Arnon Grunberg

Enterprise

Digest

On the storm - Ofer Aderet in Haaretz:

‘At the end of a series of meetings with Yaakov “Kobi” Sharett, after A total of about ten hours of interviews, with some chutzpah I asked him the obvious question. I wanted to know if he was sure that what he was saying, was said with a clear, considered mind. Sharett, who recently entered his 95th year, smiled and nodded, yes.
Yaakov Sharett, the son of Israel’s first foreign minister and second prime minister, Moshe Sharett, feels no need to mince his words. He is sharp, incisive and precise – and wants to send the readers a message that is hard to digest.
The son of the man who signed Israel’s Declaration of Independence in 1948 is ending his days as an anti-Zionist who opposes aliyah and encourages emigration from Israel, predicts dark days for the country. He even supports the Iranian nuclearprogram.
“The State of Israel and the Zionist enterprise were born in sin. That’s the way it is,” says the man, who served in the pre-state Palmach, volunteered for the Jewish Brigade in the British Army during World War II, cofounded a kibbutz in the Negev, and served in the Shin Bet security Service and Nativ, the government’s liaison bureau for immigration from Eastern Europe. “This original sin pursues and will pursue us and hang over us. We justify it, and it has become an existential fear, which expresses itself in all sorts of ways. There is a storm beneath the surface of the water,” he says.’

(…)
‘“It’s impossible to discount yerida [leaving Israel] as a curse. There are almost no Israelis who don’t have relatives overseas. I’m happy that I have granddaughters, great-granddaughters and a great-grandson in New York."
"I’m not ashamed to say it. Sharett had a yored father too. My grandfather. If he hadn’t left Israel, I wouldn’t have been born, because after he made yerida he established a family. As opposed to the false mantra ‘I have no other country,’ the facts show that there are other countries. There is more than one land. Over a million Israelis live abroad. The ideological Zionist commitment evaporates the more the generations pass. People understand that there are better places where to raise children and live. Everywhere has problems, life itself is a problem, but Israel has existential problems.” Nonetheless, don’t you have a feeling of missing out? Your father signed the Declaration of Independence, and you no longer see Israel as the national home of the Jewish people.
“The life of the Jewish people is a tragedy. Our people, at a very early stage, proved that it is not a dutiful people and doesn’t know how to sustain a state. So, for most of its time it did not have a national existence, but the existence of a persecuted and hated minority, that lives which lives without a higher organization and without its own government. It may be paying a price, but it withstood it."
"One of the genes in our national DNA is the ‘Get thee out of thine country’ (Lekh Lekha) gene that began back in the days of our father Abraham. Since the days of the Second Temple, most of the Jews haven’t lived in Israel. They established a magnificent community on the Tigris River and after that moved to Spain, where they created a wonderful culture for a thousand years, and from there they dispersed all over …” And then came the pogroms and after that the Holocaust, and many realized that the “Jewish problem” was solvable only in a territorial way.
“Suddenly people say, ‘We know what needs to be done,’ for everyone, and are prepared to force their ideas on the public. Who put you [in charge]? The moment Zionism called for the Jews to immigrate to Israel, in order to establish here one home for the Jewish people, which will be a sovereign state, a conflict was created. The Zionist idea was to come to a place where there were people, members of another people, members of another religion, completely different.

"Have you seen anywhere in the world where the majority would agree to give in to a foreign invader, who says, ‘our forefathers were here,’ and demands to enter the land and take control? The conflict was inherent and Zionism denied this, ignored it… as the proportion of Jews to Arabs changed in favor of the Jews, the Arabs realized that they were losing the majority. Who would agree to such a thing? “So violent conflict began, the riots of 1920, 1921, 1929, 1936–1939, and war and another war and another war. Many say that we ‘deserve’ the land because the Arabs could have accepted us as we were and then everything would have been alright. But they started the war, so they shouldn’t complain. I see in this whole transformation of the majority [Arab] to a minority and the minority [Jewish] into a majority as immoral.” So you claim that your father was also immoral and so are you – your biography intertwined with that of the Zionist Movement and Israel in its seminal period.
“If Israel is not OK, I’m not OK either, as someone who pays taxes here. For a certain period there was great hope here that something new had been created. I was a part of that. But now, Zionism, from my point of view, has disappeared. All the promises we made disappeared. I am not comfortable with this. Our national agenda is blood, death and violence. This flag files to this day in our country as a vision. Israel lives on the sword and sharpens it. I am completely alienated from this.”’

(…)

‘“I’m speaking frankly because I have nothing to hide. I’m 94 years old... The more homogenous society is, the healthier it is. The less so, there are problems. I’m disappointed in the fate of the Jewish people, which divided us into tribes. I’m also disappointed in the character of the state. When I see the prime minister with a kipah on his head, I don’t feel good. This is not the Israel I want to see. How did it happen that this new place, that was to have brought innovations, became the blackest place, controlled by the nationalist ultra-Orthodox? How is it that here of all places, there’s reactionism and zealotry, messianism, the desire to expand and control another people?” Yaakov Sharett was born in 1927 to a well-connected family of the cream of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine. After him came Yael (the future author Yael Medini), in 1931, and Haim in 1933. He spent his first three years in Tel Aviv and after that, with his father’s career advancement, the family moved to Jerusalem. He studied in Jerusalem with the geographer David Benbenisti, the philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz and the lexicographer Avraham Even Shoshan.
As a young man, Sharett went to study at Colombia University in the United States and Oxford in the U.K. His expertise was in what was called at the time “Sovietology,” for which he learned fluent Russian, his father’s mother tongue. His uncle, Shaul Avigur, enlisted him in 1960 in a secret unit he had established and led, called Nativ, whose members entered the Soviet Union under the cover of Israeli Embassy staff and helped Jews behind the Iron Curtain.
Sharett was appointed “first secretary” of the Israeli Embassy in Moscow, and crisscrossed the Soviet Union looking for Jews who showed an interest in Israel and Zionism. His stay there was stopped suddenly after a year, when he was expelled on charges of espionage. One day, while on a visit to Riga, he accepted a letter from a person who presented himself as Jewish and asked him to deliver it to relatives in Israel. This was apparently a trap, because later, as he describes it, “two hulks jumped me, picked me up off the ground, without considering that I had diplomatic immunity.” When he was questioned he was shown the letter that he had hidden in the pocket of his coat, and when they opened it, they found a picture of a missile.’

(…)

‘He will contribute his body to science. “I don’t need a grave. I don’t go to the graves of my family. I don’t think that a person’s memory, his soul, is associated with his bones or the place he is buried. I don’t want to take up space in a tiny country like ours. There’s no point at all. In any case, in one or two generations the headstones will be forgotten and abandoned. “ But before all this happens, he still wants the time to write his autobiography, some of whose chapter headings he revealed in this article. He’s already chosen the name for the book: “Forced Collaborator.”’

Read the article here.

Sharett’s jeremiad is the continuation of Arendt’s fear that the pariah will be replaced by a pariah state. But there is in his world view also a regret, to avoid the word racism, that less ‘enlightened’ Jews from the Arab world changed the character of Israel.

And of course, strains from messianism were to be found in some parts of Zionism from the very beginning.

The deadly force of Messianism, not in the last place for the believers, is well-known.

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