Jonathan Freedland: Welcome, all of you. Thanks to all of you for
coming and thanks to Jewish Book Week and the New Israel Fund for putting
together tonight’s event. It’s
a ‘first’ for Jewish Book Week, to come together with the New
Israel Fund and they are delighted to do it. As somebody who is a fan of both
those institutions, I am delighted that they are both together.
Incidentally, because I’ve
just realised that you have no idea who is talking to you, my name is Jonathan
Freedland and I write a column for the Guardian and for the Jewish Chronicle and I am going to be asking the questions today and I’ll also be
inviting all of you to ask questions of the man you have all come to listen to
and see.
He is one of Israel’s
foremost historians and journalists, really a chronicler of the present life of
that country and also of its past. He has been called, both by friends and
enemies, one of Israel’s leading ‘new historians’, and what
that term means is going to be one of the things I hope we talk about tonight.
He writes a column for the Ha’aretz
newspaper called, revealingly, ‘Foreign Correspondent’, meaning
that his brief is to look at his own country with the clear eye of an outsider
and an observer of the tiniest detail which sheds light on the wider national
life. Those of you who know his column know that it is a ‘must
read’.
But also he is famous for three
books really, each one of which has had a huge impact on the way Israel is seen
and how it sees itself. His book 1949: The First Israelis was one of those works of new history that made
people re-assess the origins of the country. His book The Seventh
Million, proof incidentally that our guest
has a fantastic knack for titles of his book, The Seventh Million, an account, an exploration of Israel’s
complex relationship with the Holocaust. And then, most recently, One
Palestine, Complete, a very new and
awakening account of the British Mandate period over Palestine which again, as
all his books do, upset several sacred cows all in one go, a stampede of sacred
cows, perhaps.
All three of those books, I hope,
we are going to be talking about, as well as his newest one, and again to make
my point about titles, Elvis in Jerusalem:
Post-Zionism and the Americanisation of Israel.
Our plan is to talk about all of
these as much as we can. The format I am going to suggest is that we do about
a third up here, a conversation, Tom and I. Then we are going to broaden out
to a conversation with all of you. But having given him that introduction and
build-up, please join me in welcoming Tom Segev.
It’s been pointed out by
somebody rather observant that the two people up here are wearing ties that
complement each other in a thematic appropriate way. I’m wearing stars, he
is wearing stripes! I promise you that wasn’t co-ordinated. We will get
on to some more, I hope, subtle aspects of that. But let us just kick off with
this bald and bold claim in the sub-title of your book, Tom, that somehow Elvis
is in Jerusalem and that Israel is being Americanised. Tell us what you mean
by that and whether or not you think that is a bad or a good thing.
Tom Segev: Well, Elvis is in Jerusalem, like everywhere else.
There is in fact, on the way to Jerusalem, a huge statue of Elvis, the picture
is on the cover, and there is actually a sign somewhere, divided in two: if you
turn right you get to Jerusalem; if you turn left, you go to Elvis. It’s
an official road sign and it is there. So the original Hebrew title was simply
‘The New Zionists’, and the American publishers called it Elvis
in Jerusalem. And I said to them: Well, if you dare to do that, do
that and they did. So that’s how we ended up with that title.
The Americanisation of Israel
means more than a Hebrew internet or a kosher McDonalds. We have both, but it means more. It means that the entire
elite of Israel is manned by people who were trained in America. If you want
to be somebody in Israel today, you really need to have an American chapter in
your biography, and most elites do have that chapter. I think that’s a
good thing and I know that this sounds very provocative, not only in England
but even more so in the other countries of Europe.
I know you talk to Europeans
about Americanisation, and they think it is a terrible thing. In Israel, it is
still a good thing. It is a good thing because we are adopting from America a
whole set of values which are relatively new to us. We don’t have a
constitution in Israel but we are adopting constitutional values from America,
which means that we are adopting the concept of a stronger democracy from
America. Human rights, we adopt from America.
Our Supreme Court is so powerful,
among other reasons because the President of the Supreme Court, his spiritual
capital is in America. The Supreme Court, about a year ago, ruled that Israeli
Arabs can buy houses in Israel, to which you may say wow, why do you need the
Supreme Court for that? But you do need the Supreme Court for that, and the
Supreme Court ruled that the Government which had originally refused to sell
land to Arabs should reconsider. When you read the verdict, this is a very,
very interesting document because you ask yourself: Where does he take his
inspiration from, the President of the Supreme Court? It’s all from
anti-segregation cases in America, and he says so. Now the Hebrew terms for
‘blacks’ is shechorim, which
is already an indication of adopting to American political correctness, because
we have a perfect biblical term, which would be kushi, but we don’t say kushi any more we say ‘blacks’.
Now in this verdict, at one point
the President of the Supreme Court uses a term which Israelis can’t even
understand what it is, and I think it is a slip of the pen. He says
‘Afro-Americans’ in Hebrew. We don’t say
‘Afro-Americans’. And I asked him about it. I said, ‘Where
does that term come from?’ He said, ‘Well, you got me there!’
So we are adopting from America
the concept of accountability of government, of more professionalism, of more
pluralism, of multi-cultural concepts which are basically new to us, of rights
for minorities in Israel, not for the Palestinians on the territories but for
Israeli Arabs, for women, for gays, for other minority groups including foreign
workers. So I feel that Americanisation is still a good thing.
We have already experienced one
bad thing which comes to us from America, and that is the economic system which
has led to a very, very deep gap between the rich and the poor, in fact deeper
than it is in America. So social solidarity, which was something Israel was
always proud of in the ’50s and the ’60s, is very weak today. But,
other than that, I think that we are still improving our society. Israel is
more open today as a result of values which come to us from America.
Freedland: You talk about the ‘elites’ who all
have to have an American line in their resumes. What about at sort of street
level, regular, ordinary people (in that dreadful phrase), regular Israelis?
You make a point in the book that the shift has been from thinking collectively
to individually. So say something about that.
Segev: Israelis, particularly the ones living in Tel Aviv
or in the spirit of Tel Aviv, don’t live for the sake of history any
more, or for an ideology any more. They don’t live for yesterday. They
don’t live for tomorrow. They live for life itself, very much in the
spirit of the American ‘now’ culture. They don’t live an
ideology and they live individualism. You have a whole generation, I would
say, of young people in Israel who ask themselves today ‘do I want to go
and serve in the army?’, and if you don’t want to serve in the
army, you don’t have to. But the question is new to Israelis. And you
also ask yourself: What do I get out of the army? Is it good for me? Some
people say: Ok, it’s good for me. All kinds of reasons why people will
want to serve in the army. But it is not something you do as a matter of fact,
just the way you would have done it years ago.
So there is a whole Americanised
generation in Israel. Yes, you can say they are superficial and they only
watch American TV and this and that. But I don’t think that’s
true. Yes, the American mass culture is present in Israel like everywhere
else, but two things: first, we never experienced in Israel an anti-American
culture, unlike many countries in Europe. Secondly, interestingly enough, at
least at this point, the elements of Israeli identity are so strong that you remain
an Israeli even if you leave Israel. You can open a falafel stand in London, and you will still be an Israeli if
you talk Hebrew to your children and among yourselves, which is what Israelis
usually do when they live abroad. So that is very interesting. It is not
something that we lost under the influence of Americanisation.
I think the strongest element of
the Israeli identity is the Hebrew language, and the Hebrew language improved
under the influence of the English language. Some people regret and they say,
‘Wow, all these foreign words!’ Yes, we use a lot of foreign words
but we also adopt from the English language a whole set of grammatical
constructions which don’t exist in Hebrew. So Hebrew is actually
enriched by the English. So, yes, it’s a good thing.
Freedland: You say in the book that you can always tell those
Israeli journalists who spent time in America because they come back using
these sort of flashy Americanisms in their prose. But you also spoke about,
and I think this is a very arresting image in the book, you spoke about Yom Ha’atzma’ut,
Independence Day, and how in the past people would dance together the hora, and now instead they go on the beach.
Segev: Sure. Yes. When you look at old newsreels now,
it’s really another world. There was a time when, on Independence Day,
people would go out on the streets and dance in circles. The circles have a
symbolic meaning in the history of Zionism. It’s not a coincidence that
they danced in circles. It’s ‘togetherness’ which they celebrated.
And they don’t do that any more. They celebrate differently. They
celebrate in private parties or they go to the beach, as you say. They
celebrate as individuals. They celebrate their Israeli identity as
individuals.
Freedland: This shift from collective consciousness, if you
like, to being much more individual. A lot of people would recognise and
understand that describing the Israel of the middle 1990s, the Oslo period, the
Rabin period, dotcoms and people growing their hair and sitting at cafés
and it’s a very relaxed different kind of Israel.
Segev: They shave their hair now! What an old-fashioned
thing to say!
Freedland: Ok. I’m talking about the 1990s. I’m
engaging in modern history here. Whereas, ever since the intifada
began and the end of the Camp David process, some people have said that has
changed back again. What do you think of that?
Segev: Unfortunately that’s true. Actually, as
soon as I’d finished this essay, the second intifada broke
out. I even said to my publishers that maybe we should wait before we come out
with that thesis because maybe it’s not true any more. The reason why I
got to think of the Americanisation of Israel and actually how Israel is moving
towards a post-Zionist situation was because I was quite amazed that a majority
of Israelis told their prime minister Rabin about ten years ago: Go and make
peace with ‘Adolf Hitler’, because this is what he was, Arafat,
until then. A majority of Israelis would have sworn that the territories we
occupied in 1967 are essential for the very existence of Israel. And here you
have, all of a sudden, a majority of people who say: ‘Who needs Gaza?
Who needs Nablus? Who needs Jericho? Give it back to the Palestinians. Go
and make peace with Arafat.’
This is such a revolutionary
thing that I thought it really needs a deeper explanation. Something must have
changed in the society. This is when I reached a conclusion that Israeli
society is actually moving towards a post-Zionist stage of development. This is
not an ideology. Post-Zionism is not an ideology. Post-Zionism is really a
stage of development.
And the intifada broke out and we are now experiencing something
other countries have experienced, including this country and certainly the
United States, and that is the effect of terrorism on the mentality, on the
psyche, on the atmosphere. Following two years of terrorism, we are being
pushed back. We have been pushed back in time many, many years and so we are
back into a situation of some kind of tribal closeness where we are afraid,
where we openly express hatred, racism.
The walls of Jerusalem are
covered with black graffiti saying ‘Arabs out!’ or ‘No Arabs,
no terrorism!’. Things like that. It has been legitimate to discuss the
idea of mass deportation of Arabs. It’s called ‘population
transfer’, but it’s actually an idea of expelling the Arabs. So we
have really been pushed back in time. Things which I thought we had left
behind are suddenly back.
I think the reason why terrorism
has such a strong effect on us is precisely because we have already entered
such an individualistic period. In other words, everybody knows that terrorism
is not endangering the existence of Israel. It is endangering me personally.
So people take it very, very personally because you have to make decisions on a
very personal basis. Do I take the bus or not? Do I send my daughter to
ballet class or not? Do I go out or not? What do I do?
That is also true, perhaps even
particularly true, for people on the left, people who define themselves, as
they call it, as the ‘peace camp’ in Israel. The left side of
Israeli politics. What happens is that you sit in a café, with other
liberal leftists naturally, and you talk peace. You talk Palestinian state.
You talk withdrawal from occupied territories. You talk human rights. If you
are lucky, the café doesn’t blow up while you are there but only
after you go. So you feel stupid. You don’t go to vote for a Peace
Party. And that is a very, very personal reaction which many people took to
terrorism, and this is very harmful of course to the democratic fabric of
society. But the way terrorism endangers democracies is not a particularly
Israeli experience. As I said, these are things that happened in America and
this is probably the worst danger to a democracy, terrorism. That is what
happens and it definitely happens in Israel. So this is not a good time to
talk post-Zionism. Right?
Freedland: Because, in a way, as you described it, the intifada
and the rise of terrorism has pushed a country that was moving towards
post-Zionism in a way back to its Zionist position before?
Segev: Yes.
Freedland: But let’s just sort of decode some of these
terms, because the phrase ‘post-Zionism’ is a hot and controversial
one in Israel. Some people use it as an insult, directed at people like you
and your fellow new historians, if we’re going to talk about that. With
people so used to ex-Zionist, non-Zionist, anti-Zionist:
‘post-Zionist’ is a fairly new one on most people I’m
guessing. How do you define it? Perhaps you could say something about how your
enemies define it, but what does it mean for you? And, I suppose more
pertinently, are you one?
Segev: Yes, I want to be one, but we haven’t
reached it yet. Post-Zionism is, first of all the awareness that the existence
of Israel is no longer in question. Israel’s existence is safe. It is no
longer in danger of its existence. Israelis are in danger, but Israel, as a
state, is no longer in danger. It has a very, very strong army to defend
itself. It is in fact a nuclear power, as you know. It has a more or less
viable economy, a more or less viable democracy, bureaucracy. Within 10 or 15
years, Israel will be the largest Jewish community in the world. There you can
use the cliché saying ‘for the first time in 2,000 years’.
And at that time you will have to say: Well, Zionism fulfilled its goal. This
is what Zionism was all about. So, for how long am I to celebrate an ideology
which has already fulfilled itself?
You can also say that not the
ideology, but at least Israel represents a very, very dramatic success story,
one of the most dramatic success stories of the 20th century. Then
you look around and you say, Well, there’s also an Israeli routine which
is relatively new to us. There is a third and fourth generation of Israelis
who speak Hebrew with their parents. There are Israelis who have grandparents,
a relatively new experience to us because we grew up not having grandparents.
They perished in the Holocaust. So you have a generation of Israelis who go to
the same schools as their fathers did, who share the same atmosphere, the same
experiences as their parents.
As I said, the Hebrew language is
very, very strong. We have Hebrew literature, and everything happens in
Hebrew. So that is what Zionism was all about.
Then you look around and you say:
Wow, in the last ten years about a million people joined us, namely the
immigrants from the Soviet Union. Half of them are not even Jewish and most of
the others are probably not to be defined as Zionists, because Israel was not
the first preference. Unfortunately they cannot be defined as political
refugees any more, so they cannot get into America. So they come to Israel.
But Israel is really the second choice for them. So they don’t bring
with them Zionist ideology, and so if for every four people a fifth one joins
and brings a different ideology, then that is a whole new atmosphere.
Then we have a very strong
Orthodox section, and they are not Zionists, and one of every five Israelis is
an Arab and they are not Zionists. Today, I think that three of every five
children do not go into the Zionist system of education any more in Israel. So
things have changed.
You look around and you say: So
where does that get us? Where do we go from here? The most neutral way to
describe this would be to say: Well, it’s a post-Zionist situation.
It’s not about ideology at all. It’s just about the country that
has changed.
Freedland: I see that, and that is a very good sort of
description, almost academic style, of the country that Israel has become. The
reason why it is so controversial in Israel is that people see in it more than
just a description of where we are, but instead assume that buried within that
term is some kind of ideological programme for how Israel itself should run.
Segev: That’s right.
Freedland: For example, given exactly what you said about the
Arab Israelis and Russian non-Jewish Israelis, that maybe the kind of Zionist
organs and institutions of the state, even the very idea of it being a Jewish
state rather than just a state of everyone who happens to live there, that that
is really what post-Zionism is attacking.
Segev: Post-Zionism is not attacking anything.
Post-Zionism is a situation, as I said. It is not an ideology. Some people
cultivate it as an ideology and many people, make no mistake about that, many
people feel very uneasy about post-Zionist signs. But you’re right that
one of the things post-Zionism is all about is about more openness towards the
Jewish tradition of most Israelis. And that is also a relatively new thing to
us, because we grew up to believe that we are supposed, as the founding fathers
of Israel said, to be ‘a new kind of human being’.
David Ben-Gurion wanted to breed
a new man. The concept is a combination of Bolshevik Russia, fascist Italy,
Weimar Germany (not Nazi Germany). These ideas, if you look at the first
Zionist posters you see larger than life, beautiful people, men and women. They
are always painted or photographed from below so that they should look bigger!
And they work the land, everybody is supposed to work the land and be patriotic
and be as ‘unJewish’ as possible, looking down at the Jewish
Diaspora, at Jewish history, asking every Jewish who ever comes to Israel, as
soon as you land in Ben-Gurion Airport: Why don’t you live in Israel?
We don’t do that any more.
We have learned that you can’t wipe out 2,000 years of Jewish history.
So what you have is a very, very strong, relatively new movement of Sephardic
Jews, the Shas Party, which are Orthodox non-Zionist. They don’t want to
be ‘a new man’. They want to be exactly as close as possible, to
hold onto their tradition from Morocco or from other Arab countries. That is
what they want to be. And on the Ashkenazi side, you have something which is
also relatively new to us. That is the importance of the Holocaust.
I grew up at a time when
Holocaust survivors wouldn’t talk to their children about their
experiences, and children wouldn’t dare to ask. The Holocaust was a
complete taboo. Today, the Holocaust has become a very essential element of
the Israeli identity, because the whole society has become more Jewish. It is
not a shame any more. The Holocaust is nothing to be ashamed of any more. We
also don’t expect Holocaust survivors to have been heroes any more.
There was a time when we did that. In fact the Hebrew term shoah ugevurah has almost become one word. It means
‘Holocaust and heroism’. You almost say it as if it is one word
because you couldn’t relate to the Holocaust without mentioning heroism,
military heroism, the people of the Warsaw Ghetto.
The concept of heroism has
changed. It is such an interesting process in Israel. How gradually Israel
learned to recognise that, say, a mother who stole bread to give her children
would also be counted among the heroes. If you just did something to preserve
your human dignity, today you would be considered a hero. But if you look at
the statue at Yad Vashem from Warsaw, the copy of the famous Warsaw Ghetto
uprising statue, you see people with guns and hand grenades and that was how we
wanted everybody to be, heroes, which is also why we believe that if we only
had something to say in the ’30s, the Holocaust would never have
happened.
You know there is this old very
common myth that if the state of Israel had existed in 1937, we would have
saved six million Jews.
Freedland: You don’t believe that? You write in the
book that you think that’s actually untrue and that is a fantasy. Is that
right?
Segev: It is not true. It can’t be true. Why
would the State of Israel do more than the combined armies of the Red Army and
the American army and the British army and the whole world fighting the Nazis?
The only way to save the Jews was to defeat the Nazis. Why would Israel be
able to do that? We have taken in more people than the British government
allowed us to take in, but it wouldn’t bring us six million Jews. Even
today we don’t have six million Jews in Israel.
Freedland: I didn’t understand that when I read that.
What I couldn’t follow was if, and it is obviously a huge
‘if’, if the British immigration policy had been different and
those people had been allowed to come, albeit as almost starving refugees,
given that Palestine could have remained out of Nazi hands and did, why
couldn’t those people, even if the country had been a glorified displaced
persons’ camp, why would they not have been safer and therefore alive
compared to what did happen to them in Europe?
Segev: A lot of them could have been saved. A lot, yes.
We don’t know how many: thousands, probably. Not millions.
There’s no room. Where would you put them all? I mean there is no room
in Israel for six million Jews. We don’t have six million immigrants
today, fifty years after World War Two. So to me that is probably the weakest
moment in the history of Zionism, a very tragic moment. Zionism was able to
predict the tragedy but, in the moment of truth, it was not able to offer
assistance to the Jews. So you might say yes, that Zionism was a good ideology.
But the Zionist movement was too weak to save more Jews.
Freedland: I only want us to spend a few more minutes before
we open out, but let me just press you on this point about the Jewish state,
the Jewishness of the state, because it’s one of the questions that
people who embrace the term post-Zionism debate. As Israel changes, maybe now
because of the reasons you have described, things are suspended and that
progress has been halted, but long-term, do you think that in order for Israel
to remain a democratic state, somehow the Jewish nature of it, or perhaps the
Zionist nature of it, has to be at the very least looked at again?
Segev: Until two and a half years ago when the intifada
broke out, the major topic in public discourse in Israel was how to make sure
that Israel remains both Jewish and democratic. Nobody talks about this any
more but, as you say, it is suspended. That is a major challenge for a
post-Zionist Israeli society. That was a major issue. Books and symposiums
and articles and everybody talked about it, meaning of course: How do we make
sure that Israeli Arabs become part of Israeli democracy? That was really the
major question which interested people.
Now, at least on a purely
theoretical level, there is a contradiction between Zionism and democracy
because Zionism is incapable, theoretically, to meet the national demands of
such a strong minority as the Arab minority in Israel. I am stressing the
theoretical thing because I felt at the time that too much is talked about the
symbolic questions. What flag would we have? What national anthem would we
have? What kind of cultural autonomy the Arabs would have?
I feel that Arabs in Israel,
Israeli Arabs I am talking about Israeli Arabs, not Palestinians on the
territories, Israeli Arabs are still discriminated against on a whole range of
topics which we can change before we get to the symbolic issues. So
let’s first make sure that the Arabs are equal citizens of Israel and
then we can still debate the symbolic issues. So that was my feeling and I
thought that it is really, really interesting to follow this discussion of what
do we do in order to have Israel both Jewish and democratic. The reason why
this came up was because there was greater awareness that Zionism poses a
problem, at least a theoretical problem. Lots of people who took part in this
discussion were academics, people who are in political theory and all that, and
they had to admit: Yes, there is a problem. Zionism has a problem with
democracy.
Freedland: But you sound confident that, as practical people,
it is not an insoluble problem? It may be theoretically insoluble, but in
practice..
Segev: To me it is a very pragmatic kind of thing. Yes, it
can be solved. Or, let me say, there is a lot of things we can do before we
reach the theoretical gap where we have to say: Well that’s as much as we
can do.
Freedland: Sure. I remember that there were letters in your
own newspaper, Ha’aretz, about the difficulty of having this
phrase nefesh yehudi in a national
anthem which non-Jews are asked to sing. And the Star of David. But that is
looking to the future. The other aspect of your work is obviously about the
past, and you and your fellow new historians charted, really for the first time,
the opening up of what happened in the birth of the State of Israel, you, Benny
Morris, Avi Shlaim, there are others.
How important do you think it is,
given all the list of practical tasks that Israel has to deal with in the now,
how important is it that Israelis do look themselves in the mirror and tell the
truth as you see it and as you have uncovered it about what really happened in
1948 between Jews and Arabs in these painful birth pangs of creating a new
nation?
Segev: It is as important as it is for you to tell the
truth about yourself. Some people say that it is not a good thing. Maybe you
should not know all the truth about yourself. You will be happier if you
don’t know.
I don’t believe in that. I
think that you really need to know the truth about yourself and a society needs
to know the truth about itself. It is always a wrong thing when some people
decide that the rest of the population shouldn’t be aware of some things,
or if you cultivate myths, or if you sell lies to the people, or write wrong
school books.
Now Israel has a relatively
liberal policy of opening up archives. Not liberal enough to my taste, but
more liberal than many other countries, including some countries in Europe.
Freedland: You can say ‘here’ if you want,
because it’s true!
Segev: Do you know that some files in the Public Record
Office dealing with illegal immigration are still closed? I am dying to know
what the secret is, but they are still closed.
Freedland: It’s the 100-year rule. There’s a
30-year rule, then the 50-year rule, then the 70-year rule.
Segev: Right. So Israel is opening archives. It is
possible today and has been, in fact, possible for the last 15 years or so, to
write Israeli history. Before that, we didn’t have history. We had
ideology. We had mythology. We had a lot of indoctrination. About 15 years
ago, for the first time, archives opened up and what happens to all of us is
that you go to an archive. You order a file. You look at a document and you
say, Wow! this is not the way I learned it at school. It’s all
different. They lied to me. They lied to me about the Arab refugees. They
lied to me about the efforts to make peace with the Arabs. They lied to me
about the treatment of immigrants from Arab countries. And they lied to me
about many, many other subjects. They lied to me about what they said in
public. If I compare it to what they said in closed sessions, which in a way
is not really fair to those deceased politicians because they spoke on the assumption
that nobody will ever see the minutes of what they said, now we are able to go
and see that this is the way they talked in cabinet meetings, and you say that
this is not quite the same story as the story I learned in school books.
Now I have to know that this is a
very, very sensitive subject in Israel for a simple reason, because the whole
Zionist ideology is based on a certain interpretation of Jewish history. This
is what Israel is based on. So as soon as you change a little bit, if you take
a slightly different view of Zionism, there is somebody likely to come up and
say, Oh, you are endangering the very existence, you are making some cracks in
the foundations of the existence.
So history is a very, very
political subject in Israel. The first thing the Sharon government did was to
cleanse the new history books. They were too post-Zionist. So it is
interesting how both Sharon and the Minister of Education, Limor Livnat..
Freedland: You’re talking about what is in the schools?
Segev: Schoolbooks, yes, textbooks. Because what happens
is that people always ask: How influential are the new historians? And, again,
new historians are not an ideological group. They are not an ideological
group. They are people who go and see material which other people have not
seen before. So what happens usually is that these people write a book, myself
or my colleagues. You write books. Usually these books get a lot of attention
in the press, and they also attract many people to read them. What then
happens is that Israeli television produces a film, a documentary, where they
use these books without saying that there is anything controversial about them.
Once it has been on television, you find that the next phase is then in
textbooks. So it is very interesting. You can follow how something which is
very, very controversial when it first comes out, once the media, the national
television has given it some kind of legitimacy, you then find it in a
textbook. It takes a long time to produce a new textbook in Israel. There are
all kinds of committees and everything, so it takes about five or six years.
All of a sudden, I open a textbook, I say: Oh, yes, this is a good approach!
And so that is the way it happens.
But it is so political and so
controversial and so sensitive that the first thing the Sharon government did
was to save Israeli high school kids from ‘the evils of the new
historians’.
Freedland: I promise you that this is the last one from me.
When you had that wow! moment, when you were going through the archives,
specifically on the point about the Arab refugees, and you discovered that the
things you’d been taught as a child, that all the Arabs had run away of
their own, were not true and that in some cases, several documented cases, they
were chased out and expelled, did that in any way undermine your conviction in
the rightness, the justness, of those 1940 Zionists in creating a Jewish state?
Segev: It made me aware of the price of Zionism, in terms
of the unhappiness to the Arabs, and also in terms of unhappiness to many Jews,
because many Jews who came to Israel from Arab countries were not treated very
well and they also in a way paid the price of Zionism. They did not come as
Zionists. They came as refugees. They could not go on living in Arab
countries as a result of the Arab Israeli conflict. So I am more aware today
than I used to be that Zionism involves a very, very high price in terms of
human unhappiness.
Freedland: On that note let’s widen this out and bring
in as many people as want to come in. [Explains procedure.] You can identify
yourself if you want to, and not if you don’t.
[Male]: The religious-secular standoff: would you say that
forms part of the post-Zionist concept that you described?
Freedland: Thank you. That’s admirably concise.
You’ve started us off on exactly the right note.
[Male]: I’d like to know what your views are on the
links between a post-Zionist Israel and the Diaspora?
Freedland: Excellent. That’s one of the ones I wanted
to ask myself, but I censored myself!
[Male]: Based on the American model, could you envisaging
it happening in Israel: a Kent State situation where the army turns on its own
refuseniks?
[Male]: Two things: first, in this country you would say
that British culture got much more individualistic when the Conservatives came
into power in the ’80s and I am wondering whether the end of Labour rule
in Israel and the start of the growth of the right in Israel also marks such a
similar division in Israeli culture? My second point is: what are the
downsides of Americanisation? One of the things I would suggest, for example,
is that freedom of speech is seen as being much more polarised in America than
it is in Europe, where there are seen much clearer limits as to what is acceptable
behaviour.
[Male]: In the context both of the secular-religious
divide that was referred to earlier and the individualism which you’ve
talked about, Tom, the question of the importance of Tommy Lapid and Shinui.
How significant is his party’s election? And, long-term, what sort of
impact do you see them having on the country?
[Male]: A subtle contradiction in what you said before,
actually. You were talking about the change in Independence Day, that people
no longer dance in circles. They have celebrations. They go to the beach.
Whereas in America, of course, they do dance in circles and they put flags up
on Independence Day. So does that mean that the Americans are now much more
patriotic than the Israelis are? And, taking that a step backward but talking
about something else you mentioned too, about the Holocaust: had there been a
state of Israel, it’s unlikely that the situation would have been very
different. But, with the patriotic fervour of early Zionism and knowing what
they would have know, I find it very difficult to think that they
wouldn’t have taken steps to get Jews out.
[…]
Segev: When I came in this evening, I immediately spotted
a book up there called The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Middle East
Conflict and when I went through the pages of that book, I
immediately realised that I still have a lot to learn! And I am learning. It
is not easy. Those of you who follow the news from Israel know that very
dramatic events happen all the time. One constantly has to re-evaluate
one’s views and cope with surprises and disappointments and grotesque
situations. So it is not easy to answer all these questions. But we’ll
try.
Freedland: Ok. We go in the order they came. Let’s
start with this idea of the religious clash with the secular and how that
relates to your understanding of what post-Zionism is. Is that a post-Zionist
phenomenon? How does that fit in?
Segev: No, I think it’s the other way around. I
think that the founding fathers of Israel were distinctly secular and tended to
put down the religious parties. Israel has become more religious as part of
becoming more Jewish, but the Jewish consciousness is also something that
secular people feel. So I think that it is the other way around. In a
post-Zionist situation, where the challenge is as I said multi-cultural
democracy, we would also have to find ways to accommodate religious and
non-religious. I never thought that this is something that we cannot bridge
over. We have, in fact. Some people always expect a religious war to start in
Israel, and we haven’t. The reason is that very, very, very few Israelis
are truly secular. They are not. They are somehow, well they all define
themselves as Jews and they only argue about whose definition is more viable
than the other. But basically the potential clash between religious and
secular Israelis is much smaller than some people think.
Freedland: Now is a good time to take on board this question
about Shinui and the phenomenon of that militant secular party.
Segev: Yes, Shinui reflects a mood and I think will
disappear as soon as the mood changes. It’s a non-party. It is very
strong but it really doesn’t exist at all. That’s my feeling about
Shinui. We already had such an experience called Dash, which was also a
middle-class Tel-Aviv secular feeling of ‘I’m sick and tired of
everything and so I vote Shinui or I voted Dash’ or people say ‘I
vote Shinui’ in addition to (and this is true) a very strong, almost
racist, almost anti-semitic aversion to religious people. This is something
the leader of Shinui, Tommy Lapid, cultivated as part of his ego trip, first as
a television personality in Israel and then he went to the next stage and ran
for politics. I think that in every other country we would probably recall our
ambassador for the victory of such a party! I don’t think that it is
something that is really that strong. There is such a sentiment in Israel. It
is probably worth two or three or four members of the Knesset. I don’t
believe that it is a prevailing mood or a prevailing party and it’s also
very, very difficult to find out what other things he has to say. Ask him what
do you have to say about the Arab-Israeli conflict and it’s very
difficult to get an answer.
Freedland: I’m going to combine three of the questions
that were about America: one is: Are the Americans now oddly more patriotic
than the Israelis? Another was: Could you ever imagine a Vietnam Kent State
style situation where those anti-Vietnam War protesters were shot by their
fellow Americans? Could you see that in Israel with the refuseniks? And: Are
there some downsides of Americanisation, for example the unlimited free speech,
unlike Europe, and could that be problematic for Israel?
Segev: Yes, America is more patriotic than Israel and
many Israelis follow that wave of patriotism, the flags everywhere in America,
with amazement. If you look at the Israeli media, they made comments about it
like everybody else in the world. And American media also made quite a few
comments. That was a very strange thing. I was in America: I arrived there on
September 10th, as a good journalist should, always be there before
the event! And I was amazed by the flags everywhere, including sex shops on
Eighth Avenue have flags up. It’s a very strange thing.
And, by the way, they
disappeared. You don’t see those flags any more. Yes, it is a very,
very strong wave of patriotism which is again a result of terrorism. We did
not experience yet anything as traumatic as September 11th, but
whenever we do experience a bad terrorist attack you can see signs of
American-style patriotism but it is not necessarily an American-style
patriotism.
Freedland: What about Israeli troops shooting on refuseniks?
Segev: I don’t think that Israeli troops will ever
shoot at refuseniks because we don’t have that many refuseniks. We did
get from the American anti-Vietnam movement the Peace Now movement. In Israel,
the Peace Now movement is a very, very clear indication of how the Israeli
society and Israeli politics have become Americanised. It’s a complete
copy. It’s also manned by people who went to Harvard at the right time,
when it flourished. So refuseniks in Israel are numbered very, very few. So I
don’t think that the question is really relevant.
I must admit that I did not quite
understand the question about the freedom of speech.
Freedland: Well you are exercising your free speech in
expressing that view! We’ll just go on with other ones in that case
because we’ve got lots of people who want to get in.
Segev: There’s no Salman Rushdie in Israel. People
sometimes ask me: Are you in danger for your views? And I always say, Big deal.
Everybody says everything they want in Israel.
Freedland: That’s very good. It’s encouraging to
hear that. No, I meant it: you all think I’m being insincere! There we
are. Let’s go over there –
[Male]: Mr Segev, is there in Israel any body of opinion
which would endorse the sentiment of (I can’t remember which) Iraqi
politician who said that the assets abandoned by Iraqi Jews who had found
refuge in Israel kind of compensated the assets lost by the Palestinians?
Could one build on this by creating, if one takes over Iraq, a more sympathetic
regime, by creating a fund which could be those assets in Iraq to make it attractive
for Palestinians in the territories to go to Iraq for a better life, and then
use the territories as assets to compensate the Iraqi Jews?
[Female]: I noticed that in your list of people who are
increasingly accessing human rights in Israel, you didn’t include women.
I’m wondering if that was coincidence, or very significant, or what? The
question I also wanted to ask was: You talked about the updating of history
textbooks in schools. How far ahead are the Palestinians in updating their
textbooks for schools?
[Male]: I just wanted to hear Tom Segev’s views on the
collapse of the Labour vote in the last election and the near extinction of
Meretz in the Knesset? People are already sort of saying it’s the end of
the Labour left; the Labour Party’s time’s gone. That sort of
thing. Just your views on that.
[Female]: I just wanted to comment on your observation of
the clash between the religious parties and the secular. I think it
doesn’t stem from Tommy Lapid’s ego as much as it does from not
separating state from religion at the early stage of the state of Israel.
[Female]: I’m pretty fascinated by how sanguine you
sound about the future of democracy in Israel. I made aliyah
from America in the early ’80s and with many of my fellow Americans. We
were a little crazy and we believed that we were going to be part of bringing
American values to Israel. Today I wonder how much our fellow Americans who
made aliyah to the territories have been
the ones whose influence and contribution is going to be more significant in
the long run. I’d like to hear more on that.
[Male]: Well, I’m saying anti-Americanism was rife in
the 70s and 80s. Certainly when I went to Israel the American culture was a
negative thing. It was looked down on rather than revered or respected.
Certainly that may or may not have come as a result of the things that people
smoked in the 60s and 70s. I don’t know! But it maybe part of that.
Freedland: Thank you. A wide range, I think, of
contributions. Why don’t you begin with the man who suggested that
Palestinians could move to Iraq?
Segev: I wish I could share your laughter. I think it is
not funny at all. As I said to you, for the first time today in Israel this
has become a legitimate topic for discussion. Do we want to expel the Arabs or
not? And I think this is a very, very dangerous phase in our development. A
very ugly, but in addition to being ugly it is also very, very dangerous. We
don’t know what the war in Iraq might do and there is a serious possibility
that the Government of Israel under Sharon might use the opportunity to expel
Palestinians, many Palestinians. That is a possibility. So, that’s
really not a good topic for laughter.
The government of Israel sometime
in the 50s invented this idea that we have actually experienced a population
exchange: Iraqi Jews came to Israel and Palestinians went elsewhere. They have
also invented the idea that as long as the Government of Iraq doesn’t pay
back the Jews for their property, we don’t pay that. Interestingly
enough, today there is a new tendency among young Israelis from Arab countries
to resent that very much. They don’t feel that they want to be used in
this game. But the idea is not a new idea. The idea has been advocated by the
Government of Israel for many, many years, describing the tragedy of the
Palestinians as some kind of population exchange, which is also very
problematic from a Zionist point of view. Supposedly all these people came to
Israel because they saw the Zionist light, not because anybody expelled them.
So there are lots of, even theoretical difficulties, with this thing.
Freedland: Since we’re on Iraq, your Israeli fellow
writer and thinker Avishai Margalit has written recently that he is puzzled as
to why so many of his fellow Israelis are enthusiastic for a war with Iraq
since it would be Israel that is most likely the target of Saddam Hussein who
is going down in flames and wants to have one last roll of the dice, etc. Your
own view on that, and where you think Israelis are on a war in Iraq.
Segev: I don’t know that many Israelis are
enthusiastic about the war against Iraq. I think that most Israelis are very
much afraid of Saddam Hussein and most Israelis are very much afraid of the
war, and they don’t really know how to formulate their views in-between
these two extremes. They feel helpless more than anything else.
Freedland: Well, let’s go back to the questions we had.
We had a woman asking about the fact that you did not mention … human
rights.
Segev: About women. I did not mention any particular
groups and I did not say whether they are male or female. There are lots of
women very active in the human rights movement in Israel, some even define
themselves by their gender, ‘Women in Black’ and of course the Four
Mothers who started the movement to get us out of Lebanon and succeeded. And
we did get out of Lebanon as a result of that movement. I think that as part
of the Americanisation of Israel, we have discovered women as a minority, as a
discriminated minority. Before that, we all believed in the myth that we
don’t have to fight for equality of women because women are pioneers and
we are all the same and we don’t even have that problem of women who are
discriminated against. This was, I think, the original idea. So this is one
of the things which we definitely got from America and you have a quite nice
list of achievements, of people who fight for rights of women in Israel: not
enough, again. It’s an ongoing struggle but it’s definitely very,
very active and it’s there.
Freedland: I’m just going to mention the other
questions and then you can choose which ones. The issue of Palestinian
textbooks was mentioned. The collapse of the Labour vote.
Segev: I will forget it all so let me do it one by one.
There is no such thing as new history among the Palestinians. The Palestinian
historiography is more or less where our historiography was 50 years ago when
we were at the stage of nation-building, just as they are now at the stage of
nation-building using history for national mythology and I think it is a very
understandable thing for them, also being on the weaker side, the attacked
side, the oppressed side. So that is a very natural thing and I don’t
think you must expect new history from them. It is very unfortunate that so
many of their textbooks are so full of incitement, including anti-semitic
incitement. But to expect them to have new history is wrong.
The Labour movement lost (a)
because it shared the failures of the Likud. For two years it was part of the
national unity government and many people said: Why do I have to vote for a
fake Likud. I can vote for the real Likud. So they voted for the real Likud.
But I think that what people did more than anything else was that they did not
vote with their heads. They voted with their guts. It was a completely
irrational decision for them. They voted for the man whom they thought will
punish the Palestinians. It was about prevention. It was not about rational
decision and the leader of the Labour party, Amram Mitzner, came out with a
very, very rational alternative, a clear alternative to the policies of the
Government. No emotion. No passion. Very clear analysis. This is not a time
for cool heads in Israel. This is a very, very passionate, very, very
irrational time in Israel. Again, as a result of two years of terrorism.
Freedland: And you were asked if the problem with religion
and the secular was different because there was not a separation of religion
and state at the very beginning.
Segev: Well some people say that the reason why we
didn’t experience a religious war was that from the very beginning,
religion and state were not separated in Israel. Again, it’s a very
pragmatic thing to me. Some things have changed. Again as a result of the
fact that about half a million Israelis, new Israelis coming from the Soviet
Union, can’t get married in Israel so we will probably have civil
marriage one of these days. They can get buried now because we have
non-religious burial sites which are new. This is probably a problem which we,
perhaps similar to the Arab-Israel conflict, we will never be able to solve.
We can only manage it. It is all about managing the conflict between religious
and non-religious, and that is I think what we do in a more rational way than
we do manage the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
Freedland: The last of these before we go back for one final
round was the American olah who worried that she was going to
have less impact than those of her fellow Americans who settled on the West
Bank –
Segev: I believe you said that you settled somewhere on
the territories? No. Oh, your friends did. If they settled on the
territories, then they had zero influence on Israeli democracy. They weakened
Israeli democracy. Many people who came to us from America brought Jewish
racism with them. Meir Kahana brought racism with him and so sometimes, for
example, when I mention Peace Now which comes to us from America, I also say:
Well, some other Americans, many, brought with them a very dangerous attitude
to Jewish democracy. So I don’t really know who your friends are. In
general, interestingly enough, the influence of immigrants from America is not
very high. That is a very interesting thing. We never had an American cabinet
minister, for example: somebody who came from America. For some reason -
[Interjection from audience.]
They said Moshe Ahrens and they are right. Yes. I am sorry. Oh, Golda Meir
came from Kiev, you know! She came via Milwaukee but she actually came from
Kiev. We had a Canadian one, Dov Yosef. Ok? But very few, very little real
political influence on the society. That’s interesting. It’s a
little bit comparable to the very limited influence of the Jews from Germany
who came to Israel, and there may be somewhat similar reasons for that.
Freedland: Thank you. You’ve started a little parlour
game where everyone is trying to think of an American who made it! Trying to
disprove the speaker: a favourite activity at Jewish Book Week!
One more round and then
we’ll ask Tom to conclude for us.
[Female]: I’d like to know how much of an inroad has
your movement had in Israel? To what degree is there hostility towards it or
how much of an inroad have your views made on Israeli culture? The new
historians.
Freedland: What impact have the new historians had?
[Male]: I just wanted to ask you, as a historian
(I’ll refrain from using the word new because I don’t really like
it: it makes it sound like you’re selling a washing-up powder or
something!), but I wanted to ask you about the Dayton peace accord. I was at
an Arab-Israeli debate where Jonathan Freedland was a speaker a couple of weeks
ago and there were several prominent spokespeople from both sides of the
conflict and no-one seemed to be able to agree what had happened at Dayton.
Freedland: Are you talking about Camp David?
[Same Male]: At Camp David, yes. I just wondered whether you
think there is a new mythology or Zionist myth that’s emerging which is
problematic to having peace?
[Female]: Just following on from the question earlier about
the relationship between post-Zionism and the Diaspora, one of the things that
you mentioned was that post-Zionism in Israel is predicated on the fact that
the existence of Israel is kind of guaranteed is secure and certainly as a
Zionist based in the UK, a lot of the debate sometimes within the Jewish
community but often outside the Jewish community, has taken a step back as to
whether the state of Israel almost should exist. I am just interested to hear
what you think about that.
[Male]: Within Israeli society and within the media there is
a sense that the traditional Zionism is being appropriated by the Orthodox, the
religious within Israeli society, the kind of more Modern Orthodox. You said
earlier that you felt that the religious weren’t part of Zionism. I
wondered what you feel about that? Do you feel that the traditional Zionism is
being more appropriated by the religious as opposed to in the past where it was
more secular within Israel?
[Female]: Isn’t there an inherent problem with the
development, although you said it had been interrupted, the ideas of
multi-culturalism had been adopted from America, and that was one of the good
signs of American influence. If you ultimately, the distinction in forms of
multi-culturalism has to be that you have a non-ethnic basis of the state? In
Europe where you have problems with multi-culturalism, for example, the basis
of the German state is still effectively an ethnic nationality law.
Isn’t that really an inherent limitation in the development of a
multi-cultural democracy in Israel?
[Female]: I wanted to ask, regarding Zionism, if it was born
out of a need for a Jewish homeland, then the idea of persecution of Jews which
has become less and less over the past 50 years due to perhaps Americanisation
and tolerance and openness, perhaps would mean that the decline of Zionism is
actually more due to the Americanisation of the rest of the world and Israel
than anything else?
[Male]: Thank you very much for your answers to some of
the more difficult questions, in particular the question about transfer or
expulsion. But I’d like to ask you: You made it very clear that you
don’t see the new historians as one group. I’d like to ask you,
however, whether you can help us to understand Benny Morris’ remark that
his investigations have shown him that Palestinians were expelled in 1948, it
isn’t something which we should admit. And furthermore, when you were
talking about expulsion, I take it that you were thinking about expulsion from
the occupied territories? I wonder whether you also fear that if there was
some kind of two-state solution, there might then be a call for expulsion of
Palestinians from the Israeli state?
Freedland: Ok. Thank you. Do you want to go straight away to
those two clear questions?
Segev: Yes. For the last question, yes. Some people,
including a cabinet minister called Ephraim Sneh, of the former government,
came up with ideas which would in effect exclude Israeli Arabs from Israel.
They talk about a new border that can be drawn and that would somehow
miraculously exclude many Arabs from Israel. Nothing of this is a definite
plan. The danger is that it is in the air. Years ago it was an idea which you
would find on the inside of doors of public toilets. Today it has become part
of public discourse. So that’s why I think it is so dangerous.
I don’t know of any plan
that Israel has to expel Arabs, either from the territories or from Israel. I
know, by the way, about plans the Government did have and we know that from the
archives which were opened. This was an idea that was discussed as a big
secret on several occasions. Benny Morris is the guy who talks peace with his
friends in a café that blows up. He does not like terrorists and this
is, I think, a very emotional, personal reaction that he has. I may be doing
him injustice by describing it that way. We are good friends and we often talk
about that. That’s the way I understand him. He now believes that the
biggest mistake we made in our history was that we did not expel more Arabs.
I think the biggest mistake we
made in our history was that in June of 1967 we did not invest many, many,
many, many millions of dollars in order to solve the refugee problem. That was
something we could have done. Later, of course, it became more difficult and
once we gained some sense of security that we are sitting in the territories
for ever, we said: Oh well, it’s a waste of money and we didn’t do
that. – So that is the kind of thing we argue about. But I really think
that Benny Morris – and he is not the only one: there are many very
decent liberal progressive Israelis who feel very uneasy now, very confused
also. Not everybody is as articulate as Benny is and many people are just
confused. You don’t really know what to do with terrorism.
That’s, I think, the Benny Morris syndrome.
Freedland: Let’s put together two of the questions on
new historians. What impact as a group are you having? And is there now a new
myth arising, the myth of Camp David?
Segev: Ok. I already talked about the new historians. I
told you how they have an influence. I sometimes say that we are not new
historians: we are first historians because we are the first ones to see those
archives. And there are new historians who prove that we were wrong. So they
are the new historians!
Camp David. Nobody really knows
what happened in Camp David. Many people write books about it. All the
participants write books about it. Everybody has their own version. For some
reason, both Barak and Arafat claim – they even have the same body
language – they say: We were that close to an agreement! – They
both say that. They said it to me. I spoke with both of them and I noticed
that they both do the same thing! [Makes gesture] I had a long lunch with
Arafat, and he kept doing, ‘That close we were!’ –
So I said, ‘Ok, tell me.
How close were you? How would you solve the problem of the refugees?’
And he said, ‘No problem at all. According to the UN resolutions.’
Only Israel doesn’t accept them so you don’t have a solution to
that. ‘How would you solve the problem of the Israeli settlers?’
He said, ‘Oh, no problem at all. If they want, they can be Palestinian
citizens, equal citizens in Palestine.’ Well, that’s very nice but
it’s not that close. ‘And how would you solve the problem of
Jerusalem?’ He said, ‘No problem at all. We can divide it. It
will be part ours, part yours.’ Yeah, well, that’s all very nice
only it is not that close.
So we don’t really know
what happened in Camp David. I think that the major mistake made in Camp David
was made by Barak. I think that the mistake was the attempt to impose on
Arafat a final peace settlement. Arafat is not in a position to look into the
eyes of three million Palestinian refugees and tell them that the conflict
with Israel is over. Because it isn’t. And also because for them it is
not part of the diplomatic history. It is a reality. They look out of the
window in their refugee camps and they see streets which are so narrow that two
people can’t walk next to each other: they have to walk one behind the
other. So it’s there.
This is why I think that the
conflict is not a conflict which can be solved at this time. It can only be
managed at this time. It is about management. And I think that the three
people who manage it at this time are managing it very, very badly. They are
Arafat, Sharon and Bush. They have to go before anything can happen. So my
feeling is that we are wasting time right now. But after that, so we have a
new prime minister: does that bring peace? No, it does not bring peace. But
perhaps we might be blessed with a prime minister who is not Barak was,
obsessed with some kind of Napoleonic megalomania that leads him to try and
impose a final peace agreement in a situation that can’t be solved at
this time. It can only be managed.
There are lots of things which
can be done in order to manage the conflict in a more rational way and make
life livable at least because, to me, the last two and a half years are
probably the worst years in the history of Israel. I really can’t think
of any worse years. And the combination of terrorism and economic crisis and
hopelessness, the feeling that there’s nothing to do, this is exactly
what led us to the Six Day War in 1967. Now we have the Iraqi war hanging in
the air. So this is a very bad time actually for anybody to come to anywhere
like London and talk about Israel. It’s not a good time at all.
Freedland: We have a very short time left so I am going to
just crunch together two questions and I’m afraid one of them is going to
get left out. A speaker over here that what you may not know sitting here is
that when you say the existence of the state of Israel is now done and secure
and we can take it for granted, she said that it’s still argued here.
People argue the very right of Israel to exist. And another person said that
maybe if all of this Americanisation around the world is making it a more comfortable
world to live in for Jews, maybe that initial need for there to be a Zionist
state is fading. So maybe those two could be put together for your final
answer.
Segev: Ok. The need for the state of Israel is there
because, as I said, you have a third and fourth generation of Israelis who live
there and that’s their home. That’s where they feel at home and
that’s their country. I might as well say ‘our country’.
You know, that’s where we want to live and it is so deep – the
feeling of being at home there is so deep precisely because it is no longer a
matter for an ideology which you have to study and agree and understand. No.
It’s very natural to us. That’s where we are at home.
I think many of you – and
that probably answers also the question – yes, many people argue if
Israel is still in danger or not but I think that most Israelis don’t
feel that Israel is in danger any more. Those of you who used to travel to
Israel years ago probably noticed a very strange habit that Israelis have. As soon
as the airplane lands at Ben-Gurion Airport, they all applaud! Why do they do
that? Because the working assumption is that the plane will crash. If it
doesn’t crash, you applaud the pilot! Today, very few people do that.
They don’t do that any more, because they know the plane will not crash.
So they don’t applaud the pilot any more. So this is what normal life is
all about. This is what the Zionist ideology is all about.
Freedland: Thank you. I’m going to say this now so it
doesn’t get lost. Straight after this session, the second it finishes,
Tom Segev will be sitting at that table signing copies of the really admirable,
and I think wonderfully concise: you really can read it in a couple of days. It
is a really fantastically imaginative and colourful work: Elvis in Jerusalem.
Tom Segev will be signing copies of that.
For people who have a vague
interest in books as well, I’ll also be signing copies of mine!
He’ll be doing that. We’re both going to be over there in a
moment.
But really I wanted to thank all
of you for bearing with us for this. But above all, for sharing a long hour
and a half of his thoughts and dealing with a huge range of questions, and give
… [inaudible] – Tom Segev!
Segev: Thank you very much.
