Why do our intellectuals, media people and public figures express themselves in such a monolithic fashion? Prof. Amnon Rubinstein, a former Minister of Education, described them recently as “a unitary choir… [that lacks] critical polyphony, singing only one unitary note, [expressing] a collectivist taste.”

Since over fifty percent of the electorate vote center to right, it is also a puzzle why the vast majority of our elites are leftist, often extremely so. And why is there so little creative ferment and almost no dissent within the left?

Our educational system seems the key. The sabras, noted Prof. Yonathan Shapiro (in his “An Elite Without Successors”) “have absorbed a one-dimensional Zionist indoctrination, severed from Jewish and general culture. They lacked therefore the means to translate their [experience] into independent thought and action. This has turned them into an imitative [and obedient] generation.”

The indoctrination, Shapiro explains, was actually Socialist. Rabidly anti-bourgeois, anti-religious and anti-Jewish, it spawned a negative, shallow and conformist youth, capable of accepting “only one political view partial and tendentious a static unchanging view of reality”

University education has not helped. It merely covers up basic ignorance and narrow-mindedness with a veneer of professionalism and pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo. The domination of primary and secondary education by the socialist ethos was thus perpetuated (sometimes with Stalinist overtones) in the humanities and the social “sciences”, where our elites’ world view is shaped. It has been creating not only ill- or misinformed students, but people incapable of thinking straight, concretely, and lacking a moral anchor (recently under the influence of post-modernist and neo-marxist fads). Instead, they indulge in generalizations, vague abstractions and Utopian daydreams.

A striking example of how our best and brightest think appeared recently in an Ha’aretz book review by one of the most respected elders of the Hebrew University’s political science department, Professor Zeev Sternhell. Sternhell wrote a book trying to prove that Socialism was never really practiced by the Zionist left, because regretably, he feels, it was more interested in building a nation than in creating a perfectly equal society. Inventing his own definition of Socialism, he simply ignores the fact that since the early twenties Socialism was religiously practiced here in its most pristine form by the radical left that came to dominate Zionism. It achieved an almost total “public ownership of the means of production”, near total collectivization of agriculture and it established the Kibbutzim, communities that came closest to perfect communism. It also instituted a massive redistribution of capital and income. But Sternhell, who sets impossible Utopian standards for Socialism, is not satisfied. The only leftists he praises as true to the cause were members of the communist Labor Brigades of the twenties, many of whom returned to Communist Russia because, like him, they found Zionist Socialism wanting.

But then Sternhell believes that “Socialism means the right of a person to be his own master, to be free from historical constraints, not to be enslaved by the cultural and economic order” (it would be just as easy to “liberate” people from gravity too).

Paradoxically, the only practical means for accomplishing such miraculous “liberation”, Sternhell suggests, is state coercion to effect a “massive transfer of resources from property owners to the weak strata…”

But such massive transfers have been already tried, with dismal results. Unimpressed, Sternhell insists that “even when it does not yet have an alternative to the capitalist order, Socialism denies the legitimacy of this order” He seems oblivious to the fact that when Socialism invests government with enough power to force such a “transfer”, its power is bound to be politically abused and corrupted. The poor may be helped in the short run, but at the cost of making them welfare dependent and mired deeper ino a culture of poverty, as has happened everywhere, including Israel.

But a professor who dreams about liberating people from history, culture and even economics is obviously not interested in how reality works. Which is his perfect right, except that confusing dreams with reality can mentally cripple his inexperienced students who may believe him that you can undermine social institutions with impunity, and transform them overnight by revolution; that the slow painful progress required for real advances is a cop out. Much of the nihilism that plagues Israeli society can be traced to the disenchantment with such false prophesies by Utopians who do not even bother to understand how an economy works, or learn what can, and what cannot, be realistically accomplished.

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