The Jewish Tapestry

An Ambassador Speaks Out: Speeches and Writings.
by Shlomo Argov.
With an Introduction by Teddy Kollek.London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 294 pp. £12.50 (in UK).

When Shlomo Argov became Israel’s ambassador in London in September 1979 he brought with him, as part of his “credentials,” a personal background that in its color and variety was a perfect expression of what he himself called, in another context, the “tapestry” of Jewish experience. He was giving full voice to this heritage, as was increasingly being noticed on all sides, when he was shot down at point-blank range by Arab terrorists in a London street on June 3, 1982. Miraculously he has survived, though hideously wounded and still gravely ill. But if his recovery from shattering physical wounds is inevitably slow, he speaks to us now, in a collection of earlier speeches, notable for their literary elegance and moral passion.

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Until the attack, his own life had incorporated the Jewish “tapestry” in its liveliest form. Born in Israel, he fought (and was wounded) in the 1948 War of Independence. Pursuing his education after the war, he studied at Georgetown University in Washington and took a master’s degree at the London School of Economics. In the diplomatic field he worked for Israel in Nigeria, Ghana, New York, and Washington before becoming ambassador successively in Mexico, the Netherlands, and Britain. But the quality that symbolically informs everything is his descent from an Ashkenazi family that had lived in Jerusalem for seven generations.

Coming as he did simultaneously from Jerusalem and from the whole world, Shlomo Argov was irritated (as his speeches show) by critics who somehow expected Israel to have some placid, homogeneous, angelic character of the kind that could be expressed, say, in a verse from the Psalms—like “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” Certainly the Psalms belong to Israel; but, to interpret Argov, the people that has been reciting them with joy and conviction for 3,000 years has lived around the world in every conceivable circumstance, trailing clouds of experience and character that did not vanish, as by the touch of a wand, with the return to Zion. If, in Israel, ruthless struggles persisted in the arenas of religion, politics, and society, was this not the sign of both a rich history and a lively democracy? “Was there ever one precise Israel,” Argov asks, “one single variation of Jerusalem?”:

Was Israel not, and will it not always be a composite, a tapestry of all the myriad strains and strands of the Jewish people. . . . Israel never was, neither will it, nor should it ever be the exclusive expression of any one facet of Jewishness; nor must it ever be the exclusive preserve of any one community, nor be expected to model itself in its image.

This last phrase conveys a special reproof to those who see Israel primarily in terms of the pioneer Zionists from Eastern Europe who came to build a socialist Utopia on that stony soil. These, Argov reminds us, were not the only Jews who returned: “Over centuries others made their way back from the exiles of the East, and they too came in the name of Zion.” Some were passive: “They hugged the walls, sat by the stones, and prayed at the tombs of their ancestors.” Others “dwelt within the walls of the ancient capital” but then went out to found settlements that were to lay a practical base for the future, like Petah Tikvah, which, though Argov does not say so, was founded by one of his ancestors.

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Israel is now harmonizing these elements of historic diversity, but it will be a long time before the process is complete. Argov asks us to look on the contemporary “tensions and polemics” as part of a process of coming together, and also to bear in mind that the harmony being sought is not one in which

all of these unique cultural experiences and attributes will become lost in one monolithic whole in which we will all look the same, act the same, talk the same. That would not be in the nature of Jewishness as a constant individual search for comprehension, for learning, for betterment, and for accomplishment.

Argov underlines the variety and diversity of Israel in order to deal with the charge that its moral fiber has now deteriorated. Just such a charge was made in a report to a meeting of the World Jewish Congress in January 1981, asserting that Israeli society was going along the wrong road, “fragmented, contentious, and unstable,” riddled by “a growing materialism that has hastened the erosion of the old ideas and Jewish values.” Edgar Bronfman, the new president of the Congress, was already on record as believing that Israel was “becoming increasingly a Middle Eastern country and thus much less a place where the average Western (or even Soviet) Jew will feel at home.” He did not believe, Bronfman said in a later interview, that his children or grandchildren would ever move to Israel.

As his speeches show, Argov was affronted not so much by the prospective loss to Israel of Bronfman’s grandchildren as by the emotional sterility of looking at Israel so sadly. Millions of Jews in the Diaspora will never settle in Israel; the reality, therefore, is to enjoy to the full a unique and fructifying association of mutual advantage. For Israel the material benefits are obvious and immense; but these will be poisonous in their effect if the Diaspora sees its role as one of providing moral lectures de haut en bas, as though Israel were a foreign branch of a multinational business organization headquartered in the West.

This theme recurs again and again in Argov’s writing. By what impossible standard, he asks, is the community living in Israel to be judged? Quite apart from the fact that the state has had to defend itself against constant aggression and threats of aggression, is there some moral criterion according to which it is to be found wanting?:

Have we turned away a single Jew because he was penniless? . . . Did we select only the young and the ablebodied and reject the old and infirm, as others might have done in circumstances such as ours? . . . Have we betrayed our democratic tradition? Is Israel no longer an open and free society? Do we change governments by coup d’états, or is not the will of the people—freely expressed and democratcially applied—the true and decisive determinant of policy and government?

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Such thoughts burst out of Argov mostly when he is talking to Jews, within the “family.” To those outside he prefers a cool and logical approach, making his listeners aware of the practicalities that have conditioned Israel’s defense policies. A classic instance of this is a talk he gave to one of Britain’s top defense institutes only a few months before the murderous attack on him.

At the center of his argument is the rueful recognition that Israel is alone responsible for its survival—unlike, say, Western Europe, where there is “a massive American military presence and the protection of America’s nuclear umbrella.” That Israel has to stand alone “is not an inflated perception of prowess [but] a function of Israel’s unique strategic vulnerability,” which governs its every action in the military field.

Israel, Argov says, faces four major disparities vis-à-vis its neighbors and enemies. First, geographic. Until 1967, with Tel Aviv only eleven miles from the old armistice lines, Israel had no strategic depth to speak of. Today, its defense is anchored in the Golan Heights and the eastern slopes of Judea and Samaria, which, though still not ideal, represent a critical change for the better. Next, there is the demographic disparity. Israel’s small citizen army faces forces (excluding Egypt) of one-and-a-quarter million. It can only operate if there is time for mobilization, which means that everything stands or falls by the initial opening phase of hostilities. Moving on, Argov demonstrates the vast disparity in arms, usually played down because of the dangerous assumption that Israel has always been skillful and daring in deployment. But the crunch of the argument comes with the fourth disparity, that of “intent.”

Blindness to Arab intent is part of the strange double-standard by which the world can allow the nations surrounding Israel to express the most infrangible hostility to its existence and yet be praised for their “moderation.” In a letter to the (London) Times (February 20, 1982), Argov savaged an editorial that had advocated the reduction of American military aid to Israel in order to encourage good relations with a potentially peaceful Syria:

President Assad can fire heavy artillery into the narrow streets of Hama, inflicting over 1,000 fatalities and untold injury and misery on many more thousands of his own people, and still come away crowned with such Times accolades as “a man of straightforward dealing and statesmanlike behavior.”

The point is that Israel’s military necessities are linked to its unique vulnerability, and have to be judged in that perspective. Every criticism of the actions of the present government has to take note of this general truth.