www.danielgordis.org

When David Ben Gurion met the philosopher Isaiah Berlin in December 1950, the Prime Minister apparently didn't make much of an impression. Berlin, his biographer Michael Ignatieff reports, thought Ben Gurion a "peasant leader -- rough, ruthless, and cunning." And Isaiah Berlin, apparently, did not consider that description a compliment.

In some ways, though, it's surprising that Berlin was so dismissive of Ben Gurion. After all, it was Berlin himself who pointed to the fact that in "real life," ideology and practice cannot always come together neatly. In Berlin's own words, "Some of the Great Goods cannot live together. That is a conceptual truth. We are doomed to choose, and every choice may entail an irreparable loss." Real life is messy. Life in the Middle East is very messy. In this part of the world, Ben Gurion, with all his warts, was exactly what we needed.

Berlin was no great fan of Israel, quite the contrary. But he described, decades ago, precisely the loss with which many Israelis are now coming to terms. If four years ago, many of us were convinced that we could have Israeli security coupled with a more benevolent foreign policy, we suspect now, sadly, that we were wrong. If we believed that we could both stay alive and embody the moral standards advocated in the rarified halls of American Ivy League Universities, we acknowledge today that that was probably naive. That realization, that we simply cannot live up to all the principles that long guided us as human beings and as Jews, may be, after the loss of life on both sides, the saddest part of what's happened here. To be able to wake up and face the next day, some of us -- many more than we realize, I suspect -- have had to become people very different from the people we prided ourselves on being not that long ago. And that is a profound loss.

The war is calming down, at least for now. Deaths from terror were down 50% in 2003 from 2002 (due in no small measure due to the much maligned security fence). They haven't ceased, and there will undoubtedly be worse periods, but we've proven to the Palestinians and to the world that terror is not going to uproot this society. We've persevered. In many respects, we've won. A horrible price paid on both sides, and a conflict that we, at least, didn't want, but we've won. For now.

"For now," because the battles are far from over. It's clear here that Israel is now getting ready for the next showdown -- a showdown not with the Palestinians, or even the Arab world, but with ourselves. And in that showdown, what will win the day will not be force. Or classic battlefield bravery. Or the passionate ideological conviction(s) upon which this country was built and which will remain critical if we can convince our kids to stay here and to face a life that is much less easy, much less safe, much less wealthy, and much more demanding than the lives that they could lead elsewhere. What will ultimately enable us to survive is the recognition that even though Berlin was wrong about some of his appraisals of Israel, he was right when he reminded us that not all the "Great Goods" can co-exist. We're going to have to give up on some of them, and accept the pain of knowing what we've lost.

Our kids are often better at facing that pain than we are. Wednesday was a busy day. Elisheva and I both worked late, and hadn't had even a moment to touch base during the day. So, by the time we finally got home after eight o'clock and sat down for a quick dinner, the kids had already eaten and gone on to whatever they'd had planned for the evening. Only Avi was home.

As we were catching each other up on our respective days, Elisheva made brief mention of the suicide attack at the Erez crossing, in which a 22 year old Palestinian mother of two small children blew herself up, killing four Israelis in their twenties. It had made the news, of course, but the country was hardly hysterical. (Just like Christmas day, when another bomber killed four people at a Tel Aviv area bus stop, and people barely stopped to notice or to mention it.) It was, in some ways, such a non-event that Avi hadn't even heard about it. But he overheard our conversation and asked what had happened. Elisheva gave him the basics.

He kind of shook his head and went back upstairs to his room. And I thought about that exchange. He was right, of course. He was right that four people is terrible. He was right that we dare not get so used to this that "only four" seems acceptable. He was right that we need to feel the grief that was then splayed across Friday's papers with photographs of the funerals, interviews with family members (one of which focused on the dead soldier's discussions with his father about how terrible he felt for the Palestinians who had to line up every day and go through the security inspection to get across the border.) He was right, mostly, that we had better get used to feeling the pain of loss. For in the next phase of what will happen here, a willingness to accept real pain and real loss is the only thing that may save us.

Ariel Sharon, whatever other faults he has (and they are many), gets it. The same general who defied orders in the 1973 Yom Kippur War and recaptured the Sinai when the high command thought it impossible and too dangerous, has now decided that the present boundaries are simply unsustainable. So Sharon has said, very publicly, that if Abu Ala doesn't reign in terror and start a real peace process, he, Sharon, will pull back the army, unilaterally establish new borders and redeploy the army in a way that it can actually be effective.

The right, of course, is accusing Sharon of caving in to the left. And the left is busy accusing him of harming the Palestinians by putting up the fence. What Sharon has done, though, I think, is declare an end to ideology. The right's ideology that the land can never be forsaken, Sharon has effectively said, endangers the very survival of the country. It must be compromised, he has declared. And the left's desire to pretend that we border Canada, not the Palestinian Authority, Sharon says, is myopic. That myopia, Sharon is saying, cannot be allowed to determine policy. The one ideology that we need to hang on to for now is . survival. Because survival in the current state of affairs is by no means guaranteed.

Sharon isn't the only one advocating a willingness to live with the loss of ideological neatness. The most recent example is Professor Benny Morris of the Ben Gurion University. Morris, famous as one of the leading Israeli "new historians", long associated (incorrectly, Morris insists) in most people's minds with the radical left, gave an interview to HaAretz that was published a week ago. The author of "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949," Morris had regularly been excoriated by the right as being just short of a traitor, as having humiliated Israel internationally for exposing her role in forcing many of the refugees out of their homes in the early years of the State and for having proven that the Israeli mythology that all the Palestinians simply fled was simply untrue.

Now, it was Morris' turn to explain the difference between history and ideology (he didn't frame it that way). Historically, he noted, what happened happened. There were, in fact, expulsions. There was, in fact, murder. (Though not nearly as much as some suspected.) There were, in fact, rapes. (Though unforgivable, they were extraordinarily few, he notes, compared to the behavior of other armies.)

But history, he notes, isn't the same as ideology. The history is what he knows. But that has nothing to do with what he believes. And what does he believe? A few brief quotes will suffice to give the basic sense. "In certain conditions, expulsion is not a war crime. I don't think that the expulsions of 1948 were war crimes. . A society that aims to kill you forces you to destroy it. When the choice is between destroying or being destroyed, it's better to destroy."

Morris continues, "A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore, it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. . It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on."

And what about the Palestinians who suffered? "I feel sympathy for the Palestinian people, which truly underwent a hard tragedy. . But if the desire to establish a Jewish state here is legitimate, there was no other choice. It was impossible to leave a large fifth column in the country. From the moment the Yishuv [pre-1948 Jewish community in Palestine] was attacked by the Palestinians and afterward by the Arab states, there was no choice but to expel the Palestinian population. To uproot it in the course of war."

And finally, perhaps the most quoted segment of the much longer interview: "But I do not identify with Ben-Gurion. I think he made a serious historical mistake in 1948. Even though he understood the demographic issue and the need to establish a Jewish state without a large Arab minority, he got cold feet during the war. In the end, he faltered. . I assert that a mistake was made here. . The non-completion of the transfer was a mistake."

The interview has, as one might expect, rocked much of Israeli intellectual society. The left, predictably, is outraged and disgusted. Some of the right is now willing to "forgive" him. But the debate about whether he is "right" or "wrong," or discussions (among some that I've heard) about what it is in his personality that drives him from one extreme to the other, miss the point completely. Morris (who in 1988 was also jailed for refusing to do military duty in the territories) has done something very important. He has brought Isaiah Berlin home to roost. Morris is asking us to think about the most important question Israel has to face. "What ideological convictions," he is essentially asking us, "are you willing to give up on in order to survive?" Or put otherwise, in addition to human rights and the love of the land, does the survival of the Jewish State also count as one of your core values? Because if it does, you'd better wake up. You can't have American-Canadian foreign policy here and survive, and you can't have all the land and survive. We're going to have to pick our losses, and they are going to be painful.

Israel is, I think, the land of the Cyclopes. I've taken more than my share of drives through the West Bank in the last three years, almost always in the company of friends (the West Bank is one area where I'm not terribly keen on getting lost on my own). And I'm stunned by how differently some of these people -- all of whom are decent, moral and Jewishly sensitive -- see the places we drive.

There are those who drive through the West Bank, and gazing out upon a landscape virtually identical to how it must have appeared in biblical times, see, quite rightly, Eretz Yisrael. For them, the idyllic images of the rocky, rolling hills, olive and acacia trees that dot the landscape, and even flocks of sheep grazing without any humans in sight, are a moving visage of what our ancestors probably saw when they were here. The pastoral beauty of the place, and its obvious biblical resonance, make it difficult for these people to imagine relinquishing this land to anyone, much less to those to those who for decades have dedicated themselves -- and often still dedicate themselves -- to our destruction. For these friends of mine, who see and feel the land, its beauty, and our (I believe understandable) attachment to it, the trading of land for peace is so painful as to be either unthinkable, or something that must come only after the Palestinians meet a series of expectations that are made so demanding (no matter how legitimate they might be) as to render them impossible.

But other friends of mine, who drive with me along the very same roads, look out the same windows and see not land, but people. They focus on the small villages and the larger towns that dot the landscape. They see small children, often living in fairly obvious poverty, and even adults who, if they are less than 37 years old, have never lived a day without our army's occupying them. Then, these Israelis simply decide that this reality is untenable. We must, they decide, simply end the occupation, for the occupation is (as even Ariel Sharon has now said) terrible for them and for us. Then these people, who see not Eretz Yisrael but an occupied, indigenous Palestinian population, lower the bar of expectations, sometimes to the point of making no demands on the Palestinians at all, without any thoughtful regard to the undeniable security threat that some (many?) of those very people constitute.

What strikes me on each of these drives, though, is that whoever I'm with sees with either one eye or the other. Either the land, or the people. Very few see both. Very few are willing to admit the truths on the other side of the Israeli divide. Very few can contemplate giving up on any of the convictions which animate them. They could use an evening with Avi. Admit it, he would tell them. The next step here is going to be painful, very painful, and the one thing that will not work is pretending otherwise.

But even now, it's clear that those ideologies will die hard, and long before they die, Israelis will. The right (or some of it, to be fair) loves this land so much that they're willing to lose the whole country to keep the land. Sharon knows that the present situation is intolerable, and he knows that the current deployment is not sustainable. So he wants to cut the losses and save the country (which for the first time in its entire history just announced a negative consumer price index for 2003, as if the country needed more proof that time is running out). They won't leave, some of them say. Send in the army. Do what you want. But we're not budging.

Hmm, some Israelis say. Now that's going to be interesting. What are we actually going to do? Send in our kids to force those people out, risking our kids' getting hurt, knowing full well that the settlers will just go back the next day? That's kind of silly, no? So Avraham Poraz, the Minister of the Interior, says fine. Leave them there. We'll just pull the army back, and let them fend for themselves. They're not willing to recognize the rule of law? Let them deal with the Palestinians on their own, without the army to protect them.

The outcry, as one could have expected, was immediate. But not everything here is predictable. A couple of days later, I sat with a friend in Cafe' Hillel (rebuilt, reopened and thriving), and we got to talking about that. He's to the left of where I am, and I expected him to say Poraz was right. My friend's got a kid in the army. And he's in favor of pulling out. So why would he want his kid to possibly get hurt evacuating people who will just go back, again and again.

But he didn't go there. "I don't know," he said. "Rationally, I see his point. But I just couldn't do it. Leave them there? They'll get massacred. I don't think we can do it. We just can't."

"So," I asked him, playing devil's advocate. "You're willing for your kid to go in there, to get into a scuffle (assuming, in the best case scenario, that they won't actually use weapons), possibly get knocked off a roof, or tossed off a porch, or thrown down the stairs, just to get them out, when you know they'll go back the very next day and we can't really stop them?"

He thought for a moment and said, "I don't know. I really don't know." He paused, and then continued, "The way I see it, we've been due for a civil war for a long time. I guess we ought to just have it now and get it out of the way."

Sure enough, a day or two later, the big news was that Israeli forces had opened fire on an Israeli civilian who was participating in a protest against the fence, seriously wounding him. "Here it comes," I thought. "Didn't really take that long." But then, of course, the story got more complicated. The protest wasn't just a protest. They were actually damaging the fence. And the protest was organized by ISM (the same pro-Palestinian group that Rachel Corrie -- the young woman killed by the bulldozer some time back -- was from). Reality can be complicated. So the army announced that anyone who tries to damage the fence will be fired on. And then they brought charges against the still hospitalized wounded protester. And the story died down. But we got a glimpse of the future. There are a lot of weapons here, and a lot of ideological passion. It's not a great mix.

All of which could get one pretty depressed. For even if Sharon means what he says, he may not have the staying power, or the political assets, needed to pull this off. Or there may not be enough people here who think that Isaiah Berlin was right, and who will be willing, as painful as it may be, to sacrifice some of the ideologies on which they were raised. Or there may be real firing between Jews. Or The Hague may really declare the fence, the last chance we have to separate ourselves from those who still seek our destruction, a violation of some international law. And then what will happen?

And yet, just when one might be tempted to think that there's no way this can work out, that the mess is too much to bear, that the necessary compromises will never come to be, something happens here to shock you back into a conviction that it will be OK. That it simply has to be OK.

We went to an evening that Talia's high school senior class put on about their recent trip to Poland. For the first part of the evening, they'd put together a phenomenal slide show of where they'd been. Of the synagogues, many of which now stand empty. Of the communities that no longer exist. Of the concentration camps, and of the railroad tracks. In the background, they had music playing. And in the cramped, overcrowded auditorium, as a hundred parents watched the pictures of places most of us had never been, it was silent. Except for the music. And then, except for the music and one or two parents, singing along. And then, it was silent no more. Because everyone was singing. Some were crying, some were hugging their kids. Doctors, academics, lawyers, our bank teller, some journalists, a cop, some career soldiers, some natives and some immigrants, some left and some right, some hopeful and some not, they all sang. And reminded each other of what's still so extraordinary about this place, of why it simply has to make it.

Suddenly, sitting there among all these singing parents, I was reminded of everything we'd seen in Paris last month. Day schools filled beyond capacity, since Jewish kids are fleeing public schools because the schools have acknowledged that they can no longer protect them from the violence which has now become endemic there. Or a conversation at a Shabbat lunch table in which our Parisian hosts were discussing whether things were really as bad as everyone says, she insisting that they were, pointing out that a Jewish school had just been burned to the ground. And his disagreeing, say that "yes, they burned down a school, but only at night, and there was no one in it." Now that's comforting, no?

Or a recent French court case, in which a Moslem was sentenced by a Jewish judge, and he appealed, claiming that he could not get a fair hearing from a Jewish judge. The case went up the ladder of the French legal system, until a high court ruled that the sentence stood, because . the defendant had no real way of knowing with certainty that the judge actually was Jewish.

Or, when we asked people what they were doing to combat all this, the answer was, not much. Because the French feel very vulnerable now, and the last thing that the Jews want to do is to call attention to themselves. Because there really is an unspoken rule that Jewish institutions can only be burned at night, and no one wants to provoke a change in the rules. And because there's nothing they can really do. Except leave.

And come here, when they do. To the anger, to the confusion, to the excess of ideology. But to the singing, too.

When we got back to Israel on the way home, we collected our baggage and made our way through customs. Just as we were passing the customs officials, not exactly the place to start being cute, one of our group muttered, "finally, a normal country."

You had to be there, but it actually was incredibly funny, given how not normal that airport is. No jet-ways, so you have to get bussed from the plane to the terminal. Baggage claim that often breaks down, where people stand smoking right under the no smoking signs. And public bathrooms that look more or less like I imagine they do in the main airport of Mozambique. At the suggestion that this was finally a "normal country," a few of us started laughing, not because he was wrong, but because it was so strange that he was so right. We laughed because we were relieved to be out of Paris, relieved to be in a place that despite all its lunacy, is the place where we get to decide. Where we don't have to hide. And where, because of that, we're home.

Given Paris, with all its glory, its wide boulevards, museums, culture and even stability, or this place, where stability is nowhere in sight, I'll take this place. Every time. Any day. Because with everything that's wrong with it, it's still the only place where we can chart the course of our own destiny, where we don't have to leave our survival in the hands of others.

The real question now is whether enough people here are willing to lose enough of what they love and believe to save this place and to keep it that way. And that, only time will tell.

(c) 2003 Daniel Gordis

©Jason A. Miller