Struggle for the Israeli Soul
Last week Haaretz published an interview with Aharon Appelfeld. The noted author and Holocaust survivor discussed the ambivalence of Israelis concerning their own identity as Jews. This becomes an element in the struggle of the Jewish state to survive in a region of hostile Arab neighbors. Yaacov Lozowick, author of Right to Exist, sent me this link and referred to is as "perhaps the most important piece I've sent around, in more than three years." An excerpt follows.
From Haaretz, February 13, 2004
I think that the great difficulty in Israeli culture and in the Israeli soul is that there is no continuity here. There is no organic, evolutionary development from the Jewish past to the Israeli present. There is no understanding of the Israeli story and the Zionist story within the larger context of the Jewish story. There is too much localism here. Too much here-and-now. Do you know what saved me in the war? What saved me was the warmth and the love I received from my parents before the war. What saved me was the feeling I had during the war that any moment, mother would come to get me. It was out of the question that she wouldn't come to get me.
What you are actually saying against Israeliness is that it cut itself off from Jewish history, and from the irony and the compassion and the aesthetics and the broad knowledge of modern European Judaism.
That is correct. There was some sort of thrust here toward a kind of primitivism. There was an attempt here to amputate internal organs of the soul. That caused incapacity, a serious cultural incapacity. Therefore I think that today the Jewish people is waging two existential wars simultaneously. One for the body, against the Arabs, and a second war for the soul, against itself. The identification of Judaism with a religion from which people are trying to dissociate themselves is creating a very serious vacuum here. The result is a black hole of identity. That is why there is a deep recoil from everything Jewish. But without some sort of Jewish identity, we will not be able to exist. There will be nothing by which to exist in Israel. A society without true roots is a society without a future