Sunset for a Twilight Nation.

This is the article by George Jonas I tried to link to in the comments to Bush and Obama: Betraying America.

Israelis are a fractious people; maybe not quite as fractious as Arabs, but close. When Israel’s major political parties agree on something, as Labour, Likud and Kadima agreed this week that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made the right decision to resign in the fall, it’s not a sign of harmony but trouble.
SEVILLE PICTURES
Cast members from the 2006 Israeli film The Bubble, directed by Eytan Fox.

The Olmert-period’s dismal record is a symptom rather than the cause of Israel’s 60th anniversary turning into a crisis-year. What is the cause? It may be the political equivalent of metal fatigue. Few nations have been stressed for as long as Israel. Or perhaps a structural flaw is revealing itself after five generations.

That’s what some Israeli commentators think. “The greatest destabilizing factor has been the proportional representational system inflicted upon us by our Zionist founding fathers,” writes Isi Leibler in the Jerusalem Post. “This inherent weakness of the system was concealed during the early years of the state because the leaders then … would never contemplate promoting their personal agendas above the welfare of the nation …” What if the flaw goes deeper? When Israel — not the state, but the wishdream — was founded at a conference organized by Theodor Herzl 111 years ago in Basel, Switzerland, the delegates wore pins whose German text reflected Herzl’s most fundamental belief: “The only solution to the Jewish question is the establishment of a Jewish state.”

The “Jewish question” was, of course, antiSemitism.

Today we know that Herzl and the Basel delegates were mistaken. Whatever else the Jewish state may have achieved, it didn’t solve the “Jewish question.” If anything, establishing Israel spread anti-Semitism from Europe to the Middle East. More accurately, it intensified existing Arab/Muslim anti-Semitism to European/Christian levels and beyond, without reducing it elsewhere.

Hindsight is blindingly bright. Even so, I confess that if I had been a columnist or “feuilletonist” in 1897, as Herzl was, I too would have written that a Jewish state would solve the Jewish question. The difference is that, unlike Herzl, I would then have called the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine a juvenile fantasy, an impossible pipe dream.

Herzl was wrong on one count. I would have been wrong on two.

The 19th century was ending when Herzl wrote a fellow Zionist that even if they wouldn’t see the Promised Land with their beards still black, they’d see it when their beards were white. Had the founder of Israel lived to be 87, he would have been right. As it turned out, his beard was still black when he died at 44.

By the time Israel’s blue-and-white banner ran up a flagpole, few Zionists sported beards of any colour. The old guard didn’t because it was mostly dead, and the new guard didn’t because beards were no longer fashionable. Any beards still in evidence on May 14, 1948, would have been snow-white. The dream of Herzl’s generation took about 60 years to mature into a country.

Since that day another 60 years have passed — enough time to turn another set of beards white, although a mere blink of an eye in the life of a nation. Yet the news from Israel often mimics an old nation’s news — an old and exhausted nation. Israelis aren’t without flashes of “black-bearded” vigour in non-fiction, documentaries or music, but they increasingly write a white-bearded country’s fiction and produce a white-bearded country’s movies.

I saw one the other day, called The Bubble, by Eytan Fox and Gal Uchovsky. Released nine months ago, it’s a very stylish, contemporary, entertaining, if ultimately tragic, story of gay love, set against the backdrop of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

The Bubble is about good guys and bad guys, like most movies. The good guys are casual, sensitive, epicurean and mainly homosexual; the bad guys are conventional, intense, political and mainly heterosexual. For good guys, life is about sex, drugs, beach parties and getting a fashion designer’s job in London or Paris; for bad guys, it’s about securing and segregating countries, communities and families in Palestine or Israel. Good guys make love; bad guys make war.

Turning in his grave is Herzl. For his post-Zionist great-great-grandchildren, the Middle East conflict isn’t about “the Jewish question” — people awash on a sea of hatred trying to get into a lifeboat and people trying to beat them back. They don’t see it as a conflict between Arabs and Israelis, anti-Semites and Jews, disenfranchised colonials and imperialist colonizers, defenders of Islam and usurpers of the Hebraic faith or even between straights and gays. The filmmakers’ well-crafted opus sees a conflict only between the repressed “Right” and the libidinal “Left” — between fanatics who prefer blowing each other up, and hedonists who prefer giving each other blow jobs.

Films like The Bubble signal twilight countries in sunset periods. They aren’t bad films; on the contrary, they’re good. That’s the problem. For such films to come from beleaguered Israel doesn’t augur well for the Jewish state. Think of French and Italian cinema. Fighting the worst wars and making the best movies about them is the specialty of losers.

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