What will Israel look like when we have peace, firm and stable? What are the chances that a new national identity worthy of respect will take shape ---and the danger that it won’t? I am going to look ahead five or six years and try to describe the effect the peace to come will have on Israeli society. I look ahead not to the eternal peace of ‘the End of Days’, not to an incident-free peace unshaken by a single terrorist attack, but to a time when it can be said that what we know as ‘the Arab-Israeli conflict’ --- we have lived with it for a hundred years or more now --- is over and done with.

Israeli Society on the Operating Table
The condition of the peace process is causing despondency everywhere. A metaphor from the realm of medicine may help us understand what is happening. We are deep into dangerous major surgery. We got to the operating table at the very last minute, when there was nothing for it but an operation to separate the two nations, to remove the Palestinian cancer from ourselves and the Israeli cancer from them. Two bodies which in the course of the last twenty-seven years have become pathologically and complexly interdependent, have to be severed. In this operation, performed without anesthesia, we are at one and the same time the patients, the surgeons, and the spectators in the gallery. There are crises, moments of extreme hazard. Blood spurts out, emergency transfusions are needed. Breathing suddenly stops, organs cease functioning. The two bodies on the table go into shock. But if we ask why we chose to enter on this operation, the answer is --- there was no choice.
 Had we performed it ten or fifteen years ago it would have been simpler and easier, but, over the years our systems have just got more and more interlocked and inter-grown. Now we have begun the process of disentangling and separation and there is no way back. Even if we all of a sudden discover, Heaven forbid, that they do not have the living tissue to control the autonomous body they will be taking over, it is clear to me that, even then, there is no way back to what we had before. From now on we go a completely different way. From here on, there is only one way --- forward.

The Security Issue is not the Force it Was
So what next? What will Israel’s secular identity look like when a well-founded, stable peace reigns? Until now, Israeli identity has converged around three central pillars: security, settling the land, and aliyah [the immigration of Diaspora Jews to Israel] --- three values that are the very mainstays of our collective identity and the most profound source of strength and sustenance to Israeli society. The consensus and closing of ranks around this group identity has been amazingly strong. Internal conflict there is, problems are not hard to find, but in the final analysis, this is a tolerant society. The truth of this assertion can be tested by the number of Jews killed by other Jews in clashes over ideology or politics. In France and England, tens of thousands have died in civil wars. In Israel, in spite of our divisions, you barely need the fingers of both hands to count them.
 Israeli society closed ranks primarily because an outside enemy hammered it into solidarity. When sickening acts of terrorism hit every other day, we felt our hearts go out to the victims, that the threat hung over every one of us. Disputes between secular and religious, between the poor of the townships and the rich in the affluent suburbs of Tel Aviv, became blurred, or at least abated for a while, within the solidarity on security. But the security issue is not the force it was and no longer has the energy to sustain the sensations that used to be so familiar to us and on which we built our identity. We should be glad of this, obviously, but we must also realize that this empty space, this void in the Israeli identity will immediately be filled by something else, good or bad. It will not happen in a day, but I think the first signs are already visible. We have heard about soldiers serving in Lebanon who failed to pursue retreating Khizbullah terrorists. The sense that they were not fighting for their home was somewhere at work there. The desire for life suppressed the discipline of battle: ---We’ll soon have to leave here in any case, and Khizbullah is not an enemy worth getting yourself killed for. They don’t threaten our existence, and they clearly can’t move a millimeter beyond any line we set for them, so why risk your life chasing them? --- I read this sort of tendency as the first signs that the solidarity on security is crumbling, and with it security’s supremacy in Israeli society.

Settling the Land is Losing Sanctity
There are similar things to say about the second value that was once a matter of universal agreement --- the sanctity of settlement. As a core constituent of Israel’s being, as what established the Jews on the land and fixed the country’s borders, the power of this value too is crumbling away. Land settlement is now judged by its cost, its economic functions and its contribution to the quality of life. It is measured in terms of productivity and financial profit. The era of settling the land at any cost is past and gone. No Frenchman mourns the fact that south of Dijon, along the Swiss border, there are swathes of land empty of even a single French village. Quite the contrary, he is happy about it. Where is the Frenchman who thinks that the area must be settled lest the Swiss come and grab it for themselves? We actually need far more empty areas; we need green land for our quality of life. Why  does every single hillside have to be built on?

Immigration for All Jews or Selectivity
Aliyah is going the same way. Clear signs of change are emerging. Once the Jews started returning to the ‘Land of Israel’ a hundred years ago, the consensus on aliyah in Israeli society was absolute. Extreme shook hands with extreme. We needed immigrants because we were fighting a demographic war with the Arabs. We needed immigrants to help us in the battle for our very existence. Every single Jew was welcome and our doors stood open. But with the coming of peace have come the first murmurings of new thinking. Are we really duty bound to open our arms to every type of immigrant? Do we have to take in anyone who turns up? Is there some obligation to make ourselves a transit point for Jews in trouble who have no genuine attachment to us, and who will leave to go elsewhere as soon as they can? How, indeed, do we define a Jew?
 As secular Jews, we fought long and hard to get the definition accepted that a Jew is whoever identifies himself or herself as a Jew. Today, we find such a sweeping definition somewhat daunting. The tremendous chaos that has been raging around the world the last few years has turned up many questions as to just who is a Jew. Are we under obligation, indeed, to accept everyone, when every day a new tribe of Jews in adversity is ‘discovered’ who want to come and join us? All sorts of people arrive in all sorts of trouble and say: I am a Jew, I had a Jewish grandfather somewhere, or my wife’s father’s father was Jewish. This puts us under commitment to take them in? What is this craze for expanding our numbers? Is a country of five million people, like Norway or Denmark, weaker than one of seven or eight million? Has the time not come to evaluate aliyah on economic and rational criteria? It seems to me that, like security, the role of aliyah too, once so fundamental a value in giving shape and strength to Israeli identity, has been worn down or is at least taking a smaller place in the overall scheme of things.

American Trash Culture versus the Frenchman’s Heritage of Treasures
Into the void created by this modification and replacement of values under the force of changing realities, will flow either good values --- challenges that will give new creative impetus to Israeli identity --- or bad values --- trash of the American variety, that is already filling our screens right now. Let us not forget that, unlthe French, the Italians, the English, the Germans, we do not stand here with a thousand years of cumulative, orderly history at our backs, layer on layer, course on course, embodied in great physical structures that build identity. Even in France, they worry about the influence of C.N.N. and the pervasiveness of the vacuous trans-national American identity. A Frenchman living in Paris, however, is at least protected by a heritage of identity-building cultural treasures. At his back stand thousands of years of history, there stands the Louvre, there stand his great books, and there stands the richest and profoundest universe of identity from which to draw all that is needed to integrate and interweave old and new identities. France is, for me, one of the finest models of identity preservation. The French also have identity-battles and identity-disputes, but in the final analysis, the test is whether the material culture of the past can be integrated into contemporary identity. A French fashion designer can take a dress worn by a queen of three of four hundred years ago and copy the style of her sleeve onto a new dress. A man planning a new restaurant with his chef can draw on old menus for his new cuisine. Past and present merge. Elements of past culture constantly feed into the continuity of an identity that moves ever forward while blending all the time with the old.

Three Rifts in Israel’s Identity
In the situation now evolving, I see three great rifts forming within the Israeli identity. Unless we prepare for the future, we may find ourselves, seven or eight years from now, longing for the era of war, God help us!, harking back to the days of battle, our identity shoddy and devoid of content.

The Secular-Religious Rift: The Defeat of Religious Judaism
The first rift --- and getting wider all the time --- is that between secular and religious. Israel is moving in two blatantly divergent directions. On the one hand, hedonistic secularism will expand to new heights and transfer all the energy of the Left, previously devoted to the Palestinian issue, into issues of the rights of the individual. On the other hand, religious Judaism will shut itself up in its ghettoes. The ‘black’ variety of religious Jew, Agudah, Shas, Chabad  [Ultra-Orthodox political parties and movements, called ‘black’ from the color of their habitual costume], will build isolated, autonomous social structures and segregate themselves within to the point of saying: The rest of you are not even Jews! For the meantime, they are still joined to the rest of the population by a sense of solidarity on defense and security, and the army is still important to them and makes a link between us. But as soon as this link goes, their self-seclusion will just get more and more impenetrable.
 The same will apply to the National Religious camp after its political defeat [at present it is fighting politically for Jewish settlement and sovereignty on most of the land between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan]. They will not return to their natural place at the center of the political map, where they were until the Six Day War, but will opt for segregation and alliance with the Ultra-Orthodox. We must understand that these people, the National Religious, will undergo the most extreme of crises. Over the last year, their members made up close to 80% of terror attack victims. Death hit one yeshiva after another, and despite their deep solidarity and the supportive human warmth they extend to each other, their deep sense of victimization is gaining strength. For some of them, their whole biographical identity stands or falls by the issue of Greater Israel. The partition of the land of Greater Israel between the State of Israel and a Palestinian state/entity entails not only their political defeat, but the destruction of their identity; demolishes the whole point of their life to now. Many of us took part in the efforts of Peace Now [a campaigning organization for Israeli-Arab peace], but that was only one part of our identity. We have other identities --- teachers, scientists, or everything else we have done in our lives. For them it is different. Many have no profession or occupation; ‘Greater Israel’ is their profession and, therefore, their defeat is not only political but professional. It is the defeat of their professional identity that they are staring in the face and, in their shock, their need for revenge is liable to be very dangerous.

 
The Mizrakhi-Ashkenazi Rift: A New Legitimacy for Mizrakhi Culture
A second source of division is the jealous rivalry between Easterners (Mizrakhis) and Westerners (Ashkenazis). [The Mizrakhi (or Sephardi) Jews are, in the main, descended from Jewish communities that lived under Arab regimes in the Middle East and North Africa while the Ashkenazi Jews are, in the main, of European-American descent and culture]. I believe that the hoops of solidarity hammered onto Israeli society by the security problem, and the consensus on settlement and aliyah, all this has covered up the cleavage between these two groups. The bonds of consensus removed, the rift will widen and express itself in many, many ways. First and foremost, it will erupt in the context of a battle of two cultures. Once there is peace with the Arabs, no shame will attach to Arab culture, and there will be no need to conceal it as the culture of the enemy. I have always advised Mizrakhi Jews to learn from the German immigrants who arrived here during the 1930s with deep loathing for Germany but who, and even after Auschwitz had cremated European Jewry, never confused the Germans with German culture. They always insisted that, though they had been driven out by persecution, this culture was theirs as much as the Germans’. Goethe, Schiller, and Thomas Mann were their heritage and treasure. They even saw themselves as preservers of this heritage. In other words, a distinction was drawn between loyalty to a culture and loyalty to a mentality, between the adoption of certain values and hatred for an enemy. Why cannot our Mizrakhi Jews do the same? Why the sense of shame? Why the need to display such total hostility against the Arabs? To hate them so passionately? I think I can see, however, the first buds of change. Note how Israeli Jews from Morocco reacted when the King of Morocco said to them: You are still my subjects! Did they protest? No, they seem to have received his words with affection, receptive to the warmth and the bond. When peace comes and frontiers open up, tourists of all kinds will flock to Israel from all over the Arab world --- cheap group excursions of ordinary Palestinians from Kalkiliya and Nablus [towns on the West Bank] who will load up with sandwiches and barbecue gear, travel west twenty or thirty kilometers, and throng our beaches, which they have missed so much; Saudi and Kuwaiti sheikhs will come for the nightclubs and casinos that will open up especially for them. All of a sudden, we shall be flooded by a variety of tourisms, some definitely unappetizing. I envisage Mizrakhi Jews wanting the legitimacy of their adulterated and suppressed culture restored, and drawing new strength from the contact with the East. Come peace, our country will begin to look eastward. When war reigns, iron curtains separate us; when these curtains of iron are taken down and we establish real contact with the Arab world, Israel will become much more eastern, more oriental in character [both ‘mizrakhi’ and ‘oriental’ mean ‘eastern’]. I see this inducing the Mizrakhis amongst us to, as it were, regress into their ‘orientality’, to embrace it, to reconnect with it, and to fight for it. Some Israeli Jews of western culture will not like the change at all, and in their disgust will take themselves off. Half a million of us are already living abroad. As Azariah Alon nicely put it in an interview to the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, there may well be many who ‘will see this country as a kind of second home. They won’t renounce Israeli citizenship but they will live and work in other places, bring up their children elsewhere, and keep a summer home here, a kind second home to come and vi’.

The Israel-Diaspora Rift: Alienation from Israel and Its Problems
The third rupture will open up between Israel and the Jewish world. The Jewish world is very ambivalent about the issue of peace here and finds it very disturbing to its own peace. I am not referring to the closed world of Orthodoxy, which feeds on its own sources. I mean the great majority of Diaspora Jews, the greater number of whom are already intermarried but who keep up some sort of association with a Reform or Conservative temple. The Jewish identity of this majority rests on three central pillars: memory of the Holocaust, which American Jews only discovered in the mid-sixties; Israel’s wars, particularly since 1967; and the plight of Soviet Jewry. These are the three things that define the Jewish identity of a Denver or Iowa Jew who, apart from occasionally going to listen to a standard sermon at the local temple, has nothing else in Denver or Iowa to give content to his Jewish identity. These three issues lived, pulsated, inspired energy. A Jewish identity could unite with them, but now their power is exhausted. The Holocaust no longer speaks to people as it used to; the plight of Soviet Jewry has been solved now that the exit doors have opened and there is nothing left to fight for. The Jews are free to come and go, even to retain their Russian citizenship. As for the last issue, Israel’s wars, Israel is on the road to peace. No American Jew need now run to his senator to plead and weep for Israel. Advocacy is passé; lobbyists have lost their license. The enormous investment the Jewish-American leadership poured into the Israeli cause, and which so nurtured its identity, is no longer needed, thank you. Israel is fine.
 It is to be expected that alienation from Israel will spread. The voices of disappointment can already be heard: ‘You are not playing the part we cast you for in the movie. We wanted a good Western with the poor loner holding out against the bloodthirsty Indians. You to do the fighting and shooting and we to bring up the reinforcements. Suddenly it’s all gone wrong. You’re making peace and powwowing with the Indians. If that’s the way things are going to be, you aren’t in our movie any more.’ Fewer Jews will come to visit Israel and the unwillingness to make aliyah will become legitimate. On the other hand, our own satiation with new immigrations will make it legitimate for Israelis to leave Israel. The sense of guilt that used to accompany those leaving (‘Your buddies are still sitting in a tank on  the Syrian front and you take yourself off to New York or Los Angeles!’) will evaporate. People will emigrate from Israel as from any normal country. No more ideology. Anyone who wants to go can go. All this will only increase the alienation of Diaspora Jews from Israeli Jews.

How To Turn Peace into a Blessing:
Six Courses of Action
If we do what is needed to prepare ourselves for what I expect to happen we may be able to turn the voids and the rifts awaiting us into new creative opportunities that will fill with good things. Six possible courses of action are open. It is up to us to bring the content that will turn peace into a blessing:

1. The Left Must Put Social Justice Back into its Program
Over recent years, all the energy of the Left has been poured into the Palestinian issue, and problems of social justice totally neglected. [The  Israeli Left --- the Labor and MERETZ parties --- is hardly more ‘left’ than the Democrats in the U.S.A.].   Once all this energy is available again, it must not be given only to liberal causes, to nurturing civil rights. It has to face up to the issues of social justice and to make an attempt at narrowing the gaps in Israeli society. Once we lived in a society that took pride in how narrow these gaps were. Today the strata of our population are further apart than in Scandinavia and some nations of Western Europe. If the solidarity of the Left is shared only with homosexuals and lesbians, and cares only for civil rights issues and suchlike and not for the low-income groups, if it does not find its way back to an ethos of widening equality and building a juster society, even at the expense of  slower economic development, even at the cost of the right of the individual to do just as he wants, if all the energy locked up in the Left is not released into these causes --- then it has lost its role in the world.

2. Renew the Secular-Religious Pact
The renewal of the secular-religious alliance must begin with the National Religious camp. I am referring to the National Religious Party (NRP, – now MAFDAL), which used to occupy the center of the political map and for many years worked in excellent alliance with the Labor movement. NRP members always accepted responsibility for the totality of Israeli society then, and planted many vines that have come to fine fruition. 
Over the last few years, we [the secular Left] have confronted them over Israel’s geopolitical future as bitter enemies. Once this issue has run its course, however, we will have to make the attempt to restore the bridges to them, even, and I know this will not make me popular, even at the cost of concessions on religious disputes. Our standpoint must not be the standpoint of the losers but of the victors in the battle. Secularism has won the victory. I have no doubt at all that in an era of peace our political dependence on the religious will dwindle to nothing. The major political blocs that we have lived with for so long will change. The key confrontation will be between the moderate center-left and the moderate center-right, and many of the leaders of both are already of one mind on many issues, such as, for instance, that they can do without the support of the religious parties. The ascendancy of the religious parties, which exploited their hold on the balance of political power to impose religious laws, will collapse. And from this new constellation of power there ought to emerge, I think, a new form of dialogue, a spiritual dialogue between the secular and religious. I know that it is not easy for someone who has been used the whole of his or her life to see the religious as public enemy number one to behold such a change, but I am convinced that among the religious there are individuals and groups who can be our partners in dialogue, and it is our duty to make the effort to build a relationship with them, even at the cost of a concession here or there.
As for the Ultra-Orthodox parties --- SHAS, Agudah, and all the rest --- they have not even seen fit to say where they stand on the peace process. They relate to the problem as Jews related to the American Civil War --- they have no opinion. Nothing could be more contemptible than that on the paramount issue confronting us all, on the issue that splits Israeli society from top to bottom --- the peace process, for or against --- they have no opinion. If they get out of it what is good for them they are for it: if they don’t, they are against. Nothing demonstrates more completely the completeness of their ghetto mentality.

3.  Build a Relationship with Middle Eastern Culture
In an era of peace, the key questions will be: What is our place and our role in the Middle East?  and:  What is our identity, a people of Western culture, vis-a-vis the Islamic East? From its outset, one current in Zionism has addressed the peoples of the East as follows: We have come to the East not only because Europe hates us and has thrown us out, but also because this is our wish and our natural tendency, we sense that here are our authentic roots.
 Now that the Middle East is opening up to us, we must create two-way cultural communication and sympathy, a far from easy task because the disparity between the two cultures is wide. For over four hundred years, for reasons quite unconnected to Israel or the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Arabs’ socio-cultural situation has been very difficult. They are in a state of deep and barren torpor, in a state of dangerous regression. The question before us is: How to find the positive forces in the East and make contact with them? How to attune our senses to their culture, to their , and find ways to work together? Remember the photo of Chaim Weizmann in a kefiyyah [Arab headdress] with King Feisal of Jordan [in 1918 when Weizmann was Chairman of the Zionist Commission].  That was a picture with a message. Zionists then wore Arab garb not as play or ploy. They wanted to show their neighbors amicable respect and to say: We are also part of the East.
 How do we recreate this bond? How do we bring together a community that is western in culture and technology and an eastern culture with a different mentality and a different view on the world?

4.  Redefine Who is a Jew
We must redefine who is a Jew. The definition we have stood by for so long ---- that a Jew is anyone who identifies himself as a Jew --- is now causing us problems. In the Diaspora, no one’s fate hangs by our say-so --- whoever wants to be a Jew feels that he is one.  Does a Jew in Paris wait for a certificate from Israel confirming his Jewishness? The time may have come to revise the Law of Return and let in only those who pass a test of citizenship, as in every country. In Switzerland, you have to wait twelve years and pass extremely difficult tests before you are considered deserving of citizenship. I do not suggest we do that, but I do expect everyone who comes here to know Hebrew. You want to live here? --- prove it; live here two or three years before getting citizenship. The test will not be genealogical or religious but civic. That your wife’s mother’s father was a Jew does not mean that you are automatically entitled to come here and get all the financial benefits given to immigrants. Prove that you genuinely wish to become a citizen of Israel and that you deserve it. Let us see you really joined with us in our solidarity. Social security, unemployment benefits, and everything else you need you will get, but first we have to know who we are bringing in. Obviously, this does not apply to Jews under threat of death or injury --- these we will always take in and without any form of selection.

5.  Develop Joint Projects with Diaspora Jewry
We must identify and develop joint Israel-Diaspora projects, and I suggest we direct our efforts to the Third World in particular. A nation that feels strong can also give. Over the last few years we have just been takers, a charity-begging victim, but now we are stronger and can give. Countries that give are strong countries. A large part of the United States’ power stems from their knowing how to give. They may be only 2.5% of the world’s population, but the aid they distribute makes them powerful. Israel gives only twenty-five million dollars a year in foreign aid. In contrast, Denmark, with the same size of population, gives a billion dollars. I believe that a joint Israel-Diaspora fund can establish a Teaching Corps, a corps of men and women with higher education who will supply teaching services to needy countries. We currently have more academics, engineers, doctors, and professionals that we know what to do with. Let us send them away for three or four years on teaching missions. Let them teach computers, music, chemistry, medicine, everything we know. Teaching, after all, has been our expertise throughout history. The providing of teaching services will bring together Diaspora Jews and Israelis in a joint project ‘to bring light to the nations’, even if no more than a small light, a candle, a match. This was always part of the Zionist ethos. We have always had our own troubles, and we have always said that we must first take care of ourselves. Now that peace is at the door, the time has come. We shall do what always gave us strength. By giving together with Diaspora Jews, we will not only establish productive relations with them but also a joint relationship vis-a-vis the nations of the world.

6. Protect the Environment
The last of the six things to be done is to respect the laws of nature and the quality of our environment. In this, drastic changes are imperative and a draconian implementation of environmental laws. Precisely because we are now forecasting an influx of tourists, and because of all the talk about highways and throughways and trucks from Damascus and Egypt and all that entails, we have to stand very tough. In this, we must do like the Swiss, who will not allow Austrian trucks to transit Swiss territory on their route to Italy: their country is too precious to them, and clean air and the quality of the environment outweigh financial considerations. We too will have to legislate drastic environmental laws. Our natural resources are so few and our density of population so great that our policy will have to be radically severe --- limit the number of tourists, restrict freedom of movement, dare to curtail the right of the individual to do just what he feels like doing.

With the coming of peace, we need ideas to fill the value void with new content, to evoke the qualities within us that our wars have hidden, qualities that we did not know we had. Now we will have the time to find out if we have them.