On a ravishingly clear September morning I was about to set off to interview the previous Israeli prime minister, when I decided on a whim to go to church. The Anglican cathedral was just down the Nablus road, and in this beautiful, troubled country-so much beset at present by what Shelley called "bloody faith, the foulest birth of time"-it seemed an apt sentimental gesture to support the poor old C of E, which at any rate hasn't killed anyone for a long time.
Having reached the cathedral just before the advertised service at 8am, I sat down. Nothing happened. There were a couple of other people in the pews, but no clergyperson appeared. After 20 minutes I left, disgruntled and puzzled, drove to Tel Aviv and managed to turn up punctually for the 11am appointment. But there was no one at Shimon Peres's office either, and I wondered whether I had finally lost my senses. Then someone arrived to explain that the clocks had gone back that morning, and it was now 10am. So I read the papers and drank coffee for an hour, grateful that it wasn't spring with the clocks going forward to noon. I would not inflict this Pooterish anecdote on the reader but for its significance, which I discovered later.
Shimon Peres is now 74 and at the end of a long, remarkable and controversial career, which in its own ways has epitomised the grandeurs et mis?res of Israeli history and the tensions of Israeli politics. The Israeli Labour party has always been fractious, as Peres knows better than almost anyone. But Israel itself, as he also knows in the autumn days of his public life, is today a bitterly divided country.
Born in 1923 in a shtetl-a Jewish township-in White Russia, Shimon Peres was a young boy when he went to Palestine with his family. He served in the Haganah-the Zionist force which became the nucleus of the Israeli army-and became David Ben-Gurion's prot?g?, one of the old man's favourite sons along with Moshe Dayan. By 1956, Dayan had become chief of staff and Peres was a senior official in the defence ministry. They played important parts in the Suez escapade, a bizarre intrigue of which Peres gives a just-about-plausible account in his memoirs.
A few years later Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, civil servant and army general, bumped into each other with a loud crash, and one of the great rivalries of Israeli politics began-a rivalry which simmered inside the Labour party for a quarter century. In what Peres calls "his notoriously tendentious autobiography," Rabin described how appalled Peres had been when Ben-Gurion promised to make Rabin chief of staff in 1964. Peres denies this. He also says, implausibly, that "my relationship with Rabin was wholesome and proper," at least until they became rivals for the succession to Golda Meir as Labour leader and prime minister in 1974.
Rabin won, and Peres served in his cabinet as minister of defence, but relations between the two were barely civil. Rabin said that "It never occurred to me to mix considerations of personal prestige into such fateful matters. But Peres let personal conflicts foment..."(This was written in 1979, when Peres had taken over as Labour leader with Rabin as his deputy.)
In the end, Peres came to hold the highest offices. He was defence minister, foreign minister, and finally prime minister at the end of seven years of Menachem Begin's and Yitzhak Shamir's Likud governments (Begin had, in 1977, ended almost 30 years of unbroken Labour rule). After his first premiership in 1984-86 Peres took over again in 1995, in the appalling circumstances of Rabin's assassination.
In spite of his long public career and the fact that he has twice been prime minister, Peres has a reputation as the loser of Israeli politics: he has never himself won a general election. Meeting him gives some inkling why. In his office, cluttered with memorabilia, his presence is impressive but a little overbearing, intelligent but humourless, formidable but formal-he wears a suit and tie in a country where most politicians go open-shirted. In May of last year, only months after he had inherited from Rabin an apparently unassailable lead in the polls, he was beaten by Benyamin Netanyahu in a photo-finish for the prime ministership. To make matters worse, he was then challenged, ? la Thatcher in 1975, by Ehud Barak, who defeated him for the party leadership.
Some might say that Peres's greatest achievement was getting his country's then disastrous economy into some sort of shape. He thinks that his finest hour was Oslo. As foreign minister, he conducted the historic negotiations which led to the signing of an agreement with Yasser Arafat at the White House. Even at that heroic moment, "relations between Rabin and myself were strained." Peres says that Rabin dragged his feet over the negotiations, and that "there was no agreement between us." He adds, maybe too optimistically, that "prime ministers come and go, but Oslo will remain forever."
Today Peres is scornful of Netanyahu's conduct in office, pointing out that, having won on the beguiling slogan of "Peace with Security," he has so far produced neither, and must be judged a failure in his own terms. The peace process is stalled, and there has been a fresh outbreak of suicide bombings, the latest shortly before I met Peres. He does not quite say, but clearly thinks, that Netanyahu has helped to provoke this violence, and observes in his epigrammatic way that "he is paying a higher price for non-peace than we paid for peace."
Labour's own record in pursuit of peace is chequered, to say the least, and it is as well to be clear about what Peres does not believe in. He is not an enthusiast for a Palestinian state: although he is prepared to contemplate the possibility, he would prefer a Palestinian-Jordanian federation. This is not a radical position for an Israeli, and has no support among Palestinians. Peres is not prepared to contemplate the possibility of a "bi-national state," which once so beguiled pacifistic Zionists like Martin Buber and Judah Magnes, but which, he believes, "would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state."
All the same, as he points out, in the territory controlled since 1967 by Israel there are now 3m non-Jews sharing the land with 4.7m Jews, and some form of political accommodation will have to be found. This means treating Arafat "as a partner and not as an agent. You can only fight terrorism in partnership." And it means halting the settlements in East Jerusalem, which are being encouraged by American adventurers like Irving Moskowitz, and covertly by Netanyahu's rivals on the right of his party. Or at least, Peres says a little equivocally, it means not building without Arab agreement. At present, "they are building a scandal without building buildings."
Next year will be Israel's 50th birthday, marking a turbulent half century during most of which Peres has been a leading participant. Zionism has just marked three other significant birthdays: August was the 100th anniversary of the first Zionist Congress at Basel; November is the 80th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration in which the British government favoured the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine; June was the 30th anniversary of the Six Day war. Together they provide vantage points from which to survey the story of Zionism and its long tradition of debate and schism.
At Basel in 1897, Theodor Herzl expounded the audacious "answer to the Jewish Question" which he had set forth in his little book The Jewish State the year before. As is well known (though perhaps not quite as well known as it should be), at the time and for some while after, this idea attracted very limited sympathy. A small minority of Jews were inspired by the Zionist ideal. They organised in Europe, and in a few cases "made aliyah" by going to live in Palestine, otherwise Eretz Israel, the Land of Israel.
Many other Jews opposed the project, from a variety of standpoints. Orthodox rabbis were almost unanimously hostile. The Jewish people would return to the Land of Israel, they believed, only with the coming of the Messiah-an event which no human endeavour could retard or impel, and any anticipation of which was a form of impiety. One rabbi spoke for all in 1900 when he denounced the "strangers" who had "risen among us, teaching that the people of Israel should be clothed in secular nationalism, a nation like other nations... while the observance of the Torah and the Commandments is a private matter depending on the inclination of each individual. May the Lord rebuke these evil men..."
Reform rabbis deplored Zionism as a rejection of the Jewish tradition of Weltb?rgertum (which indeed it was). Radical Jews of one stripe or another, deplored it as a distraction from the class struggle. And assimilated Jews detested what seemed to be a challenge to their position as loyal Frenchmen, Germans or Americans. Shortly before the Balfour Declaration, two Anglo-Jewish notables wrote to The Times to deplore "the establishment of a Jewish nationality in Palestine which must have the effect throughout the world of stamping the Jews as strangers in their native lands, and of undermining their hard-won position as citizens and nationals of those lands."
There were others who thought that the Jews deserved a nobler fate than becoming just another mundane little state like Serbia (the example used by Tolstoy when criticising Zionism), with overtones of militaristic nationalism. Above all, there were the millions of east European Jews who expressed no particular views about Zionism, but who eloquently rejected it by leaving their homes not for Palestine, but for New York.
Soon there were divisions within the Zionist movement itself, which multiplied as the years went by. There was a dispute between those who wanted a Jewish state and those who wanted only a settlement or homeland. There was another between those who called themselves religious Zionists (despite those theological objections) and the majority who rejected traditional Jewish religion along with traditional Jewish passivity. (Although, as George Steiner has said, there is a logical flaw in a secular-political movement invoking "a theological-scriptural mystique to which it cannot, in avowed truth, subscribe.")
But the most serious split within Zionism came in the 1920s, when Vladimir Jabotinsky, a man of genius, formed the Revisionist Zionist movement. The original scheme was much coloured by European collectivist socialism. He wanted to revise it in the direction of muscular nationalism; he campaigned, and was, if necessary, prepared to fight, for a Jewish state with a Jewish majority. And he hoped that this state would stretch across both banks of the Jordan.
There was as bitter a personal animosity between him and Ben-Gurion, head of the Labour Zionists, as there has been since between their various successors in the shape of the Likud and Labour leaders. There are also sharp animosities within each political group. While Netanyahu has to deal with rigorous rivals in his own party, Peres thinks that "there is very little difference between Netanyahu and Barak." He is convinced that, had he won the election, things would be "100 per cent better"; he doubts whether his own successor as Labour leader has the creativity to rescue the peace process with the Palestinians.
But forget about the Palestinians (as a cynic might say the Israelis have all too often done). Israel has other problems and conflicts, which are not immediately inspired by relations with the Arabs. Of all the unintended consequences of Zionist history, the resurgence of militant religion is the most surprising. And it provides the explanation for my Sunday morning contretemps.
Over lunch the next day, an Israeli friend explained that the clocks here used to change back from summer time in late October, as they do elsewhere. But the orthodox conduct early morning ceremo-nies in the weeks before Yom Kippur (which this year fell on 11th October); they thought that it would make their lives easier if the clocks were changed in mid-September.
One of the principles of Israeli politics is that what the religious want they get, so the government complied with their request-at whatever inconvenience to the secular majority. This gave the Palestinians an opportunity to assert a little practical independence by keeping to summer time until October. On top of that, some of the ultra-orthodox haredim go by a clock all of their own, producing splendid chronological chaos.
Not everyone was pleased by all this. Meir Shalev is a descendant of immigrants from the early aliyot, a best-selling novelist and a punchy newspaper columnist. He wrote a derisive piece on the summer time affair, playing on the Hebrew phrase "to rise with the lion" and suggesting that if these none-too-leonine folk were really so pious, perhaps they could show it by getting up before the rest of us.
This is the old anti-clerical Zionist tradition. Herzl hoped that in the Jewish state he dreamed of, "we will know how to keep the rabbis in their temples and the generals in their barracks"-not a part of his dream which has so far come true. Irreligion was as much a mark of the right as of the left: if Ben-Gurion was an atheist, so was Jabotinsky.
So was one of Jabotinsky's assistants in the 1930s, the historian Benzion Netanyahu, who was, and in great old age still is, a bitter foe both of soft liberals and of the orthodox. His son Bibi was brought up both as a revisionist and as an atheist, but in his eagerness to be all things to all men and ingratiate himself with his orthodox followers he promised to "go kosher," though apparently not all at once; perhaps giving up the slices of bacon one at a time, it was sardonically suggested.
This influence of the orthodox is explained partly by their growing numbers. They are the only Israelis who have matched the Arabs in the pragmatic business of breeding. While secular Israelis have a low birth rate even by western standards, the religious have a higher birth rate even than the Palestinians, so they are bound to increase their present share of the population, about 22 per cent.
Their political strength is partly due to proportional representation (PR), a device much admired in countries which do not have it. Peres waxes vehement on this subject: "I'm not disturbed by the rise of the orthodox, I'm disturbed by the electoral system. Yes, I would like to have the British system"- that maligned Westminster "first-past-the-post." Any Israeli politician can only be consumed with envy of Tony Blair and his landslide majority-produced, after all, with only 44 per cent of the vote.
Israel's system of PR has produced a mushroom growth of small parties. Not only the religious parties and the fringe groups on left and right; the Russian immigrants of the past 15 years, now representing 20 per cent of the Israeli electorate, have formed yet another party, under Natan Sharansky. This proliferation means that no one party ever wins a clear majority of seats in the Knesset.
PR means that every government is a coalition, as Paddy Ashdown would no doubt like. But it also means that every government is in hock to the small parties which hold the parliamentary balance. This is why the religious parties have imposed strict sabbatarianism on what is still a large non-orthodox majority. And it is why they can have the clocks changed at their convenience.
This is a question of democracy, not of religious rights, or of contempt for the orthodox. It is hard not to be impressed and moved by the groups of haredim walking through Jerusalem on high holy days, wearing a costume designed for the 18th century Lithuanian winter rather than for the Levantine summer-heavy black coats, heavier prayer shawls, even heavier fur hats. But these are also the communi- ties which produce those zealots who massacre worshippers in a Hebron mosque and assassinate Israeli statesmen.
Their zealotry is matched on the other side by the killers of Hamas. But then that is partly a problem of Israel's making. The Israeli intelligence services do not always seem very-well-intelligent. When they were looking for a Palestinian terrorist in Norway some years ago they bumped off the wrong man, who was completely innocent. When they tried to bump off another man in Jordan a few weeks ago they cocked it up, got arrested and caused huge political embarrassment.
In a fine demonstration of what "too clever by half" can mean, it was secret Israeli support that built up Hamas in the first place, in Gaza in the late 1970s. What the Israelis wanted was an Islamic counterweight to the secular PLO. What they got were young men and women prepared to blow themselves to pieces-as well as anyone else in the vicinity-in the sure and certain hope of Paradise (not to say the voluptuous sensual delights promised there), and an insoluble challenge to the fundamental Israeli belief that every problem must have an answer.
The reality of this new terror was brought home to me as I walked up the street in west Jerusalem where the latest bomb had gone off, and later as I sat at a pavement restaurant with an Israeli writer. He jumped up suddenly and walked over to embrace a man who was passing by. On returning, my companion explained that this man's young daughter had been horribly injured by the latest bomb; he had been taking a break from the vigil he was keeping at her hospital bedside.
And yet the most startling reaction to that latest suicide bomb came from the mother of another victim. Nurit Peled-Eichanan blamed the death of her 14-year-old daughter on her own country, or at any rate on the Netanyahu government, who "betrayed me. They are sacrificing our children for our megalomania." This is a country which 30 years ago, in the summer of 1967, was more united than any country in history, more than England in the summer of 1940. Today it is a country where 42 per cent of people said in an opinion poll a year ago that they feared a civil war: not war with Arabs, war between Jews.
Although he lost to Netanyahu by less than one percentage point last year, Peres knows better than anyone that the photo-finish was deceptive. If the election had been confined to greater Jerusalem as well as the orthodox and oriental or Sephardic Jews, Netanyahu would have won with a landslide; whereas if it had been confined to greater Tel Aviv, secular Jews and the Europeans or Ashkenazim, it would have been Peres's landslide. Any open society is of course divided, but the fault lines are confused or overlap. In England, there are working-class Tories, and City bankers who vote Labour; there are even, pace Martin Amis, serious writers who vote Conservative. In the US, there are Democrats in the most prosperous suburbs, and there are Republicans lurking in literary caf?s on the Upper West Side.
In Israel there is a difference of degree which becomes a difference of kind. Entire large communities-in the settlements, extended orthodox families in and around Jerusalem-have not a single member who has voted Labour in living memory. The same applies to the other side. Matthew Engel of the Guardian is right when he says that a member of the professional upper middle class in Tel Aviv can go for a year without meeting a Likud voter socially. Note that last adverb: the lawyer, banker or writer in north Tel Aviv will meet Likudniks regularly, but in the form of the people who empty his rubbish or drive him in their taxis.
Or perhaps not any longer. One of the guiding maxims of the early Zionists, along with "Hebrew Land" and "Hebrew Defence" was "Hebrew Labour." This was very much the tradition in which Shimon Peres was raised. As part of its great project-psychological and sociological as much as political-Zionism would "straighten their backs": Jews were to be transmuted from money-lenders and schnorrers into farmers and artisans (and soldiers, Jabotinsky added).
On his farm, the new Hebrew would dig and reap without the help of Arab hewers of wood. There were ambiguous implications in this from the beginning: it could mean that the Palestinians would be deprived of the means to make a living on what was also their land. But in any case, Hebrew Labour was slowly eroded. Only a small minori- ty of Israelis have ever lived on kibbutzim, and from the 1950s, much of the menial work was per-formed either by Arabs or by oriental Jews, Israel's own second-class citizens.
They are that no longer, and the absorption of the oriental Sephardim has been an admirable achievement. But now, apart from the Palestinians found working on every building site, there is the even more startling phenomenon of Gastarbeiter, hundreds of thousands of east Asians and Africans (even some southern Europeans) who have come looking for work in the booming Israeli economy. Professor Bernard Wasserstein of Oxford University has pointed out that these temporary immigrants, admitted under Labour governments, are the final breach with the Hebrew Labour tradition.
Peres also deplores their presence, in somewhat politically incorrect terms: "The foreign workers are a mistake. I don't want to create the sort of antagonism you see in Europe." Still, he also points out that the changes which have come over Israel in its and his lifetime were largely inevitable. The pioneers' orange groves have given way to high-tech industrial parks generating several hundred times as much economic product per dunam or acre.
Peres has met and admires Tony Blair, and there are interesting comparisons between the Israeli and British Labour parties. Peres has faced the Palestinians as enemies and has tried to make peace with them, but internal feuds have been more intractable, as they have so often been in our own people's party; from Bevin and Bevan to Healey and Jenkins to Brown and Cook. Israeli politics in general, and Peres's career in particular, remind me of the story of the young MP recently elected to the House of Commons saying something about "the enemy" on the benches opposite to a much older member, who replied: "No, my boy, those are our opponents. Our enemies are on this side."
Likewise, Peres and his party are now scarcely more socialist than Blair and New Labour. Indeed, Peres says-in words which Blair might use himself and which echo the old saw about "more Methodism than Marx"-that "my socialism didn't begin with Das Kapital, it began with the Bible." In particular, he says, it began with Amos, that unsettling prophet who decried the rich "that swallow up the needy, even to make the poor of the land to fail."
Amos has other words of warning. The Netanyahu government says that settlements-in East Jerusalem, in Gaza, in what it calls Judaea and Samaria, otherwise known as the West Bank-can no more be frozen "than life itself can be frozen." But the rulers of Israel might take to heart Amos's warnings: "I will send a fire on the wall of Gaza, which shall devour the palaces thereof," and "Assemble yourselves upon the mountains of Samaria, and behold the great tumults in the midst thereof, and the oppressed in the midst thereof." There are many memories in this lovely land, not all of them happy.
