A confusing identity

The Jerusalem Post
6 May ’04

One of the left’s most celebrated gurus recently tried to explain our existential predicament, the true, if hidden nature of our conflict with the Palestinian Arabs.

Our guru, A.

B.

Yehoshua has also devised a solution that may heal not only our guilt-ridden Israeli psyche, but will also resolve a deep conflict besetting our very nature as Jews.

The amazingly simple solution is a unilateral withdrawal from practically all of the West Bank, the eradication of most of the settlements (an original sin if there ever was one, for Yehoshua) and the demarcation of a fenced border along the 1967 line.

Filed under:

Zionism

A. B. Yehoshua

It will, Yehoshua believes, resolve the deep source of our conflict with the Arabs “situations of lunacy that are created by identity chaos”. If we will finally stop acting as an abnormal religious and national hybrid – Yehoshua assures us – and define ourselves instead unambiguously as secular “Israelis”, a normal nation with a discrete territory, its own language and well-defined identity, we will stop provoking not only Arab murderous rage, but a resurgent European anti-Semitism. Moreover, once we address this “pathology and derangement” that provokes people to hate Jews we will be free to react in full force to any further Arab attacks, even by a brutal war.

The novelist Yehoshua has always been making great – and dangerous – leaps from personal to national concerns, from individual anxieties and neuroses to national ones. A good practice, perhaps, in fiction, a dangerous one in reality. It entangles him in many distortions and contradictions and casts a dark shadow on his proud liberalism.

Yehoshua interviewer, Ha’aretz star columnist Ari Shavit asks him whether the immigration of Jews from Arab lands endangered his almost heroic, self-conscious efforts to discard his Sephardi (on his father’s side) and Morrocan (mother’s) identity and define himself as a Sabra. Yes, Yehoshua admits, “it endangered my identity.” His elitist mother, Yehoshua explains, “was frightened terribly” that the arrival of “more popular groups” (as he so delicately puts it) will impede her children’s progress in Israeli culture. She strengthened there a powerful resolve to deny their past and define themselves by a new, invented “Israeli” identity.

It was, ironically, something many Israelis, especially Ashkenazi ones, were laboring hard to achieve. Socialist Zionism’s chief definition of self was in terms of negation, the negation of “exilic” Judaism and of all middle class virtues as essentially degenerate. Perhaps it was this definition of identity by negation and by a denial of an authentic, past rooted self, that so strongly impelled many Sabras, Yehoshua included, to self-consciously labor to construct a new, distinct identity, a fenced in reality; and perhaps this effort is the source of the neurotic anxiety inflicting them. “The call for freedom”, D.H. Lawrence observed, “is often the clang of chains.” Yehoshua’s great ado, his obsession with Israeli identity may actually be the expression of a rootless circumscribed Israeli identity that artificially and willfully tries to replace its Jewish origins with an invented secular “medittereaneanness”, a conceit that reflects nihilistic denial and abnegation.

“Yes, yes,” Yehoshua enthuses, “I think it is a primary right of a person to create his identity. Identity is something you decide on. Something you choose.” Compare this cry of his heart with Heraclitus’ profound dictum that “Man’s character is his destiny,” and wonder how a talented author, who traced our past so imaginatively, can seriously entertain such a shallow notion about identity, as a willfully invented artifice.

Identity, Yehoshua elaborates, can not only be willed into being, it can also be enforced – perhaps should be enforced? – from the outside, for virtuous purposes, of course. Thus the usually very liberal Yehoshua, opposed to any cohersion, is full of enthusiasm for the French prohibition on head coverings (for Moslem girls) because this will enable his dear France to “digest” its five million Muslims “in (its) centralistic tummy”. Some liberalism!

Yehoshua even confesses that he accepts the enforced “acculturation” in the fifties of new immigrants from Arab countries. “The melting pot was the right idea” he avers. “You had to subject them to modernization and place them within rational systems.” The Moloch of a “rational system” (a curious appellation for the Bolshevik system then in place in Israel), Yehoshua believes, justified even the sacrifice of basic individual rights, the subjugation of people, even if it was “done a bit brutally” as he admits. Forget all the harm and misery inflicted on these hapless souls, forget those who keep languishing to these days in the so called development towns created by Yehoshua’s “rational system”. As long as they can be dragged into “modernity” and enlightened by the “values” of leftist progress, the breakup of everything traditional that protected them, family, ethnicity, seems justified to this great liberal.

Yehoshua’s becomes especially vague and abstract when dealing with the dangerous reality of the Arab Israeli conflict. Committed to liberal even-handedness, he apportions guilt for the bloody conflict equally. “I am not only a victim,” Yehoshua declares for all of us, “I am also a murderer.” This profundity leads to “guilt vis-a-vis the Palestinians,” and as guilt usually does, it totally distorts his judgment.

So while Yehoshua admits “that the old concept of the left, of territories for peace, wasn’t working,” that “it’s no longer possible to ignore the irrational elements [sic] in Palestinian behavior,” he expresses no apologies, no remorse, for the terrible calamity that Oslo has inflicted on Israelis and Palestinian alike. “Look, I went to Geneva, I adopted that,” he cheerfully goes on, “and I still think,” he insists, “that it is right for something like this to be poised on the horizon and say ‘Look, it can be done.’” This does not stop him from asserting right away that Geneva “cannot be implemented. It is not practicable.”

And so it goes. The willful and artificial search for a made up identity, and for a conceited simplistic “solution” leads from one contradiction to another. Instead of enlightening us our guru is simply adding to the confusion.

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