-wingdepictions of how to resolve the “Arabproblem” in the long run. A particularlyvivid example appeared in the September2006 issue of Nekuda. Yoav Sorek pub-lished an article in that issue contendingthat, with the collapse of Oslo and thefailure of the disengagement policies of theleft, “the ball is now in the right’s court tomake clear its solution. If no to thePalestinians and no to withdrawal, thenwhat?”26 In other words, an inhabitant ofthe veteran Gush Emunim settlement ofOfra, who also serves as an editor with theright-wing nationalist paper MakorRishon, sees himself called upon to offer

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the right’s plan for the future, a plan that willbe both attainable and satisfying. Consistentwith my argument, the plan Sorek offers isentirely based on unilateral actions by Jews,especially Jewish settlers, to build a powerfulKnesset lobby, to “Israelize” and otherwisenormalize expanded settlements and therebyto fully naturalize the integration of the WestBank inside Israel. Sorek includes not aword about the future of Israel’s relationshipwith the Palestinians as a political community,about Israel’s relationship with individualArab countries, or about Israel’s futurerelations with the Middle East as a whole. Inhis analysis Israel’s future is fundamentallydisconnected from the region. Indeed,Sorek’s only mention of Arabs is an exhorta-tion to deport those in the West Bank whosupport terrorism and to subsidize theagricultural activities of those who remain.Why? In order to transform Arabs there intoa kind of diorama of life in Biblical times forthe entertainment of visiting tourists! “Chris-tians from everywhere in the world wouldpay high prices to come and see ‘originalbiblical agriculture’…. UNESCO woulddeclare the area an international heritage site,etc.”27

This kind of solipsistic thinking thatradically separates images and analysis ofIsrael’s future from images and analysis ofthe rest of the region is mirrored by strongIsrael supporters in America. In October2001, Commentary editor NormanPodhoretz published a vehement anddetailed denunciation of anyone who, afterthe failure of the Camp David summit andthe outbreak of the al-Aqsa intifada, stillbelieved that a negotiated peace waspossible or that any “peace process” shouldcontinue. Toward the end of the article,Podhoretz asked himself what then might lieahead. “Is there then no glimmer of light at

the end of this dark and gloomy tunnel? Iwould be less than honest if I suggested thatI could see any.” Without entirely ruling outthe possibility of peace, sometime in thefuture and under completely unspecifiedconditions, he still sounded a distinctlypessimistic note, suggesting Israel wouldhave to live by the sword until “the Arabworld will make its own peace with theexistence of a Jewish state.”28 His articleprompted a flood of responses. Mostcelebrated his demonstration of Arafat’svillainy and the blindness of Shimon Peres,Yossi Beilin and other “peacemongers.” Butin answer to two letters that drew attentionto the dismal future he was predicting forIsrael and the possibility of Israel’s disap-pearing via emigration “as another CrusaderKingdom,” Podhoretz could offer littlereassurance. It would be silly to write offthat possibility, he said and, without anyexplanation, claimed he was “still convincedthat if the Israelis can hold on tight,…the daymay yet come when the Arab world will calloff the war it has been waging against theJewish state since 1948.”29

The columnist David Brooks, anotherstrong Israel booster, went even further. Hefound it impossible or unnecessary to locateIsrael’s place in his long-term vision of theMiddle East. In Brooks’s prediction for howa new 30-year war would reshape theMiddle East in the twenty-first century,following the departure of American forcesfrom Iraq, he entirely omitted mention ofIsrael. He seemed to imply that the countrywill not even exist after a few more decades,or will exist in some way that is fundamen-tally disconnected from the region.30

Escape: Leaving the Middle EastThe general obliviousness to, or refusal

to confront, Israel’s future relations with the

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Arabs and Muslims of the Middle East is partof a larger pattern in Israeli thinking andbehavior marked by determined efforts tosubstitute escape from habotz HaMizrach-Tichoni for attempts to engage with it.Israel’s government has been conspicuousfor being the only government in the MiddleEast to identify itself wholeheartedly withAmerica’s War on Terror and with Americanand British policies in Iraq. Both primeministers Sharon and Olmert were enthusias-tic in their personal identification withPresident George W. Bush.31 In 2006, EfraimInbar declared that American unipolarity andWashington’s policy of Pax Americanasuited Israel perfectly and was the basis foran “enduring union” between the twocountries.32 In a May 2007 poll, 59 percent ofIsraelis agreed with the proposition that “inretrospect, the United States was correct ingoing to war in Iraq.”33 In this sense, it is notjust a policy stance that isolates Israel fromthe Middle East, but also a contemporaryversion of the old idea of Israel as an“outpost of Western imperialism.” Now,however, the functional equivalent of thatview is articulated by Israelis and many ofIsrael’s most avid supporters abroad: Israel isthe front line of the Western world in itscivilizational battle with Muslim and Arabfundamentalist, obscurantist forces. Thefollowing passage from a conservativecolumnist is typical:

Israel’s culture is ours. She is part ofthe West. If she goes down, we havesuffered a defeat, and the howling,jeering forces of barbarism have won avictory. You don’t have to be Zionist,nor even Jewish, to support Israel.…You just have to understand that thewar between civilization and barbarismis being fought today just as it wasfought at Chalons and Tours, at the

gates of Kiev and Vienna, by thehoplites at Marathon and the legionson the Rhine.34

In 2001, Inbar praised Ehud Barak forhis judgment that “Israel cannot be anintegral part of the Middle East”:

The Arabs still refuse to accept, in thefull sense of the word, the emergence ofa culturally separate and politicallyindependent Jewish entity in theirmidst, because they believe we areforeign colonizers and an extension ofthe West….

Moreover, deep down, Israelis donot want to integrate into this region,which is poor, authoritarian, brutal anddespicably corrupt. Do we really wantto belong to an Arab world whose herois Saddam Hussein? …Truthfully, all wewant is to be left alone.

Barak was right in depicting Israelas a villa surrounded by a wild jungle. Itis beyond our means to change thejungle. We can only defend our nationalhome and make it clear to our neighborsthat there is a price for aggression. 35

In the interview with Ari Shavit quotedearlier, Benny Morris also describes thecivilizational war separating Israel and theWest, on one side, and the Arab-MuslimMiddle East, on the other:

Morris: “I think there is a clash betweencivilizations here [as Huntingtonargues]. I think the West todayresembles the Roman Empire of thefourth, fifth and sixth centuries: Thebarbarians are attacking it, and theymay also destroy it.

Shavit: The Muslims are barbarians,then?

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Morris: I think the values I mentionedearlier are values of barbarians — theattitude toward democracy, freedom,openness; the attitude toward humanlife. In that sense they are barbarians.The Arab world as it is today isbarbarian….

Shavit: Is it really all that dramatic? Isthe West truly in danger?

Morris: Yes. I think that the warbetween the civilizations is the maincharacteristic of the twenty-firstcentury. I think President Bush iswrong when he denies the veryexistence of that war. It’s not only amatter of Bin Laden. This is a struggleagainst a whole world that espousesdifferent values. And we are on thefront line. Exactly like the Crusaders,we are the vulnerable branch ofEurope in this place.

Among Israelis, a natural and veryprominent result of this deep-seatedalienation from the region, its peoples andits cultures is an urge to escape. It takesmany forms. Consider the construction ofthe “security barrier,” a network of fenc-ing, concrete walls, barbed wire, trenchesand embankments intended to surround theJewish state. One can usefully imagine thebarrier as transforming Israel into a kind of“gated community” sealed off from theMiddle East as hermetically as possible.Since 1994, a 30-mile barrier has existed asa seal between the Palestinian-inhabitedGaza Strip and Israel. Now that settlershave been removed from Gaza, Israel isalmost entirely closed off from that area.The West Bank barrier now runs for 436miles and is nearly 60 percent completed.It runs along the Green Line, though mostlynot on it. The barrier separates the vast

majority of Palestinian portions of the WestBank from Israel proper and from selectedsettlements included on the “Israeli” sideof its tortuous route. About 10 percent ofits current length features an 8-meterconcrete wall that makes it impossible toeven see people or landscape on the otherside.

The proposal for the barrier gainedsupport as a result of the rash of horrificterrorist bombings by Palestinians in Israelicities. By all accounts it has contributedsubstantially to the great reduction inpenetration of Israel by Palestinian bomb-ers. However, it must also be noted thatthe effect of the barrier, and perhaps moreof its purpose than is commonly acknowl-edged, is not to keep Middle Easternersout of Israel, but to physically and psycho-logically remove Israel from the MiddleEast. The iconic formula, offered origi-nally by Yitzhak Rabin, picked up by EhudBarak as his campaign slogan, but usednow by virtually all supporters of thebarrier to describe its purpose mostsuccinctly, is “Anachnu po, hem sham”(“Us here, them there”).

Of course, it is clear who is meant by“them” (the Palestinian Arabs) and by“us” (the Israelis, especially Israeli Jews).What is not so clear is where “there” and“here” are. It is undeniable that a continu-ous barrier separating Israel from thePalestinian territories, along with new lawsmaking it illegal for Israelis to visit thoseareas unless they are settlers or on-dutysoldiers, greatly reduces the amount ofcontact Israelis have with the only part ofthe Muslim/Arab Middle East to whichthey have had direct access. In theseways, the barrier contributes directly to anIsraeli separation or escape from theMiddle East. But escape to where?

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Certainly the barrier does not join Israel to“the Mediterranean” community, to Europeor to North America. Yet, psychologically,it does act in almost precisely that way. Inan interview about his controversial book,The Defeat of Hitler, Avraham Burgdescribed it as such. Burg is the son ofYosef Burg, long-time leader of theNational Religious Party and minister ofinterior under Menachem Begin. AvrahamBurg himself was a contender for leader-ship of the Labor party, speaker of theKnesset, and chairman of the JewishAgency (the highest post in the ZionistMovement). “The fence,” said Burg,“physically demarcates the end of Europe.It says that this is where Europe ends. Itsays that you [Israelis] are the forwardpost of Europe, and the fence separatesyou from the barbarians.”36 It certainlymakes it easier for Israelis to imagine a“Tel Aviv- style” rhythm of life in Israelthat is much more Mediterranean, Euro-pean or American, than it is in the “muck”of the Middle East.37

Adjusting the “us here, them there”slogan, one might say that what the barrierexpresses is a deep Israeli yearning for“them” (the Arabs) to be “here” (in theMiddle East) and “us” (Israeli Jews) to be“there” (in the United States and Europe).Other signs of Israeli alienation from theMiddle East are readily apparent. Forexample, traditionally the government and/or the Histadrut (the Israeli federation oftrade unions) maintained Arabic languagenewspapers. Radio Israel has always hadan Arabic service as well, beaming Israelinews and views to the Middle East in aMiddle Eastern language understoodoutside Israel itself. Now, according toveteran Israeli journalist Ehud Yaari,

Israel Television’s Arabic program-ming is a bad joke. The government-backed grand adventure of satellitebroadcasting in Arabic around theclock, seven days a week, collapsedover two years ago after a miserablerun of two years…. What remains is athree-hour-long daily 1970s-stylebroadcast on marginal Channel 33 thatcannot be received in most parts ofthe Middle East. Channel 2…goesthrough the motions of having anArabic program on early Fridayafternoons, with almost zero ratings. 38

Yaari not only blames governmentincompetence for the absence of Israel-friendly Arabic media; he portrays thisnegligence as reflective of a larger publiclack of interest in anything having to dowith Arabs. Unless there is a war beingactively fought, “All television ratingssurveys show a decline when it comes tointerest in Arab affairs,…(and) print mediaalso provides only sparse reporting.”Consistent with the overall purpose andeffect of the security barrier, “Israel hasstopped listening to its neighbors, stoppedkeeping track of them and at the sametime it has stopped speaking to them.”Overall, Yaari observes, the Israeli media“educates its consumers to believe thatwhat happens in Gaza or Ramallah mightas well be happening light years away.”The message, probably an accurate one,that Israel now sends to the Arab world is

a cruel one: We simply do not care!We have no interest in trying toinfluence how you picture us. Wehave no interest in what you areexperiencing. The West Bank securitybarrier may not yet be complete, butthis wall, the wall of alienation,already separates us.

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In the mid-1980s, Education MinisterYitzhak Navon, himself an Arabic speaker,made the study of Arabic mandatory in alljunior high schools. The requirement is,however, widely ignored. In 2003, only 20percent of Israeli tenth-graders wereenrolled in Arabic courses.40 Policiesannounced in the 1990s to sharply increasethe teaching of Arabic to Jewish Israelishave, since 2000, been largely honored inthe breach.41 In 2007, a major Israelinewspaper described the chances thatPrime Minister Olmert would resign inresponse to a student protest strike as “likethose of the editors learning Turkish.”42 Inother words, the metaphor that camenaturally to mind to evoke a sense ofimpossibility or absurdity was the idea ofprominent Israelis learning a MiddleEastern language! It is also worth notingthat Yehezkel Dror’s list of “strategicintervention recommendations” for Israelto save itself from the nightmare future hedescribes includes a requirement, for alluniversity graduates, of “proficiency inEnglish and one more language, in additionto Hebrew.”43 There is no suggestionwhatsoever that this language should be aMiddle Eastern language, whether Arabic,Farsi or Turkish.44 Nor does Dror, any-where in his study, offer any considerationof the 20-25 percent of the Israeli popula-tion that is not Jewish. Only a determinedact of will or an irresistible habituationcould explain how a professional futurolo-gist and policy analyst could offer seriouspredictions about the future of the countryand ignore what would be the roughequivalent, in terms of population propor-tions, of an American planner ignoring thepresence of both African Americans andHispanics.

Israelis with the training, skills andwealth to do so are also literally “escaping”from the Middle East and from those partsof Israel that are more Middle Eastern.The Sofer/Bystrov study is based on animage of Israel as a “Western society” thatis losing its ability to remain “Western” andin danger of becoming a part of the MiddleEast.45 As noted above, they say IsraeliJews have been streaming out of thecountry’s “borderlands” where Arabs areconcentrated and into “Greater Tel Aviv.”Sofer and Bystrov report that between1990 and 2005, 55,000 Jerusalemites leftthat city for the Tel Aviv core and itssurroundings and that “all in all, in the last15 years the core region has absorbedabout 100,000 Jews from the peripheralregions!”46 These migrations contributed toan increase in the density of Jewishhabitation in the central region to 92percent in 2004. “Jews,” they conclude,“are running away from all the peripheralareas and converging steadily into the Danbloc.”47 Their data also show that thesepopulation movements are disproportion-ately composed of young, productive adultJews moving to the center from theperiphery, thereby making steeper thegradient in living standards betweengreater Tel Aviv and the rest of the coun-try. In a parallel study, B.A. Kipnis hasargued that greater Tel Aviv is a “worldcity,” but with the unusual feature that ithad “earned world-city standing in spite ofits frontier location in its region, the Mid-east, and its situation at a dead-end siterelative to the global economy.”48 Kipnis’simage is of Israel as a wealthy city-statewith strong trading ties to Europe but onlynegligible economic contact with theMiddle East. “Regardless of the futuregeopolitical state of affairs in the Mideast,”

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he writes, “Tel Aviv, as a global city, willnot be part of its own region.”49

The Israelis’ urge to escape from theMiddle East is expressed in their tendencyto look to the West for a sense of belongingand reassurance. In late 2006, the ForeignMinistry’s director of public affairs, AmirReshef-Gissin, noted that Israelis were“thirsty for hope.” His advice was tocreate an attractive image of Israel; to“brand” the country. Foreign MinisterTzipi Livni, he said, was “keenly awarethat in order for branding to work, we’llfirst have to ‘sell’ our brand here at home.”What is most instructive is how Reshef-Gissin seeks to convince Israelis of thecountry’s attractiveness by emphasizinghow similar it is to the United States andCanada:

It’s time to remind Israelis that, apartfrom the U.S. and Canada, we havemore companies on the NASDAQstock exchange than any othercountry in the world; that thecellphone was invented in Motorola’slaboratories in Haifa; that the numberof patents, per capita, we’ve registeredin the U.S. is higher than that of theAmericans. 50

The logically extreme expression ofescape is, of course, emigration. It isinstructive, that when Benny Morris waspressed by his interviewer about whetherhe had in fact lost all hope for the future,his thoughts turned immediately to thedeparture of his children from the country.

There is not going to be peace in thepresent generation. There will not be asolution. We are doomed to live by thesword. I’m already fairly old, but formy children that is especially bleak. Idon’t know if they will want to go on

living in a place where there is nohope. Even if Israel is not destroyed,we won’t see a good, normal life herein the decades ahead.51

There is significant evidence that,since the collapse of the Oslo peaceprocess and the outbreak of the al-AqsaIntifada, the emigration of Israeli Jews hasincreased, as have activities that wouldmake future emigration easier. In Febru-ary 2007, Israel’s minister of immigrantabsorption, Zeev Boim, acknowledged thatthere were between 700,000 and 1 millionIsraeli expatriates worldwide, with some600,000 in North America alone, and thatin 2005 between 8,000 and 9,000 Israelisemigrated.52 This estimate for recentannual emigration is almost certainly low.Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS)estimates emigrants by subtracting Israelisarriving from those departing from thecountry, with a one-year lag in the arrivalscount. From 1998 to 2000, CBS figuresshow an average of approximately 13,000annual emigrants. The average for thenext four years, after the outbreak of theal-Aqsa intifada, showed an increase ofnearly 40 percent, to 18,400 emigrants peryear.53 A similar 40 percent increase in thenumber of Israeli immigrants gainingpermanent residency or citizenship in theUnited States, Canada, and the UnitedKingdom was registered between the fiveyears prior to the outbreak of the al-AqsaIntifada and the five subsequent years, ajump from 25,276 in the years 1996-2000to 35,372 in the years 2001-2005.54

Writing in late 2005 and citing a specialreport on emigration by the CBS to theKnesset, Meir Elran reported in a study of“national resilience” that approximately19,000 “yordim” per year from 2002 to 2004.He attributed this “negative migration” to the

44


deteriorating economic and securitysituation in Israel.55 In 2006, Hillel Halkinreported that 30,000 Israelis were emigrat-ing annually and that in 2004 there were10,000 more emigrants than immigrants.56

Late in 2007, the director-general ofIsrael’s Ministry of Absorption, ErezHalfon, announced generous economicincentives, including ten years of zero taxon foreign income, to bring “formerIsraelis” home. He cited as justificationfor the program the fact that “between18,000 and 21,000 Israelis emigrate eachyear.”57 In recent years, passionatediscussions have been underway regardingthe “brain drain,” emigration of talentedIsraelis, especially university professors.In 2006, a study published by the ShalemCenter, a conservative think tank in Israel,reported that 2.6 percent of all married,college-educated Jews who were in Israelin 1995 were classified as emigrants in2002.58 In 2007, the first official estimatewas released since the mid-1980s thatemigration would exceed immigration. InApril 2007, Yediot Acharonot reportedthat only 14,400 immigrants (including non-Jews) were expected in 2007, while it waspredicted that 20,000 Israelis would leavethe country.59 In a widely cited study, aprominent Israeli economist published datashowing that nearly 25 percent of allIsraeli academics were teaching in theUnited States in the academic year 2003/04. This was the highest proportion of anyother country’s scholars and twice as highas the next closest country, Canada.60

Just as significant is the cultural andpsychological shift that has occurred inIsrael toward the idea of emigration.“Yeridah” (literally “going down,” or“emigrating”) has traditionally been a wordof derision and blame, even disgust. As

many have observed, this norm has beenchanging since 1976, when then PrimeMinister Rabin called yordim “leftovers ofweaklings.”61 In the 1980s, the Israeligovernment began relating to Israelisabroad, not as deserters but as a resourceto be organized and as a recruitment poolfor immigration. In late 2004, a MinaTzemach poll reported that 67 percent ofIsraeli respondents “understood the choiceto relocate abroad.”62 According toMaariv, polls in early 2007 showed thatone quarter of Israelis were consideringleaving the country, including almost half ofall young people.63

Noting that 40,000 Israelis now liveand work in Silicon Valley in California,one prominent Israeli economic analystsuggested that the large-scale emigrationof highly skilled Israelis bereconceptualized. Leaving Israel, wroteShlomo Maital, should not be seen as a“betrayal of Zionism” since, in a globalizingage, “where on this planet you live mattersless than how you think and act towardIsrael.”64 Maital suggests that economicand professional concerns are still the mainimpetus for emigration, but that Israeliscapable of leaving the country are increas-ingly motivated by the security situationand the desire for an “insurance policy” incase life in the Jewish state becomes toodangerous, unstable or uncomfortable.The idea of an “insurance policy” is adominant theme in interviews conductedwith Israelis applying for European pass-ports for which they are eligible becauseof the citizenship of their parents orgrandparents. In 2004, the Germangovernment issued 3,000 passports toIsraelis. The explanation one recipientoffered is typical:

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I don’t want to lie and say that it’s nota kind of insurance policy in casesomething happens here. I’m notgoing to get up and leave the countrytomorrow…but it’s good to know thatI have a second passport. I believethat Germany will still exist long afterIsrael, and that was something Ithought about.

Watching the efforts of European nationsto evacuate their nationals from Lebanonduring the 2006 war, many Israelis withdual citizenship wondered if they would beeligible for this kind of aid in the event ofan emergency. In answer to such ques-tions, Tom Segev reported that, accordingto German officials, the 70,000 Israelis whocurrently hold German passports areindeed eligible to be evacuated by theGerman armed forces from Israel shouldan emergency arise that threatens theirsafety.66

Many Israelis were shocked whenAvraham Burg urged every Israeli whocould to imitate him (Burg has securedFrench citizenship.) and get a Europeanpassport. Altogether it is estimated that theexpansion of the EU to include EasternEuropean countries has prompted morethan 100,000 Israelis to acquire Europeanpassports in recent years.68 Thus, althoughIsraelis tend to criticize European govern-ments severely for their policies toward theIsraeli-Palestinian problem, Israelis arepowerfully drawn to the countries of theEU. The EU is Israel’s largest tradingpartner. Early in 2007, surveys conductedby a German foundation revealed that 75percent of Israelis wanted Israel to be inthe EU; that 11 percent of Israelis wouldleave Israel if granted EU citizenship; andthat in the previous three years, fully halfof Israelis had visited Europe.69 We may

consider the psychological readiness todepart the country, the acquisition of dualcitizenship in attractive countries foremigration, and the consolidation of jobopportunities and purchase of propertyabroad as a kind of “escape-route-on-the-way” for many Israelis. The trend oftranscontinental commuting, featuringsemi-annual or even bi-weekly commutesby Israeli professionals and businessmen tojobs in the United States and Europe, isassociated with this larger pattern — ashift, to use Israeli legal parlance, of manyIsraelis’ “center of life” from Israel towardlocations abroad.70

In his positive future scenario forIsrael, Dror recognizes this trend as anunavoidable feature of Israeli life. “Specialefforts,” he says, “should be made to…reduce emigration of high-quality humanresources, including…opportunities andincentives for part-time living in Is-rael….”71 Others have concluded that, inlight of the negative emigration balances ofJews and the prominence of non-Jews, theLaw of Return should be substantiallyamended. They question whether“aliyah” and immigrant absorption shouldbe reconsidered as central tasks of thestate.72 One of the most striking signs ofdemographically or politically meaningfulrates of Jewish emigration from Israel iscontained in the Elran study of Israelinational resilience, cited above. Thepurpose of that study was to prove that theviolence following the collapse of Oslo hadnot driven the country into a tailspin andthat Israel was demonstrating the “resil-ience” needed to survive the dismalprognostications he characterized asprominent in the media (p. 68). Elranprovides a great deal of data to show highlevels of Israeli patriotism and willingness

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to sacrifice on behalf of the collective. Buthe acknowledges that “the most importantindicator of patriotism is negative migration,that which is called ‘yeridah’ in Israel.”After telling his readers that, in fact, ratesof emigration had sharply increased sincethe al-Aqsa Intifada, he then providesDahaf polling data, not on how manyIsraelis said they want to leave the country(a rather standard question in manysurveys), but on how many said theywanted to remain. In other words, he citesthe fact that 69 percent of Israelis say theywant to stay in the country as evidence ofIsrael’s “resilience.”73

NON-RATIONAL USE OFVIOLENCE

From the late 1920s to the late 1960s,Zionist military thinking focused on how tobuild, train and equip an army capable ofnot only protecting the Yishuv and then thestate of Israel, but of delivering painfulpreemptive or retaliatory blows againstArab enemies. The core idea was not toavoid war, but to insure victories of suchvividness and consequence that Arabswould come to regard Israel’s existence animmutable, if unpleasant, fact of MiddleEastern life. Once that attitude wasinstilled, the objective was to combine thestick of coercion with the carrot of com-promise to achieve negotiated peaceagreements. However, in the next histori-cal stage of the Arab-Israeli relationship(1969-93), Arab Iron Walls exactedincreasingly high costs from Israeli societyand the Israeli governments in powerduring wars, thereby greatly complicatingIsrael’s own Iron Wall strategy.

Until the 1970s, the core ideaundergirding Israeli military doctrine anddeployments stressed the importance, first

and foremost, of projecting an image ofIsraeli invincibility and retaliatory might thatwould deter Arab attacks. During thisperiod, although demonstrations of Israelimilitary prowess were still seen as useful,war became something that was to beavoided if possible — not only to preserveIsraeli control of territories captured in1967, but also to convince Arab enemiesthat substantial moderation of their ambi-tions would be required as part of peacenegotiations. As portrayed by the govern-ments of Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres andeven Menachem Begin in this period, thesenegotiations could result in compromiseagreements that would satisfy some, butcertainly not all, Arab aspirations.74

Indeed, apart from a brief periodbetween the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the1975 Sinai disengagement agreement withEgypt, Israeli strategic thinking was largelybased on the presumed credibility andeffectiveness of its military deterrent. Tocement this belief, Begin signed a very“Jabotinskian” peace treaty with Egypt,largely separating it from the Palestiniancore of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Thesubsequent confidence Israeli leaders hadin their ability to deter an all-out Arabattack was reflected in the invasion ofLebanon in 1982. This operation wasdesigned to establish peace with Lebanon,inflict a punishing defeat on Syria, removethe Palestinian problem from the regionalagenda, and enable Israeli absorption of theWest Bank and Gaza. However, theresults of the Lebanon War, including thecollapse of ambitions to establish a friendlygovernment in Beirut, deep divisions insidethe army and inside Israel, and 18 years ofcostly and unsuccessful occupation ofLebanese territory exposed the limits ofIsraeli power and weakened Israel’s

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deterrent. What Arabs learned from theLebanon War was not the inevitability ofaccommodating themselves to Israelidiktats, but the vulnerability of the Israeliarmy and Israeli society to determinedArab and Muslim political and militaryaction. With the PLO relocated in Tunisand the “Resistance” in Lebanon gainingcredibility, Palestinians in the occupiedterritories began to build new forms ofdistributed, clever and defiant organizationthat led, five years later, to the Intifada, byany measure a revolutionary act of Pales-tinian confrontation with Israel.

The Intifada that erupted at the end of1987, coupled with the missile attacksagainst Israel by Saddam Hussein duringthe 1991 Gulf War, helped shift the discus-sion of national-security affairs in Israeltoward the problematic status of Israel’sdeterrent. By the end of the Intifada in1993, the dominant Israeli strategic per-spective still accepted that at the highestlevel of force, where Israel’s nuclearoption could be brought into play, deter-rence remained intact. At lower levels,however, Israel’s deterrent against Arabattacks was judged to have been weak-ened considerably. This was EfraimInbar’s analysis in 1994.75 Inbar’s chang-ing assessments of the strategic challengesand opportunities facing Israel are anexcellent way to trace dominant national-security perspectives in Israel. For thebalance of the 1990s, Inbar’s writingsemphasized the end of Israeli commitmentsto “self-reliance” in national securityaffairs and treated the peace process as alikely, if not certain, path for Israel’sintegration into Middle Eastern regional-security arrangements or for the achieve-ment of a Middle Eastern version of“détente.”76 The al-Aqsa Intifada that

erupted following the collapse of the CampDavid negotiations in 2000 and ArielSharon’s visit to the Haram al-Sharif(Temple Mount) highlighted the disappear-ance of Israel’s deterrent capacity, at leastagainst the Palestinians, while destroyingthe faith of many Israelis that peace couldbe achieved through negotiations. It alsotriggered a sharp change in Inbar’s analy-sis, entailing portrayal of the Palestinianproblem as essentially “unsolvable” andimpossible to ameliorate, endorsement ofunilateral disengagement from Gaza, andinsistent exhortations to attack Syria inorder to re-establish strategic superiority.77

As I have stressed, Zionism’s use ofviolence against Arabs was traditionallyconceived as a pedagogical device toconvince Arabs of the Jewish NationalHome’s indestructibility, and then topersuade some among them to negotiatemutually acceptable deals based on thealternative of suffering painful defeats. Itis natural, then, that, as images of a futurein which Arabs and Muslims can come toaccept the Jewish state fade from Israeliconsciousness, the rationale for violencealso changes. Instead of being conceivedas a persuasive instrument in service ofpolitical or diplomatic aims, force againstArabs and Muslims is increasingly treatedas a kind of rattonade. This was the termused to characterize the French practice inAlgeria of entering casbahs and otherMuslim quarters, killing inhabitants, andthen quickly returning to European areas orbases. Its literal meaning is “rat hunt.”More generally, it refers to a violent strikeagainst the enemy “on the other side of thewall” for purposes of punishment, destruc-tion and psychological release. WhileSharon and other Israeli military leaders inthe 1970s and 1980s made the slogan

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sbang ve’gomarnu (“smash and we’redone”) popular, and while the activities ofUnit 101 in the 1950s and many Israelimilitary operations can be understood as atleast in part motivated by the desire tosatisfy psychological or domestic politicalrequirements, Israel’s long-term strategyfor moving Arab-Israeli relations closer topeace by the use of force has never beenmore conspicuous by its absence than inthe years since 2000.

This was dramatically apparent in thefindings of the Winograd Commission,appointed to investigate the debacle ofIsrael’s participation in the Second Leba-non War. Its first and primary finding wasan absence of any plan, military or political,that integrated Israeli military strikesagainst Hezbollah into a coherent frame-work of political or strategic objectives.Absent such a framework, military actioncan be emotionally satisfying but cannot berational (in the sense of systematicallyrelating actions to objectives). The com-mission published its interim report in April2007, labeling the first of the “main fail-ures” they listed as “the decision to re-spond with an immediate, intensive militarystrike [that] was not based on a detailed,comprehensive and authorized militaryplan….” According to the report, “Thegoals of the campaign were not set outclearly and carefully, and…there was noserious discussion of the relationshipsbetween these goals and the authorizedmodes of military action.”78 Indeed, themost notable declaration by an Israelileader of Israel’s overall objective in thewar was Chief of Staff Dan Halutz’scelebrated statement that, if the twosoldiers abducted by Hezbollah were notreturned, Israel would “turn Lebanon’sclock back 20 years.” A purer expression

of the ratonnade mentality would bedifficult to find.

Of course, the most regular expres-sions of this (strategically) nonrational useof Israel’s coercive capacity are Israelipolicies: targeted assassinations of Pales-tinian leaders, entry into Palestinian zonesby Israeli intelligence agents and recon-naissance units to capture or kill particularindividuals, missile attacks, bombing raidsand temporary, but devastating search-and-destroy ground incursions. Even during theOslo period, the irrationality of conductingstrikes that destroyed the credibility andefficacy of Palestinian leaders whiledemanding more effective governance bythe Palestinian Authority never becameimportant, let alone decisive, in Israelipolitical discourse. Today, moral or strictly“professional” military criticism of particu-larly cruel or “disproportionate” raids inGaza, the West Bank, or Lebanon can stillbe heard. However, specific evaluation ofthese measures based on their politicalrationality — i.e., the likelihood that theymight enhance or undermine chances forprogress toward a peace settlement — isalmost entirely absent.

The same pattern of discussing policyoptions with no regard to their impact oneventual opportunities to advance pros-pects for peace is apparent in Israel’sreaction to the possibility that Iran couldjoin the club of Middle Eastern nuclearpowers. It also reveals the country’sabandonment of the Iron Wall pedagogy ofcoercion. The Israeli definition of thethreat posed by the Islamic Republic ofIran is existential and desperate. This isprecisely the image of Iran thatAhmedinejad and his allies are seeking tocreate. It is also worth noting that, oncedefined in this manner, there is no limit on

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the measures Israelis can imagine arejustified in taking against it. After all, whensurvival is perceived to be at stake, there isneither need nor rationale for thinkingabout consequences or how to calibrate theuse of force to foster positive outcomes orreduce the political fallout of militaryaction. More generally, military options toeliminate the threat can be discussed withno attention to their long-term conse-quences for peace in the region.79

When it comes to Israel’s response toIran, it is not just the abandonment of theIron Wall that is striking, but its replace-ment by the primitive, but overwhelming,psychological and mythic power of theHolocaust. Israelis seem haunted by thespecter of catastrophic destruction thatAhmedinejad has so skillfully associatedwith Iran’s ambiguous but apparentlyvigorous attempt to become a nuclearpower. Foreign policy speeches by Israelileaders from across the political spectrumhave a similar refrain: “Teheran delendaest!” (preferably by the United States).80

By leaking reports that Israeli planes werepracticing nuclear strikes against Gibraltarto prepare for hitting Iran, Israel’s govern-ment was clearly, if clumsily, trying toremind the West that what had been doneto Osirak in Iraq could be done, with muchmore dangerous consequences, in Iran ifthe problem were not taken care of byothers.81 In January 2007, Yossi KleinHalevi and Michael B. Oren said theyspoke for most Israelis when they por-trayed Iran armed with nuclear weaponsas equivalent to another Holocaust. “Se-nior army commanders, who likely onceregarded Holocaust analogies with theMiddle East conflict as an affront to Zionistempowerment, now routinely speak of a‘second Holocaust.’”82 Op-eds, written by

left-wing as well as right-wing commenta-tors, compare these times to the 1930s…,“(when) the international communityreacted with indifference as a massivelyarmed nation declared war against theJewish people….” Making the verypossession of nuclear weapons by Iran theissue, Halevi and Oren suggested that,even without using them, Iran could cripplethe country. An Iranian nuclear threatwould embolden Hezbollah and Hamas,limit Israeli military options, prevent anyArab country from making concessions innegotiations, deter investors away from theJewish state, and drive Israeli elites withopportunities abroad to leave the country.If the West cannot be convinced to preventIran from going nuclear by the middle of2008, say Halevi and Oren, Israel will haveto strike Iran militarily, anticipating an all-out conventional war with Iran and otherMiddle Eastern states if this occurs.83

It is not only the Iranian nuclear threatand Ahmadinejad’s jeremiads, however,that incline Israelis to see war, not as apedagogical device or a tool to move thecountry toward a brighter and morepeaceful future, but as an existentialnecessity. In January 2007, Adi Mintz, aformer head of the Yesha Council, de-scribed an American withdrawal from Iraqas inevitable and predicted it would befollowed by a “tsunami” of radical changethat would replace governments in Egyptand elsewhere with fundamentalizedIslamic and ferociously anti-Israel regimes.The result would be a threat to Israel’sexistence “no less dangerous than anuclear Iran.” It will, he wrote, forceIsraelis to abandon the image of theircountry as a “shelter” for Jews (because itwould not be) and to embrace the tran-scendental spiritual mission of the Jewish

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state as the only way to build the strengthnecessary for the struggle.84

THE CHALLENGE OF ACATEGORY

A great fact of modern human history,whether to be treated as celebration, puzzleor tragedy, is that Europeans explosivelyoutdistanced peoples anywhere else on theplanet in their ability to build things,whether states, weapons, ships or facto-ries. This meant, among other things, thatEuropean colonists, settlers and fragmentsspun out across the globe and wereimplanted on other continents. Wherethese fragments annihilated or otherwiserendered aboriginal populations politicallyirrelevant, as in North America, parts ofSouth America, Australia and NewZealand, new European-style societiesappear today as unproblematic, permanentparts of our political world. Where thesefragments survived but did not annihilate orotherwise render irrelevant the indigenouspopulations, European-style societies havehad rather less good fortune. Consideringthe category broadly (but omitting tinyenclaves such as Hong Kong, Macao, andGoa), we may include the Crusaderkingdoms, South Africa, Rhodesia, FrenchAlgeria and Israel.

Israel, of course, is the only survivor inthis list. Counting from the state’s estab-lishment, it is almost 60 years old. Count-ing from the first arrival of Zionist settlersin Palestine, it is 125 years old — com-pared to almost two hundred years for theCrusaders; about 80 years for the whiteversion of the Union, then Republic, ofSouth Africa; 120 years for French Alge-ria; and 34 years for independent (white)Rhodesia. Israel’s biggest challenge,indeed the biggest challenge facing Zionism

and its descendants, is to escape the fateof all other polities falling within thiscategory. Can Israel do what no othercountry in this category has done —establish itself as a commonsensical,naturalized, and presumptively permanentfeature of a non-European landscape?

Zionism’s architects were of twominds when it came to the question ofintegrating Israel into the Middle East. Onthe one hand, Zionist poets and writerscelebrated the “return to the East,” wherethe Jewish people’s history had begun.More powerful, though, was the sense thatthe Jewish polity would integrate itself intothe Middle East, not by becoming MiddleEastern, but by serving as the vanguard ofgeneral processes that would modernize,industrialize, secularize and Westernize theregion. The argument set forth here hasbeen that Israel and Jewish Israelis aredeep into the process of abandoning anyimage of the state or of themselves as partof the Middle East. Instead of hoping totransform Arab/Muslim attitudes towardthe Jewish state by a pedagogy of forcefollowed by diplomacy (the Iron Wallstrategy), or of transforming the culturalcontent of the region via modernizationcum Westernization, Israelis are seekingisolation or escape.

For seven decades (from the late1920s to the late 1990s), the Iron Wallstrategy for engineering Middle Easterntolerance of a Jewish polity was seen to beworking relatively well. Now, in the faceof the difficulties discussed, Israel haseffectively abandoned the Iron Wall andlives, without an alternative plan, within thecategory of European fragments that didnot annihilate aboriginal populations.Membership in this category implies ahorizon for the very existence of the

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Jewish state. In this context, it may benoted that in each of the modern cases offailed European fragments, internationalpariah status preceded the polity’s demise.There is ample evidence that Israel isassuming this image. An EU-sponsoredpoll in 2003 showed that respondentsconsidered Israel to be a more dangerousthreat to world peace than any othercountry.85 In 2006, this finding wasdramatically confirmed in a “nationalbrand” study commissioned by the Govern-ment of Israel. The survey included 25,903online consumers across 35 countries andfound that Israel, by substantial margins,had the worst public image in everycategory.86

It is impossible, of course, to be certainthat Israel is doomed by the categorywithin which history, the exertions of theZionist movement, and the moral scruplesof Jews, have placed it. For those commit-ted to the preservation of a large, prosper-ous, and secure Jewish community in theMiddle East, this is a basis for urgent andgenerous political action. However, thechange in Israel’s posture and in Israelis’view of the Middle East and of non-JewishMiddle Easterners has been so dramaticthat it is more reasonable to treat theargument advanced here as probably validrather than just plausibly so. Closeevaluation of the argument will requireextensive analysis of trends in the Muslimand Arab worlds as to images of Israel aseither an indestructible, if unwelcomefixture of Middle Eastern life or as anutterly indigestible and fundamentallytemporary phenomenon. To what extenthave the views of the great majority of theregion's inhabitants moved rapidly from thefirst perspective toward the second, and inthat way are they aligning themselves with

the way politically dominant groups in theother European fragments were regardedby indigenous majorities? Certainly it istrue that some Arab regimes continue toexpress their willingness to sign peacetreaties with Israel. But in a region whosedeepest and strongest political sentimentsare those of religion, it would seem that, ifdemocracy does take hold in the MiddleEast, it may simply accelerate the rise topower of forces unwilling to accept Israelas a long-term partner in the future of theregion. To what extent, therefore, willIsrael feel it can rely on peace commit-ments of authoritarian regimes so unpopu-lar and so likely to be replaced as those inEgypt, Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia?

In the long run, the question for Israelis not whether it can escape from theMiddle East; it is whether it can escapefrom the category of its creation. AsVladimir Jabotinsky understood, if thatescape is to be possible, if the “aliensettlers” in the Land of Israel/Palestine areto eventually become accepted as anirremovable aspect of Middle Eastern life,then the key to that escape can only be thePalestinians. The peace process in all itsguises has been based on the single andsimple wager that if Palestinians could begiven enough political, economic and legalsatisfaction, and if that satisfaction couldbe tied to the continued existence of Israelas a Jewish state, then the rest of the Araband Muslim worlds would avail itself of thePalestinian “heksher”87 to end its widerconflict with Israel. It is the centrality ofthis wager to the integrity of the Zionistproject that has made the question of defacto annexation, and whether Israelisettlements have obliterated chances for areal Palestinian state solution, so crucialand so painful within Israel.

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If the negotiated two-state solution isstill possible, the bad news is that it may nolonger be the decisive question. For, ifIsraelis are so disconnected from MiddleEastern realities as to have lost the empa-thy with Palestinians necessary to convincethem that negotiations will lead to a satisfy-ing outcome, and if Arabs and Muslims inthe Middle East are as intransigently hostileto Israel as most Israelis believe them tobe, then, in effect, a two-state solution hasbeen rendered impossible. This is notbecause of the oft-discussed supposedimpossibility of actually establishing aPalestinian state next to Israel (Hamas, forits part, is perfectly ready to accept one asa prelude to a 20-year lull in the battle.).The impossibility of a the two-state solutionhangs, instead, on the question of whetherthe belief in the rationale behind it —achieving some semblance of a compre-hensively stable and peaceful end to theArab-Israeli dispute — will have vanishedfrom inside Israeli political life. Whyshould Israelis tear themselves to pieces toproduce a state that will satisfy the Pales

tinians if they come to believe that the restof the Middle East hates Israel more thanthey care for the Palestinians?

Having abandoned the Iron Wall,Israelis are increasingly confused and evendistraught about the future. Yet they facea stark choice: engagement with the realMiddle East and the demands it makesupon Israel for justice, democracy andterritory, or escape from it. The danger forthe Jewish state is that, given the choicebetween convincing Middle Easterners thatIsrael can be a good neighbor and leavingthe neighborhood, more and more Israelisare attracted to the latter. Most unsettlingof all is the interaction between two logicalbut mutually reinforcing trends. Israelisare embracing coercive and unilateralistpolicies that destroy whatever is left of itsimage as a potential good neighbor. Arabsand Muslims can be expected to treat signsof Jewish abandonment of the region asencouragement to forget any inclinationthey may still have to make peace with theJews rather than wait them out.

1Regarding suppressed portions of Zionist Congress debates about policy toward the Arabs of Palestine, seeBenny Morris, “Thus Were the Zionist Documents Overhauled,” Haaretz, February 4, 1994.2For revealing insights into how even an extremely “dovish” Zionist such as Arthur Ruppin gravitated towardinsistence that negotiations with Arabs be avoided until they had been brought to accept Zionist realities, seeArthur Ruppin, Memoirs, Diaries, Letters (Herzl Press, 1971), pp. 189, 196, 216, and 277, and MosheDayan’s public endorsement of Ruppin’s embrace of the Iron Wall policy, reprinted as an afterword in thisvolume, pp. 315-23. See also the analysis provided confidentially by Chaim Arlosoroff to Chaim Weizman in1932, published as “Reflections on Zionist Policy,” by Jewish Frontier (October 1948), pp. 1-7. Onconvergence of the views of Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky on the Arab question, see Anita Shapira, Land andPower: The Zionist Resort to Force 1881-1948 (Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 156-58 and 210-11.3For a close analysis of Jabotinsky’s argument and direct quotations from translations of his writings in theoriginal Russian, see Ian Lustick, “To Build and To Be Built By: Israel and the Hidden Logic of the Iron Wall,”Israel Studies, Vol. I, No. 1 (Summer 1996), pp. 196-223. For an extended application of portions of thisargument, see Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (W. W. Norton, 2001).4 Lustick, “To Build and To Be Built By,” pp. 209-12.5 Ibid., pp. 216-19.6 Abba Eban, Speech to Commonwealth Club of California, November 14, 1970, http://www.commonwealthclub.org/archive/20thcentury/70-11eban-speech.html.

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7 Ibid.8 The beginning of this shift can be detected in 1993, when Yitzhak Rabin, in his Sept. 21 Knesset speechdefending the launch of the Oslo Process, slightly, mischaracterized Arafat’s letter to him that precededsigning of the DOP. The letter read, “The PLO recognizes the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace andsecurity” http://www.unitedjerusalem.com/DECLARATION_OF_PRINCIPLES_1993/Arafat_letter_to_Rabin/arafat_letter_to_rabin.asp. Rabin reported that Arafat had written a letter that“recognize(d) Israel’s right to exist and to live in peace and security.” http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Archive/Speeches/EXCERPTS+OF+PM+RABIN+KNESSET+SPEECH+-DOP-+-+21-Sep.htm.9 http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Government/Speeches+by+Israeli+leaders/2002/Speech%20by%20PM%20Sharon%20at%20the%20Herzliya%20Conference%20-%204.10 May 23, 2006. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/05/20060523-9.html. Olmert reaffirmedthis position just prior to the Annapolis summit, describing Palestinian recognition of Israel “as a Jewishstate” as a “precondition” for negotiations. Aluf Benn, “Israel to Release Up to 400 Palestinian PrisonersAhead of Summit,” Haaretz, November 12, 2007.11 Roger Cohen, “Her Jewish State,” The New York Times Magazine, July 8, 2007, p. 36.12 Efraim Inbar, “Stop Saying Sorry,” Jerusalem Post, May 30, 2004.13 Yossi Klein Halevi, “Israel’s Next War Has Begun: Battle Plans,” The New Republic, July 12, 2006. http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w060710&s=halevi071206. For a similar view of the future as having no chancefor successful peace negotiations-a view shaped directly by the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada, see BennyMorris, “Peace? No Chance,” The Guardian, February 21, 2002.14 Yehezkel Dror, “The Consequences of 1948 Are Still Unclear,” Jewish Chronicle, April 18, 2008, p. 45.15 Yehezkel Dror, “When Survival of the Jewish People Is at Stake, There’s No Place for Morals,” Forward,May 15, 2008.16 Ari Shavit, “Survival of the Fittest? An Interview with Benny Morris,” Haaretz, January 16, 2004 (intranslation at: http://www.logosjournal.com/morris.htm ). For an analysis of the pervasiveness with whichbrutality and even genocide have come to characterize Israeli public discourse on Arabs and Muslims, seeAvraham Burg, The Defeat of Hitler (in Hebrew, Yediot Acharonot, 2007), pp. 88-89.17 David Grossman, “Looking at Ourselves,” reprinted in The New York Review of Books, Vol. 54, No. 1,January 11, 2007; http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19770. For a detailed account of Grossman’s view ofIsrael’s despairing mood, see, “Writing in the Dark,” The New York Times Magazine, May 13, 2007, pp. 28-31.18 New York Times, November 1, 2006. For a more detailed portrayal of the Middle East as intractably hostileto Israel, see Mordechai Kedar, “The Illusion of Peace in Exchange for Territories,” Perspectives Papers onCurrent Affairs, BESA Center, February 15, 2007; http://www.biu.ac.il/Besa/perspectives25.html.19 “World War III Has Already Begun, Says Israeli Spy Chief,” Y-Net, January 27, 2007, http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3357552,00.html; Excerpts from Halevy address to BESA conferenceat Bar-Ilan University, Bulletin, No. 21 (January 2007), p. 9. 20 Nekuda is the official journal of the “Yesha Council,” the umbrella organization for the local councils ofJewish settlements in the West Bank and Golan Heights.21 See for example Motti Karpel, “It Is Impossible to Continue Zionism without Recognizing That It IsFinished,” Nekuda, No. 297 (January 2007), pp. 37-39. Some but not all contributors acknowledged theirviews were aligned with those of the “post-Zionists.”22 Yehezkel Dror, “The Future of Israel between Thriving and Decline,” May 2006, p. 20n.23 Ibid, pp. 7-12. http://www.jpppi.org.il/JPPPI/Templates ShowPage.asp?DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=111&FID=341&PID=611&IID=514. Dror worries that, despite his exhortation to Israelis to think seriouslyabout their future, there is the “danger of a self-fulfilling prophecy, with thinking about a possible cata-strophical end to Israel, demoralizing Israel, encouraging its enemies and wakening efforts to make such acontingency impossible.”24 Arnon Soffer and Evengia Bystrov, Tel Aviv State: A Threat to Israel (Ayalon, 2006), p. 53.25 Ibid., pp. 65-66.26 Yoav Sorek, “Normalization of Judea and Samaria,” Nekuda, No. 294 (September 2006), p. 31.27 Ibid., p. 33.28 Norman Podhoretz, “Oslo: The Peacemongers Return,” Commentary Magazine, Vol. 112, No. 3 (October

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2001), p. 32.29 Commentary Magazine, Vol. 113, No. 1 (January 2002), p. 5. For commentators who consider Podhoretzan optimist, see John Derbyshire, “Israel: The Odds,” National Review Online, January 31, 2002.30 David Brooks, “After the Fall,” The New York Times, December 10, 2006.31 To a group of visiting Americans in November 2006, Olmert said: “I know all of his (Bush’s) policies arecontroversial in America.…I stand with the president because I know that Iraq without Saddam Hussein is somuch better for the security and safety of Israel, and all of the neighbors of Israel without any significance tous…Thank God for the power and the determination and leadership manifested by President Bush.” DanWilliams, “Iraq War Was Good for Israel: Olmert,” Reuters, November 22, 2006; http://www.zionism-israel.com/israel_news/2006/11/iraq-war-was-good-for-israel-olmert.html. On the dramatically isolatingconsequences of Israeli association with the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq, see Yossi Sarid, “Israel,Victim of the Iraqi Adventure,” Haaretz, May 22, 2007.32 Efraim Inbar, “Israel: An Enduring Union,” Journal of International Security Affairs, No. 11, Fall 2006, pp.7-13.33 Poll conducted by Ma’agan Mochot, May 1-4, 2007. Reported in the BESA Bulletin, No. 22, October2007.34 John Derbyshire, “Hesperophobia,” National Review Online, September 14, 2001; http://www.olimu.com/webjournalism/Texts/Commentary/Hesperophobia.htm. See also Yaacov Katz, “The War of Civilizations,”Nekuda, No. 294 (September 2006), pp. 26-28; and Moshe Sharon, “Agenda of Islam: A War betweenCivilizations,” December 24, 2003; http://www.freeman.org/m_online/feb04/sharon.htm.35 Efraim Inbar, “What Lies Ahead for Israel,” The Jerusalem Post, December 11, 2000, emphasis added. Fora more recent expression, see Doron Rosenblum, “It’s a Jungle Out There,” Haaretz, June 8, 2007.36 Quoted by Ari Shavit, in “Leaving the Zionist Ghetto,” Haaretz, June 8, 2007; http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/868385.html.37 In June 2007, Hebrew billboards in Tel Aviv advertising concerts by Bob Dylan in Milan and Genesis inBudapest illustrated the sense Israelis have, or seek to have, of living in the European cultural space. For atreatment of the self-consciously strained psychology of normalcy maintained by Tel-Avivians, see OrlyGoldkling, “Unceasingly Trendy,” Nekuda, No. 304 (September 2007), pp. 36-41.38 Ehud Ya’ari, “Choosing to be Dumb — the Arabic TV Fiasco,” The Jerusalem Report, March 5, 2007, p.20.39 Ibid. See also Avi Issachar, “We Don’t Want to Know,” Haaretz, June 15, 2007.40 “The State of Arabic Education in Israel,” Haaretz, November 21, 2004.41 Smadar Donitsa-Schmidt, Ofra Inbar, and Elana Shohamy, “The Effects of Teaching Spoken Arabic onStudents’ Attitudes and Motivation in Israel,” The Modern Language Journal, Vol. 88 (2004), pp. 218-19.42 Editorial, Yediot Acharonot, May 6, 2007.43 Dror, p. 21.44 In its editorial on May 6, 2007, Yediot Acharonot described the chances that Prime Minister Olmert wouldresign in response to a student protest strike as “like those of the editors learning Turkish,” a metaphor thatevokes a sense of the impossibile. 45 Arnon Sofer and Evengia Bystrov, Tel Aviv State: A Threat to Israel (Ayalon, 2006), p. 53. In 2007, it wasreported that an average of 7,000 Jews per year had left Jerusalem for other parts of Israel each year for theprevious ten years. Foundation for Middle East Peace, Report on Israeli Settlements, July-August 2007, p. 3.46 Ibid. p. 25.47 Ibid.,p. 26.48 B.A. Kipnis, “Tel Aviv, Israel — A World City in Evolution: Urban Development at a Deadend of theGlobal Economy,” in M Pak, eds., Cities in Transition. (Department of Geography, University of Ljubljana,2004), pp. 183-194. Accessed as Research Bulletin #57, at http://www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/rb/rb57.html.49 Ibid.50 Interview with Amir Reshef-Gissin, The Jerusalem Report, November 27, 2006, p. 48.51 “Survival of the Fittest?”52 Tom Tugend, “No Place Like Home? Expats Wooed to Return to Israel,” Jewish Exponent, February 22,2007. These figures are strikingly higher than in 1990 of between 250,000 to 400,000 Israeli expatriatesworldwide. See Oren Meyers , “A Home Away from Home? Israel Shelanu and the Self-Perceptions of Israeli

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Migrants,” Israel Studies, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Fall 2001), pp. 71-90, quoting Yinon Cohen and Yitchak Haberfeld,“The Number of Israeli Immigrants in the United States in 1990,” Demography, Vol. 34, No. 2, 1997, pp.199-213.53 Statistical Abstract of Israel, 2006, Table 4.9, and information from Martha Kruger, “Israel: BalancingDemographics in the Jewish State,” Migration Information Source, http://www.migrationinformation.org/Profiles/display.cfm?ID=321.54 Figures taken from official U.S., British and Canadian census and immigration publications.55 Meir Elran, National Resilience in Israel: The Influence of the Second Intifada on Israeli Society (in Hebrew),Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, Memorandum 81 (Tel Aviv: January 2006).56 Hillel Halkin, “The Demographic Race,” The Jerusalem Post, November 30, 2006. Immigration into Israelhas been running approximately 20,000 per year; in 2006, there were 19,264 immigrants (Jerusalem Report,March 19, 2007, p. 6). According to the Jewish Agency, about 35 percent of them are from the former SovietUnion. http://www.jewishagency.org/JewishAgency/English/Home/About/Press+Room/Press+Releases/2006/dec27.htm. Since the mid-1990s, half or more of the immigrants from the Former Soviet Union have not beenclassified as Jewish. See Ian S. Lustick “Israel as a Non-Arab State: The Political Implications of MassImmigration of Non-Jews,” Middle East Journal, Vol. 53, No. 3 (Summer 1999), pp. 101-17. Clearly, sincethe al-Aqsa Intifada in 2000, there have been far more Jewish emigrants from Israel than immigrants.57 Haaretz, December 10, 2007, http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/932667.html. Read the postedcomments for the radically changed discourse about leaving the country. Most justify emigration and ridiculeattempts to bribe Israelis to return.58 Eric Gould and Omer Moav, The Israeli Brain Drain (Jerusalem: The Shalem Center, July 2006). See alsoDan Ben-David, “Soaring Minds: The Flight of Israel’s Economists,” CEPR Discussion Paper No. 6338(Center for Economic Policy Research, 2007) http://spirit.tau.ac.il/public/bendavid/econ-rankings/SoaringMinds.pdf. For a somewhat contrary analysis, see Yinon Cohen, “Who Needs and Who WantsDifferential Salaries in Universities?” (in Hebrew) forthcoming in Welfare and Economy. Accessed at http://spirit.tau.ac.il/socAnt/cohen/.59 http://stlouis.ujcfedweb.org/page.html?ArticleID=144274.60 Dan Ben-David, Brain-Drained Discussion Paper 6717 (March 2008), Tel Aviv University and Centre forEconomic Policy Research (London), www.tau.ac.il/~danib/econ-rankings/BrainDrained.pdf.61 Oren, “A Home Away from Home?”62 Sharon Ashley, “Shades of Grey,” The Jerusalem Report, December 13, 2004, p. 4.63 http://stlouis.ujcfedweb.org/page.html?ArticleID=144274.64 Shlomo Maital, “Expatriates or Ex-Patriots,” The Jerusalem Report, July 24, 2006, p. 37. Maital isacademic director of the Technion Institute of Management, Israel’s leading science and technology institute.65 “EU Passport Gets Popular in Israel,” Deutsche Welle, July 21, 2004, http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,1273065,00.html. See also Rafal Kiepuszewski, “Growing Number of Israelis Hoping to Make Poland aSecond Homeland,” Insight: Central Europe, Dec. 17, 2004, http://incentraleurope.radio.cz/ice/article/61469;and Justin Huggler, “Israelis Revive Their Old Family Ties to Gain EU Passports,” The Independent, Feb.15, 2003. Regarding the al-Aqsa Intifada as a trigger for emigration, see Alex Weingrod & André Levy,“Paradoxes of Homecoming: The Jews and Their Diasporas,” Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 79, No. 4(2006).66 Tom Segev, “The September 11 Enigma,” Haaretz, May 8, 2007.67 Quoted by Ari Shavit, “The Zionist Ghetto.”68 Yoram Ettinger, whose views are prominent in the debate over Israel’s demographic future, has referred tothis trend as “the passport disease,” personal communication, April 13, 2007.69 Report published at Ynetnews.com, February 22, 2007. The study was commissioned by the Israeli officesof the German political foundation Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, http://www.ynetnews.com/EXT/Comp/ArticlLayout/CdaArticlePrintPreview/1,2506,L-3368220,00.html; Aluf Benn, “European Dreaming,” Haaretz,November 13, 2003, quoted by Weingrod and Levy.70 Regarding transcontinental commuting, see Abigail Klein Leichman, “Aliyah Commuters,” New JerseyJewish Standard, February 15, 2007. http://www.jst.andard.com/articles2264/Aliyah-commuters; Dodi Tobinand Chaim I. Waxman, “Living in Israel, Working in the States,” Jewish Action (Winter 5766/2005), pp. 44-48.Regarding the legal meaning of “center of life” in Israeli law and administrative procedure, see http://

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www.mof.gov.il/ITC/taxReform2003.pdf. Although it has most notably been used as a criterion to excludePalestinian Arabs from protecting rights under Israeli law to enter Israel, it had its origin in Israeli tax law andis now relevant for considering when commuting Jews can no longer be deemed “residents of Israel.”71 Dror, p. 21.72 See Shahar Ilan, “Entering the Age of Post-Aliyah?” Haaretz, March 2, 2007, for debates between JewishAgency Chairman Zeev Bielski and Ruth Gavison and Shlomo Avineri. One reason for the decline in Jewishimmigration and an embarrassing statistic that helps explain the difficulty the Israeli government has hadfinding someone willing to be named minister of immigration absorption is that, in recent years, 200,000 ofthe Jews remaining in Russia emigrated to Germany. Amiram Barkat, “Nativ Wins Bid for Outreach toRussian-Speaking Jews in Germany,” Haaretz, May 30, 2007, http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/864945.html; Gil Hoffman, “Analysis: Absorption the New Bastard Portfolio,” The Jerusalem Post, July 5,2007.73 Between 2001 and 2004, approximately 69 percent on average of Jewish-Israeli respondents said theywanted to remain in the country. It is the asking of the question in a way that renders staying in Israel asproblematic that is most illuminating. Elran, National Resilience in Israel, p. 42.74In this period I do not include governments headed by Yitzhak Shamir in the category of those who soughtanything more than deterrence of Arab attacks.75 See, for example, Efraim Inbar and Shmuel Sandler, “Israel’s Deterrence Strategy Revisited,” SecurityStudies, Vol. 3, Winter 1993/94.76 Efraim Inbar, “Israel’s Continuing National Security Challenges,” Strategic Review, Winter 1995, pp. 48-54;“Israel: The Emergence of New Strategic Thinking,” International Defense Review (1995) pp. 90-97; “IsraeliNational Security, 1973-96,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 555,January 1998, pp. 62-81.77 Efraim Inbar, “What Lies Ahead for Israel,” The Jerusalem Post, November 13, 2000. More recentlyInbar’s exhortations have focused on the advisability of an Israeli attack on Iran. “An Israeli View of theIranian Nuclear Challenge,” Foreign Policy Research Institute E-Notes (April 2008), http://www.fpri.org/enotes/200804.inbar.israeliviewiraniannuclearchallenge.html.78 Winograd Committee, Press Release, April 30, 2007. http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=34083.79 For a typical example of an extended discussion of Israel’s options for responding to the Iran’s nuclearweapons potential that omits completely any consideration of the political fallout from various options, seeLeslie Susser, “Testing Times for Tehran,” The Jerusalem Report, November 26, 2007, pp. 8-12.80 This was the focus of a ten-minute peroration by former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the end ofa presentation at the Wharton School of Business on September 6, 2006, devoted to his implementation ofsuccessful neoliberal economic policies as finance minister in the Sharon government.81 “Israel Rejects Report It May Attack Iran’s Nuclear Program,” International Herald Tribune, January 7,2007. A larger and more public exercise was conducted in the Eastern Mediterranean earlier this summer.82 Yossi Klein Halevi and Michael B. Oren, “Israel’s Worst Nightmare,” The New Republic, January 30, 2007.83 Klein-Halevi and Oren. For another instance of this genre, see Gerald M. Steinberg, “From Pyongyang toTehran,” The Jerusalem Report, March 19, 2007, p. 46.84 Adi Mintz, “Surrounded by a Belt of Islamic Bombs,” Nekuda, No. 297 (January 2007), pp. 14-17.85 http://www.adl.org/PresRele/IslME_62/4390_13.htm.86 “Survey: Israel Worst Brand Name in the World,” Israel Today, November 22, 2006; http://www.israeltoday.co.il/default.aspx?tabid=178&nid=10395.87 “Heksher” is a legal term referring to a rabbinic authorization of food to be served or sold as edible by Jews.