[A-List] Leaving the Zionist Ghetto

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

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Last update - 23:50 07/06/2007  	 		
Leaving the Zionist ghetto
By Ari Shavit

We met 25 years ago. Exactly 25 years ago. Avraham - Avrum - Burg and
I were then part of a small group of reserve soldiers and officers who
came out against the First Lebanon War. "Soldiers Against Silence," we
were called. Very quickly Avrum was taken from us. In the great
demonstration of the 400,000 [the peace rally in Tel Aviv following
the September 1982 massacre in the Sabra and Chatilla camps in
Beirut], he became a star and immediately turned to politics. At first
he was one of Shimon Peres' smart young men. Then he was the great
hope of the Labor Party's Young Guard. After that the chairman of the
Jewish Agency, Speaker of the Knesset, a candidate for the Labor
leadership.

And then, suddenly, three years ago, Burg got up and left. Went to
feather his nest. Got entangled in a problematic and failed
privatization deal. Was slandered in the papers, scrutinized by the
state comptroller, investigated by the police. And all this time he
was writing a book.

All this time he was formulating the bold insights of "Defeating Hitler."

Burg will not admit it, but from his point of view the book he is
launching now, to coincide with Hebrew Book Week, is a book of
prophecy. A book that is intended to vest the kingdom with prophecy.
For others, the book will not be easily definable. It contains deep
thoughts about Israel and Zionism, a prolonged comparison between
Israel and Germany, trenchant criticism of Eichmann's hanging,
reflections on Judaism in the age of globalization and memories from
his father's house.

Yosef Burg, the refugee from Dresden, accords the book a certain
softness that is not to be found in the angry words of his son. True,
toward the end the optimist Avrum tries to transform his eulogy into a
paean, but the attempt is not entirely convincing. The Israel of
"Defeating Hitler" is a very harsh place. Brutal and imperialist,
confrontational and insular. A shallow place, thuggish, lacking
spiritual inspiration.

I was outraged by the book. I saw it as a turning away of an Israeli
colleague from our shared Israeliness. I saw it as a one-dimensional
and unempathetic attack on the Israeli experience. Still, the dialogue
with Avrum was riveting. We got angry at each other and raised our
voices at each other and circled each other warily like two wounded
gladiators in the arena. You can't take away from Avrum what he has.
You can't take away the education or the articulateness or the ability
to touch truly painful places. Maybe that's why he is so infuriating.
Friend and predator; brother and deserter.

Avrum Burg, I read your new book, "Defeating Hitler," as a parting
from Zionism. Am I wrong? Are you still a Zionist?

"I am a human being, I am a Jew and I am an Israeli. Zionism was an
instrument to move me from the Jewish state of being to the Israeli
state of being. I think it was Ben-Gurion who said that the Zionist
movement was the scaffolding to build the home, and that after the
state's establishment it should be dismantled."

So you confirm that you are no longer a Zionist?

"Already at the First Zionist Congress, Herzl's Zionism was victorious
over the Zionism of Ahad Ha'am. I think that the 21st century should
be the century of Ahad Ha'am. We have to leave Herzl behind and move
to Ahad Ha'am."

Does this mean that you no longer find the notion of a Jewish state acceptable?

"It can't work anymore. To define the State of Israel as a Jewish
state is the key to its end. A Jewish state is explosive. It's
dynamite."

And a Jewish-democratic state?

"People find this very comfortable. It's lovely. It's schmaltzy. It's
nostalgic. It's retro. It gives a sense of fullness. But
'Jewish-democratic' is nitroglycerine."

We have to change the national anthem?

"The anthem is a symbol. I would be ready to buy into a reality in
which everything is fine and only the anthem is screwed-up."

Do we have to amend the Law of Return?

"We have to open the discussion. The Law of Return is an apologetic
law. It is the mirror image of Hitler. I don't want Hitler to define
my identity."

Should the Jewish Agency be dismantled?

"Back when I was chairman of the Jewish Agency, I suggested changing
its name from the Jewish Agency for the Land of Israel to the Jewish
Agency for Israeli Society. There is room for philanthropic tools. But
at the center of its experience it have to deal with all of Israel's
citizens, including the Arabs."

You write in your book that if Zionism is catastrophic Zionism, then
you are not only post-Zionist but anti-Zionist. And I say that since
the 1940s, the catastrophic element has been integral to Zionism. It
follows that you are anti-Zionist.

"Ahad Ha'am made the charge against Herzl that his whole Zionism had
its source in anti-Semitism. He thought of something else, of Israel
as a spiritual center - the Ahad Ha'am line has not died, and now its
time has come. Our confrontational Zionism vis-a-vis the world is
disastrous."

But it's not just the Zionist issue. Your book is anti-Israeli, in the
deepest sense. It is a book from which loathing of Israeliness
emanates.

"When I was a boy I was a Jew. In the language prevalent here: a
Jew-boy. I attended a heder [religious school]. I was taught by former
yeshiva students. After that, for most of my life I was an Israeli.
Language, signs, smells, tastes, places. Everything. Today that is not
enough for me. In my situation today, I am beyond Israeli. Of the
three identities that form me - human, Jewish and Israeli - I feel
that the Israeli element deprives the other two."

On the face of it, your position is conciliatory and humanistic. But
out of that approach you develop a very harsh attitude toward
Israeliness and Israelis. You say terrible things about us.

"I think that I have written a book of love. Love hurts. If I were
writing about Nicaragua, I wouldn't care. But I am coming from a place
of tremendous pain. I see my love withering before my eyes. I see my
society and the place I was raised in and my home being destroyed."

Love? You write that Israelis understand only force. If someone were
to write that Arabs understand only force or that the Turkmen
understand only force, he would immediately be condemned as a racist.
And rightly.

"You can't take one sentence and say that this is the whole book."

It's not just one sentence. It is repeated. You say that we have
force, a great deal of force and only force. You say that Israel is a
Zionist ghetto, an imperialistic, brutish place that believes only in
itself.

"Look at the Lebanon War. The people returned from the field of
battle. There were certain achievements, there were certain failures,
things were revealed. You would expect people in the mainstream and
even on the right to understand that when the IDF is allowed to win,
it doesn't win. That force is not a solution. But then comes Gaza, and
what is the Gaza discourse? We will smash them, we will erase them.
Nothing has sunk in. Nothing. And it's not just between nation and
nation. Look at the relations between people. Listen to the personal
conversation. The graph of violence on the roads, the discourse of the
battered women. Look at the mirror of Israel's face."

What you are saying is that the problem is not just the occupation. In
your eyes, Israel as a whole is some sort of horrible mutation.

"The occupation is a very small part of it. Israel is a frightened
society. To look for the source of the obsession with force and to
uproot it, you have to deal with the fears. And the meta-fear, the
primal fear is the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust."

That is the book's thesis. You are not the first to propose it, but
you formulate it very acutely. We are psychic cripples, you claim. We
are gripped by dread and fear and make use of force because Hitler
caused us deep psychic damage.

"Yes."

Well, I will counter by saying that your description is distorted.
It's not as though we are living in Iceland and imagining that we are
surrounded by Nazis who actually disappeared 60 years ago. We are
surrounded by genuine threats. We are one of the most threatened
countries in the world.

"The true Israeli rift today is between those who believe and those
who are afraid. The great victory of the Israeli right in the struggle
for the Israeli political soul lies in the way it has imbued it almost
totally with absolute paranoia. I accept that there are difficulties.
But are they absolute? Is every enemy Auschwitz? Is Hamas a scourge?"

You are patronizing and supercilious, Avrum. You have no empathy for
Israelis. You treat the Israeli Jew as a paranoid. But as the cliche
goes, some paranoids really are persecuted. On the day we are
speaking, Ahmadinejad is saying that our days are numbered. He
promises to eradicate us. No, he is not Hitler. But he is also not a
mirage. He is a true threat. He is the real world - a world you
ignore.

"I say that as of this moment, Israel is a state of trauma in nearly
every one of its dimensions. And it's not just a theoretical question.
Would our ability to cope with Iran not be much better if we renewed
in Israel the ability to trust the world? Would it not be more right
if we didn't deal with the problem on our own, but rather as part of a
world alignment beginning with the Christian churches, going on to the
governments and finally the armies?

"Instead, we say we do not trust the world, they will abandon us, and
here's Chamberlain returning from Munich with the black umbrella and
we will bomb them alone."

In your book we are not only victims of the Nazis. In your book we are
almost Judeo-Nazis. You are careful. You do not actually say that
Israel is Nazi Germany. But you come very close. You say that Israel
is pre-Nazi Germany. Israel is Germany up to the Nazis.

"Yes. I started the book from the saddest place. As mourning, but for
the loss of Israel. During most of the writing the book's title was
'Hitler Won.' I was sure it was finished. But slowly I discovered the
layer of not everything being lost. And I discovered my father as a
representative of German Jewry that was ahead of its time. These two
themes nourished the book from beginning to end. In the end I am an
optimistic person, and the end of the book is also optimistic."

The end may be optimistic, but throughout its entire course the book
repeatedly equates Israel with Germany. Is that really justified? Is
there sufficient basis for the Israel-Germany analogy?

"It is not an exact science, but I will describe to you some of the
elements that go into the stew: a great sense of national insult; a
feeling that the world has rejected us; unexplained losses in wars.
And, as a result, the centrality of militarism in our identity. The
place of reserve officers in society. The number of armed Israelis in
the streets. Where is this swarm of armed people going? The
expressions hurled publicly: 'Arabs out.'"

What you are actually claiming is that we have viruses of Nazism within us.

"The term 'Nazism' is extremely charged."

Avrum Burg writes in his new book: "It is sometimes difficult for me
to distinguish between the primeval National-Socialism and some
national cultural doctrines of the here-and-now."

"There is a difference between saying 'Nazi' and saying
'National-Socialist.' Nazi is an ultimate icon; in us it goes to final
and terminal places."

OK, we will leave Nazism. Are you concerned about a fascist debacle in Israel?

"I think it is already here."

Do you really believe that the racist slogans which, appallingly, do
indeed appear on the stone walks in Jerusalem are akin to the slogans
of the 1930s in Germany?

"I see that we are not weeding out those utterances with all our
might. And I hear voices coming out of Sderot .... We will destroy and
kill and expel. And there is a transferist discourse in the government
.... We have crossed so many red lines in the past few years. And then
you ask yourself what the next red lines that we cross will be."

In the book you both ask and answer. "I feel very strongly," you
write, "that there is a very good chance that a future Knesset in
Israel ... will prohibit sexual relations with Arabs, use
administrative means to prevent Arabs from employing Jewish cleaning
ladies and workers ... like the Nuremberg Laws ... All this will
happen, and is already happening." Didn't you get carried away, Avrum?

"When I was Speaker of the Knesset, I heard people talking. I
conducted in-depth conversations with members from all parts of the
House. I heard people of peace say -I want peace because I hate Arabs
and can't stand to look at them and can't tolerate them, - and I heard
people on the right use Kahanist language. Kahanism [referring to the
ultranational doctrine of Rabbi Meir Kahane] is in the Knesset. It was
disqualified as a party, but it constitutes 10 and maybe 15 and maybe
even 20 percent of the Jewish discourse in the Knesset. These matters
are far from simple. These are roiling waters."

I will tell you frankly. I think we have serious moral and
psychological problems. But I think that the comparison with Germany
on the eve of the rise of Nazism to power is baseless. One example:
There is a problem with the place of the army in our lives and with
the place of the generals in our politics and in the relations between
the political echelon and the army. But you are likening Israeli
militarism to German militarism, and that is a false comparison. You
describe Israel as a Prussian Sparta living by the sword, and that is
not the Israel I see outside. Certainly not in 2007.

"I envy your ability to read the situation as you read it. I very much
envy you. But I think we are a society that in its feelings lives by
the sword .... It is not by chance that I make the comparison with
Germany, because our feeling that we are obliged to live by the sword
stems from Germany. What they deprived us of in the 12 years of Nazism
necessitates a very large sword. Look at the fence. The separation
fence is a fence against paranoia. And it was born in my milieu. In my
school of thought. With my own Haim Ramon. What is the thinking here?
That I will erect a big wall and the problem will be solved because I
will not see them. You know, the Labor movement always saw the
historical context and represented a culture of dialogue, but here we
have terrible pettiness of soul. The fence physically demarcates the
end of Europe. It says that this is where Europe ends. It says that
you are the forward post of Europe and the fence separates you from
the barbarians. Like the Roman Wall. Like the Wall of China. But that
is so pathetic. And it is a bill of divorce from the vision of
integration. There is something so xenophobic about it. So insane. And
it comes just at a time when Europe itself, and the world with it, has
made such an impressive advance in internalizing the lessons of the
Holocaust and has fomented a great advance in the normative behavior
of nations."

The truth is that you are a salient Europist. You live in Nataf but
you are all Brussels. The prophet of Brussels.

"Completely. Completely. I see the European Union as a biblical
utopia. I don't know how long it will hold together, but it is
amazing. It is completely Jewish."

And this admiration you show for Europe is not accidental. Because one
of the riveting things in your book is that the sabra Avrum Burg turns
his back on being sabra and connects very deeply with some sort of
yekke [a reference to Jews of German origin] romanticism. Zionist
Israel comes across as a vulgar baron in the book, whereas German
Jewry is the ideal and the paragon.

"You are dichotomous, Ari, and I am inclusive. You slice off and I try
to contain. Therefore I do not say that I am turning my back on being
sabra but that I am turning in a different direction. And that is
true. Completely true."

I have a bone to pick with this romanticism. You describe a thousand
wonderful years of German Jewry. In large measure you view German
Jewry as a model. But it ends in Auschwitz, Avrum. It leads to
Auschwitz. Your yekke romanticism is understandable and attractive,
but it lies.

"Is there a well-grounded romanticism? Is your Israeli romanticism grounded?"

My Israeliness is not romantic. On the contrary: It is cruel. It stems
from understanding necessity. And you blur the necessity. Emotionally,
you prefer the move from Dresden to Manhattan over coping with the
Jewish-Israeli fate.

"We do not want to accept this, but the existence of the Diaspora
dates from the beginnings of our history. Abraham discovers God
outside the borders of the Land. Jacob leads tribes to outside the
borders. The tribes become a people outside the borders. The Torah is
given outside the borders. As Israelis and Zionists, we ignored this
completely. We rejected the Diaspora. But I maintain that just as
there was something astonishing about German Jewry, in America, too,
they also created the potential for something astonishing. They
created a situation in which the goy can be my father and my mother
and my son and my partner. The goy there is not hostile but embracing.
And as a result, what emerges is a Jewish experience of integration,
not separation. Not segregation. I find those things lacking here.
Here the goy is what he was in the ghetto: confrontational and
hostile."

There really is a deep anti-Zionist pattern in you. Emotionally, you
are with German Jewry and American Jewry. They excite you, thrill you,
and by comparison you find the Zionist option crude and spiritually
meager. It broadens neither the heart nor the soul.

"Yes, yes. The Israeli reality is not exciting. People are not willing
to admit it, but Israel has reached the wall. Ask your friends if they
are certain their children will live here. How many will say yes? At
most 50 percent. In other words, the Israeli elite has already parted
with this place. And without an elite there is no nation."

You are saying that we are suffocating here for lack of spirit.

"Totally. We are already dead. We haven't received the news yet, but
we are dead. It doesn't work anymore. It doesn't work."

And you see in American Jewry the spiritual dimension and the cultural
ferment that you don't find here.

"Certainly. There is no important Jewish writing in Israel. There is
important Jewish writing in the United States. There is no one to talk
to here. The religious community of which I was a part - I feel no
sense of belonging to it. The secular community - I am not part of it,
either. I have no one to talk to. I am sitting with you and you don't
understand me, either. You are stuck at a chauvinist national
extremity."

That is not completely accurate. I am aware of the Jewish richness you
are talking about. But I am also aware that the basic Zionist analysis
was correct. Without Israel there is no future for a non-Orthodox
Jewish civilization.

"Take the purest Israeliness there is. Moshe Dayan, for example. And
we will shed all the Avrums from him. Totally immaculate Israeliness.
No nudniks. No effete types. Nothing. Are you sure that this
living-in-order-to-live will endure? Take on the other hand the
'kites.' Martin Buber, George Steiner. You say that these [ethereal]
kites will not get anywhere. But my historical experience tells me
that these kites get farther than the troopers."

You are actually preparing tools for exile.

"I have been living with them from the day I was born. What is it when
I say in prayer that because of our sins we were exiled from our land?
In Jewish history the spiritual existence is eternal and the political
existence is temporary."

In this sense, you are essentially non-Zionist. Because the energy
needed to establish and maintain this place is tremendous, and you are
saying that we must not give our all to this place.

"There is no Israeli whole. There is a Jewish whole. The Israeli is a
half-Jew. Judaism always prepared alternatives. The strategic mistake
of Zionism was to annul the alternatives. It built an enterprise here
whose most important sections are an illusion. Do you really think
that some sort of floating secular Tel Aviv-type post-kibbutz entity
will [continue to] exist here? Never. Israeliness has only body; it
doesn't have soul. At most, remnants of soul. You are already dead
spiritually, Ari. You have only an Israeli body. If you go on like
this, you will no longer be."

Israeliness is far richer, Avrum. It has energy and vibrancy and
diversity and productivity. But you fled from Israeliness. You
defected from Israeliness. You were an Israeli. You were more Israeli
than I was. But no more.

"No more. I think that the 'non-Israeli' is not an alternative to the
whole Jewish existence of two thousand years that I am talking about.
That is why I wrote this book. Because I cannot leave this world while
lying to myself. I told you: There is no Jewish existence without a
narrative. There is no such thing. And here there is certainly no
narrative. But what is even graver is that there are no forces that
will draw out a narrative from within.

"Accordingly, I am going to the world and to Judaism. Because the Jew
is the first postmodernist, the Jew is the first globalist."

You really are a globalist now. You really are going out to the world.
You have taken a French passport, and as a French citizen you voted in
the French presidential elections.

"I have already declared: I am a citizen of the world. This is my
hierarchy of identities: citizen of the world, afterward Jew and only
after that Israeli. I feel a weighty responsibility for the peace of
the world. And Sarkozy is in my eyes a threat to world peace. That is
why I went to vote against him."

Are you French?

"In many senses I am European. And from my point of view, Israel is
part of Europe."

But it isn't. Not yet. And you are an Israeli public figure who is
taking part in the French presidential elections as a Frenchman. That
is a far-reaching act. A pre-Zionist Jewish act. Something that
neither an Englishman or a Dutchman would do.

"True. It is completely Jewish. I am moving forward to the Jewish condition."

Do you recommend that every Israeli take out a foreign passport?

"Whoever can."

But in this, in this too, you are dismantling the Israeli mutual
surety. You are playing with your multiple passports and your multiple
identities, which is a course not available to many others. You are
dismantling something very basic.

"Those are your fears, Ari. I suggest that you not be afraid. That is
what I say in the book. I propose that we stop being afraid."

But you are not only the book, Avrum. You are also the person outside
the book. And there is a contradiction between the purism of the man
who wrote the book and the political life you lived here.

"A terrible question. Terrible. And it's true. For some of those years
I lived a lie. For many years I was not myself. At the outset of my
political path I had the energy of the struggle for religion and state
and the struggle for peace. I had the precise wind of [the late Prof.
Yeshayahu] Leibowitz in my sails. Those were my years of honesty. That
was me. But afterward, for long years I was a Mapainik [Mapai,
forerunner of the Labor Party]. I was there just to be. And I was no
longer me. I was false to the tenets."

And now that you are free of the limitations of politics, you are
going all the way with the Leibowitz in you. You describe the targeted
assassinations as acts of murder. You are happy that your mother's
grandson is not a fighter pilot who kills innocent people. You
describe the occupation as an Israeli Anschluss. An Israeli Anschluss?

"That is what we are doing there. What do you want me to say about
what we are doing there? That it's humanism? The Red Cross?"

And the targeted assassinations are murder?

"Some of them, certainly."

We are being dragged into carrying out war crimes?

"I have no other way to see it. Especially if there is no horizon of
dialogue. The Israelis are very calm. One more Arab, one less Arab.
Ya'allah, it's alright. But in the end, the pile grows high. The
number of innocent people is so large that it can no longer be
contained. And then our explosion and their explosion and the world's
will be infinite. I see it happening before my eyes. I see the pile of
Palestinian bodies crossing the wall we erected so as not to see it."

And you are not only Leibowitz. You are also Gandhi. You say that the
right reaction to the Holocaust was not Anielewicz [Mordechai
Anielewicz, commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising] but Gandhi.

"I believe in the doctrine of nonviolence. I do not think that to
believe in nonviolence is to be a patsy. In my eyes, Gandhi is as
Jewish as there is. He embodies a very ancient Jewish approach. Like
Yochanan ben Zakkai, who asked for Yavneh and its sages. Not
Jerusalem, not the Temple, not sovereignty: Yavneh and its sages."

And your Gandhiist approach has a political expression: You believe
Israel should be relieved of nuclear weapons.

"Of course, of course. The day the Bomb is dismantled will be the most
important day in Israel's history. It will be the day on which we get
such a good deal with the other side that we will no longer need the
Bomb. That has to be our ambition."

Avrum, your book is that of a man of peace. Almost a pacifist. How did
it happen that when a man of peace like you left politics you tried to
buy from the government a factory that manufactures tank parts?

"I am a businessman. I deal with companies. With bringing them back to
health. Privatizations. I like this job and I am also good at it. One
of my main projects was Ashot Industries in Ashkelon, 40 percent of
which manufactures arms. My intention was to close down that
production line and expand Ashot's involvement in the world of civil
aviation. I will not be responsible for manufacturing arms for one
day. The challenge I saw was to take a place that makes spears and
beat them into plowshares."

That deal raised serious questions. It led to an investigation by the
state comptroller and by the police. But I don't want to ask about its
criminal aspect, because the case was closed and you were exonerated.
I want to ask how it can be that the first thing a politician who
presented himself as an anti-Thatcherite and as a sworn enemy of
privatization did after leaving politics was to try to earn a huge
personal profit from privatization.

"I set out to do the most anti-Thatcherite thing. The state sold badly
but I wanted to buy well. The state wronged the workers and I wanted
to ensure their rights. I wanted to show a different model of
partnership between employees and owners. So I think it is unjust that
the State of Israel took this deal away from me. When I left politics,
the temptations were great. I could have sat on this board or that
board. People wanted me to open doors and close doors. But I said no.
I went to the old [type of] industry. To the periphery. I am now
producing corn in Hatzor Haglilit. Show me another person like me who
emerged from politics and is doing work like this. I am not sitting in
Kiryat Atidim [a high-tech industrial zone]. I am not sitting in the
slick places. I am sweating my guts out every month to pay my 600
employees. Their salary."

It's not exactly right that you decided not to open doors or close
doors. In your joint venture with businessman David Appel you were
supposed to open doors so he could reincarnate the 'Greek Island'
tourist project in southern Italy.

"Nothing came of that project. Not even a business opportunity. But if
something had come of it - so what? Because 20 people don't like David
he is unacceptable? Because terrible things are said about him in the
judicial system but nothing is proved? That is violence I cannot
tolerate. It is simply an executioner's approach. Israeliness as
executioner, and we really love it - it sells papers."

Are the allegations against you concerning Ashot Industries and David
Appel part of an Israeli executioner's approach?

"There is a gallows society here. First we'll hang you and when you
breathe your last breath we will clarify why it was your last. How it
left your body. We are now living in the equivalent of the 1950s in
America. In a McCarthyite era. The assault on corruption is
McCarthyism. It is important that we set boundaries. In the past we
swiped things from the chicken coop, and today that is impossible.
Once we asked girls, When you say no, what do you mean? - and today
sexual harassment is forbidden. But the way it is being done - the
style, the vulgarity, the populism, the superficiality. The inability
of those who are under attack to fight back properly."

You do know how to fight back. For example, Salai Meridor [former
Jewish Agency chairman] decides that there is no justification for him
and you to enjoy the baseless privilege of a service car with a
chauffeur for life, and you go to court to fight for that privilege
with all your might.

"As a former chairman of the Jewish Agency, I have pension rights just
as you have pension rights. One day they are suddenly gone. Out of the
blue. Think that part of your pension is to receive Haaretz free and
one day Amos Schocken [the publisher] suddenly takes it away. Wouldn't
you fight? Wouldn't you go to the workers' committee?

"But every person is allowed to fight when something is taken from him
- only Avrum is not allowed. Why? Because. This whole thing is such a
pittance in money terms that it doesn't even exist. But the level of
principle sent me up the wall."

We're talking about NIS 200,000. And about your behavior, which the
judge found disgraceful. And about the fact that even though you talk
high and mighty about morals, you don't see the moral flaw in the fact
that 10 years after leaving the Jewish Agency you are driving on your
business trips throughout the country with a Jewish Agency chauffeur
driving you everywhere. On top of which, today you are so alienated
from everything the Jewish Agency stands for.

"I have something to say about what the judge said. But I will not
counterattack. I will not correct violence with violence. We are
talking about a person's basic right. About a pension right."

Was it worth it? What will remain engraved in people's memory is that
Salai Meridor was fair and modest, and Avrum Burg was a hedonist who
coveted benefits.

"What remains of all this is that I am at peace with myself. Everyone
who feels good with secret violence or hidden knifing or with being an
open or covert Sicarius [name given to Second Temple Jews who used a
dagger, sicarius, to dispose of collaborators with Rome] - good luck
to him! Well and good. I am not going to educate the world. What's
important for me is that I am at harmony with myself."

But there is a question mark here which has accompanied you all along.
You speak so impressively. Not only articulately but morally. And now
you have written a book that is all morality. But your activity in the
world is different. In political life you were sophisticated, cagy and
snakelike, and in the business world, too, you are far from being a
saint. The disparity between your language and your deeds is
disturbing.

"The disparity is in the eye of the beholder. I do not ask myself how
Ari Shavit sees me. I am finished with the world in which I care what
you think of me. I live in a world in which I care what I think about
me. For many years I lived with the Moloch of what people would say.
That Moloch led me to wrong places. To places of a very large gap
between the inner me and the outer me. Today I live with my truth."

Maybe the things connect. You really are a man of peace who rejects
the militarist, nationalist, brute-force Israeli. But when you
reconnect to the Jew, you are connecting not only to the spiritual Jew
but also to the Jew of money.

"True. Life is not just to be a pioneer with a hoe and a bold fighter
at Lion's Gate. Life is also to be a merchant in Warsaw.
Unequivocally, that is a richer totality in life."

Still, you haven't given up the political. You are a close friend of
Prime Minister Olmert. Do you continue to support him even after the
Second Lebanon War?

"The story of Ehud Olmert is a terribly great tragedy. Of everyone in
the generation that is slightly older than me, he is the most
talented. The most experienced. There is a great fondness between us.
I like him very much. He is one of the most humane people and most
moral people in regard to relations between people, and in terms of
his relations with his family. But his ability to translate into
practical terms what he has is impossible because of the declaration
of the war. The Bush-like notion that war is the first option is a
mistake that colors all of Olmert's other essential qualities. I still
pray that he will correct this by means of a great political drama.
Hamas or Syria or the Saudi initiative. I tell him not to entrench
himself in the mistake. It is still possible for a great healing to
come out of the blunder."

Who do you support in the Labor Party primaries?

"Barak."

Why?

"He has already proved once that he is ready to go beyond the Israeli
Rubicon. And there will be Rubicons to cross here. His ability to do
that is very important to me."

Do you see yourself returning to politics?

"An open question. Only in 2010 will a new political era begin in
Israel. After the Olmert-Barak-Bibi [Netanyahu] generation comes to
its end, the turn will come of a new generation who will come from the
economy, the academy, the arts. Maybe then there will be a place for
me."

A place in the Prime Minister's Bureau?

"Once I wanted very much to be prime minister. It burned like fire in
my bones. I didn't know what I wanted to do there, but I wanted
terribly to be there. Today I say that I have lot of marathons to run
before that can happen."

But you are in the marathon?

"All my life."
-- 
Yoshie