He told them so By Abigail Radoszkowicz (Jpost, October 24) -- Four years ago journalist Amnon Lord broke with the Left over the Oslo Accords and shifted to the Right. Now he tells Abigail Radoszkowicz why an entire 'epoch of lie and fraud' is over -- Over the past two weeks, a number of high-profile media figures who were once outspoken supporters of the Oslo Process have publicly shifted their views. "It seems that the Arabs are still not willing to accept a compromise that includes our continued existence here," wrote economics columnist Arie Caspi wrote in Ha'aretz 2 weeks ago. "A genuine peace with the Palestinians may not be achievable for years to come." That same conclusion was reached by journalist and film critic Amnon Lord four years ago, when he broke with the Left over the Oslo Accords and endorsed Binyamin Netanyahu in the 1996 elections. But in those days, taking such a stance came at a different price. Until that time Lord, an ex-Peace Now supporter, was a member in good standing of the branja - the left-leaning media and arts clique that dominates the Israeli cultural scene. His ideological switch cost him friends, and, he claims, his job. He subsequently lost his position as supplements editor and film critic at Tel Aviv, the flagship local paper of the Yediot Aharonot chain. Although his former employers say he was dismissed out of purely editorial considerations, Lord believes his political turnabout was a major factor. "There is no question in my mind that Amnon paid a heavy price when he switched," says his colleague Reno Tzror, who had worked with Lord on the now defunct Hadashot newspaper. "It was a very brave act." Today, as some of his media peers have moved their positions closer to his, Lord is convinced that "the 'Oslo regime' - that covenant between the ruling 'Leftist elite' and an Arab minority whose ultimate aim was the de-Judaicization of the Jewish state" - has collapsed. "What is interesting," he adds, "is that after a generation of fighting the Right and settlers, the governing elite finds itself incapable of arguing Israel's case on the world stage. They have had to enlist for the job [Binyamin] Netanyahu himself - whom they not long ago painted as worse than Yasser Arafat." Not that that job, Lord believes, will be easy. "The international arena is still one in which Arab violence against Jews is extremely thrilling," he says. "Cameras are infatuated with the aesthetics of Arab violence. In thrall to this post-modern kitsch, complete with child martyr and blood libel, the world calls for Israel to be hit again and again. A direct line runs from Goebbels to the cameras of CNN. Israel could stop this cycle - were our cultural and spiritual leadership moral." And what are his pro-Oslo friends - the ones who still talk to him - telling him now, in the wake of the turbulent events of the last few weeks? "Being unprepared, their views are much more extreme than mine," he says. "So much so, they can't be repeated in public." DESPITE his swing to the Right, Lord, today a columnist and editor at the nationalist weekly Makor Rishon, still in one sense sleeps with the Left - literally. His wife is Gail Hareven, a novelist and columnist for Ma'ariv and The Jerusalem Report, is still very much part of the branja. The couple live with their twin eight-year old daughters in a cozy, book-lined apartment in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Rehavia, once itself a bastion of the Israeli "elite" from which Lord now feels so estranged. The marriage has weathered Lord's political about-face: in a recent Yediot Aharonot weekend magazine piece, Hareven (daughter of novelist Shulamit Hareven, an even more well-known pillar of the cultural Left) even said that had she possessed a magic potion in 1993 that would have halted the ideological journey upon which her husband was then just embarking on, she would not have put it in his coffee. Earlier this year saw the publication of Lord's book The Israeli Left: From Socialism to Nihilism (the Hebrew title translates literally as We have lost all that was dear: On the Roots of the Post-Jewish Left). A personal/historical cri de coeur, it sets out to examine how the long-standing Left/Right debate on security strategy - the giving up or keeping of the territories - was gradually transformed into an ideological struggle over the inherent legitimacy of a Jewish state. Though it addresses some of the same themes as Yoram Hazony's controversial study of "post-Zionism,"The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel's Soul, Lord's book has received far less notice - which he attributes in part to the fact that it was published only in Hebrew and deliberately given the cold shoulder by the local cultural establishment. One way in which Lord's perspective does differ radically from Hazony's is that he has deep personal roots in the Israeli Left, and thus can dissect it from an insiders' perspective. The 48-year-old Lord was born and raised on Kibbutz Ein Dor, on the slopes of Mount Tabor, which belongs to the then-Marxist-oriented Hashomer Hatza'ir movement. His Polish-born father and Canadian-born mother were among the kibbutz founders. His mother had been a movement activist in in Canada, and later told her son how hard-core Communists had infiltrated the movement's North American branches during the Stalin era. In his book, Lord recalls growing up in a Hashomer Hatza'ir generation he describes as dismissive of Judaism, which they regarded as an inferior religion; enthralled with general history but bored with Jewish history; despising traditional, religious, and "black" (i.e. Oriental) Jews, and rejecting that part of Zionist ideology calling for Jewish solidarity. For years, writes Lord, Hashomer Hatza'ir toed the Stalinist line; the only edition of the movement newspaper Al-Hamishmar published on Shabbat was the one announcing the dictator's death. The Soviet dictator's portrait was even hung in the children's quarters of the movement's kibbutzim, where he served as a father figure for "children who grew up in a large siblings' group without a fully functioning father." Lord asserts that the Israeli Left has never come to terms with this Stalinist legacy, noting how the expression "Stalin's children," describing that generation of Hashomer Hatza'ir, is used nostalgically rather than in condemnation. Lord says in some ways he still respects the left-wing Zionists who helped establish the country, pointing out that they saved many Jews for Zionism who otherwise would have been lost among with the revolutionary waves of Europe. It is their legacy of "totalitarian democracy," the term coined by the late renowned Israeli historian Jacob Talmon, which he says worries him. Whereas liberal democracy is based on trial and error, and calls upon pragmatic compromise to resolve issues that arise spontaneously, totalitarian democracy is founded on the idea that there is only one political truth, toward which everything must be directed - a "political messianism" that recognizes only the political and enlarges its sphere until it pervades every aspect of a society. It is this "group think" that is foisted by the "elite" on Israeli society which Lord sees as being responsible for the relatively mild Israeli public reaction to the unprecedented concession Prime Minister Ehud Barak was prepared to offer Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat at this summer's Camp David summit. "How is it," asks Lord, "that in 10 minutes, on the basis of a single rumor from Camp David, everyone aligned themselves with what they identified as the new party line. Not one politician, not one artist, not one journalist exclaimed, 'Hey, wait a minute, this is not what I signed up for.' After all, Netanyahu was excoriated for even suggesting that Barak would divide Jerusalem." "How free," continues Lord, "can the opinions of an army officer with the rank of colonel or higher be as he eyes both advancement in the army and the lucrative niches afterwards? When public figures see the non-violent Bolshevist persecution awaiting those figures - a Kahalani, a Mordechai, a Netanyahu - who step out of the proper ideological line?" NOR, says Lord, has the Left ever recovered from its internal conflict that began when its reigning Marxist ideology stopped categorizing nationalist Arab movements as "reactionary" and instead began endorsing them as "progressive." Lord, who himself served in IDF intelligence recalls the shock of kibbutz-raised soldiers in the Six-Day War as they came face to face with the huge stores of Soviet weapons in the hands of the Arab armies, and the physical evidence - no longer mere abstract knowledge - that Mother Russia was on the side of the Arabs. His reminiscences about the effect of the Six-Day War on his kibbutz generation focus on that watershed event from an unexpected angle. For these second and third-generation socialist-Zionists, the glue of Judaism that had held together these two poles of identity for their fathers had already dissolved. Suddenly confronted with such Jewish landscapes as Shilo, Nablus, Hebron, and Jerusalem, they were uncertain as to how to react. Local patriots though they were, this sudden Judaicization/Zionization caught them off-guard. Lord writes that "those Israelis who were, practically speaking, raised outside Jewish culture and unequipped to deal with their awakening Jewish feelings, soon experienced a sharp counter-reaction. They began to define themselves by their opposition to the revival of national consciousness among the Israeli public. An individual who remains outside a public experience first feels alienation, then superiority, to compensate for missing out. The war-like opposition that ultimately develops awards the alienated with a sense of equivalent experience." That this lost generation remained in the end neither socialist nor Zionist was not a surprise, Lord writes. Caught in the vise of unrelenting Arab nationalism and pervasive American nihilism, its assimilationism - a not uncommon Jewish reaction to stress in the Diaspora - could be, and had been, foretold. Other strains in the leftist fabric, says Lord, also foreshadowedthe unraveling of Zionism. He notes that many of today's most influential journalists interned at the weekly Olam Hazeh and were influenced in varying degrees by the radical politics and "Canaanite" cultural views of its editor, Uri Avnery. Last but not least, Lord accuses the Israeli elite of tapping into the American and European lefts' faddish romanticization of totalitarian third-world dictators and irredentist national liberation movements - a tendency which he credits for leading to a complete miscalculation of Arafat's true intentions in the Oslo process. EVEN before the start of the Oslo process, Lord says hex had been having some doubts about the leftist agenda. He recalls being taken aback in the early 1990s when he came across a reference to the film Magesh Hakesef (The Silver Platter) in Ella Shohat's book The Israeli Cinema: History and Ideology. Lord, who studied cinema at Emerson College in Boston, had coauthored the screenplay for this political thriller about a left-wing Israeli who falls into intrigue when he agrees to smuggle money into Israel which he believes will be used to establish a Palestinian university. Although the movie was considered politically daring for its time, Shohat criticized the filmmakers on the grounds that "they had not completely broken through the Zionist consensus." Lord was taken aback: he had never considered his leftist politics to be in conflict with his Israeli patriotism. He began to feel he was being asked for a complete renunciation of his national identity, and to feel resented as a "native-born Israeli, [and] cast as some kind of colonialist in the South African model." Lord initially supported the Oslo agreements, hoping that a signed agreement with the the PLO would signal a real end to the Arab-Israeli conflict. "However, the minute the PLO came into the territories, security collapsed. The situation was playing out just as the Right said it would, as they argued with us at Peace Now demonstrations: if an agreement was reached with the PLO, another group [Hamas] would take its place." It soon became clear, says Lord, that instead of promoting calm, "the dynamics of Oslo were having the opposite effect. I lost my confidence in the leadership of the Left as territories were traded for terror." Lord was not the only former Peace Now member who became a Netanyahu supporter at this point; the most prominent was Haifa University professor Yuval Steinitz, today a Likud MK. "The only thing that truly surprised me," says Lord, "was that no intellectual of Amos Oz's standing made the move demanded by common sense." Lord become one of Netanyahu's forum of right-leaning intellectuals and cultural figures that the prime minister had planned to cultivate. But he apparently had little real impact on any policymaking, or public opinion, during the previous Likud rule. Was Lord disappointed with Netanyahu? "The rise of an intellectual right is slow," responds Lord. "The conservative think tanks and institutes set up in US in the the late 1950s only bore fruit in the late 1960s and 1970s. But without Netanyahu, neither the Ariel Institute [which published Lord's book] nor the Shalem Institute [which published Hazony's] would have been founded. Unlike other right-wing leaders, Netanyahu recognized the importance of promoting conservative artists and thinkers." In light of recent events, Lord clearly feels vindicated and believes the "sabra elite" from which he turned away has had its day. "The blow of their turning their backs on the country, of their identification with the enemy, was even harder in light of their earlier sacrifices," he says. "They are no longer a serving nobility but a declining, hedonistic oligarchy, holding veto power over Israeli policy, neutralizing anything not to their liking - such as organizing Netanyahu's downfall. "Even now, the government is trying to go back to negotiations, but it will no longer be able to convince the public," says Lord. "An epoch of lie and fraud has ended." |
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