Israel's fictional end comes when she ignores the to-the-death nature of the national struggle, and neglects Jewish unity
DURING A RECENT VISIT to Jordan, Israeli novelist Amos Oz participated in a televised roundtable discussion with local TV pundits. When one of his interlocutors asked what held the greatest fear for Oz, as an Israeli, the writer said it was the prospect that Israel might prove to be a temporary episode in world history.
Although the Israeli literary establishment has traditionally expressed profound contempt for most forms of commercial fiction of a speculative nature, the notion that Israel might eventually go the way of the Crusader kingdom has inspired a surprising number of Hebrew-language "Dreadful Warning" stories, to use the British term for the genre coined at the turn of the century. Given the inherent precariousness of the Zionist endeavor - and the deep-rooted anxieties it's engendered - the real surprise may be that there haven't been more of them.
A number of dystopian novels were published during the 80s - Amos Kenan's "The Road to Ein Harod," Benjamin Tammuz's "Jeremiah's Inn" and David Melamud's "The Fourth Dream" are three of the most notable examples - and generally they had a left-wing sensibility to them. It wasn't until about two weeks before Yitzhak Rabin's assassination that the Israeli right finally weighed in for the Israeli Dystopia Derby. That was when Zev Ben-Yosef's "Peace unto Israel" was published.
The year is 2045, and the Jewish state is unraveling with astonishing alacrity. Israel has been at peace with the Arab world for a half century. But it has been at war with itself for almost as long. After ceding part of the Galilee to the Palestinian state, Israel has cut itself into two quasi-independent cantons. The rump Israeli republic, militarily defanged by its own faith in its peace agreements and ceding control of the streets to organized crime, is devoutly secular. The "Guardians of Israel" enclave, with its population concentrated in Bnei Brak, Me'ah She'arim and on the outskirts of Jerusalem, is grimly messianic.
Conflict between them escalates when the otherwise autonomous religious-nationalists demand foreign and military independence. Their economy ruined and army and police exhausted from decades of internecine strife, the besieged secular Israelis ask the Palestinians to send in troops to help restore order. The Palestinians, who have gotten on famously with them for decades, comply happily. And then, of course, they refuse to leave.
"We, the entire Arab peoples," observes the triumphant Palestinian leader, Dr. Walid al-Husseini (he's named for Haj Amin al-Husseini, late mufti of Jerusalem and Hitler supporter, but has the smiley-faced affability of the son of the mufti's cousin, Faisal al-Husseini) "had always been united in our hope to be rid of you, to purify our land of marauders. We never hid this from you. But you wanted to be moral, pure. You were better at worrying about us and other people than about yourselves. In that way, you made it easier for us, for the Germans, and for the rest of the world's anti-Semites."
Yes, the Germans. Or didn't I mention that by 2045, Germany and Japan have regained their stature as world superpowers, resurrected the Axis, and, with their triumphant uber-technology, have lovingly rebuilt the ghettos and death camps of yesteryear?
BEN-YOSEF, A SENIOR OFFICIAL in the World Zionist Organization, chronicles the demise of Israel through the attendant demise of a notable secular Israeli family. The patriarch of this dysfunctional clan is Dr. Shlomo Ariel, a Nobel Prize-winning particle physicist who, with his childhood cronies, ends up running a morally bankrupt, and deeply inept secular Israeli government. Wrapped up in his own career, he fails to notice that his wife has detached herself from him, and that his children have become troubled and estranged, lost in a land of depleted values and deteriorating social and economic conditions.
Ariel, in case you fail to notice, is a LEFT-WING SECULAR LIBERAL HUMANIST UNIVERSALIST (Ben-Yosef is big on affixing Rush Limbaugh-like labels on people and institutions he disapproves of) who subscribes to the (actually libertarian) notion that no state or people has the moral right to impose its will on other states or people - not even on groups residing within its own borders. So when the Arabs living in a quasi-independent canton in the Upper Galilee demand the right to merge with independent Palestine, Ariel's left-wing associates can think of no better reason to prevent their departure than they could to hold off on an earlier decision to recognize Palestinian independence. This does not distract the government, however, from imposing a secular-humanistic curriculum on all state-supported schools, thereby forcing the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox to bolt as well.
THE REAL PROBLEM, AS UNDERstood by Ben-Yosef and as articulated, with no intended irony, by a 21st-century Nazi philosopher he conjures up, is that there are peoples and races that survive by placing their own interests and welfare first, and peoples and races doomed to extinction because they value the welfare of others more than their own. As Palestinian President Walid al-Husseini later expounds to Ariel during a tour of the death camps similar to the one taken by his real-life ancestor, the grand mufti, a full century earlier: "Maybe now you'll understand why opponents of the Jews throughout the generations, who were called anti-Semites, including us Palestinians, called you The Children of Death.' You were a people who didn't know how to live, and therefore were not deserving of life.
"You simply never succeeded in understanding that the relationship between you and the Arab peoples was based on one fundamental principle - a total life and death struggle. Either you, or us. You deluded yourselves when you believed that dividing the land would bring peace, and that this peace would survive… You should have followed our example in the matter of the sanctity of the land. We were never willing to seriously consider giving up any of our land. We decided that the land of Palestine was holy, every pebble, the holiest of holies…
"Instead of unifying like us around a goal - the dedication of the entire people to the sanctity of the land - you broke up with undue haste into groups and subgroups, bickering with each other instead of the real enemy. In this manner, you lost the elementary right even to be called a people."
ALAS, BECAUSE SO MUCH OF Ben-Yosef's book consists of this kind of gabby polemic, "Peace unto Israel" loses the elementary right to call itself a proper Dreadful Warning story of the kind made famous by George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. Orwell's "1984" viscerally evoked the stink of rotting cabbages and the forbidding shadows of bombed-out postwar London slums. "Peace unto Israel," in contrast, fails to conjure up the elaborate sense of time or place a story like this needs to generate real horror. The 21st century depicted here is virtually identical, in tenor and texture, to the world we live in now. This is odd, considering the protagonist, Dr. Ariel, has in fact invented a machine that creates free and limitless energy. In real life, this would usher in a material golden age for Israel and the world not seen since the invention of the Epilady hair-removal system by Kibbutz Hagoshrim. In Ben-Yosef's fable, though, it not only fails to transform human life: Ariel conveniently forgets, for most of the narrative's duration, that he has converted it into a death ray that could be used to smite any enemy of Israel or Jewry anywhere on the globe with virtual impunity.
Ben-Yosef's polemic is further undermined by his contempt for those who would seek any end to Israel's conflict with the Arab world that is not based on the subjugation of one by the other. Shimon Peres's recent impromptu declaration that he might surrender Israel's nuclear option in the event of genuine peace notwithstanding, it remains unlikely any future Israeli government would ever commit the kind of systematic national seppuku depicted here. It is even more unlikely that discerning readers will accept Ben-Yosef's underlying belief that Israel's appointed task in this universe is to keep on waging World War II with the rest of the planet for eternity.