I met Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister-designate, back
when we were both graduate students (he at M.I.T., I at Tufts) in
the mid-1970s. He struck me as a very smart fellow — though a
bit of an extremist. I was particularly taken aback when he
casually referred to Israel’s ruling Labor Party as “those
Bolsheviks.” As a student of Soviet foreign policy, I knew this
was untrue. To be sure, Israel’s Founding Fathers (and Mothers)
were ardent socialists, but they were also, for the most part,
strongly anti-Bolshevik. Strictly speaking, Netanyahu should have
called Israel’s Laborites “those Mensheviks” — the kind of
anti-communist socialists who, had they come to the United States
instead of Palestine, would have become labor organizers, civil
rights lawyers, crusading journalists and, in their old age,
grumpy neo-cons.
But whether you call them Bolsheviks, Mensheviks or Social
Democrats, it now appears that Israel’s Labor Party is pretty
well washed up as a major political force. This is astonishing.
In the February elections, the party that is rightly identified
with Israel’s creation, the party of David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir
and (for a while, at least) Moshe Dayan, the party that has
always been the largest or second largest party in Israel’s
parliament and managed to leave its mark on virtually every
aspect of Israeli life — this party finished in fourth place,
behind (centrist) Kadima, (conservative) Likud, and (???) Israel
Beitaynu, a relatively new party that is militantly secular,
stridently anti-Arab, and very difficult to categorize.
The Labor Party fell from grace because Israeli voters were fed
up with its approach to foreign policy. As near as I can tell,
the driving impulse behind that approach was a desire to be
well-thought of in the world — particularly in its more
“progressive” precincts. I even suspect that many left-wing
Israelis are secretly embarrassed by the warm support their
nation enjoys from the likes of a George W. Bush, and would
gladly trade it for a pat on the back from Nelson Mandela, or a
friendly smile from Bishop Tutu.
But the Labor Party that went down in flames last month should
not be confused with the Labor Party that founded Israel sixty
years ago. Indeed, if some of those early Laborites returned to
modern Israel, they’d probably feel much more at home in
Netanyahu’s Likud than in the party that pretends to embody their
legacy. Similarly, I think Israel’s Founders would feel much more
at home in some of those West Bank settlements that Labor so
despises than in the long-established kibbutzim
(collective farms) that are the (shrinking) bedrock of Labor’s
remaining electoral strength.
A few years ago, a book came out in Israel that vividly described
how Israel’s kibbutzim have changed over the years. Titled
From Silence, to Outcry, to Speech (Reader be warned:
I’m translating directly from the Hebrew, and my linguistic
skills are wobbly), it described the child-rearing practices of
three generations of Israeli women who lived on
kibbutzim. Most striking were the attitudes of the
earliest, pioneering generation of women, who basically gave up
on motherhood for the sake of nation-building. For them, writes
Dr. Erala Lamdan, the study’s author and herself a kibbutz
member, “The main thing was the collective, and individuals
surrendered their private interests for the sake of such great
goals as building the land, founding the kibbutz and educating a
‘new generation.’” The challenges facing these women were so
great, and their determination to build a just society was so
fierce, that they delegated the rearing of their children to
collective nurseries, while they concentrated on more pressing
matters: serving in health clinics for new immigrants, going on
missions abroad, or even bringing in the grape harvest.
But the daughters of these pioneers and, even more so, their
granddaughters, have an entirely different outlook. Their
decision to live on a kibbutz, Dr. Lamdan maintains, has nothing
to do with ideology, and everything to do with the comforts,
conveniences and amenities that kibbutz life offers. And, of
course, they wouldn’t dream of allowing their children to be
raised outside the family — motherhood is the defining
experience of their lives.
The transition that Israel’s kibbutzim have undergone — from
socialist hothouses fanatically dedicated to equality, to gated
communities intent on enjoying the good life — mirrors the
changes undergone by the Labor Party. No longer does that party
take either its Jewish or its Zionist legacy very seriously; no
longer is it even committed to settling the Land of Israel.
Today, it merely wants to be accepted into the club of
bien-pensants, to bask in the approval of the right kind
of people. Unfortunately for the Labor Party, modern Israel is
increasingly filled with the wrong kind of people, who can’t
stand what the Labor Party has become.
