by Avraham Burg
In the afternoon, it was my turn. The time had come for discussion of issues of religion and state, and I had the honor of raising the subject on behalf of our group. None of my colleagues remained; political solidarity doesn’t always function perfectly. Few of my partners considered the subject important, and none of them believed that it was really possible to change anything in this area. The atrophied religious status quo was the comfort zone where everyone felt good hunkering down. The fact that I had come from another place—religious Zionism—with the public status I enjoyed gave me a perspective that was a bit higher and broader, and I could see the sickness of the system with my own eyes. Everywhere I went I felt religious extremism: in my family circle, in the fiery speeches in the synagogues, in the size of the kippahs and women’s head coverings among my former friends from my yeshiva past, in the length of the ritual fringes, in the condescension and resentment toward secularism and secular people, and the disconnection from family that the missionaries of return to religion had imposed on their victims. I identified the breaches that religious and ultra-Orthodox politics were going to open in the Israeli body politic. On the other side, I could already hear the beating of the tom-toms in the secular jungle, the hatred of the ultra-Orthodox, which would soon produce the Shinui Party with the hostile, almost anti-Semitic and blunt agenda of its late leader, Tommy Lapid.
I thought that our proposal for separating religion and state was a complete structural alternative that could save Israel from the one issue that has the real potential of causing bloodshed: internecine strife and civil war over issues of the identity of our undefined state. “I don’t entirely agree with you,” one of my partners told me, “but go for it, anyway, it doesn’t have a chance.” I spoke, I thought, persuasively. I felt that the audience was listening to me, that it was thirsty and yearning for a totally different message on a subject that, while not at the center of political reality, stirred anger in everyone encountering it. My speech was over and well received, a few other comments later and the chairman of the convention counted the votes, and lo and behold, our “gang of ten” proposition won the majority.
It is difficult to describe the uproar that erupted in the convention hall. Loud applause. Hugs along with cries of distress. The industrious, hard-working party hacks summoned the mythic heads of the party, Rabin and Peres, and all the rest of their comrades. The chairman, a consigliere for dirty jobs with a clean image, requested another vote. And I tried to again persuade those who had just joined the debate. The scene played out again, and again I won the vote. It was a great moment, perhaps the highest point I had ever reached in public life. I was practicing the politics of values and meaning, and I was happy. For a few hours, I experienced all the excitement of power and influence, and all in the name of ideas and the mission that I believe in to this day.
I didn’t know that precisely at that moment my public position was in jeopardy. Greatness and smallness were apparently intertwined when they were brought into this world. The main headline of one of the important papers announced, “Avrum Burg put a gun to the head of the Labor Party.” And the subhead sharpened the message: “And he pulled the trigger.” In another paper my dear father was quoted: “Avrum has lost his chance to be elected to the next Knesset.” And Dad, who understood old-style politics better than anyone else, really thought so. I wasn’t really insulted, because his voice was part of a huge chorus that was trying to understand what had happened. I was part of a reshaping of the Israeli conversation. He and they were still stuck in the past, and I was already in the new era, which ultimately responded completely differently than he had expected.
The next internal elections of the Labor Party were held in 1992 for the first time ever as a primary among the party’s members. Hundreds of thousands of them. To the surprise of all, I came in first place. Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin were hysterical. In my heart, quietly, I reassured myself: What do they know about religion and state? Give them the army and soldiers, deniable atomic bombs, settlers and political operators, and they will prove their buoyancy and swimming skills, two world freestyle champions. But just confront them with something that has to do with the essence of Judaism and Israeli identity, and the two greats of the generation lose their way and their composure. All the “big chiefs” like Rabin and Peres cared about were the elections around the corner, the coalition with the religious and ultra-Orthodox that they had dreamt would return them to power and the pleasures of compromise.
For three weeks, the entire national leadership of the party exerted heavy pressure on me, sent messengers, and expected me to take the chestnuts out of the fire for them by withdrawing my proposal and betraying my values. Some did it in candid conversations, in promises intended to be broken the minute they were given, and with smooth talk. Others spoke to me with direct and indirect threats, including the cold frowns of Rabin himself. They and their aides were not averse to any media manipulation possible. I stubbornly persisted, and the situation became a Catch-22: if the decision were overturned, they would lose the support of the young people who backed me, those who had had enough of the religious establishment, and of the emphatically secular element that traditionally supports the party. On the other hand, if the decision stood, they would have nearly no room for maneuvering with their religious coalition partners. They were caught between me and them. In the end, the party’s institutions, its central committee and convention, convened and approved an embarrassing formulation in tortuous Shimon Peres style, whose essence was this gambit: even though the party convention made the famous decision three weeks ago regarding separation of religion and state, it actually didn’t intend to separate religion and state, and so on and so forth. Both yes and no, and also maybe, both for and against the religious parties, and vice versa. I saw the sea of hands go up. The very same hands that supported me just a few weeks earlier removed me now from their agenda.
I stood in the hall choked with tears, small, pitiful, and humiliated. I had looked to the great Shimon Peres, and discovered, not for the last time, how callous his opportunism and hypocrisy could be. It was the lowest point of my political career. Until then, my actions in the political arena had been driven by values, principles, and beliefs. Every morning I got up for my public work with a clean and sincere heart. If this were to happen today, now that I’m experienced and scarred, I would react differently. I would get up and leave. But then I didn’t have the resolve. I submitted to the harsh decree and to the cynicism of the decision. I said to myself, “That’s how it is in politics. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.” Or, “It’s worth compromising because we still have many great tasks ahead: peace, justice, equality.” I applied many mechanisms of self-deception so that I wouldn’t do what might have been expected of me—to flee as far as possible. Not so much because of the substance of the issue or because of the public atmosphere that surrounded this small loss, but because with all the background noise and voices, I had stopped listening to myself. I accepted the quasi-democratic verdict and bowed my head.
It was the moment in which I told myself one of the two political lies that shaped my life. Separation of religion and state was not just another issue or compromise, one of many that any person is compelled to make in the course of his life, certainly if he is a political person who understands that politics entails constant compromise with existing possibilities. The minute I surrendered to Peres’s machinations, I stopped being a man of substance and became a professional politician. I gave up on my mission for the sake of my career. I compromised on my internal identity in return for my external status. That was not how I understood matters then. It took me many more years to be able to look back without anger and understand that I had been wrong. If the captain of a ship is off by a millimeter in the vicinity of Malta and does not correct himself in time, he may ultimately reach Australia and not America. Those minutes, between the euphoria of pure achievement and the humiliation of odious compromise were my millimeter, my Malta. I got l
ost there, and I didn’t find my true path again until I completely left the political track, freed myself from my previous bonds, and learned how to navigate anew and differently with my internal compass.
It was, however, precisely the hiding and disguise that made my public breakthroughs possible. During fifteen short years, from 1988 to 2003, the deeper I concealed my values and ideology, thoughts and understanding, the more I succeeded in climbing up the ladder. Member of Knesset, committee chairman, Jewish Agency chairman, Knesset speaker. And the horizon was still open and inviting. Sometimes when I analyze election results I sense that Israelis want to choose the politician who deludes them better than the others. The voter and the elected representative both know that it’s a fraud. But for a moment, the moment of elections, there is hope, and for the sake of that, leaders who destroy hope are elected time and again. To tell the truth, it wasn’t so hard to attain those positions. The secret was restraint, holding the stormy winds inside and appearing outwardly in the moderate garb that everyone loves so much, “because that’s what everyone does.”
CHAPTER SIX
DECLINE AND REDEMPTION (2001–2004)
NOT LONG AGO, IN 2014, I WAS RUNNING ALONG THE Yarkon River in Tel Aviv and tracking the signs announcing plans to rehabilitate the water source that not long ago was a symbol of the pollution of Israel’s streams. Through beads of sweat and my rapid breathing I suddenly noticed not only the information, but the style of the language as well. The project’s name was “Redemption of the Yarkon,” no less. I stopped and laughed. In Judaism, there’s no redemption without a messiah, so now there’s probably someone who is the “messiah of the Yarkon.” And he has a white donkey, on whose back he wanders along the Tel Aviv canal. (According to a Jewish tradition, the redeeming messiah will appear as a poor man riding a white donkey.) When I resumed running, the term “redemption” lodged in my head, and for many kilometers I reflected on this quintessentially Zionist word.
The early Zionists never bought land, or made real estate deals. They were busy with “land redemption.” They never tried to refashion the Jewish body and soul here. They were far more comprehensive and ambitious than that. They were busy with “human redemption.” And redemption is a word so loaded with the baggage of the end of days, faith, and messianism, that it can’t be assigned to the secular part of identity. From there my thoughts drifted to the Labor Party, which was the firstborn daughter of the Zionist movement. In fact, it’s a party that developed in the womb of modern Jewish messianism, within the doctrine of human redemption and the redemption of land and ideology. It is not a secular movement in the Western sense of the term. It could be that my second self-deception stemmed from there, and from my mistaken understanding of the method of Israeli division between “religious” and “secular.”
This lying to myself actually began the moment I joined the Labor Party. From many years observing Israeli, Jewish, and international public life, I had learned something very simple. In politics, in any politics, there are actually two basic strategies. One is “the strategy of the big ship,” according to which if you can commandeer the big ship, you are king of the ocean. The second strategy—“the small boat”—is the complete opposite. According to this concept, the big ship is sometimes too big and almost always blind. It will always need the small boat, the pilot boat, to steer it away from icebergs, from hidden coral reefs lurking on its course, and to guide it safely to port, to the right pier and protected anchorage. Since I grew up in a political home that was always part of the fleet of big ships in Israel, I didn’t devote any of my attention to clarifying my true internal character. I wasn’t sufficiently aware that what was appropriate for Dad and his historic partnership in the team of big ships was really not appropriate for me. I wanted to achieve opposite goals, but with the same tools, and I didn’t understand the internal contradiction. I never devoted time to thinking about who I was. A seaman on a giant ship or a sailor on a small boat? It turns out that at the start of my political path I got on the wrong vessel and told the second big lie to myself. I got on the sinking Titanic of the Labor Party; I didn’t seek to find my natural place on the small boat piloting and navigating a course with much greater ethical precision. From there it might have been possible to save the sinking flagship of Israeliness.
Today, I’m not an establishment person. On the contrary, I’m always comfortable with radical positions and feel at my best when examining unconventional ideas. I’m no longer addicted to the public’s approval, and I’m prepared to be in strict and brutal personal and public isolation, as long as I am at peace with myself and with the truths that motivate me. Like many of my colleagues, it was easy for me on the political Ferris wheel, sometimes up, sometimes down, but always connected to the centers of power. Absorbing scathing criticism, but always having status. In our house we would say, “You can tell that guy has a thick skin.” I had wrapped myself in a thick skin, not mine, until that thick skin became too heavy, and it was all over. For a few years, I kept walking in the air like a cartoon character, without noticing that the land under my feet was no longer there. Only with time—especially after my intense term as the Speaker of the Knesset, which ended with the failure of my party during the 2003 elections—and upon further reflection did I realize that I was living in a political system to which I didn’t belong at all.
The Labor Party was once the biggest ship in the Israeli sea. It was the stable ship in which I and many others had wanted to sail to distant shores. And it too sank, reached its expiration date as far as I was concerned, and with the decades and decay we had become incompatible. And when I continued telling myself the allegory of the ships, it became painfully clear to me from my failures that I’m not only a sailor of small pilot ships; I want to always be at their prow. But alas, in the party I represented and where I was active most of my political life there was no advance guard, no power, and no decisive capability whatsoever. Actually, this whole bloc, in its current makeup, doesn’t have it. A neutered giant devoid of ideas and positions, aside from the constant thirst for power wherever it may be. All that remains of that heavy and formidable ship is just its weight.
One of the deepest tragedies of the Jewish left in Israel is that it has become very conservative. Every one of the political organizations that today make up the left zealously protects something that was, anchored in the past, part real and part imagined, but most of it irrelevant. Many of these organizations want to preserve their privileges and attendant comforts as well-established Ashkenazic Jews, to fix the minimum that needs repair and not change a thing. Very few new ideas, movements, or fresh cultural content have come out of the Israeli left in recent generations. And even if they exist, they are far away, on the fringes. This is sad, especially in comparison with what is happening in Israel’s right wing.
Gush Emunim was avant-garde compared to the founding generation of my father and his cohort of political operators. Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) was an Israeli messianic, right-wing activist movement committed to establishing Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights. Emerging from the conquests of the Six-Day War in 1967, it encouraged Jewish settlement of those lands based on the belief that, according to the Torah, God gave them to the Jewish people. It was a determined, ideological, and daring group that galvanized a substantial following behind it. One would have expected things to eventually calm down and settle into established patterns as the pendulum swung back to the other side of the political map. But the avant-garde phase didn’t end, it continued in the same direction. Their children, the hilltop youth, are just as frightening. They are rebels who have come out against their parents, the political operators of Gush Emunim—those who just a generation ago were great innovators and have now become entrenched conservatives.
The politics of the right is paved and inlaid with avant-garde content that is extremist, outrageous, but innovative. And our left is old and tired. Not only in its sociological and demographi
c profiles, but mainly in its terminology. Time and again we repeat the mantra, “We founded the state,” as if it were still a work in progress, though it is pushing seventy. There’s nostalgia for the good old days, though I suspect that those days were never as wonderful as imagined by those who miss them. Very little is invested in disrupting the present and creating a different future with a completely different social and human agenda. The words are the same words, the arguments almost never change, and the yearning is for a return to “the good old Land of Israel.” The Jewish left—which had shattered all conventions with its bold Zionist rebellion against mother Judaism in the diaspora, that didn’t hesitate to come out against the wheeler-dealer culture of the shtetl, against the patronage of the lords and synagogue officers, that presented an alternative worldview of egalitarianism and socialism—has become the bastion of secular conservatism in Israeli society.
SO IT TURNED OUT THAT I HAD ERRED TWICE: I EMBARKED on the wrong vessel to cross the stormy political ocean, and among the big ships, I boarded one that wasn’t fit for me at all—the Labor Party—the mother of all conservatives. It actually never was and will never be a substantive, real left. Because left is not just the rhetoric of a diplomatic settlement and an endless flirtation with the peace process in order to avoid paying the price of peace itself. “I prefer to compromise in words and not in acres,” Shimon Peres once confided in me. And I’m not sure that the Nobel Peace Prize really changed his approach. A real left is a much more comprehensive conception. Real equality between all citizens, with no difference between men and women in any area; uncompromising struggle for secularization of public space and separation of religion from the state; constitutional, governmental, and moral equalization of all citizens, Jewish and Arab, in all spheres; a social and democratic effort to narrow gaps and fairly distribute public resources—virtually no one offers all this to the Israeli voter. It would be wrong to say that the left in Israel has vanished—it is simply yet to be born.
