A Tale Of Two Israels

The assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a rightwing extremist was not intended as a symbolic act. Yigal Amir meant quite simply to wipe out the leader of a political party and a political process he despised. And that is what he did.

One cannot help but think, however, that this heinous act points to an identity crisis that permeates Israeli society today. The assassination of Rabin calls attention to the existence of two very different Israeli cultures--both Jewish--that are proving themselves fundamentally incapable of co-existence.

Israel is a country premised on a paradox. It is an avowedly secular state established to promote Jewish national life, to turn the Jews, in other words, into an autonomous people like the French or the Germans. At the same time it is a Jewish state which takes as its charter the preservation and propagation of a distinctively Jewish history and heritage. And therein lies the problem.

A little less than 50 years since its creation, Israelis are endorsing either the secular state or the Jewish state, but not both. The majority of secular Israelis, notwithstanding the Hebrew language they speak, have lost any substantive connection to Jewish culture and history. Religious rightists, on the other hand, have ceased to see the value of the secular state.

Secular Israelis have failed to locate their own collective identity within the long chain of Jewish history. It is not that they have suddenly ceased to be religiously observant. They were never observant, and that was fine. But even the most fervently secular Israelis used to have a degree of familiarity with classical Jewish literature, for instance, beginning with the Hebrew Bible. Whether or not the words were divinely inspired was unimportant. What mattered was that they were part of a canon of texts that were crucial to the formation of Jewish identity.

No longer. Shulamit Aloni, an outspoken member of the Israeli Knesset, recently suggested that there has been too much focus on classical Jewish literature in Israeli schools. She recommended a little less Judah ha-Levi (the towering figure of medieval Hebrew literature) and a litte more Rabelais. While it is not fair to implicate all secular Israelis in the switch from Hebrew to French literature, the trend is there. And insofar as its boosters would have Israel become an ersatz California or phony France, the trend is sad.

And then there is the other trend. Religious rightists, especially those settlers who are wedded to the Greater Israel of the Bible, have ceased to see any value in the secular state as such. As the late Israeli philospher Yeshayahu Leibowitz noted, religious rightists are too often incapable of distinguishing "between the Jewish people as the bearer of Judaism and the sovereign state instituted by this people as its intrument of self-government."

It is in the matter of territorial compromise that the settlers have proven themselves most uncompromising. They have failed to understand that for the state to be Jewish does not mean that it ought to carry out its foreign policy in accord with the Book of Joshua.

This largely abstract culture war that is being waged in Israel seems a million miles away from the cold-blooded assassination of this November. Yigal Amir, after all, murdered Yitzhak Rabin for the purest of political motives.

Yet this gruesome act of political violence simply does not make sense except as the result of an underlying fragmentation of Israeli society. Religious rightists and secular leftists have grown incapable of recognizing each other's Jewishness, Israeli-ness, and humanity. It is imperative that Israel continue on its path of peace with its many Arab neighbors. It is even more crucial, perhaps, that the country address the disuniting of its own society.

Peace with the neighbors is a hollow thing when there is war in the home.

Samuel J. Rascoff's column appears on alternate Fridays.