Tom Segev Interview (2007): Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Let's talk now about the lead-up to the war, because you are also addressing the question [of] the state of Israeli society and identity in the year leading up to the war, 1966. I know that you got your Ph.D., I recall from our last interview, in Boston, and this theme of Israeli identity was something that you studied when you were in United States, the problem of political identity. Things were not going well in Israel before the war.
If you had come to Israel in 1965, you would not only get the impression that you are witnessing a fantastic success story, you would also be impressed by the fact that most Israelis felt and knew that they were part of an unbelievable success story. Within eighteen months before the war, this has abruptly changed, and most Israelis sink into a very, very deep depression. This has to do with the fact that the economic boom was all of a sudden over, there was economic recession, there was unemployment. More Israelis left Israel for good than came to live there, for the first time. You can hardly think of anything more insulting to the Zionist ego than Israelis choosing to leave Israel.
There was the beginning of Palestinian terrorism. Lots of people don't realize that, but the Fatah terrorist organization really started in 1965. And there was no answer to that, because states and strong armies really don't have an answer to that. There was a feeling that the founding fathers were losing the young generation. Now this is, of course, something that happened in the sixties in other countries as well, but it was a very, very strong feeling, almost of bereavement. These kids had not even started the war and a whole generation felt that they were lost already.
And there was a political problem. The grand founding father of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, was no longer in power. He was replaced by a life-size, very decent politician, but a gray professional politician called Levi Eshkol. Very few people trusted him. And so, there was a feeling of a lack of leadership. All these things together led to a feeling that the Zionist dream itself was over, and on the background of that feeling then the crisis with Egypt starts, and as it starts people are really, really fearful. They fear that Egypt is going to exterminate Israel. The term "exterminate Israel" is really interesting because "exterminate," of course, alludes to the Holocaust, and Israel means both "the country" and "the Jewish people." So, people really expected another Holocaust, and this is something that you'll see from these letters which they wrote to their friends and relatives abroad. This is why these letters are so important, because it's not some kind of manipulated propaganda. There was propaganda, like the Israeli Foreign Office directs the Israeli Embassy in Washington, "Seek an immediate appointment with the Editor-in-Chief of the New York Times and explain to him that Nasser is Hitler." This is a kind of manipulative diplomacy. But these letters which people wrote to their relatives about their fear -- this is not for the New York Times, this is from one sister to the other. And so, this is very, very genuine Holocaust anxiety.
One other element of this set of problems that you've just described is the question of who is an Israeli and the problem of integrating Middle Eastern Jews. Israel had been dominated and really founded by the European Jews. Talk a little about that, because this was an issue of identity but also of inequality.
Zionism was born in Europe. Everything about Zionism -- liberalism, Marxism, socialism, nationalism -- all of it comes from Europe. The Zionist dream is to create a European Jewish state in Palestine, but it should be a stronghold of European culture. This was the original dream. The Jews who were supposed to populate that country -- most of them actually were gone in the Holocaust, and so the Zionist movement starts to look around for a replacement and then discovers the Jews of the Arab countries. Before that, Jews in the Arab countries were, at most, of some anthropological interest, maybe, to the Zionist movement. They were never considered the future population of the Jewish state.
After 1948, about half the immigrants who came to Israel came from Arab countries, and it became evident that Israel was not going to be that European stronghold, but was going to be a much more Middle Eastern country, a much more, as they said in Adul's time, "oriental" country, but they really meant Jews from Arab countries, or mizrahim, as they are called in Hebrew. They inevitably changed the original character of the Jewish community in Palestine, and there are many people who are resentful. They feel that this is not the dream they had. Some are also afraid that if Israel becomes too much influenced by Jews from Arab countries, it will lose its natural contacts to Jews in other countries, particularly in America. And so, they don't feel good about it, and this is one reason of the crisis, that Israel is changing. It is also changing because the original days of vision and heroism are over. These are now days of gray routine. The Israeli society was not ready for that yet. This is why the resignation of David Ben-Gurion came as such a shock, because he's, of course, the one who symbolizes glory, and vision, and the realization of the dream, and all of a sudden days of gray routine are there, and it's very, very difficult for them to take.
There are two other elements I want to bring out as we set the stage, and one is, as a part of this fragile identity you point to how new Israel was, how few years some of the people had lived there, combined with in the Zionist dream of a relationship to the land and transforming the land. That's a second element. And the third element, which emerged in some of the diaries and letters, was the idea, "In '48 we didn't go far enough. Had the troops just gone a little farther, or not given up this particular position, then Israel's identity and its boundaries would be more secure."
Well, first of all, Israel doesn't have boundaries, so a country without boundaries has difficulty shaping its identity. We don't really know where Israel starts and where it ends. Yes, there was a feeling that more should have been done in 1948; particularly, the failure to take East Jerusalem was an open wound. Now you should not take it that everybody wakes up in the morning and says, "Wow, we really need to occupy East Jerusalem." That's not the way it happens. But there is an open wound. "We failed. We tried, we failed." The glorious Israeli army, "We tried, we failed." And of course, the West Bank and Gaza. So, these are kind of painful to some people, but I can tell you, I grew up before 1967; it never occurred to me that we would ever occupy more territory, actually. I remember that in high school they tried to convince us to choose Arabic as a second foreign language because they said, "One day there may be peace, you may get to Ramallah," and we chose French because we figured that we will get to Paris before we get to Ramallah.
[laughs]
And we did, actually. So, it's not as if we all were longing for more occupation, but from the point of view of identity, yes, this is a problem.
Now we mentioned the mizrahim which changed the country, and yes, you are right, it is very important to remember that this is a community of people who come from about a hundred countries, speak about a hundred languages. Many of them are Holocaust survivors and many of them come from Arab countries. Many of them are people who did not really want to go there, it's not as if everybody immigrated there willingly, many of them came as refugees because no other country would take them, felt very unhappy there, and tried to shape some kind of common identity. These are the stages of nation building, and this is why the routine coming so early really comes in a traumatic way. The country is not ready yet, the identity is not fully shaped yet. The other point you made is that there is a growing awareness of problems. There are social problems, social problems with the mizrahim. The Israeli Arabs become a social problem, which until then very few people realized, and some old, original, mythological values are also changing. For example, the importance of the kibbutz in Israel is not what it used to be. People don't regard the kibbutz anymore and the political influence, and the social influence, and the moral influence, the cultural influence, of the kibbutzim is diminishing. That adds to the feeling that 1948 is gone before it fully realized the dream.
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