11
In 2001 the Hungarian government passed a status law giving certain national rights and privileges to Hungarians living beyond the state’s borders. This has understandably aroused Romanian ire at what some see as renewed irredentist ambition in Budapest; from the point of view of the Hungarians of Transylvania, however, the new law simply offers them some guarantees of protection and a right to maintain their distinctive identity. For a sharp dissection of identity debates and their political instrumentalization after communism, see Vladimir Tismaneanu,
Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism, and Myth in Post-Communist Europe
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), notably chapter 3, “Vindictive and Messianic Mythologies,” 65-88.
12
Adrian Năstase, “Europe: la plus-value roumaine,”
Le Monde
, July 23, 2001.
13
On Sebastian, Eliade, and the anti-Semitic obsessions of Bucharest’s interwar literati, see Peter Gay’s review of Sebastian’s
Journal, 1935-1944: The Fascist Years
(Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000) in the
New York Review of Books
, October 4, 2001. For a representative instance of Eliade’s views on Jews, see for example Sebastian’s diary entry for September 20, 1939, where he recounts a conversation with Eliade in which the latter is as obsessed as ever with the risk of “a Romania again invaded by kikes” (p. 238). Sebastian’s diary should be read alongside that of another Bucharest Jew, Emil Dorian:
The Quality of Witness: A Romanian Diary, 1937-1944
(Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1982).
14
On Noica see Katherine Verdery,
National Ideology Under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceauşescu’s Romania
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), chapter 7, “The ‘School’ of Constantin Noica.” Ionescu is quoted by Sebastian,
Journal
, 9.
15
Among the most important leaders of the Romanian Party, first in exile in Moscow and then in Bucharest, until she was purged in 1952, was Ana Pauker, daughter of a Moldavian
shochet
(ritual slaughterer). See Robert Levy,
Ana Pauker: The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Communist
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
16
See the comprehensive analysis by Vladimir Tismaneanu, “The Tragicomedy of Romanian Communism,”
Eastern European Politics and Societies
3, no. 2 (Spring 1989): 329-376. Khrushchev, who had little time for Romanians, sought to confine them to an agricultural role in the international Communist distribution of labor; Dej and Ceauşescu preferred to secure national independence via a neo-Stalinist industrialization drive.
17
On the peculiar sadism of prisons in Communist Romania, see Matei Cazacu, “L’Expérience de Pitesti,”
Nouvelle Alternative
10 (June 1988); and Lena Constante,
The Silent Escape: Three Thousand Days in Romanian Prisons
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995; first published in French by Éditions La Découverte, Paris, 1990).
18
For the American story, see Joseph F. Harrington and Bruce J. Courtney,
Tweaking the Nose of the Russians: Fifty Years of American-Romanian Relations, 1940-1950
(New York: East European Monographs/Columbia University Press, 1991). Even
The Economist
, in August 1966, called Ceauşescu “the de Gaulle of Eastern Europe.” As for de Gaulle himself, on a visit to Bucharest in May 1968 he observed that while Ceauşescu’s Communism would not be appropriate for the West, it was probably well suited to Romania: “Chez vous un tel régime est utile, car il fait marcher les gens et fait avancer les choses.” (“For you such a regime is useful, it gets people moving and gets things done.”) President François Mitterrand, to his credit, canceled a visit to Romania in 1982 when his secret service informed him of Romanian plans to murder Paul Goma and Virgil Tanase, Romanian exiles in Paris.
19
“The foetus is the socialist property of the whole society” (Nicolae Ceauşescu). See Katherine Verdery,
What Was Socialism and What Comes Next?
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Ceauşescu is quoted on p. 65.
20
Romania’s abortion rate in 2001 was 1,107 abortions per 1,000 live births. In the EU the rate was 193 per thousand, in the U.S. 387 per thousand.
22
From a Transylvanian perspective, Bucharest is a “Balkan,” even “Byzantine,” city. I am deeply grateful to Professor Mircea Mihaies, Adriana Babeti, and the “Third Europe” group at the University of Timişoara for the opportunity of an extended discussion on these themes in October 1998. Our conversation was transcribed and published last year, with a generous introduction by Professor Vladimir Tismaneanu, as
Europa Iluziilor
(Iasi: Editura Polirom, 2000), notably 15-131.
23
R. G. Waldeck,
Athene Palace
(New York: Robert McBride, 1942; reprinted by the Center for Romanian Studies, Iasi, 1998). The quote is from the reprint edition, p. 10.
24
For Cioran see E. M. Cioran,
Oeuvres
(Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 1779: “Ce qui m’a le plus déprimé, c’est une carte de l’Empire ottoman. C’est en la regardant que j’ai compris notre passé et le reste.” The letter to Ceauşescu is cited by Kathleen Verdery in
National Ideology Under Socialism
, 133. For Ionescu’s bleak prophecy, see Radu Boruzescu, “Mémoire du Mal—Bucarest: Fragments,”
Martor: Revue d’Anthropologie du Musée du Paysan Roumain
5 (2000): 182-207.
25
Note, though, that in 1991 Adrien Năstase (then foreign minister) committed himself to an eventual reunification “on the German model.” Likewise President Ion Iliescu, in December 1990, denounced the “injuries committed against the Romanian people” (in 1940) and promised that “history will find a way to put things completely back on their normal track.” See Charles King,
The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture
(Stanford, Stanford University/Hoover Institution Press, 2000), 149-150. The Romanian-speaking population of destitute Moldova would like nothing better. But Romania just now does not need to annex a country with large Russian and Ukrainian minorities, an average monthly wage of around $25 (when paid), and whose best-known export is the criminal trade in women.
26
Repeal of anti-Jewish laws was the price of international recognition for the newly independent Romanian state in 1881. In 1920 the Versailles powers made citizenship rights for Jews and other non-Romanians a condition of the Trianon settlement. In both cases the Romanian state avoided compliance with the spirit of the agreement, but nonetheless made concessions and improvements that would not have been forthcoming without foreign pressure.
27
R. W. Seton-Watson,
A History of the Roumanians
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934), 554; also cited in King,
The Moldovans
, 36.
28
E. M. Cioran, “Petite Théorie du Destin” (from
La Tentation d’Exister
),
Oeuvres
, 850. The French original reads: “Il y a des pays qui jouissent d’une espèce de bénédiction, de grâce: tout leur réussit, même leurs malheurs, même leurs catastrophes; il y en a d’autres qui ne peuvent aboutir, et dont les triomphes équivalent à des échecs. Quand ils veulent s’affirmer, et qu’ils font un bond en avant, une fatalité extérieure intervient pour briser leur ressort et pour les ramener à leur point de départ.”
CHAPTER XVI
Dark Victory: Israel’s Six-Day War
Thirty-five years ago this summer, in one of the shortest wars in modern history, Israel confronted and destroyed the combined armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, established itself as a regional superpower, and definitively reconfigured the politics of the Middle East and much else besides. Since we are still living with its consequences, the Six-Day War itself seems somehow familiar. Its immediacy was reinforced until very recently by the presence at the head of Israel’s government of one of the generals who played an important part in the victory in 1967, and by the salience of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (occupied in the course of the campaign) in contemporary international politics. The detailed implications of Israel’s lightning victory are etched into our daily news.
In truth, however, 1967 was a very long time ago. Hitler had been dead just twenty-two years, and the state of Israel itself had not yet celebrated its twentieth anniversary. The overwhelming majority of today’s Israeli citizens were not yet born or not yet Israelis. Nineteen years after its birth, the country was still shaped by its origins in turn-of-the-century Labor Zionism. The only leaders whom Israel had known were men and women of the Second Aliyah, the Russian and Polish immigrants of the first years of the twentieth century; and the country was still utterly dominated by that founding generation and its sensibilities. A time traveler returning to Israel in 1967 must traverse not just time, but also space: In many crucial respects the country still operated, as it were, on Białystok time.
This had implications for every dimension of Israeli life. The kibbutzim, curious communitarian progeny of an unlikely marriage of Marx and Kropotkin, dominated the cultural landscape no less than the physical one. Even though it was already clear to some observers that the country’s future lay in technology, in industry, and in towns, the self-description of Israel drew overwhelmingly on a Socialist realist image of agrarian pioneers living in semiautarkic egalitarian communes. Most of the country’s leaders, beginning with David Ben-Gurion himself, were members of a kibbutz. Kibbutzim were attached to national movements that were affiliated with political parties, and all of them reflected, to the point of caricature, their fissiparous European heritage: splitting and re-splitting through the years along subtle doctrinal fault lines.
Political conversation in Israel in those years thus echoed and recapitulated the vocabulary and the obsessions of the Second International, circa 1922. Labor Zionism was subdivided over issues of dogma and politics (in particular the question of Socialist Zionism’s relationship to Communism) in ways that might have seemed obsessive and trivial to outsiders but were accorded respectful attention by the protagonists. Laborites of various hues could indulge such internecine squabbles because they had a monopoly of power in the country. There were some religious parties, and above all there were the “Revisionists,” the heirs of Vladimir Jabotinsky and his nationalist followers, incarnated in Menachem Begin’s Herut party (the forerunner of today’s Likud). But the latter were in a permanent minority; and anyway it is significant that Begin and his like were still referred to disparagingly as “revisionist,” as though it were the doctrinal schisms of the early twentieth century that still determined the colors and the contours of Israeli politics.
There were other aspects of Israeli life and Zionist education that echoed the founders’ European roots. On the kibbutz where I spent much time in the mid-1960s, a fairly representative agricultural community in the Upper Galilee affiliated with one of the splinter parties to the left of the main Labor Party (Mapai), the concerns of the early Zionists were still very much alive. The classical dilemmas of applied socialism were debated endlessly. Should an egalitarian community impose sameness? Is it sufficient to distribute resources equally to all participants, allowing them to dispose of these according to preference, or is preference itself ultimately divisive and taste best imposed uniformly by the collective? How far should the cash nexus be allowed into the community? Which resources and activities are communal in their essence, which private?
The dominant tone on the kibbutz and in the country was provincial and puritanical. I was once earnestly reprimanded by a kibbutz elder for singing “inappropriate” popular songs, that is, the latest Beatles hits; and Zionist education went to great lengths to encourage intracommunity fellow feeling and affection among the young while eviscerating it of any hint of the erotic. The prevailing ethos, with its faith in the redemptive value of Land and Labor, its scoutlike clothing and communal dances, its desert hikes and dutiful ascents of Masada (the hard way, of course), its lectures on botany and biblical geography, and its earnest weekly discussion of Socialist “issues,” represented nothing so much as a transposition into the Middle East of the preoccupations and mores of the Independent Labour Party of 1890s Britain, or the
Wandervogel
walking clubs of late Wilhelminian Germany.
Not surprisingly, Arabs figured very little in this world. In discussions of the writings of Ber Borochov and the other iconic texts of Labor Zionism, much attention was of course paid to the question of “exploitation.” But in accordance with the Marxist framework in which all such debates were couched, “exploitation” was restricted in its meaning to the labor theory of value: You exploit someone else by employing them, remunerating them at the minimum required to keep them working productively, and pocketing the difference as profit. Accordingly, as seen from the perspective of kibbutz-based Labor Zionists, to hire Arabs (or anyone else) for wages was to exploit them. This had been the subject of animated practical quarrels as well as doctrinal arguments among kibbutz members; historically it was part of what distinguished kibbutzim from the labor-employing village cooperatives, or moshavim. But beyond such rather abstruse considerations, which were of little relevance to the real Israeli economy, relations between Jews and Arabs were not much discussed.
It is easy, looking back, to see in this curious oversight the source of our present troubles. And critics of the whole Zionist project are quick to remark that this refusal to engage with the presence of Arabs was the original sin of the Zionist forefathers, who consciously turned away from the uncomfortable fact that the virgin landscape of unredeemed Zion was already occupied by people who would have to be removed if a Jewish state was ever to come about. It is true that a few clear-sighted observers, notably Ahad Ha’am, had drawn attention to this dilemma and its implications, but most had ignored it. Actually the matter was not quite so simple, to judge from my own recollection of the last years of the old Zionism. Many Israelis of that time rather prided themselves on their success in living peacefully alongside Arab neighbors within the national borders. Far from deliberately denying the Arab presence, they boasted of their acquaintance with Arabs, and especially with Druze and Bedouins. They encouraged the young to familiarize themselves with local Arab society no less than with the flora and the fauna of the landscape.