From Left To Right (An Israeli Lefty's Journey To Conservatism) MUST READ!!!

"It's about time we realized that Zionism is a success story," says Dr. Maoz Azaryahu, 48, carefully packing tobacco in a sleek wooden pipe. Judging from where we are sitting - in his modest, tastefully decorated Bauhaus apartment in the center of Tel Aviv - he's got a point. The bustle of the afternoon caf -and-boutique crowds cheerfully going about their business as the sun sets on Rehov Dizengoff serve as testimony to Azaryahu's thesis that the tensions of Israeli society are its life force, not its downfall. In spite of its imperfections, he says, Israel is "the greatest achievement of the 20th century."

Azaryahu is tall, dark, and thin with a wide grin and a deep laugh. He was born in Israel, the son of parents also born here. In the 1980s, he lived in Berlin, where he studied for his PhD in public memory in East Germany. He now looks back on his years there as crucial to his intellectual development. Today he is a geographer at Haifa University specializing in Zionist culture and national memory.

Ruthie Blum: Your fields of interest seem to be almost contradictory. On the one hand, you focus on monuments and memorials to fallen soldiers; on the other, you study Israeli beach-going as a cultural phenomenon. What's the connection between the two? Maoz Azaryahu: The Israeli experience oscillates between mourning and getting on with life - between heroic sacrifice that is symbolized by military cemeteries, and normal life, symbolized by the "first Hebrew beach" of the "first Hebrew city."

Because it is not burdened with an ideological load, the beach represents the culmination of the fundamental Zionist quest: normal life in a Jewish homeland. While researching this subject, I was thrilled to discover that the writer Sholem Asch, in a Yiddish Warsaw newspaper in 1937, maintained that the busy and overcrowded Tel Aviv beach was a dream come true, as it encapsulated the success of the Zionist enterprise - the celebration of normal life, free of anti-Semitism and persecution. In other words, the beach is where Zionism and popular culture converge.

You recently attended the inauguration of a visitors' path at the Mount Herzl cemetery. What's significant about that? Mount Herzl isn't just any cemetery. It's our national story - our history - where our soldiers are buried. We need to be able to visit the graves there easily - to pay our respect to the dead in a proper, organized way. The way people visit Arlington.

Fallen soldiers represent a collective death. It may sound funny to say in this age of cynicism, but I feel genuine sadness whenever a soldier gets killed. We all do. It's part of our collective experience.

Now that women and children have unwittingly become front-line targets, has the death of soldiers become less of a tragedy in the collective consciousness? When women and children, groups traditionally protected from warfare, are the victims of terrorism, obviously it feels like more of a tragedy than when an armed soldier gets killed in the line of duty. That's because soldiers are not considered victims in the same sense. And, after all, this was the whole driving force behind Zionism: that Jews would no longer be victims. This is what makes our current situation so tough to bear. We've shifted back to victimhood after achieving heroism.

Do you see a connection between our return to victimhood - our ceasing to be heroes - and the increase in anti-Semitism in Europe? On the contrary, Europe has a problem with Jews asserting themselves, which explains its turning the Holocaust into a virtual cult - with a proliferation of memorials and such. It is a tribute to dead Jews.

This is a paradox. While horror at the Holocaust is expressed as ultra-moral, it is in fact anti-moral. In Germany, for example, the Holocaust has become a source for collecting moral capital. All you have to do is say you regret the Holocaust, and you're a moral being. This is anti-Semitism cloaked in the preaching of morality.

What does all this mean for Israel? Israel is the greatest achievement of the 20th century. Think of two crucial events that happened five days apart in 1917. The first - on November 2 - was the announcement of the Balfour Declaration. Five days later, there was a revolution in Russia. And what happened at the end of the century? The Soviet Union fell. The State of Israel is still alive and kicking.

In spite of the fact that the country is in a state of what some would call a civil war? Religious vs secular, Sephardim vs Ashkenazim, Left vs Right, Zionism vs post-Zionism... Contrary to popular discourse, Israel is a pretty homogeneous society. What there is here is solidarity without consensus. But a lack of consensus is crucial for healthy debate, for the vitality of a society.

As for Zionism vs post-Zionism: The real problem is that Zionism succeeded. It was a vision that became a day-to-day reality - one that's less than perfect. So what?

After all is said and done, it succeeded in building Jewish life in the ancient Jewish homeland. It has creatively embodied the tension between the old and the new, the traditional and the modern, Jewish heritage and Western civilization, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

And one of its greatest achievements is the use of Hebrew in all spheres of life, from spoken language to literature.

It's about time we admitted that it is a success story. We might not be so good, but we're a lot better than other nations. I cannot think of another country as moral as this one - and I'm not comparing us to Zimbabwe. If that sounds like patriotism, it is. I'm a Zionist.

Speaking of patriotism, you used to be on the far Left of the political spectrum. Yeah, well, I was young. As Churchill said: whoever isn't a socialist before the age of 20 has no heart; whoever is a socialist after the age of 20 has no brain.

What led to your change of heart? My realization that the Left is about false morality. It's about preaching morals rather than having them. The basic statement of the Left is: "We're better than you, since we are more moral."

Is this true of everybody on the Left? Don't get me wrong. Some of my best friends are leftists... Also, there are different kinds of leftists. There is the old Zionist Left. My father is one of those. At the age of 17, he left home to join the Palmah.

The intellectual, radical Left, which is actually a tiny minority and fundamentally nihilist, is very visible. This is because the majority of the Zionist Left no longer has any ideas, especially after the collapse of socialism, which for many was identical to Zionism. So the discourse of the radicals has taken over.

How did this happen? There were many fault lines along the way. The Six Day War in 1967 was one of them. The Yom Kippur War in 1973 was another. 1977, when the Likud came to power for the first time, was another (which explains why Peace Now was founded in 1978). That was the Left's first big trauma.

So Menachem Begin was a bigger threat than the Arab world? Of course. I remember the evening after he came to power, and my friends and I were sitting around discussing the concentration camps that he would be building here.

But the really significant turning point was in 1981. That was when the realization that the Likud government wasn't just a fluke hit home.

What happened to you personally during those years? When did you realize that you no longer belonged to the Left? It was a long process. When I was young, I was a big socialist, thinking the state should have to support me financially. Then, as I got older, got married, had a daughter, a mortgage, a car - I became part of the established order. Radical leftists are basically adolescents who never matured.

You keep talking about your disappointment with the Left. What about your attitude towards the Arabs? Was there no disappointment there? To tell you the awful truth, when the Oslo War broke out in 2000, I felt a sense of relief. The lie-bubble had finally burst.

So, you knew all along that it was a lie? I didn't have any inside information, if that's what you mean. But I did have a sense that I was following ideas based on my social milieu. And it began to dawn on me that all of those ideas were taken from the Communist Party. The slogan "two states for two peoples," for example. And why do I think that this slogan was so successful? Because in a world characterized by intellectual laziness, "justice" equals "symmetry." Not right and wrong. But it's convenient. It means you don't have to give too much thought to who's right and who's wrong.

But, when I understood that what "two states for two peoples" really means is one state for the Arabs and the other for all its citizens, that's when the game was up for me.

Why does the Left believe that the problem is not with Arab ideology, but with Jewish behavior? Partly because the Left has a kind of patronizing attitude towards Arabs - that Arabs are like children and therefore not really responsible for their actions. It is neo-orientalism.

But it's also a psychological mechanism. The idea that no matter what you do makes no difference is almost unbearable. So we live in denial. And then, whatever goes awry, the tendency is to think that we've done something wrong.

The battered-wife syndrome? Exactly. The Left suffers from battered-wife syndrome. Also distorted logic, whereby if someone does something really awful, that means something really awful must have been done to him.

Has your criticism of the Left affected your academic career? I've never felt any open hostility, though I'm probably considered a traitor to my socio-ethnic group. As a secular, middle-class Ashkenazi, I'm supposed to be an Israeli WASP - which comes with a set of ideas. If I wore a kippa, or were of Sephardi descent, it would be considered normal for me to reject the Left. On the other hand, the fact that I don't fit into this mold adds to my charm. Someone once told me that I enjoy special status of belonging simultaneously to the minority and the majority.

As a student of culture, how would you define Israel? Israel is a country where in three phone calls, you can reach the prime minister. It's accessible, familial, vibrant, with a lot of Jewish tradition, a lot of noise, a lot of arguing. And it's full of energy.

It's a truly free country with a thriving democracy. It's genuinely egalitarian. What it managed to accomplish in two generations in terms of social mobility is amazing. In this respect it's like the United States and unlike Europe - which makes sense when you think about it, since what America and Israel have in common is that they were both founded on the rejection of Europe.

The only problem with Israeli culture is the hegemony of the Left. There is no free market of ideas here. The people who read and write for Haaretz have a monopoly on setting the cultural agenda.

Doesn't this contradict what you said about the country being characterized by its freedom and openness? Not really. The political and economic arenas are open. But culturally, the Left determines what is normative in everything from art to literature to scholarship. This is not because all academics, writers or journalists are leftists. They're not.

The reason this is unhealthy for society is that while most of the public is "national," the elite minority is what I call "alienational." Alienation is a built-in part of the Left. And what they're alienated from is common sense. Why does every peddler in the market understand more than many intellectuals? You could say that it's because the Left is evil. This isn't true. You could say that it's because the Left is stupid. Also not true. The problem is not with the "sense" - it's with the "common." It's the classic attempt on the part of the avant-garde or Bohemians (i.e. of a self-appointed elite) to distinguish themselves. In other words, if the bulk of the people were on the Left, these leftists would be on the Right. It's precisely because "the masses" are patriotic that the radical Left takes the opposite approach.

So you consider the culture war to be as significant as the Arab-Israeli conflict? I consider the culture war to be a war for our soul. It's dangerous for intellectuals to be divorced from normal people. We don't have the luxury - while still fighting for our existence - to let post-Zionism be the intellectual front-runner.

How can this be accomplished? It's an uphill battle. But there are people who have begun to realize that it's a crucial one, and they're beginning to show their heads.

It's the other way around. What feeds politics is culture. And the ones who control culture in the end are the ones who control politics.

Israel's universities are full of Tenured Reds, pushing socialism and their pet Second Holocaust national suicide scheme on Israel, right? Yes, there are lots of such arty types there that believe in nihilism, support Arab nazis, and believe Israel's time on Earth has run out. The post-Diaspora embodiment of Jewish self-hatred. It turns out however, this not the entire picture. Steven Plaut of Haifa University was never a Lefty, but quite a few of his colleagues, such as Professor Moshe Azaryahu are ex-Lefties who've renounced Oslo and seen the light. Once you read this interview from beginning to end, you'll understand why Israel still surprises people and lives up to its reputation as being the "land of miracles."

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The only problem with Israeli culture is the hegemony of the Left. There is no free market of ideas here. ...

This is true of Leftism everywhere.

It is death to the soul.

His comments can easily apply to America's Leftists as well as Israel's. He's an amazingly gifted thinker who has a grasp for the obvious. Few intellectuals in Western countries are as open-minded as him. We in America have been blessed in that liberalism's near hegemony on American thought has been broken. There used to be a time when there was no conservative current in America worth speaking of. Its astonishing how much all of that has changed. And what is also true in Dr. Azaryahu's comments is that by nature, we conservatives are born optimists. America is also history's greatest success story and we must never forget it.

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