The collapse of Olso raises questions not only
about the absence of intelligent life on Knesset Hill and among Israel's
political leadership, but also about matters far more ominous. It raises
serious questions about the nature of “Israeliness” and – in particular
– whether secular Zionism was in fact a success in terms of resolving
the “modernism dilemma” of the Jewish people. The Jews have been
searching for some means of bridging Jewish identity with modernism for
at least 200 years. None were successful other than secular Zionism,
which was regarded as an unqualified success until about ten years ago.
Until the beginnings of the Oslo process, few would
have questioned the idea that secular Zionism had successfully created a
new stable form of modern Jewish identity, not threatened by modernity,
by self-contempt nor by assimilationism.
Oslo however has revealed that the attempt to
create an “Israeliness” largely detached from Jewishness has failed.
Secular Zionism, it turns out, served as the petri dish for the bizarre
form of self-hatred, self-debasement and assimilationism that has
captured the Israeli elites, including the media, the universities, and
the rest of the “chattering classes”. Without this contempt-of-self,
Oslo could never have been imposed upon the country. No Israeliness
founded on Jewish identity could have aquiesced in the adoption of
policies based on the presumption that hatred of Jews and anti-Semitic
atrocities are caused by Jews being insensitive, intransigent and
failing to understand the “other”. No true Israeliness based on Jewish
identity could have agreed to a situation where deniers of the Holocaust
and those declaring the Jews drink gentile blood for Passover are “peace
partners”. No bona fide Israeliness could have sought to achieve peace
through the importation of anti-Semitic fascist hordes into the suburbs
of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, nor believed that anti-Semites could be
“bought off” through public gestures of Jewish niceness.
Oslo is
not simply a reflection of ignorance and stupidity. It is a reflection
of the loss of the will to survive of large portions the Jewish people.
