"We will not
retreat, because there is no other way/ No retreat from the trenches of
life" – wrote Natan Alterman sixty years ago. Holding fast to the
trenches of our lives is what has brought our people's successes, the
ingathering of five million Jews in their homeland. But lately there has
been a weakening of the restraints that bind the people together in
holding fast to the trenches of life. The phenomenon of withdrawal that
so powerfully affects us is not just territorial; it erodes our
spiritual foundations in our state and becomes, inadvertently, a sort of
emblem of the nation's general behavior. Not just withdrawals from
territories of the homeland, but also withdrawals from values and
characteristics that strengthened the people in its renaissance:
* Withdrawal from the Declaration of
Independence, which ensured the special status of the Jewish people in
their state.
* Withdrawal from the dream of
blending the communities in favor of an ethnic pluralism that builds a
sectoral Tower of Babel.
* Withdrawal from the program of
integration in education, as a means of forming a single people.
* Withdrawal from Zionism as a
revolutionary movement to impel the ingathering of the exiles.
* Withdrawal from the Law of Return as
a recognition of the Jewish people's natural right to return to its
homeland; its transformation instead into an ordinary immigration law.
* Withdrawal from great national
projects, such as the Lavi fighter plane and the Mediterranean-Dead Sea
Canal.
In every generation a people, any people, must
examine its path, test the assumptions on which it has built, and tend
to the necessary reforms in light of the transformations of time. But by
no means must one destroy the inner foundation, the basic values of the
nation. The passion for withdrawal that has gripped us in all sectors
and at all levels, from territorial issues to ideal conceptions, gives
the impression of a counterrevolution to the revolution
in Jewish history that Zionism wrought.