1. The death of the future. The first Israeli I met was David Grossman. He was (as you might easily guess) is an enormously impressive man. His face is a beautiful register of sensitivity. Grossman basically said that the main problem with Israel is that it's hard to imagine any future, given the stalemate. "Israel used to have the future on the brain, constantly bright. Now it feels like anything after tomorrow is a question makr. Nobody is making palns for 10 years from now. Ten years form now? Who knows." Virtually evey Israeli we met confirmed Grossman's dark diagnosis. The sense of a shared communal future has been eclipsed. Most people want to avoid politics and tend to their gardens. There is also a real retro culture in Israel right now, with a lot of nostagia for the Zionist folk songs of the 1950s and 1960s. As one of my friends explained, Israeli's are longing for a time when the future seemed brighter. It's an odd sort of nostalgia for a future that nevered arrived.
2. The fraying of social solidarity. There were very visible displays of begging and homelessness in Jerusalem and elsewhere. This was very distressing to some of the Israelis we talked to. The claimed it was a new phenomenon and cited it as proof that communal ties (within Israel) were coming apart. It seemed part and parcel of the demise of socialist hope and the privitization program of Likud (which is not getting alot of attention in North America). Even the military, by far the strongest glue holding society together, is losing its adhesive power. We met several people who had various run-ins with the military -- not refuse-niks who had a political agenda but just people who refused to obey rules out of a personal sense of self-preservaton or individual identity. (That being said, Israelis are still much more communal than North American).
3. Cultural loniness. Israel is in many ways a European country, and therefore Israeli intellectuals are feel stung by what they regard as the turn of Euorpe against their country. (They are much less concerned with the Arab world, having little hope of acceptance on that quarter). Several people said they feel that Israel has no friend in the world, except the United States. Israel is in an odd position: their Arab neighbours see them as Europeans and the Europeans see them as being part of the "Middle East" mess. Their closest economic and cultural ties are with Europe but their military and diplomatic ties are with the U.S. All this contributes to a sense of being beleagured.
4. Disdain for the Diaspora -- but this is a complex issue which deserves a more detailed airing. Below is a column where I discuss this.
Dismissing the Diaspora by Jeet Heer
Since the Second World War, Jewish-American writers have been enormously successful in attracting readers from all over the world, except, oddly enough, in Israel. Saul Bellow and the late Isaac Bashevis Singer both won the Nobel Prize, Philip Roth has had a four-day festival in France celebrating his work, and Cynthia Ozick and Norman Mailer are fixtures in the American literary firmament. Yet as I travelled through Israel two weeks ago, I had trouble finding anyone interested in these writers. (My trip, in the company of other young writers, was under the kind auspices of the Canada-Israel Committee Cultural Mission.) Indeed, Israelis are singularly cool toward the culture of the Jewish Diaspora, whether created in the United States or elsewhere. The Diaspora and Israel represent the two contrasting faces of the Jewish identity. The Diaspora is old, whereas Israel is young. The earliest Diaspora (or dispersal of the Jewish people into the Gentile world) took place with the Assyrian victory over the northern kingdom of Israel around 700 BC. Since that conquest, many other wars and migrations have caused Jews to spread across the globe. The state of Israel was founded in 1948 mostly by refugees from the European Diaspora. Over the last half-century, Israel's population has been repeatedly replenished by immigration from scattered Jewish groups returning to their ancestral home. Israel depends on the Diaspora, not just as a source for population growth but also for moral and economic support. Yet Israel in many ways was created to negate the Diaspora. The raison d'être for the state of Israel is the idea that living in the Diaspora is bad for Jews: both dangerous to Jewish safety and destructive to Jewish culture. In looking at the Diaspora, many Israelis combine dependence with disdain, an odd mixture. Yet there is a further twist to this contradictory attitude: Because of the conflict in the Middle East, it is actually much safer for Jews to live in Canada or the United States than in Israel. Moreover, the Jewish communities in North America have been hugely successful, not just economically, but also culturally vibrant. Therefore, some Israelis cannot help but feel envious and resentful of their North American cousins, even while believing that only those who live in Israel are really keeping the authentic Jewish identity alive. When you hear Israelis talk about the Diaspora, you feel like you are eavesdropping on a longstanding family quarrel. There is a Diaspora Museum in Israel, but in their day-to-day conversations, Israelis are dismissive, if not scornful, of the global Jewish culture. I got a strong sense of the Israeli haughtiness toward the Diaspora when we met up with venerable novelist A.B. Yehoshua, at age 67 the reigning patriarch of Hebrew literature. Bellow once described Yehoshua as "one of Israel's world-class writers." When we talked to him, Yehoshua curtly refused to return Bellow's compliment. "I would trade 20 Saul Bellows for a William Faulkner," the Israeli novelist snorted. Yehoshua also pooh-poohed the work of other Jewish-American writers, especially Philip Roth. These literary attitudes are part of a general attitude Yehoshua has toward the Diaspora. As Jonathan Shainin recently noted in The Nation, "Yehoshua's contempt for the Diaspora is present in nearly all his novels, and it is a frequent subject in his non-fiction as well; he has called it 'a disease' and 'immoral,' a 'neurotic solution.' " Israel's foremost translator, Hillel Halkin, confirmed that Yehoshua's lofty dismissal of the Diaspora is widely shared. Born in the United States, Halkin is thoroughly steeped in the literature of three languages: English, Yiddish and Hebrew. Halkin noted that writers such as Ozick are rarely translated in Hebrew. Nor is there much Israeli interest in the riches of the Yiddish literary tradition, according to Halkin. In the past four decades, thanks in part to scholars such as Ruth Wisse and the late Irving Howe, there has been an immense North American appetite for Yiddish literature. The fruit of the interest can be seen in the fact that I.B. Singer was recently inducted into the canonical Library of America. Ironically, the memory of Yiddish is kept alive in North America rather than the Jewish homeland. Franz Kafka was one of the greatest writers of the Jewish Diaspora, yet even his work has a hard time winning an Israeli audience. When we met young writer Etgar Keret, he told us that he was rare among his literary peers in loving Kafka. For older Israeli writers, one guesses, Kafka represents everything that was wrong with the Diaspora: He was overly intellectual, neurotic and he wrote in the language of the enemy, German. Israeli culture - tough-minded, nationalistic, outgoing and animated by a joie de vivre - almost seems based on a complete inversion of everything we associate with Kafka's name. Though chronically afflicted by persecution, the Diaspora flourished not only in North America and Europe but also in the Middle East. Well into the 20th century, cities such as Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad were major Jewish cultural centres. This ended when the conflicts between Israel and its neighbours turned Arabic-speaking Jews into refugees. These Middle Eastern Jews (known as Mizrahim in Hebrew) found an uneasy home in Israel. As immigrants, they learned Hebrew and slowly watched their culture disappear. I got a sense of the bittersweet fate of the Mizrahim when I talked to novelist Orly Castel-Bloom, whose parents came to Israel from Cairo. Over a pleasant seafood dinner, Castel-Bloom told me she wanted her son to learn Arabic so he can work in military intelligence rather than the regular army. However, her son said he didn't want to learn such a "dirty language." His remark is especially shocking when you consider that his grandparents and all his maternal ancestors for many generations spoke Arabic. In rejecting Arabic, he is rejecting part of his own Diasporic heritage. For an outsider, the Israeli chilliness toward that Diaspora is puzzling and sad. After all, the nearly 3,000-year history of the Diaspora is not only the story of persecution and flight. It is also a tale of creativity and growth, often under difficult circumstances. The children of the Diaspora include Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Marx and Einstein. These figures have enriched the global culture, including of course Israeli culture. In rejecting the Diaspora, Israel runs the risk of becoming provincial and culturally stunted. But perhaps the geopolitical insecurity of Israel contributes to its cultural lack of confidence. On that happy day when Israelis no longer worry about their physical survival, they might then be ready to come to terms with the continuing vitality of the Diaspora. National Post
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