"The Oslo Syndrome," Part III

This is a review/summary of the book "The Oslo Syndrome: delusions of a
people under siege" by Kenneth Levin, Harvard psychologist and historian.
Part III deals with the period in Israel prior to the Oslo Accords.

The worst thing that ever happened to the leftist/universalist anti-Zionist
faction in Israel was not the 1967 Six Day War, nor the 1973 Yom Kippur War,
it was the 1977 election victory of Menachem Begin's Likud Party. A large
proportion of the academic left in Israel blamed the Arab wars against
Israel not on the Arabs themselves, but on the "nationalist" policies of
Israeli Governments, and these had been Labor Party Governments from the
founding of the State until then. But, Begin was anathema to them,
representing as he did the hated petit capitalists, religious elements and
poor Sephardim in Israel, that had spoiled their dreams of a (European
style) socialist or spiritual utopia.
Although this faction was small, representing maybe 5% of the population,
nevertheless they were influential, being a large proportion of the elite
that controlled the universities, educational institutions and much of the
civil service. The irony that the extreme socialists were the power elite
that hated the poorer elements of society would have been unthinkable in any
other "normal" country. It was the exclusion of the poor Sephardim and Jews
from Arab countries from most Government programs and their settlement in
the peripheral development towns of Israel, that disaffected them from
Labor, and eventually led them to help overthrow the Labor ascendancy (there
were other reasons, including the systematic embezzlement of Government
funds after 30 years in office by Labor Ministers and appointees, that led
to the suicide of the Housing Minister in 1976 and several trials).
It should be noted that the leftists had much greater demonstrable sympathy
for the plight of the Israeli Arabs, and for Arabs in general, than for the
poor Sephardic Jews, the Israeli petit bourgeois and religious
(Yiddish-speaking) Ashkenazim. This is very parallel with the preferences
of liberal German Jews for their German compatriots, however anti-Semitic
they were, than for the Eastern European and Russian Jews, whom they blamed
for bringing this anti-Semitism upon them.
I was living in Israel at the time of Begin's watershed election victory,
and I remember the day after in the coffee room at the Weizmann Institute.
Not only were there long faces, but the predictions were alarming, the
consensus of Israeli academics was that Begin would initiate a war with the
Arabs within three months, that he would fire most Labor incumbents, that he
would cause a mass exodus of Israelis, and that he would ruin the country.
Begin and his followers (Ezer Weizmann, Ariel Sharon) were spoken of in grim
terms, they were "criminals," "lunatics," "dangerous extremists" and
"fascists." The fact that none of these dire predications came true
illustrates the lack of reality in these prevalent views of the educated
Israeli elite. In fact, it was Begin who negotiated the peace treaty with
Sadat of Egypt.
Such was the extent of leftist shock at the loss of what they considered
their right to govern that in a famous exchange with an interviewer,
old-time Labor leader and former head of the Histadrut, Itzhak ben Aharon,
said that "the [election] results were a mistake." When the interviewer
pointed out that Israel is a democracy and "the people have spoken," he
replied that "the people are wrong!" Amos Oz, the famous leftist
(kibbutznik) writer stated revealingly, "Why didn't Israel develop as the
most egalitarian and creative social democratic society in the world? I
would say that one of the major factors was the mass immigration of
Holocaust survivors, Middle Eastern Jews and nonsocialist even
anti-socialist Zionists..." and "...evil days are upon us!" They failed to
recognize their own arrogance. No Democratic leader in the USA or Labor
leader in the UK ever reacted in such intemperate terms to losing an
election.
Ironically, the defeat of the Labor Party led to an increase in its leftist
wing and a decrease in the pragmatic, nationalist, Ben Gurionist element.
Young socialist Israelis, who considered themselves the "New Jews," the
heirs of the pioneering generations, saw themselves losing ground to the
hated enemy (not the Arabs but the poor, religious, and eastern Jews), and
so "Peace Now" was born in 1978. This movement was intended, as its name
suggests, to pressure the Israeli Government to make further concessions to
the Arabs, on the grounds (against all rational evidence) that it was
Israeli policies that were causing Arab hostility (not the intransigence and
hatred of the Arabs themselves) and that if they continued to fight Israel,
this only showed the need for greater Israeli self-reform and concessions.
Such was the self-delusion that dominated the policies of the left, spawned
psychologically in the cauldron of European antagonism and anti-Semitism.