June 2018: Amos Oz, “The Whole Reckoning Is Not Over Yet”
*As of December 2024, Amos Oz’s last speech, “The Whole Reckoning Is Not Over Yet,” has been translated from Hebrew into Spanish, French, Italian, German, and Dutch and published as a book in each of these languages. The Hebrew book and the five translations may be purchased on their publishers’ websites at the links below. Our English translation, the first in this language as far as we are aware, is based, not on the Hebrew book edited and adapted by Shira Hadad, but rather on this–a video of the original speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEbqmn_gYsE
Hebrew: https://www.keter-books.co.il/כל-החשבון-עוד-לא-נגמר-ההרצאה-האחרונה
Spanish: https://www.siruela.com/catalogo.php?id_libro=4196&completa=S
Italian: https://www.feltrinellieditore.it/opera/resta-ancora-tanto-da-dire/
German: https://www.suhrkamp.de/buch/amos-oz-die-letzte-lektion-t-9783518470701
Amos Oz, “The Whole Reckoning Is Not Over Yet”
Amos Oz’s last speech, June 3, 2018
Cymbalista Synagogue and Jewish Heritage Center, Tel Aviv University,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEbqmn_gYsE
Introduction
Israel is a country that celebrates its writers. Its citizens are reminded of this every time they open their wallets and see, on each of the four banknotes now in circulation, the likenesses of their national poets staring back at them.
The trust Israelis place in their national scribes is another mark of the popular esteem for writers. For many Israelis, writers are nothing less than the conscience of the nation, and it is to them that they turn, not merely to be entertained, but also to be edified.
While it is poets whose portraits now adorn Israeli currency, novelists have occupied a special place in the Zionist and Israeli literary pantheon ever since Abraham Mapu wrote the first Hebrew novel, The Love of Zion, in 1853. There is a good chance that if just one of Mapu’s successors in Hebrew fiction had to be singled out for the distinction of “Israel’s most celebrated novelist,” the choice would fall on Amos Oz (1939-2018).
In his nineteen novels, Oz depicts Israeli experience with a poignancy and insight that mesmerized the Israeli reading public. Even Oz himself, despite his well-documented humility, had to acknowledge the evocative power of his pen and its effect on his Israeli readers, calling himself “the tribe’s conjurer.” His self-description was echoed by the panel of judges that, in 1998, awarded him Israel’s highest national accolade, the Israel Prize. In paying tribute to Oz at the award ceremony, the committee commented, “For some thirty-five years, in his writing he has accompanied the realities of Israeli life and expressed them uniquely as he touches upon the pain and ebullience of the Israeli soul.”
Oz may have written primarily about the “realities of Israeli life” and the “Israeli soul,” but the appeal of his fiction, as with all great works of literature, is universal, crossing borders and cultures. He remains Israel’s most-translated author, and the many foreign literary prizes he received attest to the global reach of his celebrity. The Nobel Prize was not among these, but Oz’s name was nevertheless floated for consideration year after year. Every October, when the Nobel Committee would announce the year’s laureates, Oz enthusiasts the world over hoped–even expected–that their hero would be crowned the second Israeli author (after Shai Agnon in 1966) to receive the world’s most prestigious award.
History remembers the following lecture not only as one of Oz’s most celebrated, but also as his last. When he delivered this speech at Tel Aviv University on June 3, 2018, it was to be the last time he would mount the podium to address an audience. Some six months later, he succumbed to the illness from which he had been ailing for three years.
The forty-nine-minute extemporaneous speech was the final installment of a lecture series at Tel Aviv University in 2017-2018 commemorating the 120th anniversary of the First Zionist Congress. Oz’s speech was delivered under the title “The Whole Reckoning Is Not Over Yet,” the haunting last sentence in Yosef Chaim Brenner’s 1911 novel From Here and There.
Whether or not Oz intended it as such, the lecture represents a kind of summation of Oz’s insights on the subjects he had engaged with throughout a career that spanned a half-century. Perhaps it would be only slightly melodramatic, then, to describe the speech as Oz’s “last word” in two senses, it being, at once, a valediction and a recapitulation. Israel’s current president, Isaac Herzog, certainly saw it in this light, describing it as a “kind of last will and testament” that “sums up [Oz’s] political world view and his vision.”
Oz’s talk found a very enthusiastic reception online, so much so that, after videos of the speech made the rounds on the Internet, it became something of a sensation–or, in cyberspeak, it “went viral.” Oz’s children, Daniel and Fania (with whom he co-authored the 2012 book Jews and Words) did the world of Hebrew letters a great service by immortalizing the speech in print, issued as a forty-page pamphlet by Keter Publishing House in 2019.
In light of the speech’s popularity, it is a matter of some curiosity that although it has been translated into several Western languages, it has escaped translation into English. At least it had until now, for the Center for Israel Education is pleased to present the first-ever English translation of Amos Oz’s last speech, “The Whole Reckoning Is Not Over Yet.”
“The Whole Reckoning Is Not Over Yet”
Good evening to you all. A pleasant summer evening [to you]. Thank you, Dan, for these lovely opening remarks.
Whenever I revisit the last lines of Brenner’s From Here to There, the lines Dan just read to us, a shiver runs up my spine. I have to ask myself from time to time, “Is the reckoning really not over yet?”
The truth is, I don’t have much to say to you this evening.
A few months ago, I published a slim pamphlet called Dear Zealots. I really tried to load it up with the accumulated wisdom of a lifetime . I did it mostly for my grandchildren. I told them, “Your grandpa, in his punditry, in demonstrations, and so on, was at the vanguard of the fight for many years. Now I’m passing the torch on to you. Grandpa is combat support now. He’s in logistics, ammunition. Here’s this little pamphlet. This will be your ammunition.” I really tried to distill in it my thoughts about the worst plague here–and not just here–of the twenty-first century–and not only this century: fanaticism.
I reflect on Jewishness/Judaism as a civilization, not just as a religion, not just as a nationality, but as a civilization, as a multi-millennial continuum of texts. I also reflect on the state of Israel, where it’s headed, and where it could end up, because “the whole reckoning is not over yet.”
I’ll mention three things from the pamphlet. First, what’s been going on between us and the Palestinians for more than a century is an open wound. It’s not just an open wound; it’s an infected, festering wound–an abscess. You can’t heal a wound with a stick. It’s impossible. You can’t hit a wound again and again, trying to teach it a lesson so it’ll stop being a wound and stop bleeding.
I’m not against the stick. I’m not a pacifist. Unlike my colleagues in Europe and North America, who often embrace me for the wrong reasons–“Our brother art thou! Our brother art thou! Make love, not war”–I’ve never thought violence is the world’s ultimate evil. I’ve believed, throughout my whole life until today, that the ultimate evil is aggression, belligerence. Aggression must usually be stopped by force. A big stick is needed to check belligerence, to vanquish it. Aggression is the mother of all the violence in the world. And so, I’ve never believed in “make love, not war; turn the other cheek; all you need is love.”
Two distant relatives of mine, Jewish women from Germany, spent their teenage years in Nazi concentration camps. Those who liberated them from the Nazi concentration camps were not peace activists with slogans, olive branches, and doves. They were Allied soldiers with helmets and submachine guns. This I’ll never forget.
So, I’m not a pacifist, but rather a fighter for peace or a champion of peace. I’m not against a big stick. If the state of Israel, if the Jewish people hadn’t finally gotten hold of a big, firm stick, none of us would be here now. We’d either be dead in the ground or in exile, having been driven out.
We’re here because we have a big stick. But you can’t heal a wound with a stick. For a century, all manner of sages have told us that just one more heavy blow will do, and all will be well. No. A wound must be healed. It won’t be healed in a day or in a week. But you must start somewhere. You must find some place to start the healing.
First of all, you must embrace the language of healing, not the language of submission, the language of deterrence, the language of “teaching them a lesson,” the language of “once and for all,” or the language of “they won’t know what hit them,” but the language of healing. The language of healing begins by saying to your opponent–indeed, your enemy–the simple words: “I know, you’re really hurting. I understand.” Not the words: “You’re righteous, and I’m wicked.” Not the words: “Take everything. I’m sorry for everything I’ve done to you.” Not the words: “I’m so ashamed.” But rather these simple words: “You’re hurting, I know. I’m hurting too. Now let’s find a way out of this.”
These are plain, simple words. You don’t need to remove a single caravan from a settlement. You only need to say these words–and say them right. That’s the first thing: You can’t heal a wound with a stick.
Second, if there aren’t two states here–and soon–there’ll be one state. If there’s one state, it won’t be a bi-national state. There’s no such thing. It’ll be an Arab state, from the river to the sea, sooner or later. There may be an intermediate phase of Jewish dictatorship over its Jewish opponents and Arabs, or maybe there won’t be. There may be an intermediate phase of horrific violence and rivers of blood, or maybe there won’t be. There may be an intermediate phase of apartheid, or maybe there won’t be. Whatever leads up to it, if there aren’t two states, there’ll be a single Arab state from the river to the sea.
To be clear, I’m okay with Arabs. I have no problem living with Arabs. I have only one problem: I don’t want to be a minority–and not just among Arabs, but anywhere, not after what my parents and grandparents told me. Not after what Brenner says. Not with all the baggage I carry deep within my genes. I don’t want to be a minority. Not even in Switzerland, and certainly not in today’s Muslim Middle East. I don’t want to be a minority.
Don’t buy the honeyed words they’re selling you about a multi-national or bi-national state or a state of all its citizens. There’s no such animal. There are six present-day examples of flourishing, multi-national states. I’ll cite them for you right now: Switzerland, Switzerland, Switzerland, Switzerland, Switzerland, and–let’s not forget–Switzerland. The rest have either fallen apart or sunk into rivers of blood. Cyprus was a bi-national state. Lebanon was a bi-national state. Syria and Iraq were multi-national. The Soviet Union was. Ukraine–part Russian, part Ukrainian–was. There’s no such animal. Even Spain, with its Basques and Catalans, is quaking. Even Britain is quaking. Even Belgium is creaking. Even from Canada I’m hearing rumblings.
It doesn’t work. It either ends with rivers of blood or–in the only such example in modern history–it ends well, as when the Czech and Slovak peoples peacefully separated into two countries. We should be so lucky. It wasn’t easy, even for them. Where exactly would the border be? What about strategic locations? Natural resources? What about the central bank reserves? What about the bullion in its vaults? It wasn’t easy. But their bloodless divorce set the standard.
There’s no such thing as a multi-national state of all its citizens. Don’t delude yourselves, and don’t let anyone else delude you. Either there’ll be two states and fast, or there’ll be, by degrees, an Arab state from the sea to the desert, where Jews will be a minority. What will be the condition of the Jewish minority in a predominantly Arab Muslim state? Not good. Why do I say, “not good”? Why do I see such darkness? Some of my friends see it with rose-colored glasses. They see coexistence, they see a honeymoon, they see the Jews in Muslim Spain.
I’ll tell you why. When I was a boy, twenty to twenty-five percent of Palestinian Arabs were Christian. Ramallah had a Christian majority. Bethlehem and Beit Jala had a Christian majority. Nazareth had a Christian majority. Many villages in the Galilee had a Christian majority. They no longer do. And it wasn’t our fault, or the fault of Israel, the occupation, oppression, or Zionism. The Christians are gone. And they were Palestinian Arabs, Arabic speakers. It’s not good to be a minority–here or anywhere, least of all in the Middle East.
The third and last thing I want to tell you paraphrases my little pamphlet, Dear Zealots. Anyone can buy it, and, in fact, I arranged for it to be given away as a gift. I gave away loads and loads of copies to be distributed in the settlements for free. I had the pamphlet translated, at my own expense, into Russian and Arabic and the translations circulated. I saw to it that bookstores would charge no more than twenty-nine shekels for it, just a bit more than the cost of a cup of coffee. I don’t want to call it my “last will and testament”–I don’t like that term–but the pamphlet does include all the musings I’d like to leave behind on politics, culture, history, and Zionism.
There’s one more thing from the book I’d like to relate to you. Why is this quarrel between us and the Palestinians so tangled that it stupefies the faculties of highly intelligent people, both here and the world over?
Why does it push smart people either into the corner of Gideon Levy–“colonialism, apartheid, the whole thing is rotten, the whole thing should never have happened”–or into the other corner–“everything we do is good, and if it isn’t, at least no one else could do better. They should shut up. No one’s better than us. They should shut up.”
In the other corner, the guiding principle is that the majority in the Knesset can do anything it wants–even move Passover to Tu Bishvat–“because that’s the will of the majority.” The Knesset majority could decide to declare the outside world illegal, thus settling the problem of international disapproval. “Then the outside world would mind its own business.”
It’s either this position or the opposite position.
Why are people so confused? Because for decades here, two wars have been underway. The Palestinian Arabs have been waging two wars against us, not one after the other, but at the same time, two wars–not alternately, but concurrently. One is perfectly just while the other is abominable and wicked. The perfectly just war is the war for the right of Palestinian people “to be a free people in their own land”–without oppression, subjugation, checkpoints, humiliation, plunder, exploitation, and killing. Any decent person would say the end, quite apart from the means, is just. But at the same time, the Palestinians have been waging a war against our right to be a free people in our land, to deny us the same right they claim for themselves. Either we won’t be here at all, or we’ll be here as their underlings. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at the same time.
We’re the same. The people of Israel in the state of Israel are fighting a perfectly just war in pursuit of the very thing that lies at the foundation of the Zionist idea: to be a free people in our own land. Not to have masters. Not to be a minority. Not to be persecuted, discriminated against, and demeaned. But at the same time, we’re waging a war to add two more rooms, at our neighbor’s expense, to our apartment.
It’s terribly confusing–there’s a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde on both sides. Terribly confusing. There are indeed two wars that both sides are carrying on here. It deranges even the most sensible people otherwise capable of sound analysis. Certainly it confuses simple people who only need to decide if they’re for, say, Hapoel Tel Aviv or Beitar Jerusalem. And if the state of Israel is Beitar, then they have to hate Hapoel; they’re for Beitar because it’s their team, no matter what it does.
Now, since this talk is a distillation of my wisdom, I’d like to tell you a story. A little more than twenty years ago, I met a Palestinian intellectual in Paris. He was around thirty years old then. We haven’t kept in contact, but he must be about fifty or so today. He was a lecturer, social science faculty at a French university. Not the Sorbonne. I don’t remember which one. I don’t remember his specific field. I don’t even remember his name. But I do remember the first sentence he said to me, right after we shook hands: “I’m from Lifta.”
That seemed a bit odd. How could a thirty-year-old man be from Lifta? I remember Lifta vividly. My parents’ house in Kerem Avraham was a mile away from Lifta. I’ll confess this here today, unsure what price I could pay for doing so: My Revisionist father, my mother, and I, for all our national pride, would go to Lifta on Saturdays to buy cheese–truly excellent cheese–and some fruits and vegetables, which were cheaper and very tasty. It was a wonderful place of a hundred or so beautiful, small hillside stone houses. There were fig trees, olive trees, vines, grape arbors, even a spring. A charming and beloved place.
This man said to me, “You know, I don’t care who rules Palestine. I don’t want to expel the Jews. I don’t want to take revenge on you. I want my house in Lifta.” We didn’t meet in his office, so he couldn’t show me, but he told me, “My office and my apartment are filled with photos of Lifta and of my house there.” I asked, “Pardon me, but have you ever been there?” He said, “Never. All I have is photos.” He said that his father or grandfather, I don’t remember which, was expelled from there–expelled or he fled, it doesn’t really matter. But then he told me this with great conviction: “You know, you Israelis will have no peace and no respite until I get my family’s house in Lifta back. I want it. It’s mine. I won’t let anyone take it from me. I won’t allow peace or compromise so long as I don’t get my house in Lifta back.”
I was particularly struck by this because he’d never even seen the house in person. I thought about it for a bit, a short silence followed, and I said, “Even if tomorrow the Jewish people were to decide, by an overwhelming majority, that Zionism was a mistake and that we all should pack our bags, leave, and turn the keys over to you, you still won’t get your house in Lifta back.”
He asked me why, and I said, “Tell me, do you want to live in the house in Lifta? Will you quit your job in Paris?” He said, “No, of course not. I’ll go there in the summer, every summer, to sit under my vine and fig tree, listen to the spring and the bells of the goats as they make their way up and down the hillside. That’s all I want. Not sovereignty. Just that.”
I told him, “You’ll never get this, and it’s not because of us.” “But why?” he asked.“It’s simple,” I told him. “Suppose all the Jews pack up and leave–and not just Lifta, but the entire country. Suppose the Israeli government decides tomorrow to agree to the total, unlimited right of return for the refugees’ grandchildren and great-grandchildren and anyone who wishes. You still won’t get your house in Lifta back.” “Why not?” “Because if the villagers return–there were, if I’m not mistaken, about a thousand back in 1948–if they all returned today, it’d be to a town of 15,000-20,000 people, a town with multi-story buildings, at least one Super-Pharm, two or three supermarkets, a few traffic lights, and terrible parking problems. You’ll hear neither the goats nor the spring.”
“You’re ailing,” I told him, and I diagnosed his illness. If any of you have any medical or paramedical training, do take out your notebook and jot this down. “You have ‘reconstritis.’ You’re looking to find in space what’s lost in time. You yearn for the Lifta of the stories your grandparents and parents told you. I get it. I don’t blame you. I’m not telling you to forget about it either. I wouldn’t dream of telling you to forget about it. I haven’t forgotten my childhood or my childhood memories either.”
“I’ll tell you something else: If you miss Lifta so much, write a book about it. Make a movie about it. Write a play about it. Do research on it. Look for what you lost, not in space, but in time. If all the people of Lifta were to return, it would be to a town of 15,000-20,000 residents, nothing at all like the village in the photographs hanging on your office walls. No sheep, no figs, no vines, no small stone houses. Not because of us. Reconstritis,” I told him. It’s a very dangerous disease. I understand it, but it’s still dangerous.
If a person aches longingly for his childhood or for the scenes of his childhood or his parents’ childhood, he should sit down and write, as Agnon did about Buczacz, The Bridal Canopy or A Guest for the Night. Don’t try to reconstruct it in a physical place as the protagonist-narrator of
A Guest for the Night did rather grotesquely, before leaving with his tail between his legs.
Maybe you once loved a woman, your childhood sweetheart, the great love of your life. You can’t forget her. Perhaps you feel that she hasn’t forgotten you. But now you’re sixty, seventy, or eighty years old. Don’t go to her home to spirit her away and tell her, “You’re mine.” Write a book about her. Write a poem. Write a play. Write a memoir. Don’t try to find in a place what has been lost in time. Don’t take your childhood memories to the ATM. You’ll get nothing but indignity and insanity. It can drive you mad, reconstritis.
After we parted, I couldn’t help but ask myself, “Sorry, Amos, but isn’t Zionism reconstritis? What’s Zionism if not one big case of reconstritis?” I thought a lot about this. My answer is, at bottom, no. Maybe to a limited extent, but, in general, no. It’s not reconstritis. Why not?
Our ancestors, mine and yours, for two thousand years, said these words at every Passover seder: “Next year in Jerusalem.” This is true enough, but had they not been persecuted and tortured, had they not been humiliated and murdered, they’d have kept saying them for another two thousand years, and they wouldn’t have come here.
The only reason that the Jews of Eastern Europe were the first to come here, and the Mizrahim came later (and are a bit aggrieved about this) isn’t that the Mizrahim weren’t as discerning and didn’t “get it.” Nor was it that they loved the Land of Israel any less than Avraham Mapu or Naftali Herz Imber had. It’s simply that they weren’t tortured like the Jews of Russia, Poland, and Romania were. They weren’t tortured like them. In other words, reconstritis was a component of Zionism . It was a spice in the mix. It was a stimulus. It was a recruiting device. It was even an anthem.
Naftali Herz Wessely’s original poem doesn’t go, “To be a free people in our land….” [Audience corrects Oz, who misspoke, misnaming the author of “Hatikvah”]. Imber’s poem! Sorry. I’m senile. Naftali…Thank you. What would I do without you?
Naftali Herz Imber’s poem doesn’t just say, “To be a free people in our land.” It says, “To return to the land of our forefathers.” “To return.” There was an element of reconstritis in Zionism. It was part of the stimulus, of the mobilization, of the power, the evocative power, of a new political movement, a new ideological movement. But it wasn’t the core. It wasn’t the principal component. It wasn’t the main driver.
Had it not been for the suffering and persecution and the recognition that they had no other recourse–neither isolation in the ghetto nor total assimilation, both having availed them nothing–Zionism wouldn’t have come about. It didn’t come from reconstritis. It wasn’t born, solely or chiefly, of “Next year in Jerusalem.” The truth is, there was nowhere else to go.
My grandfather, Grandpa Alexander, my father’s father, was a fervent Zionist–indeed, a Revisionist Zionist–for many years. He’d give his shekel to the Zionist Congress, always voting for Jabotinsky. But he did this in Vilna. Why didn’t he come to the Land of Israel? Because the Land of Israel struck him, perhaps rightly so, as not quite European enough for his taste. It wasn’t yet. Maybe it’d be one day.
When antisemitism in Vilna turned fiercely violent, Grandpa Alexander applied for visas for himself and his family to immigrate to America. He went and applied. It’s documented. He was told, “You need to wait seventeen years. There’s a seventeen-year waiting list.” In 1930s Vilna, at the beginning of the decade, he didn’t exactly have seventeen years to wait. It wouldn’t do. So, he sought French citizenship. He even sought German citizenship. He was crazy enough to seek German citizenship, perhaps two or three months before Hitler came to power. I’m eternally grateful to Germany for turning him down; otherwise, I wouldn’t be here. He also applied for Scandinavian citizenship. I don’t know which country. All this because Jerusalem wasn’t yet European enough for his taste. Maybe it’d be one day.
He came here only because no one else wanted him. That’s the forgotten truth. Neither Israel’s detractors today nor our children know it. No one wanted them. Canada’s immigration policy for Jews in the 1930s was “one is too many.” Switzerland, which I’ve already mentioned today, said, “None is too many.” Our great friend–lover of Israel, philo-Semite Field Marshal Smuts, Jan Smuts of South Africa, who supported Zionism–said something more clever than “South Africa won’t accept the Jews of Europe.” He said, “South Africa sees antisemitism as a squalid thing to be scorned and detested. And that’s why we won’t admit Jews: We don’t want to bring antisemitism here.”
No one wanted them. They came to Jerusalem not because of reconstritis. They had reconstritis, like all Jews, but it wasn’t reconstritis that brought them here. The Land of Israel was the only log they could cling to in the storm. If it hadn’t existed, they wouldn’t have existed. Instead of six million, there’d be six and a half million dead Jews.
So, too, with the Mizrahim. Anyone today who tells you fairy tales that Zionism ruined the wonderful Jewish-Arab honeymoon, that things would have gone swimmingly had it not been for Zionism’s muddling of minds, that the Mizrahim were dragged from the greener pastures of Baghdad and Morocco and brought here to transit camps only to be mistreated….They were mistreated. Badly. But not out of malice–and I say this parenthetically–but because of the childish impulse, which originated in the nineteenth century, to create a new man–a new Jew, a new man. A new man shouldn’t be created. Don’t ever try. It always ends very badly when molding someone into a new person or a new Jew is attempted. In the best case–ours–it ends with indignity that lasts generations–“excellent ‘human material.’ We can still make them human.” In the worst case, the attempt to fashion a new man ends with rivers of blood.
But no. Had the Mizrahim, the Jews of Iraq, had they remained there….Not quite six months ago, we saw what happened to the Yazidis at the hands of the Muslims in Iraq. They slaughtered all of them. No, no, not all of them–pardon me–just the men. Girls aged ten or older could be bartered for a pack of cigarettes. That’s what would have happened to the Jews had they remained there. Make no mistake.
And when did they pack up and leave? It’s also not nice to mention. They packed up and left not when the state of Israel raised its flag, not when they suddenly said, “Next Year in Jerusalem….Why not?” They left Iraq when British rule was about to collapse and they knew they’d be left in the lurch. They left North Africa when French rule was about to collapse, and they didn’t want to be left in the lurch.
It wasn’t reconstritis. Reconstritis came through in the anthem, the flag, the motivation, the phraseology, and the ideology. What brought us here was not reconstritis, but…and this is the crux of tonight’s talk: We’re in danger of reconstritis’ becoming the core of the Zionist enterprise. Woe betide us!
It’s not just “woe betide us,” it’s also absurd. Take, for example, the rebuilding of the Temple, which is being bandied about more and more. “We’ll make war on the whole Islamic world.” As if war with the Arabs isn’t already enough. “We’ll make war on Turkey, Indonesia, nuclear-armed Pakistan, and Malaysia. We want the Temple Mount. It’s ours! The Temple Mount now! The Temple will be rebuilt now! Not tomorrow, not in ten years. Now!”
Now let’s assume for a moment….I’m inverting the fantasy I shared about the man from Lifta….Let’s suppose that it’s announced on the news tomorrow morning that the “Supreme Muslim Council” in Cairo, or Riyadh, or Damascus, or Tehran–never mind where–or in all four of these places sat up all night until dawn re-examining their texts and came to the conclusion that the Temple Mount really does belong to the Jews after all. “Give us a month, we’ll clear out of the mosques, and hand over the keys. It’s all yours. We goofed. Sorry about that. You can come back.”
You know what would happen? In the state of Israel today there are more Jews, far more pious Jews in the Land of Israel than there were in the First and Second Temple periods. During Shimon Bar Yochai’s hillula in Meron, there were four hundred thousand people. What would happen in Jerusalem during the Three Pilgrimage Festivals, if a million or a million and a half pilgrims came to Jerusalem, all wanting to ascend the Temple Mount? All of them! It’s a mitzvah, after all. It’s a mitzvah more important than honoring Shimon bar Yochai’s hillula in Meron. Even at Rabbi Ovadia Yosef’s funeral there were six hundred or seven hundred thousand people.
A million and a half people would come to Jerusalem for the Three Pilgrimage Festivals to visit the Temple. Bathrooms for a million and a half men and women on the Temple Mount? Parking spaces? Under the Temple Mount instead of the Mount of Olives? Under the Mount of Olives? Central A/C–yea or nay? CCTV cameras–yea or nay? Parquet flooring, yes? And if so, need it be made from the cedars of Lebanon, or will other trees do?
This is no more doable than the return to Lifta. Physically, it’s not doable–not because of the Arabs, not because they don’t grasp that it’s ours, not theirs, and that they, in their stupidity, think that it’s theirs, not ours. It’s not doable because these people, afflicted as they are with reconstritis, are looking for a place to give them back what time has taken from them. If you want the Temple, write a poem about it. Uri Zvi Greenberg did it very beautifully. Write a play. Make a film. Write a novel.
You’re longing. No one should quit longing. There’s no law in the world against longing, nor can there be. Although there are governments that are trying to legislate what can be remembered and what can’t be and what can be mourned and can’t be….Let it go. If you want to mourn, go ahead. If you want to yearn, go ahead. If you want to reconstruct something in your imagination, go ahead. If you want to fantasize about the woman you loved so dearly decades ago, fantasize about her all you want. Write about her. Pine for her. Do with her in your imagination everything that comes to mind and even more. Just don’t try going to the ATM with your longing.
The same goes for the desire to take over every hill in the territories. Let’s say they take over every hill. Let’s say all the Arabs leave here or are made to leave. What will traffic lights and intersections be like? It won’t be this biblical landscape that you long for. It won’t be the land of the prophets with the olive trees and fig trees and the springs and the herds. It won’t be the tranquil villages of tillers of the soil. There won’t be anyone under his vine and fig tree.
There will be huge industrial complexes, industrial zones, intersections, traffic lights, multi-story buildings, and parking headaches. This is the disease of reconstritis. I want to tell you: The thing that, in my eyes, threatens the state of Israel most is if reconstritis, which was an ingredient, a spice in the Zionist mix, becomes the dominant motif.
I’m telling you, people are dying from this disease. Or going mad. They long for their childhood, and they start acting like five-year-olds. A sixty-year-old who starts acting like a five-year-old should be committed. They either die or go mad. I’m terribly scared.
I should wind this up soon. What was the core of Zionism? Not reconstritis. That was a spice in the mix, an impetus, an anthem, a poem, a longing, and a life force. What was it, the core? You may be surprised, but it’s terribly hard for me to answer this. It’s hard because there were completely different answers to this across the board. You couldn’t find, at least in my childhood, and perhaps even today, two people who would agree on what the purpose of the Zionist enterprise actually was. To restore the kingdom of David and Solomon? To bring a shtetl here from Eastern Europe and replicate it in Bnei Brak or Mea Shearim such as we had there? Or to build a North African mellah here such as we had in Marrakesh? Or to establish here the ideal enlightened Scandinavian social democracy? Fundamentally, the religious parties in Israel today, United Torah Judaism or Agudath Israel–or whatever they’re called–that want a shtetl are not all that different from the Jewish Home Party, which merely wants to bring back the kingdoms of David and Solomon. Nor is the party I’ve been voting for for many years that different, which says we want nothing less than Scandinavia here. What’s good for them will be good for us. Our ideal is Scandinavia in the land of Canaan.
But there were others too. In the neighborhood I grew up in, Kerem Avraham, I’d heard that until the end of the 1920s, there was an apartment building, and on its second floor, there were two apartments facing each other. In one was a family in whose living room there was a big picture of Stalin, and in the apartment across the hall was a family in whose living room was a big picture of Mussolini. This was before Mussolini had made his alliance with Hitler. This was before my time. This was at a time when many Jews thought, this is what we need: a strong hand, militarism, muscular Judaism, order, an iron fist, trains leaving on time, centralized power. Enough with this Jewish turmoil! Enough with the perennial mess! Enough with the communal council! Give us Mussolini at his very best!
There were all kinds. There were those who wanted to make a kind of Tolstoyan paradise here–religious and anarchistic in equal parts–à la A. D. Gordon, a kind of spiritual purification, not through the synagogue, but a quasi-religious experience rooted in close contact with the earth and the intimacy of small communities, not big cities.
That was also in Zionism. Everything was. There were those who dreamed of coming here to sit on their verandas, just like the white colonialists in Kenya or Indonesia. They’d oversee the native laborers, treat them well, cure their ringworm and their trachoma, but they’d sit on their verandas. There’d be good work here. It’d be good for everyone. Everyone would enjoy themselves. We still have such people today. You better believe it. Many.
So, what was Zionism about? I can’t give you an answer other than the realization that we have nowhere else to go. Whatever the program may have been, whatever the goal may have been (beyond curing reconstritis), from Stalinist Marxism to Mussolini-esque quasi-fascism, and everything in between…
There were all kinds of things in between too. There was, for instance, a not-so-small group that dreamed of establishing here on Middle Eastern soil a lovely replica of the Kaiser’s Austria-Hungary, with good manners, with red roofs, with people addressing each other as Herr Doktor or Frau Direktorin, with total silence between two and four in the afternoon.
There were Zionist dreamers like that too. I could go on about it all night. I could write a whole trilogy about it. It was a federation of dreams, but they all agreed that whatever the dream was, it could only be here because we’d have a chance nowhere else. We tried.
On the one hand, we tried to shut ourselves away, not to disturb anyone, to sit in our towns and pray to God. “A community of Jews, with neither shovel nor sword, awaits the messiah,” wrote Uri Zvi Greenberg. They didn’t let us. On the other hand, we tried to assimilate, we tried to be like them, we tried to convert to Christianity, but that didn’t help us either.
In the same area of Silesia, on both sides of the prewar German-Polish border, six miles from each other, there were two Jewish towns that were mirror images of each other. One resembled the Bnei Brak of today. The Poles detested these Jews with a lethal hatred because they were different. “They don’t speak Polish. They don’t act like us. They don’t live like us. They’re not like us. They’re strangers. They’re aliens.” Six miles to the west, the Jews were hated because they were assimilating to the point that it would soon be impossible to distinguish between Jews and non-Jews. “Look at them. They already behave just like us. They dress like us. They already speak without an accent. They already eat our food.” They were hated either way.
The basic common denominator was this place: the Land of Israel.
What will happen next? I don’t know. I’m not a prophet. I’d also like to know. But I do know one thing from my profession as a storyteller. I know it as one who’s spent his whole life looking at the vicissitudes of man.
This table will remain a table until it’s recycled. Nothing else will come from it. A table it’ll always be. It’ll either be recycled or used as tinder in the Lag BaOmer pyre.
People can also surprise themselves, not just others. I’m not just talking about political figures. Who would have expected de Gaulle to grant independence to the Algerians? Same with Churchill, who dismantled the British Empire. Gorbachev. Begin and Sadat. Rabin, the hawk, and Peres, the hawk, shook hands with Arafat. Man is unpredictable.
There are many people here, and since I don’t know you personally, my question will be rhetorical. I won’t take a vote. Is there a single person in this hall, man or woman, are there any people here who at least once or twice in their lives haven’t surprised themselves to the point of asking themselves, “Why, is this really who I am? I can’t believe it’s who I am!”
Humanity is infinite, and I don’t know where the person will come from. People ask me who will do it, who will be the leader who will do it. I don’t know. I think that deep down most Israelis know that the operation must be performed and the land separated into two states. But it’s hard, it’s painful, it’s unpleasant. “Maybe it’s better to put it off. There’ll be a civil war, there’ll be riots, there’ll be blood. What’s the rush? There’s no one to talk to when the Arabs kill us, and bomb us, and burn us. Why talk when they just sit quietly and do nothing? How can we be wrong?”
But there may already be a man or woman among us who will tell Israelis, “Guys, deep down, you know this operation must be done, so let’s do it.” Deep down most of us know, including the right-wing voters. They’re just angry. “Besides, there’s no one to talk to. You don’t know them. I do. And these leftists presume to tell us what to do? What’s your rush anyway? Talk nicely to us first.” Deep down most Israelis know this operation must be done.
How do I know this? From where? From the simple fact that ninety percent of Israelis are hawks and doves, ninety percent of Israelis are religious and secular, ninety percent of Israelis haven’t been to the territories for at least twenty years, ever since they stopped replacing radiators with ones bought for cheap in Qalqilya. They may be for them, against them, they may vote accordingly, but they don’t go there. It’s not a part of them.
When courageous leadership comes along and says, “Guys, this is it, it’s time for the operation. Deep down you’ve known this all along….” When will it be? I can’t say. Who will it be? I can’t say; it’s impossible. Not only don’t I know, he or she doesn’t know yet either. It’ll be a surprise not only to us.
Just as it was when Begin surprised himself. Think of this irony of history: In 1967, Levi, son of Deborah, Eshkol–a Gordonist, a Tolstoyan from Kibbutz Degania–found himself ruling over the largest Hebrew kingdom since King David. Levi Eshkol–practically a pacificist, a vegetarian, a Tolstoyan, a Gordonist, a man of peace.
A decade after him, exactly ten years, came the former Betar commissioner of Poland, Jabotinsky’s man, and dismantled this empire for the sake of peace. So don’t talk to me about “irreversible” facts on the ground. Only death is irreversible, and that’s something I’ll soon find out firsthand. I don’t know if I’ll be able to report back to you about it, but I’ll test it out anyway. Nothing is irreversible. It’s about leadership. It’s about telling people what they already know deep down.
I’d like to end with two little stories. First, what’s leadership? When I was a young student, I had a notebook in which I’d collected at least forty or fifty definitions of leadership going back to the ancient Greek philosophers–I can’t remember what was in the notebook. I lost it–through to Machiavelli, Bismarck, Churchill, and so on. What’s leadership? Do you know who gave the best definition of leadership? A simple, provincial farmer from a backwater in Middle America, the town of Independence, Missouri. His name was Harry Truman. After he finished up all his business in the White House, he returned to his hometown to be a high school music teacher one day a week. He didn’t write much of a memoir because he wasn’t really a man of letters.
A visiting journalist sat with him to record three hundred hours of interviews, later published in the colorful, unpolished language of this farmer’s son. Among other things the journalist asked him–I’ll say the following in Hebrew–he asked, “Mr. President, what does it feel like to sit in the Oval Office and be the most powerful man in the world?” Truman cradled his cheeks in his hands and shook his head from side to side like an old woman and said something like this: “Oh my. Oh my. If a man happens to sit in the Oval Office thinking that he’s the mightiest guy in the world, this guy is in big, big trouble. And so is his country, and so is the world.”
And here it comes–inscribe it on tablets of stone: “When you sit in the Oval Office, you’re in the perfect position to convince people to do things that deep down in their hearts they know they should do but don’t feel like doing.”
I’m telling you, this borders on genius. Forcing people to do things isn’t leadership. Bribing them isn’t leadership. Flattering them isn’t leadership. Leadership is telling people something that deep down they know needs to be done, but they don’t want to do–paying taxes, for example, dividing this country into two states. Who will be the person to convince Jewish Israelis to do something that they know deep down needs to be done?
Here’s the second and final story. I did my reserve duty in the armored corps at its headquarters in Qastina. The major general at the time was Israel Tal, a friend of mine from university. We studied philosophy together.
I was sitting in some godforsaken office on a dismal winter day translating hopelessly boring technical materials from English into Hebrew for a training manual. That’s why I was drafted into the reserves. Talik also must have been bored in his office because he said to his aide-de-camp, “Call Amos. I want to talk to him.” I knew he wanted to talk about Spinoza. I walked to his office in the rain, and we duly sat and talked. (Incidentally, his aide-de-camp was Leora Meridor, Dan Meridor’s wife.) As he and I talked, in front of the brigade commander’s window looking out onto the road, the master sergeant had a group of fresh recruits running back and forth in the heavy rain, soaked to the bone, sloshing through puddles. “Up! Down! Up! Down!” Talik pressed the button on the intercom, and said to Leora, “Call Shlomo, the first sergeant. I want to talk to him for a moment.”
In walks the first sergeant, Shlomo, saluting his commander.
“Shlomo, who are these people outside?”
“They’re not even trainees yet. They still haven’t been assigned.”
“So what are they doing here?”
“Commander, they’ve been sent here to do basic tasks pending their assignment.”
“So why aren’t they doing basic tasks?”
“The rain, commander.”
“Then why are you giving them a hard time and having them run around, Shlomo?”
“Commander, I’m having them do this because I don’t want them to forget who they are.”
Then something happened I’ll never forget. Talik put his arm around Shlomo and led him to the window. Meanwhile, the whole platoon stood at ease in front of the window, waiting for the sergeant to get back to hazing them. Talik, embracing him, said,“Shlomo, who are you? We all already know. You’re one of the best first sergeants in the IDF and in a few months you’ll retire. Who are they? You don’t know yet. Who are they? Look at the scrawny guy who keeps cinching up his oversized pants. For all we know, he could be the next Beethoven. The one there, the guy whose pants won’t button, who’s constantly drying his glasses. Maybe he’ll be the next Bialik one day. That one in the back row. You don’t know. He looks really goofy, pitiful, but maybe he’s the next Einstein. That one in the corner. Maybe he’ll be the chief of staff one day.”
Taken aback, Shlomo could only ask, “Just a second, commander, who’s the one that’ll be the chief of staff?”
So, I can’t give you the answer: I don’t know who it’ll be. But it’s quite possible–though I wouldn’t necessarily take it to the bank–that a man, a woman, a group of people will come along and do just what President Truman defined as leadership. In other words, they’ll tell the people of Israel, “You know this in your heart, you haven’t been to the territories for a long time. You know they’re not part of the homeland. You know you can live perfectly well without them. Now let’s get it done. It’ll be difficult. It’ll be complicated. It’ll be painful. But let’s get it done and get it over with.” The whole reckoning is not over yet. Thank you very much.