The new Hebrew Azure is out, with plenty of goodies - including a very enlightening article about the differences between value-laden education and education that focuses solely on equality. I would like to dedicate this post to another enlightening article by Asaf Sagiv on the mentality of the radical Israeli anti-Zionist left.
Sagiv, editor of Azure, is in my opinion a brilliant and erudite intellectual historian. His essays explaining the thought of various radical thinkers are always clear, concise and fair. Even if one doesn't agree with the views of his subjects, and I certainly don't, he succeeds in presenting their side of things in easy-to-understand manner.
Sagiv tries to explain the position of radicals like Adi Ofir, Yehouda Shenhav (this is how Shenhav spells his first name in English) and Ariella Azoulai as one not of hatred, or self-hatred, but rather of despair. The radicals have convinced themselves that the entire Zionist enterprise is one long act of evil and oppression, one which cannot be separated with "cutting-off points" like the 1948 refugee problem or the six-day war. The differences between "green-line" Zionists and settlers are for them purely cosmetic; the entire state and Zionist society is one large empty void, a dark void so malevolent it conjures up horrifying 1984-esque images of a totalitarian atomizing state that will snuff out all hope.
Having convinced themselves of Israel's unredeemable nature, these radicals are focused entirely on the act of destruction (or deconstruction) of the void, withdrawing completely from any attempt at reform. The attempts at boycott, of derision and violent anti-Zionist rhetoric; these are the acts of people who have become so ostensibly desperate that they believe that only through negation and destruction – "resistance" in their terminology – can anything be accomplished.
So far, this is Sagiv's take. While I'm sure many if not most radicals believe in this vision, I cannot help but see the underlying pathology of radicalism that taints their view of the world. Radicals tend to see things in essentialist terms that often have only tenuous ties to real life; Israeli radicals are no exception. They have no interest in real life, in facts, in shades of grey and actual people. They remind me of many a Russian radical pre-1917 who claimed to speak as "the general will" of the people or the proletariat despite having never actually gained their consent to act on their behalf.
The examples are strewn throughout Sagiv's article. They refer to "the state" as an idea and not the actual state and how it functions, either then or now. The 1948 Palestinian refugee problem is a cosmic event made with a Zionist wave of the hand and not a messy, complicated process borne of a violent national conflict. Actual positive reforms and changes that help the disadvantaged mean nothing to them, since there is either total equality or total darkness. One gets the impression from much of the rhetoric that the Zionist project has to do with a great cosmic clash between Good and Evil rather than serious disputes between fallible human beings. Under such conditions, their despair stems, in my opinion, not from objective reality, but from the underlying assumptions that guide their thought, a mirror image of their essentialist view of how they think Zionism works.
So what am I saying? It's simple. While radicals may be convinced that their's is a position of despair, I argue that this despair is borne of a view of the world that cannot possibly actually deal with the world as it is, with its flaws and foibles. It is a pathology, a powerful and intoxicating philosophical drug that both convinces the bearer of his righteousness and absolves him of the need to get his hands dirty. These people put on themselves the mantle of prophets speaking His word, only they replace themselves with the actual Almighty Blessed be He.
Against people like that, we need to marshal the reformers and the centrists, people of action and not just pure vision. We need more realists. We need more Yaacov Lozowicks and Shalem Centers, more people who deal with the real world and its problems, who can offer real-life solutions and not utopias and apocalyptic visions.
We need to deal with the world as it really is, not as we think it should be.
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