Word: elon
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Once upon a time, as Elon tells his disillusioned story, the early Zionists (circa 1882) were "secular rabbis of a new faith of redemption." The founders of modern Israel called themselves olim: pilgrims, "those who ascend." Generally, they were mystics with a "terrible sincerity," an "almost inhuman sense of rectitude," and "not a glimmer of doubt...
...beginning of this century, the waves of immigrants from czarist Russia, Poland and the Austro-Hungarian Empire put a salvationist mark on Israel "as indelible," Elon suggests, "as that imprinted by the Pilgrim Fathers in the early stages of the American Republic." Counting 102 countries of origin for the 2,500,000 Israelis in 1970, the author writes: "Ethnically, Israelis may be a hybrid; as political creatures, they are children of 19th century Europe." Aglow with humanitarian socialism, Zionists also dreamed of a morally perfect society rather than just one more chauvinistic nation-state. They discovered their image of Utopia...
Bandits in Eden. Elon quotes the letter Ben-Gurion wrote to his pregnant wife when in 1918, with the British organizing the Jewish Legion to occupy Palestine, he temporarily abandoned her for the cause: "I did not want to give you a small, cheap, secular kind of happiness. I prepared for you the great sacred human joy achieved through suffering and pain." From such moral heights as well as a rightful sense of wrongs endured, passionate Zionists could not take seriously the half-million Palestinian Arabs who were viewed merely as a harassment in Eden. Arab attacks, which began...
Agrarian Ritual. When Israel became an independent state in 1948, the dream of the Zionists seemed to be realized. But, Elon contends, the dream come true has strong elements of nightmare. A typical European Israeli is now 45 years old. He has been in and out of uniform since he was 17 or 18. He was a soldier with the British in World War II. He fought in the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948, 1956 and 1967. During peaceful intervals he has watched a land of "agrarian ritual" turn into an urban industrial society...
...this Elon sees as producing an old-fashioned nationalism and a "cult of toughness." The kibbutzniks, imbued with an agrarian-romantic zeal, probably never made up more than 8% of the population; now they total less than 4%. In the past they were influential far beyond their numbers. Between 1949 and 1967, about one-third of all Cabinet ministers had worked in a kibbutz. But now the kibbutznik is losing authority as an elite stylist. The "new glamour boys," says Elon, "are high-powered technologists, scientists, management consultants." The true believers have been replaced by "hardboiled 'pragmatic' politicians...