When our distinguished poet Haim Gouri agonizes (in a monologue poignantly rendered by Ari Shavit in Ha’aretz Magazine) over a possible threat to Israel’s very survival as a Jewish state posed by the “collapse” of our “ethos of standing up firm”, we should listen to his ruminations with alarm; for their insights, of course, but also because they reveal a continued part-blindness of the generation that created his “collapsed world”, that discourages a process of healing.

Shavit correctly characterizes Gouri’s moving monologue as the “summing up by a tribal elder” of the Zionist tragedy. Gouri wonders why we are plagued by a “culture of contrition and guilt” that saps our will to fight even for our very survival; why our young, raised to sacrifice all for “the land”, have such weak roots, that they can easily “integrate in Los Angeles”; why have we lost that “multiplier of strength” that comes from “being besieged” and “being right”, though “standing firm” is still so crucial?

Gouri believes that the terrible wars foisted upon us by a brutal enemy, the ferocious struggle for survival, have “branded us with the mark of Cain”, shaking our moral confidence. He also thinks that our rootlessness stems from the fact that exile “is part of (the Jew’s) DNA”, that we are “at bottom an anarchic” people, that is bound to be dissatisfied with a “too small” Israel.

Nevertheless Gouri is proud of his Socialist Zionist past, nostalgically depicting its beginnings in a youthful, fervently ideological Tel Aviv. His only past regret is that, “like an archer, who must close one eye to focus and hit his target”, he was partially blinded by a brutal War of Independence to Arab suffering, to the “world we were forced to destroy”. “Human instincts broke (then) loose”, he explains, and beastly acts perpetrated that he “should not have let go by in silence”.

Gouri defensively insists, however, that despite its “soul destroying… tangled web of contradictions… the world I grew up in was not a total lie”.

Cultures have “collapsed”, however, for living less than “a total lie”. Fairly recently, the Soviet empire disintegrated as a result of similar “contradictions” to those lived by our own left, when it professed to establish an egalitarian society yet organized, Gouri admits, “small leading cadres who…decided things”, the privileged elites that still run the country. These “cadres”, many fine people misled by a totalitarian ideology, literally took over the Zionist enterprise and all its resources, as if by birthright, and dictated to others where and how to live. Since the twenties, they allotted themselves (in the case of the collectivist agricultural establishment) the best land, and most capital and resources, while new immigrant settlers had to survive on very little. They praised international Labor solidarity but deprived Arab workers of livelihood, and subsequently imposed on those who “did not belong” a discriminatory, disabling economic system. They witnessed, some first hand, heinous Communist oppression, yet they kept promoting its falsehoods and worshipping its murderous leaders, never ever expressing regret. No wonder they eventually lost all credibility, especially among the young who came to consider Socialist Zionism self serving hypocrisy.

More significantly, everyone with eyes open could have seen how the brutal suppression by the left’s bolshevik campaign of intimidation of its nationalist and traditionalist opponents (climaxing in the Arlozorov blood libel), tore this nation apart. And everyone could see how collectivism failed both economically and socially. Yet Gouri remains silent on how, since its beginnings, the left squandered most national resources and how its radicalism totally politicized, brutalized and corrupted every facet of life. Dominating education and culture, it created a narrow- minded indoctrinated youth that fell easy prey to the siren songs of the anti-Zionist, nihilistic New Left, filling the void left by the collapse of radical Socialism.

Gouri acknowledges that the “almost anarchic” left “sanctified the profane and profaned the sacred”. Yet he fails to see how left’s fiercely “anti-religious” (namely Jewish) and anti-nationalist campaign (except, as he observes, the “earth and blood” indoctrination) had to lead to its youth’s eventual rejection of our Jewish and nationalist roots in the land. Gouri also fails to notice how a ferocious anti-bourgeois indoctrination created some of the Sabra’s unsavory characteristics such as sloppiness, unreliability, lack of individual accountability etc.) Franz Oppenheimer, a fervent Socialist, observed already in 1926 that the local leftists were “people possessed by a murky mixture of Utopian Communism and… anarchism, yearning for impossible goals by impossible means, trying to establish what they know are absolutely unrealizable Utopias”. Gouri coyly names it “some sort of Socialism”.

Even blind poets can sometimes hit, like Gouri’s archer, profound insights. But to reach true understanding they must keep their inner eye honestly, widely open.

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