Where does the soul of Israel lie, and to what does it aspire? Even if Israel had never conquered an inch of Arab territory in the 1967 war-and therefore didn’t face the painful decisions about giving some of it back–the question would arise now, as the generation of the founders prepares to surrender power to the sons and daughters. Having set out to build a strong modern nation, they naturally are now wondering if they didn’t succeed only too well. Like John Adams, they fought so their children could farm and their children could be musicians, but would they have even bothered if they’d known about MTV? President Ezer Weiz-man himself, who is 71, has taken to decrying the effects of Madonna on Israeli youth, along with another quint essentially Gentile import, McDonald’s. Even a cheeseburger seems almost innocent next to the fare in chic Tel Aviv restaurants specializing in what can only be called anti-kosher cuisine: shellfish, pork, goose liver in cream sauce. “I would say the country is in great danger of losing its Jewish soul,” says Orthodox Rabbi David Hartman. “There is a great danger that Israel will be swept up by the MTV-Madonna culture.”
The pioneering Zionist spirit of the kibbutzim-collective farms–has been predictably sapped by prosperity. Most young Israelis don’t want to pick grapefruits any more than most young Americans want to work on farms. The kibbutzim have fallen on hard times, victims of the same economic laws that doomed socialist enterprises everywhere else in the world. To survive, some have abandoned the idealistic practice of paying workers according to the size of their families rather than the value of their labor. A few years ago a kibbutz founded in 1915 even began selling shares on the Tel Aviv stock market. As a kind of crowning irony, one of the proudest achievements of the pioneers-draining the Galilee swamps for farmland–is now being reversed in the interests of ecology.
Of course, to many Israelis, especially in cosmopolitan cities like Tel Aviv and Haifa, these changes are part of the welcome process of “normalization,” marking Israel’s emergence as a modern, liberal, democratic state. These Jews have a dream, too, which looks more to a place like Menlo Park, Calif., than either the Kingdom of David or the communal utopias of Saint-Simon. It is the position of “liberal Zionismzz which Zeev Sternhell, a professor of political science at Hebrew University, describes as “a recognition of the fact that Israel is more than a Jewish state, that it belongs also to the 20 percent of its citizens who are Arab . . . what counts are the universal values, the Rights of Man, and not the particularist Jewish values of Judaism.”
A few weeks before the assassination, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres spoke eloquently of this vision- of Israel at the heart of a new Middle East economy based on technology and tourism, of Arab and Jew working together to make the desert glint with bronze-glazed office parks and fuzz over with the green of golf courses. “This year,” he boasted, “Israel will make out of [its] brains more than the Saudis will make out of their oil wells.” Peace, of course, is a prerequisite for this dream, because wars make tourists and foreign investors nervous. But Peres also believes that ending the occupation of the West Bank is a goal worth pursuing for itself. Israel’s occupation of the territories, he told NEWSWEEK’S editors last month, is a moral
What does the country hope to be?
Protesters demonstrate against the peace agreement with Palestinians– but they may be MTV watchers, too
