Ariel Center for
Policy Research

A JOURNAL OF POLITICS AND THE ARTS

 

NATIV   ■   Volume Thirteen   ■   Number 3 (74)  ■  June 2000   ■  Ariel Center for Policy Research

 

SYNOPSIS

 


Withdrawal as a National Trauma

Moshe Zak

"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.

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