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Complete Party Planning .0 • Bat Mitzvahs • Bar Mitzvahs • Weddings • Anniversaries Call Parties Galore: 855-8801 72 FRIDAY, OCTOBER 27, 1989 lence, peace becomes less like- ly — but the public is hedg- ing the bet. Like Wall Street traders, whose lives are founded on risk but who can- not abide it, many Zionists have become arbitrageurs, with our security (as opposed to securities) as the stakes. My pal Todd is another good liberal American Israeli. an administrator who moon- lights — everybody here moonlights — as an interna- tional basketball referee. Over beers with his counterparts in Zagreb or Barcelona, he says, people, tell him the Israelis ought to wipe out the intifadw the old-fashioned say, with tanks, and he tells them this is ridiculous. But back in the States, he reports, "I'm always under attack" from fellow Jews who want Israel to pull out of the territories tomorrow and end this dread- ful, insupportable situation. He finds himself dwelling on the kinds of security-oriented arguments he'd seldom make in Jerusalem, where every- body knows them by heart anyway. Not long after the Jaffa Road stabbings, I took a trip to America. In 1bxas I went jogging with -two professor friends, former colleagues, liberals of course. It was a beautiful Sunday morning, on a landscaped trail by a lake, and I was amusing them with absurdist tales of my new life, writing for Hollywood and liv- ing in Jerusalem — scribbling while Rome burns so to speak — when one of them said he had read in the paper that some sort of awful milestone had just been reached in the intifada. I said I had read it too, the Associated Press reported 500 Palestinians had been killed. We all 'agreed this was terrible, and then I add- ed — almost involuntarily — that this was not quite as many people as had been kill- ed in the drug wars in Los Angeles in the same period. "Listen to you," said one of my friends, and the subject was quickly dropped, not worth ruining a nice day over. There's no escaping it. The liberal in me is dedicated to fairness and justice and human rights, the patriot to the security and survival of the Jewish people — and when they clash, I refuse to choose between them. Nor need I. Negative capa- bility has been intrinsic to the Zionist enterprise from its in- ception. The very idea of the Jewish State is messianic, meta-historical, a romantic fantasy of the first order. Ben- Gurion demonstrated his kin- ship with Keats and Coleridge when he struck a deal with the Orthodox rabbis, grantng them hegemony over mar- riage, divorce, and other sec- tors of Israeli life, for the sake of ahavat yisrael, a love for all Jews that he thought would transcend our differences. Just as Israel must absorb all Jews, it's as if one's mind must entertain all of their opinions, daunting as that may be — becoming, like the State itself, cluttered and claustrophobic in the process. David, King of Israel, was both poet and conqueror, and as the song goes, he is chai v'kayam, alive and kicking. We are a nation with armies and a religion with the loftiest values. We inhabit a land that is two countries at once — ours and the Arabs,' neither people acknowledging the other's sovereignty but living in a state of astonishing in- timacy, like two families in the same apartment. We are at peace and at war simul- taneously, not only since the intifada began, but from at least the beginning of the cen- tury. How many nations, 41 years after statehood, cannot take their existence for granted? Even Argentina knows it will be there when it gets up tomorrow morning. Thank God I have lost no sons or brothers or friends in Israel's wars, nor has anyone I know first-hand been a vic- tim of terrorism. Having grown up in Brooklyn and lived in Los Angeles I long ago developed the ostrich neck and tortoise shell of the fearless urbanite. I worry more about getting smashed to kingdom come by a fellow Israeli driver on the highway to Tel Aviv that I do about Iraqi chemical weapons or Shi'ite suicide bombers, Yet -there is something very scary about living here, from an ex- istential point of view. Month by month, I sense it more, like a distant drumbeat just be- coming audible. This is the Middle East — not some miniature America, a Jewish Disney World her- metically insulated from ayatollahs and other demi-fic- tional bogeymen the Ameri- can mind can imagine only as characters on a screen, not as the man on the street. Haifa and Beirut are as close as New York and Hartford. Then what are we doing here? Are we crazy? The answer is yes, of course. If we were rational and foresighted we might have chosen a dif- ferent spot to build our na- tional house: not Uganda — that crazy we're not — but perhaps Western Australia, which was also on the docket. But the dream was of Zion — not just any metaphorical Zion but the genuine article. After two millennia Of wait- ing in line, we would accept no substitutes. We have returned to the East, and I for one say make the most of it. Negative capa- bility seems completely apro- pos here, the perfect tool for the art of Jewish living. Ac- ceptance of simultaneous op- posites is a hallmark of East- ern thinking; long before the Romantic poets there was Yin and Yang. If Zionism is a volatile amalgam of mysti- cism and pragmatism, vio- lence and holiness, beauty and brutality, it has come home to the correct address. With Keats, I am prepared to revel in our contradictions, yet never despair of resolving them, even though no rational resolution is at hand. I am content to concentrate on the process of peacemaking, even if it seems fruitless; to view confusion as the seedbed of progress; to dance on the lip of the volcano. Sometimes — see what ten years in Cali- fornia does to you — I think of this as the Zen of Zionism. Poppycock, say the profes- sional doomsayers — and they are in generous supply, in Israel and abroad. The diagnosis is all too plain: creeping conservatism or, worse, fatal ambivalence, depressing evidence of the in- tractability of our problems. I must confess that I myself — in keeping with my own negative capability — occa- sionally wonder whether I am not confecting a highfalutin , metaphor to conceal a politics of pure jello. But zeh ma she'yesh, an Israelis say, this is what is. Until proven wrong I will con- tinue on my waffling way, and expect to encounter many friends, in Israel and Amer- ica, en route. At • the very least, negative capability, as its name suggests, encom- passes both the Jewish pen- chant for gloominess and our proven history of spectacular achievement. It enables you to be pessimistic and optimis- tic at the same time, waiting, as Talmudic tradition has it, for Elijah the Prophet to set- tle insoluble disputes — or for the next Begin and Sadat to make an illogical leap toward peace. ❑