Israel's war with itself

[bemildred]

This seems slightly incoherent to me, perhaps as simple as that "gossip" is not the meaning intended where that word is used, but it makes some sound points and observations.

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As we head into yet another round of peace talks and the heat is turned up on the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, it's crucial to understand the divisions that run beneath Israeli life. There's the rift between Arabs and Jews, yes; the rift between Labor and Likud, yes; but there's also the rift between descendants of the Peace Party and descendants of the Zealots, evident in the never-ending debate: Are we too stubborn, or not stubborn enough? Are we too hated, or too afraid of being hated? Are we too aggressive, or has our fear of appearing aggressive caused us to sit in the sun as old Nebuchadnezzar builds his nuclear gallows?

In the 19th century, when the first modern Zionists decamped from Russia, they came with many theories but a shared intention -- to build a country where being a Jew would be so inconsequential that being a Jew would cease to have meaning. Only in a nation filled with Jews, they believed, could a Jew be free of being a Jew. These were secularists, scientists, students of the Enlightenment. They, and the waves of immigrants who followed them, became the elite of the new community: the left-wing politicians, professionals and kibbutzniks who built Israel, which they envisioned as a pragmatic, sane little country free of zealotry. For years, this state went unrecognized by certain ultra-religious Jews, to whom it was a grotesque presumption because, in their view, only the Messiah can gather in the exiles and restore the Kingdom. In the state of Israel after independence, many of them were marginalized -- and marginalized themselves -- while the state was run by the progressive secularists, epitomized by David Ben-Gurion, the country's first prime minister.

But the national mood began to change in 1967, when, as a result of the Six-Day War, Israel took control of old Jerusalem with its holy places and the West Bank of the Jordan River, the Judea and Samaria of the Bible. The images of the war -- Israeli tanks in the tight lanes of Jerusalem, the Star of David flying above the Temple Mount, Jewish soldiers praying at the Western Wall, a remnant of the Second Temple complex -- were too powerful. People went mad with the miracle of it. For certain groups of religious Jews, the victory seemed to prove that God had in fact been involved all along -- that Yahweh was the secret force behind Zionism. No longer sinners, secular leaders like Ben-Gurion were now seen as dumb beasts, in the nature of the ass that pulls the cart with the tablets, knowing neither why nor whither it goes.

In this way, the Zealots got back into the Temple and then wandered out to the West Bank, where they built and prayed. In the years that followed, they and their right-wing allies gained political power, especially after the 1977 election of Menachem Begin, the first non-Labor Party prime minister of Israel. In this way, the argument resumed. The positions are basic: For one group, Israel is the only place a Jew can stop being a Jew; for the other, Israel is the only place a Jew can live an authentically Jewish life.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-cohen21-2009jul21,0,7835710.story