Did Likud get it wrong all those years?
צילום: צפריר אביוב
Taking stock
Likud and its predecessors got it (mostly) wrong, Eitan Haber writes
According to legend, when a man is about to draw his last breath, he closes his eyes and can see his entire life pass before him: childhood, adolescence, adulthood, family life, career.
When the last Jew will leave Gush Katif this summer, filled with rage, surrounded by bitter tears, it will be time for the National Movement, which today is comprised of various factions that come under the Likud’s umbrella, to take stock of its “life.”
For over 80 years now, this movement is an inseparable part of Zionism’s landscape, and has been leading the State of Israel for more than 25 years. At this time, it is important that the movement’s honest members engage in some self-scrutiny.
Our history is sufficiently long to be able to tell which of the large camps within the Zionist Movement got it right.
An honest assessment would show the National Movement erred in a large portion of its ideas, dreams, statements, and deeds. It floated atop imagination and impossible dreams, while the other camp, Labor, chose to be pragmatic, with two feet planted firmly on the ground, and avoided weekly visits to the Messiah.
This is not to say however, that Labor did not make mistakes, too.
Aftermath of 1967 War misinterpreted
Yet when we look at the facts we see that when it came to the big dreams and the right deeds, the National camp erred badly when for long years it disparaged the early settlement enterprise prior to Israel’s establishment, comprised of hundreds of Kibbutzim and other small communities, established in an effort to set the future state’s borders.
The small country we have today is a result of that early settlement enterprise.
Menachem Begin, as the National Camp’s leader, was wrong not to offer uncompromising support to David Ben Gurion’s intention to declare the State of Israel’s establishment.
Begin was wrong again when he was not quick to dismantle his pre-Israel military organization, the Irgun, immediately upon the state’s establishment.
The next error was in the harsh resistance to German reparations, which partly served to lay the economic basis for our nascent state.
Later, the National Camp erred in warning of horrific consequences should Israel, God forbid, withdraw from the Sinai desert following the Sinai War in 1956, while Ben Gurion foresaw the troubles that awaited Israel there and left the territory as fast as he could.
The gravest error of all apparently (which was also shared by Mapai, the Labor party’s predecessor,) was to interpret the Six-Day War’s aftermath as an opportunity to realize the Greater Israel vision and adopt, two generations late, the settlement vision.
2 good decisions
It was also an error to view Jordan, back in 1948 already, as a temporary entity and not recognize the country and its king.
Other National Camp mistakes include the resistance to intermediate agreements with Egypt, agreements that later paved the way for Begin’s peace agreement.
However, we must mention two bold decisions in this context - the peace with Egypt and the bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor – both serve as a shining light in the National Movement’s annals.
When the last Jew leaves Gush Katif in tears, the time will come perhaps for taking stock and self-scrutiny. But between us, who in the National Movement today can do that?
