Jews From Israel

"Any given discipline contains a majority of priests and a minority of prophets, and the eternal question is who prevails."

"Intellectuals usually analyze change, sometimes they are lucky enough to foretell it, and occasionally they are instrumental in causing change. In the usual situation the intellectual becomes a kind of ornament to a revolution, if it likes to pride itself on its intellectuals."

"A group of intellectuals can unwittingly become an arrogant anti-intellectual group if it does not give a good shake once in a while to itself and its vocabulary, from the bottom up. It can become anti-intellectual if it is no longer able to live with ambiguity and cannot bring itself to say "I have no answer," "We do not know.""

"The more one shares knowledge, the more of it one has, and the more complete it becomes. Moreover, it is the sharing of knowledge that brings about greater knowledge and inspires more and better thought. Knowledge is not subject to purely commercial considerations, just as good books are not subject to the prevalent economy."

"After Auschwitz, absolute justice has no meaning; the Nuremberg trials did not bring a single murdered child back to life. We do not expect absolute justice today, perhaps not an absolute anything. The preferred term now is "beneficial justice," one that would do most reasonable good to all parties concerned. Conflict management has taught us that presenting each other with lists of grievances will not bring about any justice at all, and that it is the feasible, rather than the absolute, to which we should aspire. The astute listener will of course understand that the moment we use terms like "cooperation" and "conflict management" we have given up the old or neo-Marxist vocabulary of power struggle as the sole human motivation. Thus do linguistic changes, new semantic habits, usher in a different era."

"In an era when patriarchal, hierarchical, patronizing attitudes have lost their importance, when we do not accept the patronage of one culture over another, when women are no longer treated as inferior beings, and when children have their legal rights, management and cooperation are prevailing over war. The horizontal society of equals rather than one of perpendicular hierarchical groups, a society that creates worldwide networks, is the society of peace. Minorities struggling for recognition have taught us that assertiveness is good, while aggression is dangerous; that empowerment is good, while the abuse of power can be catastrophic; that discrimination is not to be tolerated. We now describe situations rather than groups at fault. All these constitute a modern dictionary of terms unknown to our grandparents."

"Francis Fukuyama wrote about the end of history-and he may have had in mind the end of historical narrative consisting of war and conquest, victors and victims, the kind of history that has been dictated by the patriarchal hierarchical society and that seldom took into account ordinary life, creation, culture at all levels, literature, ideas, everything that happened between wars. But the end of history means the beginning of ecology, both in the broad sense and in the primary sense of the word, which comes from the Greek oikos, meaning "home." In the present era we concentrate on the home and its environment, in networks and partnerships and cooperation, for the benefit of all. The moment people realize that war is not only cruelty, brutality, and the complete failure of human common sense, but also the most antiecological act possible, we are on the way to the most beneficial and the sanest possible peace. Our semantics already enable us to take this road. Politics would be well advised to follow."

"Midway in life, as at its outset, you do not trust your body not to fail or disappoint you."

"We would lie numb, waiting for the night's Operation Cauldron to end, the leaden silence to return, the hollow grief."

"Ido chatters gaily as a sparrow."

"They were born without, and I was quibbling over a housecoat."

"Ido's mother is the only person with whom Ada can really laugh out loud, the way you can laugh with someone who has known you since childhood."

"After 1948 and with the mass immigration of Jews from neighboring Arab countries, Sephardim quickly became a significant component of Israeli society. But a cultural rift between the Ashkenazim and Sephardim quickly developed, which has persisted to this day. More than a few Sephardic authors in Israel have been published to international acclaim-Sami Michael, A. B. Yehoshua, Shulamit Hareven, and Orly Castel-Bloom spring immediately to mind-and the difficult relations between Sephardim and Ashkenazim in Israel often figures prominently in their work."

"If we leave aside Israeli self-pity and examine the facts, we'll see that it is Israel, not its neighbors, that, to date, has broken all of the made through various intermediaries since the Yom Kippur War in 1973; that it is the Arab states, not Israel, who greatly need guarantees that Israel will keep its agreements. Not out of love or hate, but for reasons of “stateness”; to abide by matters that have been agreed upon."

"Either born in Palestine or having come with their parents at such an early age that Hebrew became their natural language, writers like S. Yizhar, Benjamin Tammuz, Aharon Megged, Moshe Shamir, Natan Shaham, David Shahar, Hanoch Bartov]] and Shulamith Hareven wrote in the emerging local idiom, of orange groves and olive trees rather than birch woods and evergreens."

"Wherever a great promise is not and cannot be fulfilled, the resultant empty space is filled in by fantasy. Such is the case with leaders and followers, with parents and children, and between spouses; who knows better than psychologists or writers how difficult it is, then, to confront that fantasy with reality."

"The first things that get lost in charismatic leadership are facts."

"That is precisely what agreements are for: so that hatred won't become war."

"The Israeli novelist Shulamith Hareven, born in Europe, has described herself as more Levantine-by disposition and sympathies-than Ashkenazic Israeli: "Authentic Levantism means the third eye and the sixth sense. It is the keen sensitivity to "how," the knowledge that "how" is always more important than "what;" therefore every true artist is a kind of Levantine. It means a perpetual reading between the lines, both in human relations and in political pronouncements—an art no Israeli political leader has yet succeeded in acquiring....Levantism... is the tacit knowledge that different nations live at different ages, and that age is culture, and that some nations are still adolescent, among them, quite often, Israel. And it is the bitter experience that knows that everything-every revolution, every ideology-has its human price, and there is always someone to pay it. It is the discerning eye, the precise diagnosis, that sees the latent narcissist in every ideologue. It is the joke at his expense, and the forgiveness"...Hareven ends her essay, "I am a Levantine because I see war as the total failure of common sense, an execrable last resort. And because I am a Levantine, all fundamentalists on all sides, from Khomeini to Kahane, will always want to destroy me and all Levantines like me, here and in the neighboring countries.""

"The question remains: aside from a great writer, or a writer-historian of Barbara Tuchman's stature, who can draw an accurate picture of the situation and not enrage those who were there? Who can highlight the distress of both sides, without betraying either one?"

"The history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the history of two societies in extreme distress: anyone who speaks only of the anguish of the Israelis is not telling the whole truth, nor is anyone who speaks only of the misery of the Palestinians."

"Perhaps our region could have freed itself from this prevailing mode of thinking; perhaps not. One cannot play the game in retrospect. Neither can one talk about statistics and numbers without addressing the entirety of human misery, or, by extrapolation, without asking the medics."

"The best encounter is not between Jews and Jews, or between Arabs and Arabs. The best encounter-and such things have happened-is between Jews and Arabs who know one another personally, intimately, and who can tell each other honestly what their anxieties and fear were, what they and their families felt when things happened as they did. The shock of such encounters is great. People learn things they did not know or had repressed, or that their leaders or teachers did not tell them because they did not dare break the silence-not necessarily because they had evil intentions. A different truth is revealed, and not through documents: documents do not talk; a person talks, a family talks. Then something happens: people who have recognized each others' anguish are people who are capable of making peace. People who know the anguish of one side remain stuck in the past, which becomes less and less relevant as the years pass."

"Charisma is catastrophic. It is a relationship-a sick one, and to a great extent symbiotic-between a man who is very, very much in need of applause and constant reinforcement, and a public that seeks a hero to whom it may attribute all sorts of mythological virtues. Once it has found such a hero, this public disclaims all responsibility, as long as the leader endlessly excites and entertains it. A charismatic leader forges an unholy alliance with his public; he becomes a kind of national drug pusher, a provider of constant thrills in return for the vocal adoration he craves. He cannot manage without his public, and his public cannot manage without him: there is a kind of unchecked, mutual, constant high. A leader of this type does not have a normal public; he has groupies. It is difficult to understand what this kind of relationship has to do with leadership, since a leader's role is to define real problems and solve them. Throughout history charismatic types have led people to disaster. Once they have vanished-and they vanish in the blink of an eye-a mere decade or fifteen years later, no one can understand wherein lay their power. In retrospect they usually look ridiculous, their speech and movements laughable, like those of bad actors. There is nothing less comprehensible than the frenzied excitation of yesterday."

"It seems that the right to hate-so well understood in these parts-is a right not granted the Arabs. We may hate them. In parliamentary elections we may grant legitimacy to individuals and movements that talk of deporting the Arabs, if not worse; but they may not hate us. Even if their houses and property are laid bare to any who would break down their doors. Even if any sadist and sicko can kick their shackled sons."

"The greatest leaders the world has known were never charismatic or dependent on their public's falling in love with them."

"Once a large, difficult, bloody conflict with many losses has begun, it is not the guiding policy of politicians that determines what happens in the field, but rather the ordeal, the sense of distress, the feelings of weakness at each and every spot. In a war, it is not papers that do the fighting, but people-people who are scared, stunned, sometimes hungry and sometimes desperate for vengeance; people who often make bad mistakes."

"More than anything, we must understand that this was not a battle of strength against strength, but of weakness against weakness; throughout the whole Arab-Israeli conflict, each side has felt itself to be far weaker than its opponent, and acted accordingly. We must understand that there was no "Jewish justice," as Golda Meir said in one of her less sterling moments, nor was there "Arab justice," a claim that also has proponents; rather, there were two deep traumas, on which a completely new life, a different world, new hope must be built."

"From The Vocabulary Of Peace, Hareven's 1995 volume of poetic, philosophical and biographical essays, comes one typically mordant observation. "On the outer wall of one of the Israeli administration buildings in Gaza, a section painted in white stands out. In gay colours are the words Love, Brotherhood, Peace, Friendship. Beautiful words. There is just one problem: they are written solely in Hebrew.""

"Let us recall the precise role myth plays in society: it inhibits change. Perhaps that is its raison d'être."

"The fall of the leader is a terrible disappointment, because a charismatic leader's public is always consumed with longing for purity, faith, soul, absolute justice, the whole truth-and it thinks its leader is delivering or has promised to deliver all these things. Charisma is at base a promise never fulfilled."

"An extreme always appears more pure than a compromise."

"I have always felt that if the feminist movement had done its job well, it would not have tried to force women into large, hierarchical frameworks that do not suit them; rather, it would have done its utmost to change society from a largely vertical construct, with authority descending from the top down, as it is today, to a horizontal construct, with autonomous networks and cooperating groups."

"In charismatic relationships there is no responsibility, only guilt; in more developed relationships, responsibility is present. With charisma there is no "other"; everyone is part of one familial porridge, a publis pabulum. Anyone outside of it is an enemy."

"We are living in an age of peacemaking. Not peace through love. Peace through accord."

"The charismatic leader says, "I know what is best for the people" (or "we know what is best for the people") and reaps applause. The authoritative teacher says, "There is a book; in it is written what is best for the people; you will follow me and go by that book, even against your will, so that things will be best for the people." The role model says, "Do as I do, because I have the knowledge and personal experience to know what is best for the people." But the facilitator says, "I have come to the conclusion that this is what is best for the people; let's sit down and discuss it, and I will try to convince you." Since this leader says "come let's sit down" and not "run after me," he has no chance of garnering rhythmic applause in the town square. It is difficult to ask people to sit down and think a minute. It is thought to be practically unleaderly. As if a leader, like a gym instructor, must always make people run...The facilitator demands that we be independent, think autonomously, be critical, have an open mind. In other words, he demands that we be not subjects in a more or less enlightened regime, but citizens; this is sometimes a painful process, because knowing the difference between good and evil also means expulsion from the Eden of childhood. But if we do not leave this Garden of Eden, we will never be able to mend or change anything about our reality"

"Under no circumstances are we to forget our tragedies. But whoever bases our identity on them and them alone, distorts the greatness of this people and keeps from its sons not only pride, but sanity itself."

"Statistics are often the last refuge of the antihumanist."

"These two societies do not need any more probing of their pasts; they do not need to be shown what "really" happened, nor do they need a painstaking examination of protocols and documents. They need only one thing: healing. Anyone who does not bring them succor, or balm, who does not help them bind their wounds and find common ground, would do best to keep his silence."

"Ultimately, Hareven's greatest impact was on Hebrew itself. A linguistic patriot, she was the first - and for 12 years, the only - woman in the Hebrew Language Academy, where she contested "sexist" neologisms foisted on the 3,000-year-old language."

"Shulamith Hareven is a great writer. She combines historical and emotional depth with a brilliant and haunting style...Shulamith Hareven writes with integrity; her historical and human truthfulness cannot be lost in translation. She makes all our lives richer, traversing all borders."

"Cultural change that enables people to think in terms of cooperation, rather than enmity and strife, is the conceptual change from the language and state of mind of a closed agrarian society, the forerunner of the nation-state, to that of an open technological one."

"With the waning of the patriarchal society, we have also freed ourselves from the tyranny of the past and do not feel obliged to prefer that tense over our present, here and now. In Hebrew, writing in the present tense was considered bad form only half a century ago; now it is prevalent, almost as a kind of protest language. But other languages have undergone the same process: the present, previously used mostly in slang and street parlance, is now completely legitimate in literature, and not by accident. We are important; the here and now is important; we need no more obey blindly the supremacy of the past."

"Today, we can discern from the vocabulary the underlying ideology of a text or a speech. No self-respecting liberal would freely use the terms "enemy," or "annihilate," or "avenge," which no fundamentalist can do without."

"If my only identity is that of the victim, the world's deterministic and doomed victim, I may (or so it seems) commit any atrocity, including exiling Arabs from their homes (excuse me, dear hawks, "relocating" them) and taking possession of their land, because I am the victim and they are not; because this is the only way I define myself and my identity-forever. But if I also define myself as the son, or daughter, of a people with a splendid four-thousand-year history of responsibility, of conscience, of repairing and improving, of appealing for social order and justice, of a legal system nearly unparalleled in the world, and of the protection of these traditions; if I have indeed learned and internalized all these, so that they define my identity; then even if often in history I have been the victim of others, I will never oppress those weaker than myself and never abuse my power to exile them (excuse me, dear hawks, "bus them out"). I will not have to define my uniqueness in terms of the past alone."

"We must never make the mistake of confusing a criminal act with a national policy."

"Two acquaintances meeting in the street would warm one another's hands with a shy smile."

"you could always tell a man's calling by his dress."

"(HC: What is your feeling about the current role of women in Israeli society?) SH: For myself, I have always done just what I wanted. I do have a sense that in Israel this is really less of a problem than in the United States. After all, in periods of emergency our women have always carried a heavy responsibility and functioned in most capacities in what still is, in some ways, a pioneer country. That makes it very hard to deny us appropriate roles. Moreover, it springs right from the Jewish family tradition of women serving as breadwinners while their husbands study. I know that Israeli society is famous for being rather macho. But my experience is that any woman who has something to say is listened to."

"I much prefer this cold peace to a hot war. But let me tell you about the atmosphere in Egypt in May '82. That was a real honeymoon. Everything was open, even euphoric. We had already given back Sinai, and every Egyptian in the street would stop to tell us that Israel was an honorable nation, one that kept its word. Practically all of our friends were making definite plans to visit Israel for congresses, lectures, or simply for private purposes. There was a joint exhibition of women painters-Egyptian and Israeli-at the biggest hotel in Cairo. Once they knew we were Israelis, waiters and shopkeepers refused to accept our tips. "You are family now," they would say. And you know the level of poverty in Egypt where a teacher earns $40 a month. In May of '82, Egypt was a ball! (HC: And then?) SH: And then Israel invaded Lebanon, and everything, everyone stopped-horrified."