[A-List] The Apostate: A Zionist politician loses faith in the future (The New Yorker)

[Jim Farmelant <farmelantj@xxxxxxxx>]

Letter from Jerusalem
The Apostate
A Zionist politician loses faith in the future.
by David Remnick July 30, 2007
   www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/07/30/070730fa_fact_remnick

"People are not willing to admit it, but Israel has reached the wall,"
Avrum
Burg says.

The self-regard of Israelis is built, in no small part, around a sense of
sang-froid, and yet few would deny that the past year was deeply
unnerving.
Last July, Israel launched an aerial attack on Lebanon designed to
destroy
the arsenal of the radical Islamist group Hezbollah, the Party of God,
and
force its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, to return two kidnapped soldiers and
end
its cross-border rocket attacks. "If the soldiers are not returned," Dan
Halutz, the Israeli Army's chief of staff, said at the time, "we will
turn
Lebanon's clock back twenty years." Israel bombed the runways of the
Beirut
airport, the Beirut-Damascus highway, and numerous towns, mainly in the
south; Hezbollah, from a network of guerrilla installations and tunnel
networks worthy of the Vietcong, launched some four thousand rockets,
mainly
Katyushas, at cities in northern Israel. Israel degraded Hezbollah's
military capabilities, at least temporarily, but there was no victory.
Hezbollah survived and, in the eyes of the Islamic world, in doing so
won;
Nasrallah emerged as an iconic hero; and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of
Iran, one of his sponsors, called yet again for the elimination of Israel
from the map of the Middle East. Halutz, who had dumped all his stocks on
the eve of the war, resigned, and Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime
Minister,
saw his approval rating fall to as low as two per cent.

More recently, Hezbollah's ideological ally in Palestine, Hamas-the
Islamic
Resistance Movement-led a violent uprising in the Gaza Strip,
overwhelming
its secular rival, Fatah. Suddenly, Israel, backed by the United States,
found itself propping up the Fatah leadership, in order not to lose the
West
Bank to Hamas as well. Not even the ceremonial office of the Israeli
Presidency was immune from the year's disasters: a few weeks ago,
President
Moshe Katsav agreed to plead guilty to multiple sexual offences and
resign,
lest he face trial for rape. Despite a resilient, even booming economy,
peace and stability have rarely seemed so distant.

In this atmosphere of post-traumatic gloom, Avraham Burg, a former
Speaker
of the Knesset, managed to inflame the Israeli public (left, right, and
center) with little more than an interview in the liberal daily Ha'aretz,
promoting his recent book, "Defeating Hitler." Short of being Prime
Minister, Burg could not be higher in the Zionist establishment. His
father
was a Cabinet minister for nearly four decades, serving under Prime
Ministers from David Ben-Gurion to Shimon Peres. In addition to a
decade-long career in the Knesset, including four years as Speaker, Burg
had
also been leader of the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency
for
Israel. And yet he did not obey the commands of pedigree. "Defeating
Hitler"
and an earlier book, "God Is Back," are, in combination, a despairing
look
at the Israeli condition. Burg warns that an increasingly large and
ardent
sector of Israeli society disdains political democracy. He describes the
country in its current state as Holocaust-obsessed, militaristic,
xenophobic, and, like Germany in the nineteen-thirties, vulnerable to an
extremist minority.

Burg's interlocutor for the Ha'aretz article was Ari Shavit, a writer
well
known in Israel for his confrontational interviews and his cerebral
opinion
articles. (His Profile of Ariel Sharon, "The General," appeared in these
pages in January, 2006.) Shavit's interviewing style is aggressive and
moralistic-not so distant, at times, from Oriana Fallaci's in her prime.
Politically, he is left of center, but, in the view of some to his left,
he
has seemed apocalyptic of late, warning darkly of the "existential"
threats
against Israel. In the preface to the interview, Shavit declared himself
"outraged" by Burg's book: "I saw it as one-dimensional and an
unempathetic
attack on the Israeli experience."

The Israeli political world is unfailingly intimate. Shavit, who is
forty-nine, and Burg, who is fifty-two, met twenty-five years ago, when
they
were both protesting against Israel's first war in Lebanon. After the
massacre of hundreds of Palestinians by Israel's allies among the
Christian
Phalangists in 1982, Burg gave a powerful speech before four hundred
thousand people at an anti-war demonstration in Tel Aviv-the biggest
rally
in the history of Israel. This was his entrance into public life.
"Because
Avrum was a lefty and a religious Jew who wore a kippa, he really stood
out
among the left-wing speakers," Shavit told me. "That gave him a very
specific role in our society, and he played it extremely well." Whatever
remained of the relationship between Burg and Shavit frayed badly when
they
met for their interview. After Burg described Israel as a perpetually
"frightened society," the discussion quickly grew tense:

SHAVIT: You are patronizing and supercilious, Avrum. You have no empathy
for
Israelis. You treat the Israeli Jew as a paranoid. But, as the cliché
goes,
some paranoids really are persecuted. On the day we are speaking,
Ahmadinejad is saying that our days are numbered. He promises to
eradicate
us. No, he is not Hitler. But he is also not a mirage. He is a true
threat.
He is the real world-a world you ignore.
BURG: I say that as of this moment Israel is a state of trauma in nearly
every one of its dimensions. And it's not just a theoretical question.
Would
our ability to cope with Iran not be much better if we renewed in Israel
the
ability to trust the world? Would it not be more right if we didn't deal
with the problem on our own but, rather, as part of a world alignment
beginning with the Christian churches, going on to the governments and
finally the armies? Instead, we say we do not trust the world, they will
abandon us, and here's Chamberlain returning from Munich with the black
umbrella and we will bomb them alone.

Burg has a fairly standard left-leaning view of the Palestinian question:
even now, with Hamas in control of Gaza, the longer Israel delays in
coming
to terms with a sovereign Palestinian state, the more Palestinian society
will radicalize and embrace maximalist, jihadi ideologies, and the more
Israeli society will lose its moral sense. But some of the views that
Burg
expressed in the interview were far from standard. He told Shavit that
civil
disobedience would have been preferable to the uprising in the Warsaw
ghetto
and that Israel should give up its nuclear weaponry in exchange for an
unspecified "deal" with its Arab neighbors. Israel's "law of return,"
which
allows any Jew around the world to immigrate and become a citizen, was
"dynamite" in the Arab world, he said, and needed to be reëvaluated. One
subject that especially infuriated Shavit, and provoked countless letters
to
the editor, e-mail screeds, and editorial-page rebuttals, was Burg's
depiction of the European Union as an almost irresistibly attractive
"biblical utopia" and his flouting of the fact that he holds a French
passport, because his wife is French-born, and voted in the recent French
elections. When Shavit asked Burg if he recommended that all Israelis
acquire a second passport, Burg replied, "Whoever can"-a moment of
determined cosmopolitanism. Shavit sarcastically called Burg "the prophet
of
Brussels." He went on:



SHAVIT: There really is a deep anti-Zionist pattern in you. Emotionally,
you
are with German Jewry and American Jewry. They excite you, thrill you,
and
by comparison you find the Zionist option crude and spiritually meagre.
It
broadens neither the heart nor the soul.
BURG: Yes, yes. The Israeli reality is not exciting. People are not
willing
to admit it, but Israel has reached the wall. Ask your friends if they
are
certain their children will live here. How many will say yes? At most
fifty
per cent. In other words, the Israeli élite has already parted with this
place. And without an élite there is no nation.
SHAVIT: You are saying that we are suffocating here for lack of spirit.
BURG: Totally. We are already dead. We haven't received the news yet, but
we
are dead. It doesn't work anymore. It doesn't work. . . . There is no one
to
talk to here. The religious community of which I was a part-I feel no
sense
of belonging to it. The secular community-I am not part of it, either. I
have no one to talk to. I am sitting with you and you don't understand
me,
either.


This was not the first time that Burg had outraged some of his
countrymen.
In 2003, when Hamas was carrying out a suicide-bombing campaign, he
published an article in the mass-circulation daily Yedioth Ahronoth
(which
was republished worldwide), saying, "Israel, having ceased to care about
the
children of the Palestinians, should not be surprised when they come
washed
in hatred and blow themselves up in the centers of Israeli escapism."
That
statement caused a sensation not only because of the offices Burg held
but
also because of his ambitions. "Once I wanted very much to be prime
minister," he admitted to Shavit. "It burned like fire in my bones." He
allowed that he had been living "a lie" while he was in government. "I
was
not myself." Now he was very much himself, a man with multiple
identities,
"beyond Israeli," a universal humanist.

In Ha'aretz, Burg was prepared to explore his spiritual options and
defend
his quest for material well-being. Even as he lamented lost values, he
made
no apologies for going to court to retain the perks of his old job
(particularly a chauffeur-driven jeep) or for his desire to leave behind
public service for business. "Life is not just to be a pioneer with a hoe
and a bold fighter at Lions Gate," he said. "Life is also to be a
merchant
in Warsaw. Unequivocally, that is a richer totality in life."

Soon after the interview was published, Otniel Schneller, a Knesset
member
from Ehud Olmert's centrist Kadima Party, said that when Burg dies he
should
be denied burial in the special section of Mt. Herzl National Cemetery,
in
Jerusalem, reserved for national leaders. "He had better search for a
grave
in another country," Schneller said. One letter to the Jerusalem Post
compared Burg to young people who, after military service, go off to
India
to find their spiritual selves in an ashram. "Yesteryear, Burg would have
been disowned as at least a lunatic," the columnist Sarah Honig wrote in
the
same paper. "The grave danger is that today he gives voice and lends
insidious quasi-respectability to what was heretofore unutterable. By
tomorrow, the uncontrollable infestation he spreads might confer outright
legitimacy on Israel's delegitimatization." If and when Israel's borders
changed, Honig continued, "Burg probably won't stick around to risk the
ensuing slaughter. The new Wandering Jew will pack his sinister seeds and
propagate his wicked wandering weeds from afar."

My own unscientific survey suggested that criticism of Burg was, with few
exceptions, general and crossed ideological lines. Conservatives like the
former Likud adviser Dore Gold said that Burg's analysis was "dead wrong:
what we used to call crum pshat-twisted interpretation-in the Yeshiva
 world." A range of prominent political and cultural figures on the
left-Yossi Beilin, the chairman of the Meretz-Yachad Party; Shulamit
Aloni,
a feminist and a former education minister; A. B. Yehoshua and Meir
Shalev,
both well-known novelists; and the peace activist Janet Aviad and the
philosopher Avishai Margalit, a founder of Peace Now-expressed a familial
disgust, or worse, for their wayward brother. They sensed in him a kind
of
undergraduate universalism, a table talk at once snobbish and half-baked.
Burg's remarks about Edenic Europe and his French passport were
hypocritical, a particularly Israeli form of bad taste at a time when it
could least be tolerated. "For the so-called head of the Zionist movement
to
say all this-to say, 'Get another passport for your kids,' " Avishai
Margalit said to me. "It's like the Pope giving sex tips."

"Avrum is a friend, but I felt what most people felt-that, beyond the
ideological debate, there is something profoundly wrong in his
character,"
Yossi Klein Halevi, a writer, said. "You don't take all the perks of the
Zionist movement and refuse to relinquish them and then repudiate the
most
cherished notions of Zionism at the same time. There's something smarmy
about it. He is so totally out of touch with Israeli reality that I'm
appalled that he ever had any positions of Israeli authority. That
interview
really destroyed him, or he destroyed himself."

Avrum Burg lives with his wife in the tiny village of Nataf, in the hills
west of Jerusalem. They have six children, all grown. Burg's bungalow is
surrounded by shrubbery, desert blooms, bougainvillea, and a tiny lawn.
The
Israeli Arab village of Abu Ghosh is a few minutes down the road, and the
border with the West Bank is little more than a thousand yards away. The
house in Nataf is quiet except for the mewling of cats, whinnying horses,
and the attention-beseeching barks of Burg's dog, Buling, who is missing
his
left hind leg. The dog, Burg explained, lost the leg when, on patrol with
one of Burg's sons in the West Bank city of Nablus, he leaped at a
Palestinian gunman just as he was firing his gun. "Buling saved my son's
life," Burg said, "so we had to adopt him."

Burg is a vegetarian, and fit; he has taken up marathon running. He is
nearly bald, and wears a small knit yarmulke. Normally, this is the
yarmulke
of the modern Orthodox, though Burg seemed eager to emphasize his
disaffection from all things Orthodox; he told me of his affinity for
B'nai
Jeshurun, a synagogue on New York's Upper West Side where some of the
rabbis
are women and the sermons are as likely to quote Martin Luther King as
Maimonides. "My alliance with the people at B'nai Jeshurun," he said, "is
much more immediate and intensive and important for me than my alliance
with
my nephew or my cousin, who lives two kilometres away in the West Bank, a
fundamentalist settler."

Burg comes from a conservative Zionist family; his father helped found
Mafdal, the National Religious Party. But when he started out in politics
he
joined the Labor Party; he was deeply influenced by Yeshayahu Leibowitz,
a
scientist and philosophy professor at Hebrew University who had contempt
for
the Greater Israel movement's conflation of religion and politics and the
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Leibowitz referred to abusive
Israeli
soldiers as "Judeo-Nazis" and was so upset by the sight of the
festivities
around the Western Wall after the Six-Day War that he referred to it as a
"disco wall." In the pursuit of increasingly higher offices, Burg avoided
such language. He held back, he self-censored. "You're into the system,"
he
said. "You're in the tunnel. I was a devoted politician and so I talked
the
talk."

But then, he said, "after some fifteen, twenty years in political life I
had
a feeling all of a sudden that, to use the Biblical term, Israel was the
kingdom without prophesy. I realized that the three founding narratives
of
the national idea of Israeliness were over: the mass immigration to the
land, aliyah; the security of the land; and the settling of the land. All
three had served their purpose and were no longer the core of the
nation's
narratives. I asked myself what was the alternative. This was a long
process
of thought. I didn't feel that the political system in Israel was trying
to
renew its thinking."

In 2001, Burg attempted to succeed Ehud Barak as leader of the Labor
Party
and lost. Thwarted, if not entirely humbled, he quit the Knesset in 2004.
At
one point in the last months of his political life, he said, "I went on a
very long walk on the Appalachian Trail. I went for five weeks and
crossed
half the state of Connecticut, the whole state of New York, and half the
state of New Jersey. I saw maybe twelve people, none of them Jewish-for
the
first time in my life. I did a lot of thinking, and I realized that I had
to
change the pace of my life."

In "Defeating Hitler," Burg writes that one of the most dispiriting
aspects
of Israeli political conversation is the constant reference point of the
slaughter of six million Jews in the nineteen-forties. "The most
optimistic
years in the state of Israel were 1945 to 1948," he said to me. "The
farther
we got from the camps and the gas chambers, the more pessimistic we
became
and the more untrusting we became toward the world. It was a shock to me.
Didn't we, the politicians, feed the public? Didn't we cheapen the
sanctity
of the Holocaust by using it about everything? Some people say,
'Occupation?
You call this occupation? This is nothing compared to the absolute evil
of
the Holocaust!' And if it is nothing compared to the Holocaust then you
can
continue. And since nothing, thank God, is comparable to the ultimate
trauma
it legitimatizes many things." Burg said that contemporary Israelis "are
not
at the stage to be sensitive enough to what happens to others and in many
ways are too indifferent to the suffering of others. We confiscated, we
monopolized, world suffering. We did not allow anybody else to call
whatever
suffering they have 'holocaust' or 'genocide,' be it Armenians, be it
Kosovo, be it Darfur.

"In the last years, Israeliness has confined itself for itself only and
lost
interest almost for what happens in the world," he went on. "For me,
Israel
is shrinking into its own shell rather than struggling for a better
world.
Who is responsible for identity? The ultraOrthodox. They sit in the
 yeshivot"-the religious schools. "Who is responsible for our fundamental
relation to the soil? The settlers. The two tribes responsible for the
spiritual dimension and the territorial dimension are anti-modern
Israel."

Burg is ambivalent about the kind of support that the Israeli government
has
traditionally received from the United States government and the American
Jewish community. His views, in fact, are not far from those expressed in
a
controversial article published last year in the London Review of Books,
by
Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, denouncing the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC) for subordinating American policy to Israeli
interests and, by doing so, radicalizing public opinion in the Arab
world.

"Can you imagine the European Union with a lobby or a PAC for the
Knesset?"
Burg said. "Maybe this was O.K. in the early fifties, but today I don't
need
it." He would prefer that Israel take no financial aid from the United
States: "I don't like it. A state like mine should live on its own
means."
What Israel does need from its superpower ally is the impetus to move
forward on negotiations with the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab
world, no matter how paralyzed, fractured, and desperate the situation
now
appears. A purposeful American President, he said, can always push
forward
even the most conservative Israeli Prime Minister. "Even Yitzhak Shamir
shlepped to Madrid" for a peace conference in 1991, he said. "Israel
needs
dramatic decisions, like de Gaulle giving up Algeria."

The longer Israel waits to resolve the Palestinian question, Burg said,
the
more intractable the problem becomes and the more deeply it scars the
psyches of both sides. In towns near Gaza, like Sderot, the political
outcry
is not for peace talks but for military action. Among some right-wing
Israeli politicians, there is open talk of schemes to "transfer"
Palestinians to Jordan or other neighboring Arab countries, and this
alarms
Burg: "You hear the conversation in the Knesset, you hear it in the
public,
you see the graffiti 'Arabs out'-like Juden raus. I don't care all that
much
about the right-wing hoodlum who writes the graffiti so much as I do the
municipalities that don't erase it. The seeds of national chauvinism are
here and flourishing. Of course, I can understand all the fears-can you
imagine an American kid hit by a foreign rocket in Chevy Chase? Can you
imagine the hysteria? I've watched Jack Bauer very closely. '24' iconizes
the fears of America. So if this seems right in Los Angeles it must be
right
in Sderot."

Although Burg is now trying to make a living as a businessman, there are
those who think that "Defeating Hitler" is an attempt to reënter the
political discussion and, eventually, the electoral arena. And, in fact,
Burg's views on some issues, if not his language, are in keeping with the
Israeli mainstream. Even now, with Palestinian politics in chaos, around
two-thirds of Israelis, and almost as many Palestinians, are ready to
accept
a two-state solution-an independent Palestine in Gaza and the West Bank
with
part of Jerusalem as its capital. What Ari Shavit and so many others are
less willing to accept is Burg's harsh diagnosis of "Israeliness."

"The comparison with pre-Nazi Germany is absurd," Shavit said over lunch
one
afternoon in Jerusalem. "Also, Israel was much more militaristic in the
old
days. I don't like the role of generals in political life, and I regret
the
lack of a Truman to restrain the influence of generals-a tough, decent
civilian who understands the need to use power but who is decisive in
controlling the Army. But there is nothing here of that Junker tradition
or
even anything like America's military élites and academies. Israelis live
in
an open, free society with a very free spirit, even verging on anarchy.
To
describe us as a Bismarckian state with expansionist chauvinism-if there
was
a grain of truth to that, it was thirty years ago! Soldiers here take off
their uniforms as soon as they come home. They're not proud of their
uniforms or their ranks. Wearing a uniform doesn't get you girls." There
are
anti-Arab racists in Israel, he added, but nothing like those in Burg's
favorite part of the world. "There are actual racist parties in
Continental
Europe that are far more powerful than any of the sickening elements
here,"
Shavit said. "There is no chance that an Israeli Day parade will draw as
many as the number of people who came out for the Gay Pride parade in Tel
Aviv. So to describe this as a Prussian Sparta is ridiculous."

One morning, Shavit and I drove south to Sderot, which is surely the most
anxious-and Burg-resistant-town in Israel. Sderot is a "development
town,"
one of many towns that began as absorption sites in the nineteen-fifties
for
"Oriental" Jews, mainly religious and poor, from Morocco, Algeria, and
other
Muslim countries. More recently, many immigrants from the former Soviet
Union, who are generally low-income and politically conservative, have
moved
to such towns. Sderot, with a population of twenty-four thousand, is the
closest Israeli town to the Gaza Strip-about half a mile from Beit
Hanoun,
just over the border. Since 2001, Sderot has been hit by nearly five
thousand homemade Qassam missiles launched from Beit Hanoun by Hamas,
Islamic Jihad, and other groups. Qassams are extremely inaccurate, but
they
have exacted a toll, especially psychologically. The rockets have killed
eleven Israelis in Sderot-far fewer than the Gazans who have been killed
by
Israeli F-16s, helicopter gunships, and troops-and have succeeded in
terrorizing the town. In the second half of May, when hundreds of rockets
fell on Sderot, eighty per cent of the population evacuated, according to
city officials.

The mayor, Eli Moyal, a rangy, chain-smoking Moroccan who has been called
the Rudy Giuliani of Israel by his admirers, has demanded that the Olmert
government take more severe military actions against Gaza and has
denounced
the leadership for failing to spend enough on shelters. The shelter
problem
has been addressed by Arcadi Gaydamak, one of the most mysterious figures
in
Israel. He is a Russian-born, multi-passport-holding billionaire oligarch
who is wanted in France for tax evasion and for making illegal arms deals
with Angola. (He has denied any wrongdoing.) Gaydamak has provided
temporary
housing for residents from Sderot during heavy periods of attack, and
last
summer, during the war with Hezbollah, he underwrote a tent village on
the
beach in Nitzanim for people fleeing the shelling in towns in northern
Israel. Gaydamak recently bought Beitar Jerusalem, the popular soccer
team
supported by the city's political conservatives, and used his money to
improve its roster. Last year, he offered the people of Sderot free
vacations to the beach resort of Eilat; and he has even talked-in Russian
and English; he speaks almost no Hebrew-about running for mayor of
Jerusalem.

When I asked Moyal about Gaydamak, he took a long drag on his cigarette,
with such force that he burned it to the filter.

"Aaacchh," he said, exhaling at last. "Don't make me talk too much about
. .
. him." The Gaydamak phenomenon was evidence of a failed government. Nor
was
Moyal pleased, he said, to have received a gift of more than two million
dollars from an American evangelical group for the purpose of reinforcing
buildings against rocket attacks. Moyal came to office hoping to build
schools, and he has ended up on the borderline of what is widely known in
Israel as "Hamastan." Even as the Israeli government, along with the
United
States, tries to bolster the Fatah president, Mahmoud Abbas, in the West
Bank, with funds and diplomatic blandishments, Hamas has an absolute hold
over Gaza.

"Look," Moyal said. "Hamas wants to empty Sderot. If we experience a
hundred
rockets a day-and Hamas says it has ten thousand rockets in its
arsenal-no
one will stay, and Hamas will be able to show the world that it can beat
Israel with its primitive arms. It's so simple: make Hamas pay a price
for
this. But the Israeli reaction is nothing. And if Sderot collapses this
will
be the end of Israel. Then Hamas will reach Ashdod," ten miles farther
north. "And then what? Evacuate Ashdod, a city of two hundred thousand
people? Imagine if they start launching rockets from Judea and
Samaria"-the
West Bank-"and they hit Tel Aviv."

Moyal said that if the United States could send troops thousands of miles
to
Afghanistan to fight Al Qaeda and the Taliban, Olmert could surely order
a
more decisive force into Gaza. Sharon's unilateral disengagement, in
August,
2005, he said, had been a disaster: Hamas controlled Gaza and the Qassams
had not stopped. "The big mistake is that this was all for nothing. At
the
time, the defense minister under Sharon, Shaul Mofaz, said that if after
disengagement there was just one Qassam Gaza City would be shut down.
We've
had a few thousand rockets since then."

Moyal expressed disgust for the generation of Israeli politicians now in
their forties and fifties-not least Avraham Burg-and said that it was
because of their failure that "we are living in a retro age," in which
the
emerging contenders for Prime Minister are two former Prime Ministers:
Barak, of Labor, and, Moyal's preference, Benjamin Netanyahu, of Likud.

Later, Moyal took me to the police station where the municipality stores
debris from the missiles that have fallen on Sderot. About a hundred of
the
rockets-twisted metal tubes, thicker ones by Hamas, thinner by Islamic
Jihad-lay on a set of shelves. "Here is the latest harvest!" he said, as
if
the distorted metal were a rack of prize melons. The police paint the
date
on the rockets the day they fall. Moyal pointed to one from the previous
morning, which exploded in a scrubby field on the edge of town. "This is
yesterday's, fresh from the oven."

Nearby, in a tiny office, a few young Army technicians monitored a series
of
computer screens. They were getting satellite information from
surveillance
cameras, including cameras mounted on a blimp that hovers above Gaza.
More
than ninety per cent of the time, when rockets are launched toward Sderot
from Gaza, the system, called Red Dawn, picks up their flight and an
alarm
sounds throughout the town.

"You have about fifteen seconds to take cover," Moyal said.

Most Israelis believe that the occupation of Arab lands is untenable, and
they also wonder how, when both Palestinian and Israeli politics have
degenerated, the economy has soared. The Tel Aviv stock-exchange index
has
gone up two hundred and ten per cent in the past four years.

In the coming months, it may turn out that the most important
constituency
applying pressure to the Israeli government to engage the Palestinians in
diplomatic negotiations will be not the activists or the left wing of the
Labor Party but, rather, the entrepreneurs and managers who run such
successful companies as Teva, Check Point, and Iscar. According to
Bernard
Avishai, a consulting editor with Harvard Business Review and the author
of
"The Tragedy of Zionism," the business élites know that political unrest
and, of course, potential war on any front threatens their interests.
Those
same businessmen are also wary of the most right-wing sector of society:
the
thirty-eight per cent of the Jewish population that wants the state to be
run by religious law, and the thirty per cent that wants Yigal Amir, the
assassin of Yitzhak Rabin, to be pardoned.

"The continued success of the economy depends on global companies being
willing to let Israeli companies into their networks," Avishai told me
over
lunch in Jerusalem. "If Israel collapses into chaos-if the Lebanon war
had
been six months instead of one-that could all end."

Olmert and the two leading contenders to succeed him, Netanyahu and
Barak,
differ politically, but they are all closely connected to the business
élites, and they can easily see that, decades after the country left
behind
its old semi-socialist pioneer economy for a modern one, it cannot afford
to
let its most educated and entrepreneurial young people leave for Europe
and
the United States. Avishai said that about a third of forty-five business
and law students he taught a few years ago at the Interdisciplinary
Center,
in Herzliya, now live abroad, and many of them may never return.
According
to a study by the Institute for Economic and Social Policy at the Shalem
Center, in Jerusalem, Israel is the world's largest exporter of
intellectual
capital to the United States.

"Will the young people take the job offer in London from Goldman Sachs or
will they stay here and wait for the missiles to fall?" Avishai said.
"The
question is, is this a good enough place to come back to when they are
married and have children? Finally, the Israeli government has to
confront
its own crazies and create a national consensus on democratic ideals,
enact
a secular constitution, and really confront the settlers. So far, the
government is only willing to say that it is making 'painful' moves. We
are
told that we have to grieve with the settlers, think about making deals,
but
quietly let on that we actually think these are the real Israeli
pioneers.
Bullshit. Avrum Burg might not express the need to change in the most
effective way, but at least he has the courage to insist on it." ?