On being a 'traitor' by Amnon Lord Opinion Jerusalem Post March 11, 2004 I felt forced to make a choice between my social milieu and my country In the mid-1990s, after the wave of massacres began, I understood that the path I believed in for many years as a leftist was wrong and led to the opposite results of what is called "peace." Dozens of mangled bodies on Dizengoff Boulevard were not my idea of historic reconciliation and peace. Standing in line with friends to donate blood after mass terror attacks contradicted the many pictures of ceremonies of the days of Oslo I and II. I expected the Left to respond to those events of the Rabin and Peres era with critical thinking about the various moves. Of course, that didn't happen. Then, ahead of the May 1996 elections, I felt I had to make a choice: between loyalty to my immediate social milieu and the political organizations to which I felt a blind affinity, and loyalty to Israeli society and the existential interests of the State of Israel and democracy. Word got around that I was going to vote for Binyamin Netanyahu and the Likud. This shocked the people who knew me as a foot soldier at Peace Now rallies or as an editor and reporter at the Hadashot newspaper during the 1980s and early 1990s. Ha'ir sent Aviv Lavie to interview me. Until that interview I could toy with the idea of voting however I wanted without making a big deal about it. I decided to cooperate with the interview because I thought the 1996 elections were critical and that maybe if I said I was going with the Right and voting no-confidence in Shimon Peres's leadership, it would help. Peres seemed dangerous to me at the time. I remember telling Aviv Lavie that actually leaving the Left was not so much a matter of choice: I felt suffocated as if I were inside an intellectual gas chamber, I told him, and I just ran for my life. I couldn't survive inside. What made things worse for me was that Netanyahu won. A childhood friend from my kibbutz left a strange letter with my mother: First of all, why did you go get interviewed by Aviv Lavie?! It's one thing if you want to vote for Netanyahu. Go ahead. But why talk about it? The atmosphere on the Left towards such a move was documented in the huge collection of letters sent to the Haaretz supplement after the long and sympathetic piece by Ari Shavit when Netanyahu was in office for one year. He called it "the year of hatred." The very fact that Shavit described certain aspects of Netanyahu in a positive light were enough to define him as a "defector" and "traitor." In leftist parlor talk, the phenomenon was called "the Amnon Lord syndrome." That is, anyone doubting the all-embracing totality of leftist rectitude. After I started studying the nature of the Israeli "Left," its roots, its history, its patterns of action and its ideology, I concluded that a leftist's loyalty is almost completely to a political organization, to a movement. It has been said about European social-democratic parties that they do not recognize the sovereignty of the state, only the sovereignty of the party. That is true of the Israeli Left, too. The word "treason" is unsuitable in the context of various figures on the Left and their actions. It is an issue of an entire elite class turning its back on its nation and country. Yossi Beilin and his people's Geneva agreement expresses that moral collapse in the most poignant way. It includes a willingness to collaborate with PLO propaganda against Israel, a surrender of matters of principle such as Jerusalem and refugees, and especially a waiving of Jewish sovereignty in Israel along with a waiver of our ability to defend ourselves. Anyone who remembers how in the years after losing the 1977 elections the Labor Party's economic leaders, headed by Ya'acov Levinson, tried to transfer large parts of the Histadrut's financial and business assets abroad, should not be surprised by today's moral capitulation. Since then, the Left has cultivated the myth of the collective murder of Yitzhak Rabin, of which the whole Right is to blame. The Right is the enemy, and if the Right happens to be the Israeli people, then too bad, but there is no choice. There is no doubt that a person like Yossi Beilin is closer to Yasser Abed Rabbo or Joschka Fischer than he is even to his party colleague Ran Cohen. This process, signs of which were seen throughout the 1990s, was incredibly and most surprisingly accelerated, particularly in the last three and a half years of terrorist warfare. In the first year of the Palestinian terror campaign I had the feeling that many on the Left were reaching the conclusion I had reached five or six years earlier. But today it is clear that not only did the Left undergo a process of radicalization and emotional and political separation from the people, but it also managed to recapture the public agenda. The Israeli public is assaulted not only by exploding terrorists but also by a demoralizing media that depresses the public's spirit. The Palestinians must not be called "the enemy"; the enemy is the IDF, the air force, and the settlers. We have reached the point where anyone identified in any way with the "Right" cannot participate in a public debate. The very definition of his person or position as "rightist" automatically puts his arguments outside the limits of public discourse. A strange situation in a country where just a year and a half ago the rightist parties won an overwhelming majority such as they had never seen before. ---------- The writer is the author of The Israeli Left, from Socialism to Nihilism and a columnist with Makor Rishon.