Brain Drain
By Robert Rosenberg
June 12 2002

Israel did not start with an anti-intellectual tradition. Judaism itself does have an anti-intellectual movement, in the Hasidic movement, which while insisting on Hebrew literacy for its followers, so they could read prayers, did not insist on Torah studies as a way of worship. However, the Litvak opponents of Hasidism were strongly intellectual in their outlook, if not cosmopolitan. And if there's anything to be learned from Talmud, it's that the dialectic of intellectual argument is in the core of the Jewish experience.

Theodore Herzl, on the other hand, predicated Zionism on a strong intellectual outlook. His vision was of a cosmopolitan society that looked to the sciences and arts, and the raison d'etre of the state was no merely as a refuge, but to provide the environment in which the sciences and arts could flourish. After all, he could look around in 19th century Europe and see Jews filling the most prominent positions in both the sciences and arts. And from its earliest stages, even when it was choosing farming over more traditionally Jewish pursuits, it derived its ideological underpinning from a kind of core curriculum of both socialist and modernist texts.

Pretty much through the 1960s, Israel's educational system was one of the best in the world. Routinely, Israeli math and sciences scores on internationally compatible achievement tests ranked in the top five worldwide. But a decline was beginning, and not because of budget constraints, which will always exist, but because of a dramatic, defining moment in history, when Israeli society chose the irrational over the rational. That moment was the summer following the 1967 war, when it was dubbed the Six Day War, with the latent and inherent implication that the war was an act of divine intervention. Every military history and military autobiography of the time states bluntly that the army knew it would win, and in hours, with the air force. All else would be, as Rabbi Akiva once said, would be commentary. Indeed, while the main battles did indeed end six days after the initial outbreak, there was much to do for the army throughout that summer.

It is easy to understand why the media, the politicians, and many -- though thankfully not all -- of the intellectuals of the time, propagated this Shabtaist mass hysteria. The build-up to the war was fraught with anxiety, even though the army's 13 generals (yes, there were only 13 major generals in the Israeli army in 167) were confident of victory, mostly due to Ezer Weizman's brilliant strategy of a pre-emptive strike to eliminate the Arab air forces. Levi Eshkol's retrospectively admirable thoughtfulness (when since has this country had a thoughtful prime minister), was seen as dithering. And the magnitude of the outcome in territorial gains, combined with the Biblical significance of some of those lands, was overwhelming for a people who had been led to believe that Nasser (called Nazzer by the press of the time, as if to say he was a Nazi) planned to finish what the Germans had started.

Until 1967, God was not part of the national discourse, except, perhaps, to ask where he was in the Holocaust, and political Zionism made every effort to make certain that the world understood that the conflict between Israel and the Arabs, at least as far as the Israelis were concerned, was a purely territorial one. But from 1967 onward, things changed.

First there was the revisionist reading of a speech given by the famed Rabbi Kook Jr., who gave a speech a few weeks before the war -- indeed before it was eve on the horizon -- in which he said something about the messiah being on the way, and Jerusalem being reunited. Suddenly, he was made into a prophet -- though unlike the prophets of the Bible, he was never heard railing about the treatment of the poor, corruption in high office, and hypocrisy among the religious leaders. And his prophecy suddenly made the Land, with a capital L, as important as Torah, something radically un-Jewish by any standards of Judaism of the preceding post second commonwealth millennia in which Judaism was redefined by the rabbis, as not needing land in order to survive as a system of belief and law.

But Gush Emunim, the Bloc of the Faithful, swept up in by the irrationalism of believing that God had won the war for the Jews, swept aside any question about the Jewish people in the state of Israel being able to turn the non-Jewish inhabitants of Judea and Samaria into compliant servants, hewers of wood and drawers of water. As Nomi Shemer wrote in her song Jerusalem of Gold, there was nobody in the main plaza of Jericho But there were people there. And so, as the mass hysteria grew and evolved, a prime minister of Israel could say "there are no Palestinian people" -- and if there are Palestinians, then she was one, since she still had her identity card from the days of the British Mandate. Palestinian objection to Israeli rule meant terrorism, and its ugliness only deepened the irrationalism, since it justified ignoring any political compromises that might have been able to satisfy both Israeli and Palestinian needs, and that deliberate ignorance led to even blinder efforts to make sure the territories called Yesha, an acronym for Judea, Samaria and Gaza, which means salvation, remained forever Israeli. Irrational in the purist sense of the term, since its entire outlook hinged on an underlying faith that God had selected them to be the leaders of Israel into the real promised land (after all, Hebron is in the Bible, while Tel Aviv is merely an invention), the settlement movement could say with moral equanimity that by virtue of their Judaism, they were lords of the land, and all the other inhabitants were "locals," "natives," and as anyone who has visited the Jewish neighborhoods of Hebron has seen in the graffiti scrawled on walls throughout the town, "dogs." While the settlement movement wasn't strictly anti-intellectual - after all, it had is supporters in academia, and among some of the country's finest Hebrew writers - its arguments were brutal and bullying, denying patriotism itself to any who disagreed with then, expropriating Zionism for their exclusive use, and always certain to bring the argument to a tautological extremity that argued, as Prime Minister Sharon so succinctly put it, "there's no difference between Netzarim and Tel Aviv," as if there can be any comparison between a thriving metropolis of more than a million and a half people and barbed wire enclave of a few dozen families living comfortably at about five people per dunam, protected by hundreds if not thousands of soldiers from hundreds of thousands of far poorer people living 20, 30 or more to a dunam just on the other side of the fence.

But the settlement movement, unfortunately, is not the only irrational, anti-intellectual movement that has grown into a golem threatening the existence of the state of Israel as a modern, western country. Menachem Begin, as far removed from Moroccan culture as any politician in the land, won the hearts of Jews everywhere when he put on a kippa in front of the TV cameras to thank heaven for his election. He was elected because it was simply about time -- Labor's long rule in government was bound to eventually end because power held too long does indeed corrupt, and corruption in democracies, does eventually get punished. But the demographics said he was elected because the "Sephardim," meaning those expelled from Spain in 1492, were sick of being the underdogs in Israeli society. Why were they underdogs? It depends who is asked. The answers range from the racist, European Zionist establishment to the inherent failures of melting-pot societies, which Israel purported to be, to simply a matter of poor schools in poor neighborhoods, a phenomenon known worldwide in the west, and usually combated by inducing the best teachers to move to the poorest neighborhoods with tax breaks, higher salaries, and other enticements. Suddenly, the resentful Ashkenazi revisionists of Herut and the Likud, who said they hated the socialism of Mapai but really hated being left out of the inner circle where money could be made from getting the right authorizations for land development, or key import licenses, were the representatives of the Israeli underclass, the "Oriental" Jews, who, it seemed, had forever turned their back on the political establishment that had, after all, won independence for the Jewish state, and brought them to the promised land.

From Begin's kippa on election night it was just a hop skip and a jump to his call the next day "there will be many Elon Morehs," meaning many more settlements on "Biblical" lands, and he did devote his government to settling the West Bank and Gaza after he thought he could give back Asinai to the Egyptians in exchange for keeping those "Biblical lands." The international focus on Begin during those years was on the folly of the settlements - every western government was predicting what would happen if Israel kept trying to ignore the demographics of the occupation - and then the folly of the Lebanon War.

But something more insidious for the future of the state was brewing at the time. While Begin had clearly won the election, he needed a coalition. He turned to those who should have been the archenemies of his presumably purist Zionism -- the ultra-Orthodox, non- (and anti-) Zionist Haredim. Thus began the rise of a second political force that derives its strength from anti-intellectualism. It began with decidedly un-Zionist concept that said anyone who wanted to study Torah instead of serving in the army, getting an education and going to work, would be subsidized by the state. From 400 Torah geniuses, hand-selected by the rabbis in 1949, after they reached their deal with David Ben-Gurion to allow Torah study exemptions from the army for their best students, within a year iof Begin's deal with the ultra-Orthodox, there were 4,000 Torah students. And the number has only increased yearly since.

But that wasn't enough. A dispute over the political power that was evolving in the Chief Rabbinate meant that Rabbi Ovadia Yosef wouldn't get another term as Chief "Sephardi" rabbi. The aging, Eastern European Rabbi Eliezer Shach, saw that as an opportunity to win his own private battles with some other rabbis, so he threw his weight behind a new political party, Shas. And suddenly, the Likud was no longer the voice of the "Sephardim," but Shas was.

And what did Shas offer is constituency? The rhetoric was about helping the poor. But the main slogan was to "revive the glory" of the past, the traditions of the grandparents of North Africa, when, admittedly, life was a lot easier, women knew their place, men knew their place, and children knew their place, in the rigid social structures of colonized Arab countries in which Jews had few if any civic responsibilities. And using its political strength, which grew from election to election mostly because of the clever politicking of Aryeh Deri, a political genius by all accounts, but perhaps too smart for his own good, since he ended up in jail on a corruption conviction, Shas won its demand for a state-financed school system that teaches its pupils to worship Rabbi Yosef, choose yeshiva studies over secular studies, and send the women to work (or collect the welfare check) while the men "kill themselves for Torah." In effect the state of Israel has been financing a private school system that has the goal of turning everyone in the country into ultra-Orthodox Jews, the most anti-Zionist goal of all.

Thus two anti-Zionist, anti-intellectual movements were born in the Zionist state during an era of political hegemony by ostensibly right wing, conservative governments: the Shas movement, which sets its policies according the strategies of a papal rabbi who cares only about his school system, and the settlement movement, which over 35 years has drained hundreds of billions of dollars in direct cash payments to encourage settlement, and indirect expenses caused by "security needs" of those settlers, but more importantly, drained the moral strength of the state of Israel as it became a repressive colonialist power fighting a Sisyphesian struggle to deny the vast majority of residents of the territories -- the Palestinians -- their basic human rights, while forcing the vast majority of the citizens of Israel to pay for it.

Where is this all leading? The best minds of the country (excerpt for those in the yeshivas and settlements) will leave. Why should they stay when two anti-Zionist forces have usurped Zionism? And what will happen as they leave? Mob rule, irrational thinking, will prevail. The first signs are already here. The mob has accepted the irrational position that as long as the Palestinians resist Israeli occupation it is impossible to discuss alternative compromises with them. That position is not only irrational; it is anti-Zionist, because Zionism, more than anything else, is about Jews taking control of their destiny. Instead, the destiny of the Jewish state is in the hands of any angry Palestinian 15-year-old with enough fertilizer and ammonia to pack into a pipe and carry onto a bus.

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