After Netanyahu, Israel Is a Country About to Purge Itself : Army School of the Americas

After a nightmarish election campaign that lasted almost half a year, Israel has woken up to a new opportunity to break free from the snare it set itself in 1996. During these past three years, which seemed an eternity to many Israelis, the country has gone through one of its most difficult, divisive and grotesque periods.

This writer is not among Ehud Barak’s fervent partisans. By all accounts, the new prime minister is a brilliant man. He is a rapid, original and daring thinker, well-read, and has an analytic mind. A good friend of his said of him that every time someone comes to Barak with a new idea, it turns out that Barak has already thought of it himself.

But no few Israelis are apprehensive about his tough positions on the peace process. When it comes to territory, Barak is a classic Israeli hawk. He’s not a fundamentalist who believes in the mystical value of Greater Israel, but he does think that territory is an important part of a good defense. In this he is the natural heir of Yitzhak Rabin. He has spent most of his life in the army, and his operating methods--both as a soldier and when he planned his conquest of the prime ministership--are, at base, military centralized, hierarchic and aggressive.

The adherents of the Israeli peace camp have not forgotten that Barak abstained when the Knesset voted on the Oslo accords, that he has steered clear of any contact with Palestinians and that in his recent visits to Israeli settlements in the occupied territories he spoke in messianic terms. Still, for a majority of Israelis, he was the better of the two candidates because he convinced them that his top priority, and sincere desire, is to heal the wounds of Israeli society.

Perhaps one of the strangest reasons for the sense of relief that so many Israelis feel is that they realize that they are now absolved of that irksome need to constantly preoccupy themselves with the riddle of Benjamin Netanyahu’s character. Preoccupation with Netanyahu’s personality became, for even many right-wingers, a kind of national obsession. It was a kind of cult of personality, but backwards. That incompletely resolved enigma was what fueled the unquenchable obsession. Part of the experience of being Israeli in recent years was the need, the drive, to try to decipher the character of Netanyahu the man, his motives, his frequent zigzags, the nature of his relations with his colleagues, and with his wife, his compulsive need to tell lies that were uncovered almost the same day they were told, the multiple, contradictory promises he handed out with such amazing, unbearable lightness.

Netanyahu is undoubtedly a smart man, but it would seem that it was not only his actions and failures that made him intolerable even to inveterate Likud supporters, but also that annoying lack of clarity that was like a shadow, a false bottom, of his character. Even more depressing is that this personality of his seeped into the national personality of the society and state and legitimized certain character traits that surfaced with such intensity during his term--lying as a norm, total contempt for promises and commitments, smug brutality, open rudeness, the unending preoccupation with public image and nothing else, his enthusiasm for pitting different groups of Israelis against each other, and that strange, fundamentally suicidal hostility that Netanyahu nourished against the country’s elites.

All these in the end penetrated the deep structure of Israeli society, imbuing it with instability and a deep sense of disintegration and disorientation. Here is one of the paradoxes characteristic of the period: Netanyahu the politician promised his people stability, security and unity. Netanyahu’s personality in the end accomplished the precise opposite of what Netanyahu the politician promised.

Barak’s victory has created a rising tide of enthusiasm for a new beginning, for the possibility that we will have a future here. Israel has not seen such a wave of joy in the four years since the murder of Yitzhak Rabin. It is an odd phenomenon: the need, the great urge to love Barak--to ignore the worrisome signs about how he is concentrating power in his hands and entirely neutralizing other members of his party; to ignore the large contingent of former military and intelligence people he is appointing to his personal staff.

But Israelis love Barak today just as a sick person loves the doctor who saved him from a long illness. Suddenly the country is being swept up by a heartfelt desire to conciliate opponents. A country that was split and mad with internecine hatred and mutual distrust is now charging passionately toward this opportunity to stop hating, to relax the tensed muscles of hostility, belligerence and division. Suddenly, sworn leftists are willing to examine the usefulness of a coalition with the Likud. Sworn enemies are asking to be forgiven for insults they have hurled at each other. Champions of the rule of law are willing to overlook the criminal and anti-democratic attributes of a party such as Shas and seek to bring it into the government.

I don’t know how long this honeymoon will continue. Certainly not very long, certainly not after the Cabinet portfolios begin to be apportioned. But in the meantime it is fascinating to see how the agonized Israeli soul, hardened by external and internal wars, is so ardent about finally divesting itself of the burden of constant animosity.

Israeli author David Grossman’s most recent work is “The Zig Zag Kid” (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1997). This piece was translated by Haim Watzman.