As Israel Faces Peace, Old Challenges Return : Mideast: Waning security concerns point up social, spiritual issues. Future of nation, Judaism pondered.

In leaving the Gaza Strip after a quarter of a century of military occupation and looking toward withdrawal from the West Bank, Israel is finally able--in the view of many of its liberal thinkers--to return to the question, profound and contentious, of what kind of nation it should be.

“As long as we were occupying another people, depriving the Palestinians by force of arms of their basic human and political rights, we were not a democratic state ourselves. And as long as we had more than 2 million Palestinians under us, we were on the way to losing our Jewish identity,” philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz declared.

“We can again ask ourselves the question, ‘What does it mean for Israel to be Jewish? What kind of democracy should we have? What sort of nation are we? What sort of people should we aspire to be?’ After a generation, those questions are back at the top of the agenda.”

Although the iconoclastic Leibowitz challenged Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip immediately after the 1967 Middle East War, and called for a Palestinian state, he is joined today by many others closer to the Israeli political center in suggesting that the country must now confront new issues.

“The glue of security has kept this country together,” said Rabbi Naama Kelman, who directs Reform Judaism’s education program here. “If we obtain peace with the Palestinians and then with the other Arab neighbors as we hope--and that is a big if --we will face serious questions like social unrest, poverty, domestic violence, intolerance, economic priorities and relations between synagogue and state. . . .

“Once Israelis are less concerned about physical security, they will have time to worry about spiritual security--and they will find there is a lot to worry about.”

Among Israeli liberals, there already is a lengthening agenda: the role of religion in the Jewish state, improvement of education after years of degradation, relations between Jews and Arabs within Israel, how to close social gaps while encouraging entrepreneurs, the future of Judaism itself.

Many on the Israeli right share these concerns. But their focus, more than ever, is on security, because of their fear that an agreement with the Palestine Liberation Organization on Palestinian self-government will prove to be a deathtrap for the country.

Even liberals preface their discussions of where the country should go with clearly stated assumptions that the autonomy deal must be the first step into an era of peace--and with warnings that if it fails, Israelis will respond “very, very vigorously and violently,” as Rabbi David Hartman put it, and then retreat back into the “world of conflict” that they know so well.

Novelist Amos Oz, while noting that “everything depends on the Arabs and their acceptance of us,” said it “already feels a bit strange--this life ‘after the (occupied) territories’ and the possibility we will look out and not see someone ready to kill us.”

“The overwhelming presence of conflict in our lives will diminish, and that is maybe already beginning,” Oz said. “Just how should we spend the ‘peace dividend’? It’s a question now. We will have to go about our real business, but working out what our real business is will itself be a challenge. . . .

“I worry sometimes that Israel at peace will lose its character and become part of a homogenized, CNN world. That would be a great pity, because Jews form a unique instrument in the world orchestra of art and culture, and it would be a shame if it vanished.”

“The big question is whether Israel is the end of Jewish history or another chapter of Jewish history,” said Hartman, a theologian and philosopher. “People are wondering seriously about that. There is a profound Jewish identity crisis in Israel.”

With the establishment of Israel as a modern state in 1948--and earlier, in the Zionist movement--according to Hartman, Leibowitz and others, many Jews came to substitute the founding and building of a national home for the spiritual values and way of life that had defined Judaism for centuries.

Israel’s triumph in the 1967 war, including the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, confirmed for many that “the whole biblical promise was being worked out . . . and we were living in God’s redemptive scheme,” Hartman said. “That meant they need not ask any difficult or embarrassing questions about the future of the Jewish people or the purpose of Israel.”

That was an illusion on virtually a national scale, Hartman and others maintain. And because of the fundamental shifts implicit in recognizing the Palestinians’ right to self-determination, including a share of the biblical Land of Israel, Israelis will soon be searching for new points of orientation.

“Religious Zionism has to offer a different perspective . . . a different way of understanding the return of the Jewish people to national sovereignty that doesn’t define the holiness of the task by how much land you own but by the quality of daily life of the society,” Hartman said.

Michael Breeson, who writes provocatively on political and social issues under the name “B. Michael” in Israel’s largest newspaper, Yediot Aharonot, was even more pungent in assessing this historic juncture.

“Over our 27 years in the Gaza Strip and on the West Bank, we became occupation junkies, hooked on power and running--and ruining--other people’s lives,” Breeson said, “and now we have to give it up. That will be tough. People know they have to kick the habit--and that means getting out entirely from the West Bank, settlements and all--but they say, ‘Just a little more.’

“What do they get instead? Quite banal problems like education, social welfare, garbage collection--in short, ending the slow but very sure deterioration in our quality of life over the past 30, 40, even 50 years. This will be very difficult. It requires a sense of who we are and where we are going and proper leadership. At this point, we have neither.”

Yet Leibowitz expects that Israel’s “liberation” from its long occupation will not only force the country to confront these challenges but provide the energy and new political and religious leaders to do so.

“After partition, and we are partitioning the (biblical) Land of Israel to share it with the Palestinian people, we will have to fight out our internal problems, most of which we conveniently put aside for years,” Leibowitz said.

“And the first, of course, will be the problem of the Jewish people, who for 200 years have been in crisis, facing dissolution, disintegration and assimilation. If we do that, we will know where we are going and how to solve the other questions.”

For secular Jews such as Ilana Hammerman, a prominent literary editor and translator, the questions may be the same as they are for Leibowitz, Hartman and others who are religious, but the answers are certain to be different.

“Is Israel a religious state, a theocracy run by rabbis, or is it democratic and pluralist?” Hammerman asked.

“We need a very big discussion on that. Having our lives run by rabbis, as it is now at the most important points like birth, marriage and death, is the first battle I will fight.

“Then there is education--that is the very future of our society. Next is the forced nationalism, the militarism and all the holy little rituals that remind me of countries we fled. What about the cultural conflicts we have among us? I could go on--the list is long. But when can we start? If we have to wait another 40 years, we will cease to exist.”

Many liberals are looking to an emerging generation of political leaders--dovish in their approach to Israel’s Arab neighbors, social democrats on domestic issues, pluralist in philosophy.

“We want the good life as well as the secure life,” Kelman said. “We are an urban people moving into the suburbs, Westernizing at a dizzying speed, anxious that our children are not only well-fed and well-educated but also well-dressed and, overall, getting on with life.

“We have been on this journey for a while, but the changes are crystallizing as peace becomes a real possibility.”

Oz also believes that “the future has already begun--getting out of Gaza just confirmed it.”

“Turn your back on Jerusalem and scan the entire coastal plain from Haifa down to Ashdod, and you see a land that is secular to the core, hedonistic, passionate, noisy, warmhearted, temperamental like Greece, Italy, Spain and North Africa,” Oz said.

“Israel is finding its place in the Mediterranean where it belongs. I like it. People smoke a lot, speak loudly, push a lot, but are open and creative, very creative. What makes me relatively optimistic is that it is not going to become a boring place for a very long time.”

But Hartman insists on a spiritual renewal as the foundation for Israel’s re-creation of itself.

“The interest of the world in Israel is not because they feel greater computer technology is going to come out of here,” he said, “but because they think in some way we are destined to be an important voice about the moral conscience, about God, about what the spiritual life is about and about the meaning of life.”