And Yossi Sarid Has Something to Say

The upheaval that wasn't

Three days before the 1977 elections I ran into the foreign minister on the main street of Metula. I was then a young Knesset member at the end of his first term and he was - then as always - Yigal Allon. He was in high spirits, having just come out of a successful election meeting, whereas I was in a bad mood. I feel we've lost the elections, I told him. He laughed and tried to calm me: "We may lose a few seats, but if we weren't defeated four years ago, right after the Yom Kippur War, there's no chance we'd be beaten now."

I know he interpreted my defeatism at the time as end-of-campaign fatigue. I was then information chairman of the Labor Alignment (the alliance of Mapai, the largest left-wing party in the country with Achdut Ha'avoda) campaign. I saw his response as the obtuseness of being in power too long. It not only corrupts but also blinds the eyes of the wise.

A few months earlier I met the West German chancellor, Willy Brandt, who visited me in Kiryat Shmona during his visit in Israel. I made the same pessimistic forecast, but added that perhaps Labor, out of power, would rehabilitate and heal itself. The experienced chancellor shook his head and said: "I have been young, and now I am old; yet I have not ever seen a defeated party rehabilitate itself in opposition."

In retrospect, I daresay he was right. There are illnesses that only get worse in the political wilderness, and they attack mainly parties that have never been weaned from power.

Yesterday was the 30th anniversary of the upheaval - the Likud's rise to power. It's not good for a democracy to have a single ruling party. So 1977's turnabout should be seen positively, at least in principle. The Likud's beginning seemed promising. What the Alignment failed to do in its various incarnations in 30 years - make the first peace with a major Arab state - Menachem Begin pulled off in an amazingly short time. For a brief moment, it seemed to confound all the predictions of disaster. The land might after all overflow with milk and honey.

But the moment was brief indeed. Everything Mapai had spoiled, the Likud spoiled further. Under Begin's leadership the rifts and gaps in Israeli society widened. Granted, the Jews from Arab countries felt better, felt at home, but that feeling didn't pay their grocery bills. Poverty, for the most part, increased, while a few became hugely wealthy. The ultra-Orthodox draft dodging spread, and yeshiva pupils multiplied and increased and now fill the earth.

The occupation strengthened its grasp on the land, and the settlements expanded their boundaries. The seed of calamity planted by Golda, Galili and Dayan took hold and grew and sprouted all the wild growths.

Jerusalem, which was never united and never will be, received an annexation law that drove all the ambassadors from it.

At the end of Begin's term the first Lebanon War broke out. It was a preemptive war of choice, and it was obvious from the beginning that it was a mistake. In the 18 years we were in Lebanon, our presence exacted more than 1,000 victims and finally defeated Begin himself. The voice and hands were Begin's, but the legs that knocked over the bucket were Ariel Sharon's.

Begin was a decent, honest man, who would be horrified to find what happened here after his death. Mapai at the end of its hegemony was a corrupt party but its sins were like the driven snow compared to the Likud's era in power. Corruption lost all shame, and Begin's heritage was stained unrecognizably by the Diadochi.

A few weeks ago retired Judge Sara Sirota recalled in a newspaper report that a thief once explained why he broke into Pinhas Sapir's house. He was sure he said that in the treasurer's house there'd be a treasure. To his amazement all he found was an old watch. Today's thieves would not emerge empty-handed from the homes of prime ministers and ministers.

Thirty years since the Likud came to power, it's easy to be nostalgic for the good old Mapainiks and their culture, whatever their flaws.

After all that has happened since, one may well ask - was there an upheaval? And one should also answer - there was no upheaval.

Yossi Sarid Responds to Kollek's Role in the Saison

From Yossi Sarid's op-ed in Haaretz, "Free peoples in their Own Lands":-

A month ago, Yedioth Ahronoth published classified MI5 documents that had recently been made public. They revealed that Teddy Kollek, later mayor of Jerusalem, had given the British security service information about the activities of the Etzel and Lehi underground movements. The newspaper published this and there was an outcry, as if by conditioned reflex. Since then, not only those involved, but also numerous infuriated talkback participants have had their say, and there were suggestions that Teddy's name be removed from the Jerusalem stadium that bears it and replaced with that of Lehi leader Avraham ("Yair") Stern.

Indeed, it is not nice to be a teller of tales and not fitting to pass such information to the British, and we all know what happens to an informant under Jewish religious law. But there are times when such behavior should not necessarily be criticized. In his autobiography, Kollek wrote: "I was always opposed to the anarchy among our people. It was vital that the Jewish Agency, our government at the time, take action against terrorist groups who took the liberty of making their own decisions and endangering policy ... I was opposed to the Etzel and the Lehi, just as after the Yom Kippur War, I was opposed to those who set up settlements against government policy."

Kollek was right, and whoever wishes to be convinced of this is invited to take a look at Israel's position toward the Palestinian Authority. Israel categorically demands that the PA assert control over its rebels and impose the central government's authority on them. Israel also praises any sign of Palestinian cooperation with it. But every nation under a foreign yoke has the tendency to consider its dissidents as heroes, and those who collaborate as traitors. History teaches us that lawbreakers bring disaster upon movements of national liberation.

Had the Palestinians stopped their indiscriminate violent opposition and turned it into civil disobedience, they would have been rid of the occupation a long time ago. Terrorism is harming their justified struggle for independence; every terrorist attack merely delays the end of their subjugation. The violent underground activities of the Etzel and Lehi, which were also stained with terrorist acts, did not further Israel's independence, and possibly even held it up.

From time to time, the argument flares up over who really expelled the British from here - the organized Yishuv (Jewish community) or those who did their own thing - and it seems that there is still no more burning argument than this one, which brings all the bears out of the forest. According to historian Yehuda Bauer, "no one expelled them; they decided to go because they considered this in their best interests after they lost the support of the Americans, and this was lost because of the impact of the Holocaust." And Haim Guri once said to me that one "Exodus" - a ship overflowing with refugees - at sea was worth as much as all the campaigns on land, from the attempt on Lord Moyhinan's life to the attack on the King David Hotel.

David Ben-Gurion, Kollek and their colleagues in the Haganah understood that Britain had made up its mind to fold up the flag of the empire and that the Yishuv must prepare for its real war of liberation, against the Arabs, and not waste its strength in a war against the rearguard of an imaginary enemy. Following World War II, it became clear that the empire was a liability rather than an asset, and United Kingdom citizens were more interested in how to heat their homes than whether the sun would ever set over India and Ceylon. Palestine was as interesting to them as last year's snow. England saved itself when it shed its colonies; the burden of control was too large for its democratic measurements and vital needs. The other colonial powers followed suit, throwing colony after colony and mandate after mandate off the deck so that they would not sink.