Institute for Advanced Strategic

and Political Studies

IASPS Research Papers in Strategy

January 1997 No. 1

The Peace Process:
An Introductory Essay (Part I)

By Robert J. Loewenberg

"the dialectics of...order is not merely a 'theoretical problem,' but the ontologically real struggle for order conducted in every man's existence." Eric Voegelin, Order and History, I, 462.

"The peace process...is the greatest event in the 4,000 year history of the Jewish people." Shimon Peres, Israeli State TV, October 1996; Maariv, 4/11/96.

Author's Introduction

Although little in the following essay, the first of a three part series, is new -- most of my arguments have been made before, and what has not been argued before is well-known material from Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, Hannah Arendt and others -- the response of some of the readers who reviewed this study for publication has been a kind of surprise.

Undoubtedly there is a wrenching aspect in what follows. This is in part because the aim is to refocus policy and discussions of policy as it were from the ground up. There are perhaps two main explanations for surprise about what appears here.

First, the surprising point in this essay is what is made of the familiar view, mainly developed by Strauss and Voegelin, that the Western tradition has been turned on its head. What I have "discovered," although, again, I have been making this point for some years, is that the peace process, an expression of modern Israel, of Jewish liberalism and of modern social science, is preparing the first institutional means of actualizing this reversal of Western civilization in an entire state among an entire people.

I first made this kind of point with respect to liberalism generally, and particularly with respect to American politics. In a series of books and essays in the mid-1980s, I sought consideration for the argument that two representative monuments of liberalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Abolitionist movement, helped set the West's course toward totalitarianism. The response was much less surprising than the present one, to the peace process.

Ironically, or so it must seem today, Hitler self-consciously undertook to make a turnabout of Western civilization exactly by inverting Judaism, a mainstay of Western civilization. It was Nazism, what seemed clearly only totalitarianism's first step, which drew my attention to Israel, and led to founding the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies.

IASPS has in effect re-said and re-argued all the points I made and many of those made by the two leading political thinkers of our age whom I have named here, although in the indirect or non-controversial form of studies in economics. But the Institute's now familiar critique of aid and of socialism is a form of what appears in the present essay, set out here in its more explicit form, its "fighting trim" so to say.

And so this is the first reason why the present essay may seem surprising or even shocking: it says, flat out and in context, what is generally shielded from policy debate, either inside the rarefied critiques of Strauss and Voegelin, or in focused economic analyses.

There is a second explanation why the following essay seems shocking. Pointing to Israel and the peace process, it also points beyond, to the West. The peace process is only the most advanced and dangerous expression of a process everywhere at work in the West. We are approaching the actual inverting of the Western tradition.

As recently as two decades ago, a reasonably courageous political figure could have questioned "peace," or taken it for granted that the politicizations of sex and family life were out of bounds; and Straussians could survive such uncivilized attacks as Yale University made upon them, or as Berkeley professors made on Strauss himself. This is past. In my own experience, I came near to losing the friendship of a first rank political leader when I "questioned peace." Indeed, one personal reason for publishing this essay is to alert him to what is at stake in such questioning. But it is not hard to sympathize with him.

The second reason, then, why the present essay seems surprising is that it rejects the on-rushing promises of peace, equality and every apparent goodness, saying these things, and those who pursue them, are not good. But, having said all of this, one says only that what is surprising about this essay is its firm rejection of liberalism.

But this raises a question. Why should there be anything surprising about a firm rejection of liberal policy at a time of large international conservative policy influence? And yet the surprise I have been writing about comes from this community. If this is not itself surprising where the peace process is concerned, it is worrisome.

It was Voegelin's view, in the 1950s, that conservatives have been taken hostage by the ultimate principles of the dominant liberal policy community, differing with it largely over means, or by turning ends into means. Above all, he said, they misconceive the meaning of "theory."

What Voegelin called the destruction of political science by "positivistic" scholarship, namely the antagonism to theory or "the divine," still applies today to the conservative policy community. Potomac fever, the instinctive lurch of conservatives to find favor with liberals and liberal aims, is more than a social impulse or a misapplied Burkean distrust of theory. It's a failure to grasp what is at stake in policies of freedom.

The present essay, as likely to arouse opposition among conservatives because it is "theoretical" as among liberals, is shocking because a conservative, non-liberal policy community has yet to take root. The present effort is informed by a rooting of this kind.

And so let me say it at last. What is the shocking thing? What is it that even our best political leaders do not say, even when they defend economic freedom, tax cuts, school vouchers? The shocking thing is freedom. The challenge of the peace process for those in the Western policy community who support freedom properly so-called, includes the challenge to liberate policy from "positivistic social science." From the standpoint of freedom it ought not to be surprising that the peace process is a critical moment in the course of anti-Western purposes.

This paper is composed of seven Sections:

§ Section I: The study of the Peace Process in Context
(Establishing the role of "the middle" as the necessary condition for clarity about political order and policy.)

§ Section II: The Peace Process in its Context
(The peace process as a culmination of anti-Western tradition in Western civilization, and the launching point of the universal and homogeneous state. Substituting the "elimination " of disorder for the search for order; the end of government. The problem of representation in Jewish history.)

§ Section III: The Peace Process in Economic Context
(The peace process as a contrivance for aid and as a means to forward socialism or the realm of freedom, a stepping back from nation-state existence and the hollowing out of national life.)

§ Section IV: The Peace Process in Political Context
(The democratization of Israel as statism by means of police state tactics and the Basic Law. Israel Kastner -- the problem of order and represenation as betrayal of Hungarian Jews for the sake of Zionism; Uri Savir -- the problem of order and representation as replacing experience with words for the sake of Zionism as peace.)

§ Section V: The Peace Process as a Reordering Crisis
(The role of terror in the fashioning of a universal and homogeneous state seeking peace. Arendt's totalitarianism as process and terror as a means to deny reality on principle. Peres's mirror: collaboration with terror; Kastner and the sacrifice of Jews for Zionism. Israel's reordering crisis as the peace process, toward the universal and homogeneous state in the West.)

§ Section VI: Is there an Action Item?

§ Section VII: Concluding Comment

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Section I: THE STUDY OF THE PEACE PROCESS IN CONTEXT

This essay is written for the general policy community, and for others interested in the peace process. For readers unacquainted with the work of Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss, or who are unaccustomed to a consideration of policy and political science topics along so-called classical lines, there may be an initial, but I hope not jarring, adjustment.

The main thing to keep in mind in making such an adjustment is that we are obliged to make it, less because what we are accustomed to is natural, than because academic political science and public policy typically separate theory and practice, values and facts. This separation diverts our attention from something more important. It is that these separations are not philosophically neutral.

Indeed you could say, actually Strauss did say, that this very procedure of modern political science makes it nearly impossible to understand politics at all.1 It is therefore not to be wondered at that The New York Times and other popular custodians and promoters of the policies spun out by modern political science, regard the assault upon this procedure, by Strauss, for example, as "sinister."2

And Eric Voegelin, reviewing Hannah Arendt's book, The Origins of Totalitarianism,which concerns two pertinent topics of the present study, totalitarianism and Arendt's study of it, noted that the "positivistic destruction of political science is not yet overcome." What he describes as "the great obstacle to an adequate treatment of totalitarianism...[namely,] the insufficiency of theoretical instruments," is found in just these misconceived separations between theory and practice or policy that mark the study of political questions.3 Arendt's book, which provides much of importance to the understanding of the peace process, does not itself overcome the effects of positivistic destruction of political science.

One need not go very far into this topic before confronting what is at stake between a modern approach and a classical one. At stake is everything that interests policy and policy making, above all a concern for the divine realm as the basis for understanding, really for ordering, human things.

But modern political critique gives the impression that man's existence is composed of "factors," and "ideas." Jumbled about in actual living, they can be re-composed for analytical purposes, to be moved around like counters on a board. And so we have the realm of ideas, linked or otherwise, and the world of action, also linked or otherwise to the ideas, while the whole is "interpreted" and historicized for use. Neither the exercise itself, nor the interpretations, are subject to limits or constraints.

This is the destruction of political science, both because it misperceives man and political things, and because it radically distorts, actually denies reality on principle. Political understanding, residing in a spiritual re-enactment, as Voegelin described the Aristotelian procedure, is marked exactly by the restraint imposed by existence or nature.4 And that restraint is ultimately imposed by "the divine." And here we meet the center-point of this review.

This "divine" has, of all things, been mystified by modern policy. People are scared to talk about it. The peace process, however, is about the "divine." Let us give it just six paragraphs here for those readers schooled to consider it as inappropriate in discussions of policy.

Everyone recognizes today, as men always have, that there are vast areas of existence as experienced that are unclear or incomprehensible. Everything from dreams, and thoughts, instinctive-seeming but clearly human responses, for example to music, to blood, to animals, to people, to seeing, to fear, joy, death, mirrors, fun, emptiness, water. We also take note of themes -- bending, hiding, playing, thinking, anticipating and the way these are laddered and repeated in our experiences of things, without our knowing why. And we take note of relations: high, round, closed.

No one needs to be a philosopher to know that these experiences are not understood, though they are deeply moving and disturbing. We know nothing, or really almost nothing about them on our own. What we know of them we know by way of the order of existence around us. Establishing political order is the goal of man's "ontologically real struggle."

This is a struggle for understanding that the basis of order is not arbitrary or of man's making. Until the rise of modern science -- much of which promised to explain these things above all -- men were satisfied to regard this, the largest area of our existence, as "the forces which stream...from the cosmic [center]...in the ground of the soul."5 However, for the last two centuries at least, men have been instructed to believe the reverse, that existence is reducible to what is quantifiable.

The peace process, because it stands at the cutting edge of what moves Western institutions and ideals today, is a kind of culminating/launching event at the forefront of this two centuries old rejection of man's struggle and of its basis in the divine.

The assault upon the divine at the political level is an attempt at philosophical reform reaching to the constitution of all life. Its practical aim is to transform man. It has been the habit of the recent, science-based centuries to regard the ground of being toward the divine realm, as in reality mystically repressed versions of what can be understood at the material level by science. In demystifying these repressions (dreams, society, history, language, gestures and so forth), social science has, from the start, contemplated exactly peace and tranquility for man to end the struggle for order. This is a part of what is meant in calling the peace process a pertinent culmination and launching.

This transposition, to social science, of experiences belonging to the soul, and, until recently, constituting the ground or measure of political order, is known as reductionism: reducing one type of experience to another type to fit the methods of science.

This is not the place to discuss reductionism except in the following sense, relevant to our purpose. Reductionism has not been successful at the empirical level. The examples of Freud and Marx are best known, although social science as a whole, the fields of sociology, psychology, anthropology, and the scientized and historicized humanities, has not rewarded the hopes once placed in it.

Still, social science has not failed as politics. Quite the contrary. The institutions of social science -- the universities and the wider culture they inform, including certainly the thoroughly penetrated religious institutions of our day -- have succeeded beyond every expectation. It is this success, focused in one significant expression of it at this time, or in Israel, that draws our attention to the peace process. Israel obliges us to take note of what is at stake.

Thought and Action: Introducing the "Middle"

The distance, so to speak, between the hurly burly of politics, the pragmatic level, and thought, is not what it sometimes seems. Distance there is, certainly. Thought and action are distinct. But it is what is between them, the middle, that makes all the difference. And the reason is that it is there, in the in-between, that everything of importance takes place.6

This point is a central one of this essay. And this in-between, which is not so much a place as an activity of soul, describes the enterprise every human being knows about. It is the touchstone of politics and policy. I am speaking of what Voegelin called "the ontologically real struggle for order conducted in every man's existence." Politics is about order and the struggle for order.

This would be a policy-based way of saying that man is a political animal. Of course this ontologically real struggle is not only a philosophical struggle. If it were there would be no politics. And, if there is politics, then this struggle is not an animal's enterprise either. This describes a middle, an in-between position.

The in-between or middle position is the flight deck at every level of normal human existence. There is something of spiritual metaphor in the fact that Aristotle designed logic around the syllogism, ethics around the mean. And when he noted that what he called, more or less, "smart people" had an intuitive grasp of middle terms in syllogisms, he was describing the human condition. These intuitions are "logical" because they participate in being: the "openings of the soul." The peace process is an attempt to escape the middle.7 This relationship, between philosophy and practical life, has a political and policy meaning. It is this: philosophers are not kings, and kings aren't philosophers.

This, Plato's axiom, is an ultimate condition regarding the impassable gap between the philosophic and the practical life. Even so tentative and disguised an attempt by philosophy as that of Socrates to roam about in the agora, or public market, and pose questions, is likely to end in murder the minute philosophy exposes itself as the exploration of the ground of order. The challenge of political policy, paradoxical today as then, is to prevent the murder of the philosophic while insuring that the political reflects the truth of order.

The subject of these pages is the Israeli peace process, considered from the standpoint of order. The ground of order, of direct philosophic concern, is also important to policy. This is especially true in times of historic disorder, and with respect to developments which appear to be leading or representative instances of disorder. The peace process is a development of this kind.

As part of Israel's undermining of regional stability, of peace, created by its proposed stepping down and away from nation-state existence, the Israeli peace process is setting out institutional stepping stones on the way to a Kojèvean or post-Marxist realm of freedom.8 At the heart of this process is the liberation of men from ego or self-hood as in a state of nature. There, freed of egos or selves, men no longer struggle in the in-between in the search for order. The myth of the middle or metaxy, symbolic of the effort to articulate the ontologically real struggle of the human soul, is replaced by the counter-myth, snuffing out the soul as well. 9 The myth is the source of order for man, whose political life is at once the road map for right action, or order, and the touchstone for "the ontologically real struggle for order conducted in every man's existence."

Just as every individual is aware of this struggle for order, Western man is also aware that his culture urges him to doubt the struggle is real. Western history over the past two centuries, and increasingly in the last several decades, has made the instilling of this doubt its central project. The lesson of soullessness is the theme, repeated endlessly, of modern civilization.10 In supplanting the soul, men would have peace in a radical sense as the liberation from the experience of disorder. Soul-less men will be tranquil. Only peace, not the balance of power or "peace" in the Western sense of nation-states, will satisfy. This means "comprehensive peace," radical tranquility. But peace, the peace process has now shown, is only movement and terror, an "absurd oxymoron," as journalist Charles Krauthammer has put it.11 What Tocqueville saw as the natural tendency of the age, toward equality and centralization, must not be pressed beyond the nation-state. Its character is such that we are bound to find nothing beyond it except murder; or what Kojève calls suicide, its mirror. The tendency, then, of equality and of centralization would be toward contradiction. Resolving it peacefully will mean the "dialectics of order" is also resolved and the "struggle" is ended. Israel brings us to the edge of an era.12

Section II: THE PEACE PROCESS IN ITS CONTEXT

The peace process is among the most striking political episodes of our day. At the least, its contradictions suggest much about what we can expect in the age that is now opening before us as the 20th century ends. Here we have the Jews, key founders of Western civilization, returning to their ancient site as if to stamp out what first began in Jerusalem, and to rechart civilization, this time along opposite lines.
And this is what is at first striking about the peace process. On its face the peace process shows itself to be a fulfillment of a now two centuries old rejection of Western civilization. Prepared in the 17th century by science, subsequently rationalized by Descartes and Spinoza, the prime condition for this rejection is the elimination of the divine realm as constitutive of man, world and society.

The outward, pragmatic form of this rejection is the familiar assault by enlightened intellectuals upon nation-states and on markets. At the non-philosophic level, the attack upon the nation-state is meant to disclose human differences as conventional and arbitrary, and to show that conflict, rooted in "difference," is immoral, ultimately that difference is immoral and irrational. The assault on markets, reaching to profits as radically unjust consequences of arbitrary differences, producing conflict and difference, aims at the founding, would-be irrationality, of the private as such -- the self. Thus the assault on private property prepares the assault on the self as self-ish.

Certainly, the history of the West since the Enlightenment (combining what Leo Strauss calls the "radical Enlightenment" which set out to overcome religion, and the "moderate Enlightenment" which effectively did so by including divine claims as yet "another perspective"), has been focused upon elimination of the divine realm before all things. But, until now, no regime has internalized this purpose as tranquility, making it the basis of political order, as such.

The purpose of this essay is to consider the question of political order in light of Israel and the peace process.

The outward, public expression of the rejection of the Western tradition, beginning in the 18th century and flowering in the 19th, targeting nation-states and free markets, is the specific focus of the peace process. This targeting is institutionally purer than earlier communist or fascist movements before it, and more advanced and self-understood than present, halting enterprises such as the European Union. In all of these, the fundamental political crises of order in our days, the Jews have been at the forefront, as formulators in communism, objects in nazism, and now as pointers, in the peace process.

In truth the peace process continues the constitutive crises of Israel and seeks to resolve them by radical means. We speak of people as having existential "critical mass" sufficient to act in history, being in this sense constituted or capable of representation, loosely "leadership." The exodus from Egypt, taking on self-rule as son of God, in place of imperial rule under son-of-god Pharaoh, was itself replaced by divine-based kingship and finally by an exodus from normal existence in favor of becoming a Suffering Servant with a messianic message of peace.

Politically, this last exodus dooms Jewish existence to constant constitutive or representational crisis: what is "the Jews" and how is it represented? Does this representation take action in history or for whom? The peace leadership that today claims representative status, Mr. Peres and Yossi Beilin for example, contends the new role of Israel is to be the world's advisor for peace, leading a "people" who will be the first to give over nation-state existence, trading land, Jewish religion and every institutional index of nationalism, for "democracy." But students must look beyond social science typing of this experience as "secularization."

The Jews, that is to say, will now exit, as it were, from themselves as a way to solve the problem of human order and representation as such and for all time: the Jews will make exodus from order as such. In context of Western history this would amount to saying that the solution of what is known as the "Jewish problem" will be exodus of the Western tradition from itself.

But this, a variation on what the Jews' most deadly enemy of this century proposed, looking no further than Jews alone, sheds harsh light on much that has seemed unaccountable in Jewish behavior, for example the collaboration of Israel's Jewish Agency and Israel Kastner with Nazis Eichmann and Becher in Hungary in 1944. Notably, Israel's then Attorney General, Chaim Cohen, and Prime Minister Ben Gurion, defended Kastner, and themselves, by arguing, in 1955-1956, that this supposed collaboration in the murder of 800,000 Hungarian Jews was a part of what was required to "work with" the British in Palestine, for the sake of Zionism.

That Zionism, existentially expressed in the state of Israel, should today uncover itself as "post-Zionism, or post-Israel" ought to have been expected from the start when socialism, the practical expression of this tendency, might have been stopped. But the Jewish crisis of representation has now put Jews at the heart of the anti-Western counterpoint to the Western tradition. It is no wonder that the peace process has become an obsession everywhere or that we are more familiar with the Jews as counter to the tradition.

At the pragmatic level, it is enough to name only Marx and, after him, the Marxists and Alexandré Kojève to establish this last point. It is also true that no population is more fully identified with the anti-Western counter-tradition to Western civilization than Jews, both the political intellectuals, and others. The extraordinary, and, to many, unaccountable liberal bent of the Jews is a pre-eminent factor in the peace process, just as it is a factor in the drift toward centralization everywhere, for example, in the United States.

Relating "Theory" and "Policy": The Western Tradition and the Peace Policy

Any possible explanation of this counter-tradition as an historical development within institutions, and, more particularly still, as coming to actuality within a policy at a specific time and place, confronts great obstacles.

There is, first, the professional snobberies of too many of the people who write books about philosophical topics, and would deny any "connection" between what interests them and, say, policy, as not important enough to come within their view. Second, there is the reverse snobbery of policy people who resent the intrusion of "theory" in the world of politics. But, in fact, the connection between the peace process and the destinies of the Western tradition must confront the obstacle of the destruction of common sense by Western educators and the political intellectuals.13

The greatness of Voegelin and Strauss has in a measure to do with their preparing a return, in context, to the old science of politics so that we can understand where theory and practice connect. They clarified the old science of Plato and Aristotle, and, as part of this, repaired, again in part, the disfiguring of man and the study of man by social science and the universities, the "festering heart," as George Gilder has written, "of the surrounding darkness."14

Strauss and Voegelin taught that human affairs yield to the methods of science, to cause and effect connections, only as a kind of cosmological courtesy. To know a thing or a causal relation, you need to understand its formal cause. But things that happen in time and place among men have no clear end or telos, for the reason that history has none. The ordered field of experience is referenced outside of history or eschatologically in the Beyond. We have to be satisfied with finding those points of intersection at which institutions, the products of reason and reasoned instruments, meet and produce or signal philosophic clarity. Instead of explaining this, I will demonstrate the point as it as relates to our topics.

Look at the problem this way: policy is about "fixing it." Theory, is about "it."

Academics write books about Voegelin and Strauss, whose aim was to clarify the "it" so that policy would know what has to be fixed, but these books don't make their way into the world of policy. For example, policy is concerned today to fix the problem of big government, to understand where "limits" are, but without any clear picture about what is to be limited. But a limit is an ontological category, the main one. And the commentators on Voegelin and Strauss who know well why this question is profound, don't often stir themselves to take note of the fact that the hottest issues of the day are about limits.

Where is the intersection between the book writers and the policy community? The two great matters of policy -- fixing it, and "it" -- intersect at the point where the philosophic crosses the path of its object in time and place. This is where the active struggle about policy engages the problem of limits as a problem of reality. The peace process is the place in our time.

On the one hand, the "it" that arises most visibly from a consideration of the peace process is the realization of the challenge in time and place to the Western tradition, and the attempt to overcome it, actually reverse or invert it.

On the other hand, the "it" in the sights of the fixers is the Western tradition. Everyone agrees, at whatever point of understanding he sees the matter, that the Western tradition is broken and needs fixing -- whether "fixing" means to further break it (via the anti-Western tradition), or oppositely. This is the point of intersection for "theory" and "policy." I put these words in inverted commas to make the point that the terms are distinct but not separated as people often think.

The peace process, culminating opposition to markets and to the nation-state, is the cameo intersection of our day, more so than the UN, the EU, PC or the struggle over limited budgets. The peace process is the first ever real policy undertaking to actualize the anti-Western tradition, namely the realm of freedom, and, as we have just seen, the "Jewish problem" stitched on to the Western tradition. This solution would be a so-called universal and homogeneous state, the physical, real world reversal of the Western tradition. 15

Israel's abandonment of the nation-state (its own), and what goes along with this -- what I describe here as the hollowing out of the country's mediate institutions -- are policies directed to the theory of the anti-Western tradition.

"Theory," of course and by definition, is not within the language or ken of practical life; words of theory and all words, would not otherwise be true or false. The meaning of actors' words, their institutions and actions must be somehow measured. The measure is reality, which, if it responds to genuine philosophic inquiry, resides in the search for order, the existentially real struggle. The object or "place" of this search is the divine. In the attempt to escape reality, the new place of this search becomes Nothing or negativity, as in Kojève.

We are alerted to the need to take the measure of the peace process as geared to the Western tradition from the key facts of the peace process -- the backing out of nation-state status, and the hollowing out of mediate institutions, as policy, as order. We know from the history of Western life and institutions, and from seeing what is around us, that the counter-Western tradition is bound up with opposition to the nation-state and to markets.

The Logical or Theoretical Part of the Matter

As a matter of logic, cutting across centuries and institutions, the point is not hard to see. It is a purpose of this review to show something of the effect or actualization of this logic in real time in a real place. The logical side is clear, as follows.

The Western tradition, and its counter, have to do with the understanding of man as a political animal or creature, or in other terms, with the perception that man is not his own maker. Aristotle deduced from this, and also demonstrated, that man's political make-up or definition is logically prior to his existence simply; man is a political being. 16

Man is known to be a political being because he reasons and speaks, and because he speaks about good and evil. What precedes man in time are the things he does because he is a political being "before," logically speaking, he is anything else. Man has being; he is not seeking it. He's already made; he is not going to make himself. These things he creates are institutions informed by speech and by a distinction between good and evil.

Now, the counter-tradition to this is exactly its reversal or inversion. The practical vehicles for this reversal are outwardly two instrumental reversals: first, the reversal of war to peace by means of dismantling the necessary condition for war, which is the nation-state; second, the reversal of selfishness to selflessness by means of replacing ego, and certainly the soul, by dismantling man's political being.

All of this is achieved, first, by the reversal of the nation-state to the universal "state." If man is not a political being, neither does he speak and reason. The reversal of speech to the language of bees, or noise without an object, follows from the elimination of differences or from the universal state.17 Human talk, like the language of bees, is not about good and evil, it is not political talk, properly understood.

But this is equivalent to saying that selves, egos, are indistinguishable. Talk is about good and evil because man is a political being. Invert this and the problems of the human condition are solved. In other words, the universal and homogeneous state is universal because every possible difference has been eliminated, or, again, the state is homogeneous because man, as the being who speaks about good and evil, does not speak. His being, thought to be political, is vacated: he has no being, literally. This conflicts with all of human experience, and immediately eliminates the divine.

Just as the solution to war is to eliminate, exodus from, the existent that can make wars, nation-states, the solution to man's being as founded in the commonly experienced, logic-based discovery that he is not his own maker, is to empty-out, exodus from, the existent who experiences, the self.

How is this destruction accomplished? The key to revolutionary transformation is to hollow out or eliminate the human self, the soul or ego. As a practical matter this has been done or attempted by way of eliminating the distinction in life between the public and the private realms of existence. In our times, the nation-state and markets have upheld these separate realms.

Aristotle set the propositional basis of the Western tradition (the root of which is the "I am" assertion of God as recounted by Moses in the burning bush episode), in Politics, as follows, and here I repeat: man is a political creature. This means, he said, that man's existence is experienced as "logically prior" to his existential or historical beginnings and activities. Aristotle presents this as a deduction from the fact that man has speech, and reasons to distinguish good from evil.

This logical demonstration of Aristotle's, sharing much with the Eden myth, establishes man, and political life, as "natural" in the specific sense of not man made; as a creature of the middle, open on one side to transcendence, but not a god, and on the other side, like an animal, but not wholly subject to cause and effect.

This, as it were ontic summary of the understanding of man and politics, is what lies at the heart of the Western tradition. It is not an "argument" or a point of view. Rather it is an experience of being. Its meaning, so to speak, is the institutional history of the West, which sustains the experience. Visible at the root of this experience as institutionalized is the ultimate founding distinction between the human and the divine. And, finally, resting upon this distinction is the inescapable necessity of human beings to distinguish a self, their own self, from other selves and existents.

The distinction of a self is the practical or institutional consequence of the experience of being, explained in the proposition that man is a political creature, or that political life is logically prior to other human behavior. The institutional foundation, that is to say, of the Western tradition as a political matter, is the distinction between the self (the private par excellence), and the public. This is why Aristotle defended "the constitution," or the law, as man's salvation.

Opposition to the Western tradition, whether reaching to the roots or the branches, would need to overcome the institutional housing which shelters the distinction between the public and the private. Until the Enlightenment, this housing was religion. After that, as religion gave way to Enlightenment jeering, this distinction between the public and the private, protecting the self, retreated to law and constitutions in the crude sense as protections for selves in the context of pragmatic factors, such as property, and, in time, principally markets.

This is to say that in the recent history of the West, the divine source of limit, and therein of constitutions, weakened, and a secondary, distant institutional prop came to take its place. The distinction between the public and the private, hence of the self came to be maintained by way of contracts and law, the basis of market economics. The selfish individual or ego replaced the soul. Drawn by profit rather than by God and immortality, the market became a much easier target than religion had been as a way to attack the founding experience of being at the heart of the Western tradition.

Most of all, the distinction itself, or limits, understood as man's own selfish and arbitrary imposition upon others in the forms of politics and law as such, could now be seen as selfishness writ large: what is prior is not man's nature as a political creature. The opposite. Man's "nature" is unmade; what is prior is this very unmade, what Kojève calls negativity or Nothing. The assault on the nation-state as a limit, therefore as a falseness or negation in its own right, was because the nation-state was said to be the source of selfishness or war. In this way the nation-state, together with selves, assumed the role of the destroyers of man's freedom, of his peace. The anti-Western tradition, therefore, has targeted markets and nation-states as the enemies of Mankind (of man liberated from limits of every kind, the "realm of freedom"), and of Mankind's Human Rights (as against his national rights).

The "connection" then or causal relationship running from Western beginnings (i.e., Israel), to the peace process, again Israel, is this line of institutional transformation.

The distinction between the public and the private rests on self-perception and self-understanding of a distinction between one's self and others. How a man arrives at this distinction, if not in the ways Judeo-Christianity and classical philosophy say, that is, by way of an intuitive understanding of the middle term of the divine ground of being, to paraphrase Aristotle, is the great problem for a counter-Western project. The assault on property and on nationality conceived as convention help to solve this problem.

It is no easy thing to confuse men about their possession of a self. However, the peace process is a superior institutional solution. It advances the merely cultural institutionalization of selflessness, by way of the politicization of the private, and the dogmatizing of relativism to the level of strategy and international relations. Kojève noted the totalitarianisms of the 1940s were limited by circumstances; for example, he speaks of the "democratization of imperial Germany (by way of Hitlerism)."18 The point is the peace process continues this radical democratization, liberated from the need to practice the older, non-liberal tyrannical modes.

The institutional power of the anti-Western counter tradition, for Israeli Jews and for American liberal Jews, draws upon and continues the tradition of the court Jew. In Europe, the Jews alone did not take the lesson of the Minorities Treaties to heart: the Jews insisted it was only Hitler or "rightists" who denied a concrete society called Mankind, endowed with Human Rights. One could say this was a natural response to two centuries of being Europe's "Mankind," or people without a state whose rights and privileges came from being an intra- and supra-national people, protected by states, by Bismarck and the Fredericks. But the fact remains, the Jews' unique position in European life, especially the leadership, was the worst possible training ground for building a Jewish nation-state.

Not all Jews, not even all intellectual Jews drew this lesson, however. But by the time the Second World War was over, and some few Jewish intellectuals were prepared to say, as Hannah Arendt did, that "the pragmatic soundness of Burke's concept [that human rights can and should never be more than national rights] seems to be beyond doubt in the light of our manifold experiences," it was late -- especially for many in Europe.19

Now, the question today respecting the peace process would be how much bearing these experiences and institutions have in Israel. Jews still do not accept that the rights of men are national rights, perhaps especially in Israel.

Problematic too, European experiences fitted a Jewish leadership perfectly suited to American egalitarianism. American Jewish leaders embraced American liberalism. Following them, the Jews have been overwhelmingly disposed to statist policies and opposed to local liberties, in spite of the relative absence of antisemitism.

The inter-European, non-nationalism of the Jews over two centuries in Europe was easily transported to America, as if it were the perfected, conscious version of what had been a mere economic contrivance in Europe -- before the EU. And so there is little enough of mystery in the fact that Jews vote Democrat, and are always over-represented on the liberal side of issues, especially civil rights issues. Jews have missed the point about these issues, as if on purpose, turning limited government in America, and in Israel, into a version of antisemitism. The success of American egalitarianism has been exactly its packaging of statism, beginning with antisemitism, so as to make any objection to statism equivalent to sympathy for the evil -- antisemitism, racism -- used to package it.

Every liberal and civil rights issue, takes power from local or private hands, and transfers it to the state. This explains the would-be mystery of Jewish liberalism, and devotion to civil rights. But this political vision, transferred to Israel and to nation building, has produced, in fatal combination with East European communist traditions, a uniquely dangerous version of post-Marxist idealism now embodied in the peace process.
In a nutshell, the egalitarian doctrine and its "natural tendency toward centralization," are alike tailor-made to Jewish institutions, and fit the drift of modern Jewish diaspora life. There is, so to speak, an undertow in Jewish institutions, pulling Jews from the shore of national life, back, toward the Europe that is being built, and that their leadership remembers as shelter. What lures always is the State and centralization, baited by equality. Israeli leaders still look to the omnipotent State to prevent "primordial" behavior, that is, nationalism. Only weeks after West Bank Arabs shot Jewish soldiers with guns provided by Mr. Peres, he led the first anniversary of Rabin's death beneath banners that proclaimed against "nationalist fascism."20 Would the Jewish Kojève, who influenced Peres, have dared to look forward to Marx's realm of freedom beginning in Israel where Jews today wave the same banners they once waved for communism in Europe?

Kojève, a European, assimilated Jew, is aptly called the Unknown Superior of the political intellectuals. Specifically, the line to the peace process runs to Peres from Kojève's protege Jean Monnet. The EU, says Peres, is the blueprint for comprehensive peace. Former Prime Minister Peres, the intellectual master of the peace process, was closely allied to the French intellectuals around Kojève. His book, The New Middle East, is a Kojèvean fantasia in praise of "ultranational [supranational] identity" and of Jean Monnet.21

Peres's plan for the Middle East is regional integration modeled upon Western Europe. "Our ultimate goal is the creation of a regional community of nations, with a common market and elected centralized bodies...."22 It is significant that "comprehensive" peace means "total," with respect to peoples. Peres advisor Jacques Neriah clarified this total, all or nothing, vision just as Chancellor Kohl now clarifies the mission of the EU: "the peace process," says Neriah, "will not survive if it is not comprehensive, and...wins a consensus from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf."23

Note that English philosopher Roger Scruton has cautioned today's champions of the EU's "ultimate goal" of an ultranational identity. He points out that Germany's Chancellor Helmut Kohl makes the anti-bourgeois, now mainline point that the cause of war is nation-states. Kohl says, too, that unless we follow him in an all or nothing opposition to nation-states, we're headed for war. This, says Scruton, is flirting with "the same old language...[of] the Nazis and the Communists."

Scruton adds that what began in Europe in support of free markets (Peres, too, talks about markets but instinctively opposed reform of Israeli socialism), soon turned "in a socialist direction."24 But the step beyond nationalism is necessarily socialist, and not just organizationally. The roots of socialist order are Promethean in opposition to the gods.

Choose Death

It was Kojève who insisted that "a complete atheistic philosophy" was the cornerstone of freedom, understood as the equivalent of death. "Death and Freedom are but two...aspects of one and the same thing.... If Man lived eternally and could not die, he could not render himself immune to God's omnipotence either." Suicide is man's ontological challenge to the divine. Suicide, or the death of the self as freedom, grounds the political order of a sole, uniform centralized state, the unitary homogeneous state. It liberates man from war (by eliminating nations), and from competition or markets (by eliminating selves or egos).25

The assault upon the nation-state and upon markets, characteristic of modern Western elites over the past two centuries, was understood as a sociological phenomenon by Alexis de Tocqueville. In 1835 he made a prediction, saying "Equality prompts men to think of one sole uniform and strong government.... In the dawning centuries of democracy individual independence and local liberties will always be the products of art. Centralized government will be the natural thing." 26

But Tocqueville did not also consider that "equality," and "one sole uniform and strong government," would invite a radical philosophical conclusion -- that philosophy and history were alike completed; that the human problem was solved. Equality and a sole, uniform government as natural would end man's struggle, ending its venue, history, and its nature or human differences, including speech.

Liberated men, said Kojève, speak the language of bees -- relativism. In the final "universal and homogeneous state," men are at last free of death and of reason. And this is because men are liberated from the ultimate, fatal inequality or selfhood, the obstinate constituent of untransformed man.

Events have borne Tocqueville out, pointing modern states toward opposite shores he never dreamed or imagined. The matter of "equality" and its natural tendency is the first and ultimate subject of policy today.

The importance of the Israeli peace process, informed by "equality" in the sense Tocqueville used the term, poses the historical moment in our time, and, with it, the fate of the "reality of man."27 Behind the blur of daily anticipations of peace beyond process on the horizon, the peace process has to do with equality and centralization. The peace that the peace process envisions for the region is meant to apply everywhere, and has already begun to apply within Israel. (Kojève maintained the universal and homogeneous state existed already, in America.)28

Peace and Tyranny

This vision, what Kojève calls the universal and homogeneous state, "means: the disappearance of wars.... And also the disappearance of Philosophy.... [This is] the disappearance of Man...properly so-called."29

Building on Hegel and Marx, this vision is rooted in the misunderstanding that human order, or rather the striving for order, is itself a mistake, a derailment so to say. This striving comes about because of man's failure, the consequence of inequalities and decentralizations, to understand that man's world, that is, these very inequalities and decentralizations, is man made.

This can be said another way: there is no order because there is no divine; more exactly, the divine can be transformed. The realm of freedom, or the realm in which men are free in the sense of having no being, but are free to make their own, rejects on principle the "reality of man." This means that equality and the natural drift toward centralization is toward "the disappearance of wars...," and all the rest.

This is the process Israel's peace process would lead. And so the "government" or peace in process, to call a spade a spade, is totalitarianism. The extraordinary assault now being mounted by the Labor party, assisted by American Jews in the State Department and elsewhere, to topple the elected Netanyahu government (pliant enough, in any event), will show how far Israel will come to actually leading this process. Without the peace process, even if Netanyahu carries it through, there can be no Labor party.

Total Peace, or "Comprehensive Peace"

Of course there can be a peace process without Israel. In fact whatever finally arises from Israel, from the peace process as it is, will not be more than an intimation -- the Israeli versions of menace are too plainly shot through with implausible, perhaps laughable limitations. Consider Labor Minister Ora Namir's chasing "ideological criminals" into lavatories, where "mean things about the government" are written upon stalls. 30

Remember, the peace process as an institutional matter reflects Israel's failure to solve its practical problems of constituent existence in the matter of making a nation-state: the problem of representation. While this failure has made Israel the early riser in presaging the next stage in the counter-Western struggle, it is unlikely Israel will endure to lead the unmaking of nation-states.31 Still, the intimation is what makes the Israeli peace process important today.

Certainly the peace process intends the world's first actual "sole" central government in which local liberties are beyond art because the state will no longer tolerate institutional mediation ( for example, religion, family, selves, markets, law) between individuals and itself. And this part of the process is well advanced in Israel. Its proponents attach the term "irreversibility" to it for the same reason that Marxists in the 1930s spoke of the inevitability of historical laws.

Israel's democratic spokesmen, looking to the future when peace will not require an effort on their part, clearly understand what is needed. For example: "We will crush all opposition," said Labor Minister Chaim Ramon, calling today for jailing extremists without trial or an attorney. "We will exterminate fascists," said Environmental Minister Yossi Sarid. "The state must control out-of-control people, including the press," said Foreign Minister Ehud Barak. "The courts will prescribe values," said Chief Justice of the High Court, Aaron Barak.

And late Prime Minister Rabin, who used his view of "democracy" (giving the people what they need, not what they want), to justify a rough and ready absolute government power, maintained that a Jew's right to his home was a function of how much security he provided to the State, measured in turn by what the security cost. The former mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, believes, "Settlers educated to fight...the state...is a much greater danger to our existence than the PLO." Finally, ex-MK Yoram Lass, says, in Israel you must "believe first in Democracy before God."32

The Labor party made "opposition to the peace process," including showing insufficient grief for Mr. Rabin, ideological crimes. Tel Aviv ex-mayor Shlomo Lahat of the Likud opposition has repeatedly cried in public, and also insisted that Rabin be included in the Tanach, the canonical books of Judaism -- equivalent to putting President Kennedy in the Gospels. The Minister of Education, Dr. Amnon Rubinstein, instructed students to turn in teachers and parents guilty of criminal speech and thoughts to the State. We must, said one feverish ex-judge,"drive out these 'ideological criminals' in our midst." Preposterous as actuality, perhaps, the intention is not. And while it sounds like the "totalitarian democracy," an earlier Israeli historian wrote about -- never thinking about Israel, it is more sinister.33

Prohibition of the Philosophic in an Actual State

The principle that underlies opposition to the nation-state and to private property (i.e., markets) is the prohibition of philosophy. But philosophy is the condition for establishing political order in the struggle against disorder. "Philosophy is not a doctrine of right order, but the light of wisdom that falls on the struggle...[to establish right order]. Right order of the polis is not...an 'ideal state,' but the elements of right order are developed in concrete opposition to the elements of disorder in the surrounding society."34

The prohibition of philosophy in the context of total peace, like all idealisms to alter the human condition rooted in the prohibition of the philosophic, is accomplished by its being inaccessible, put out of reach, as it were, by the State: a transformation of man. Exactly this is not an act of force. On the contrary, this prohibition is an "act" of not-willing on the part of solitary beings in the unitary and homogeneous state. This act is what inspired Ralph Waldo Emerson’s hopes, whose famed "self reliance" was not at all what Americans of his day, and later, thought it was. Emerson called men to place themselves in the stream and, without any act of will, float to "a perfect contentment."35

The point is: "Disorder" is meant to vanish. (Again, Emerson made this point in "Nature," baffling commentators who could not make sense of his promise that everything evil would simply vanish, once men came to look at the world aright, through a transparent eyeball, i.e., when looking in or out was the same -- because the self is then selfless.) Resistance or ideological crime is impossible. The reason is disorder, thought or speech properly so-called, is not possible. Peace is the universal and homogeneous state: the sole and uniform government.

The Greek sophists who destroyed Socrates only dreamt of eliminating the agora, or marketplace, in which Socrates committed his crimes. The reason is men would not doubt the truth of experience that political existence is logically prior to other aspects of man's life, its condition or nature.

It would not have occurred to the Greeks to have tried to alter man to fit their dreams. Destruction of the agora or of political life would have struck classical men as irrational, as destructive of the human. Note, too, that elimination of the agora, or of the nation-state, or, most of all, of the self, poses a tyranny beyond murder or terror. Modern totalitarianism is only now being broached as radically total, leaving no possibility of an opponent, including the opposition of a self. 36

This was what made Hermes's response to Prometheus's irrational protest that the gods did not exist pertinent. It's why Marx reversed the response. "You are mad," said Hermes. But exactly what drives the vision of peace is the transformation of man, in practical life, the replacement of national rights with Human Rights for Mankind. Only men who are radically solitary, as in a state of nature, are eligible for such rights. Think of equality in contemporary life in this context. Marx's famous revision of the Prometheus myth is that Prometheus was not mad at all. Recall Kojève. If the gods exist and man cannot escape them by dying, peace and freedom are denied to us; we must continue to strive for order.

Prometheus as heroic savior of man obliges Marx to call for the criticism of everything existing; to overcome reality. Hannah Arendt's explorations of totalitarianism in Germany and Russia indicated to her that the practical result of this ontic or promethean radicalism, what she called "ideology" (the explanation of everything from a single premise whose intention is to overcome reality or everything existing), is to "'finish once and for all...' with the autonomous existence of any activity whatsoever."37

In other words, everything that exists must serve action for the sake of some other action. Man's being is in process. If so, man's political existence is no longer logically prior to other forms of human life, that is, man has no political existence, properly speaking, except convention. Relativism is revealed here as an escape from limits. Policy would be overwhelmed at this point, reduced to method --- what Strauss long ago predicted for Weberian social science.

The End of Government

What we see before us in the peace process, is, in part, what we see before us elsewhere in the West: non-government or merely elite-management of peoples in process of becoming selfless, or non-peoples. The difference is the peace process is showing us where this leads. In this respect, the Israeli case is something almost unique in human history. Its success at any level would mean that, in practical life, "the ontologically real struggle for order conducted in every man's existence," at every minute of existence, is over. And this would signify political life was over, too. Men would not struggle to survive, but would be at peace. Here, in a coming together of classical and modern epicureanism, Israel would be the mirror for the new Western man.

This is what is at stake in the prohibition of the philosophical, or, more exactly, this is the result of the prohibition. But this prohibition, while not yet the actual institutional anchor of any state in the West, is nevertheless the central faith of all of them. Again, this is what causes people to have great interest in the peace process, in Israel and Jews at this time.

At the root of this interest resides the ontologically real struggle of every man to establish right order, a struggle that has no meaning whatsoever apart from the object of philosophic inquiry, which is the "soul." Exactly this object, and its ground, or the "divine," is what the anti-Western tradition will at last have overcome, institutionally, in a present nation-state (Israel).

Let's turn to the peace process as actuality and policy, after which we will return to the subjects treated to this point.

Section III: THE PEACE PROCESS IN ECONOMIC CONTEXT

The peace process begins with the end of the Cold War in 1992. The balance of power between the U.S. and the USSR imposed a peace-keeping, geostrategic tension upon the region's political units -- the would-be nation-states, the sub-states, the movements and gangs -- providing a measure of stability to the whole. The significance of this must not be minimized, either in conditioning the background of the peace process, or in the context of a "comprehensive peace."

That Israel would opt for a peace process when the Arab nation-states are visibly crumbling is jarring.38 Still more incongruous is Israel's choice of a doubtful European-style idea, comprehensive peace. Supposing it were a real option, its ingredient is mature nation-states. In the Middle East where still-born nation-states are giving way to Islamic-based tribal disintegration, comprehensive peace is not one, but two steps ahead of reality. In fact, Israel's peace process initiative betrays a strange disregard for fact. What principle could Israel, could America, be applying?

The ending of the Cold War lifted the tension that provided stability, setting in motion a regional scramble to re-position and adjust. The end of the Cold War could not have come at a worse time for places such as Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iraq for the reason that they lack the institutional and historical basis for stand-alone existence. Regional circumstances posed two options for stability.

The first option was an inter-regional balance of power, based essentially upon alignments with one or another of two or three possible regional superpowers, Israel being the most likely one of these. The second option was a Pax Americana essentially to assure the survival not of Israel but of the radical Arab states. Israel, and America, chose the second. It was not the obvious, or one might say, the wise choice, but a predictable one. What made it predictable was Israel's existential decline and weakness in the context of the Arab states' still graver decline and weakness.

Israel's declension, hence its predictable choice of flight rather than fight, was a function of its socialist makeup, in every sense, including the economic sphere. Israeli socialism introduces the peace process. First there is the economic aspect.

Israel's Economic Growth in Context

Although Israelis, Labor and Likud parties alike, consistently maintain that the peace process is being made from strength, the opposite is true. The Israeli monopolized, cartelized and protected socialist economy has been stagnant since 1974.

Only a brief review of Israel's socialist, aid-based economic system can be given here, but enough to suggest (to readers unfamiliar with the work of Alvin Rabushka, and the Institute's Division for Economic Policy Research) an idea why the economic problem is a central fact of Israel's overall national failure. It is also a key to understanding the peace process.

A tiny country measuring 300 miles north to south, and 10 to 15 miles at the heartland between the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Mediterranean Sea, Israel is land and resource poor. It needs capital and direct foreign investment (DFI) to grow. But Israel's socialist state system repels capital -- Israel's "capital market is quite unlike other capital markets.... It is dominated by the government to such an extent that there is virtually no free access to it."39 As for DFI, in the recent decade Israel took in about $100-200 million of net, new DFI, essentially nothing. In the same period the State absorbed aid and unilateral transfers in amounts over $40 billion. Jews, in Israel and in the U.S., have been eager to take pride in Israel's accomplishments. Here, as in other matters, they have not been told the truth.

Israel's contrary claim, that the economy has been growing at a record-breaking rate of 6 percent in each of six years from 1990-1995, is false.40 Although Israel's growth rates have been hailed world wide, perhaps because questioning them seems to cast doubt on the peace process, the fact is Israel's economy is unchanged since 1974.

What grew in the high growth years was population -- and additional free money, in this case, U.S. loan guarantees. Israel experienced a massive one-time 22 percent population increase of almost 1 million immigrants from the CIS, and, along with this, an inflation-boosting infusion of additional free money -- $2 billion/year of U.S. loan guarantees, in addition to the traditional government and private free money totaling $7 billion.

Taking these factors into account means that Israel did not grow at 6 percent each year. Rather it appeared to grow at 2.3 percent per year, per capita. But the economy didn't grow at this rate either. Israel measured its growth in inflated, overvalued shekels. In the would-be growth years the shekel lost purchasing power against the dollar by about 4 percent a year. This effectively wipes out what remains of Israel's per capita growth, which is to say there has been no growth.

If Israel's growth claims are so obviously untrue, how can Israel get away with claiming high growth? The answer is an integral part of the economic problem. Israel's political economy rests upon aid and free money.

It is easy to tell a different, opposite story for several reasons. As a matter of PR simply, no one has much of an interest in a straight account of things. The truth is there is no great curiosity about Israel's economy except among those who have an interest in saying false and exaggerated things about it. Claims of great numbers of Israeli firms on foreign stock exchanges, for instance, reflect the fact that American Jewish underwriting firms are involved. And Israeli companies are on foreign stock exchanges because the Israeli stock market (TASE) has been mostly destroyed by the Israeli government, depriving start-ups of capital. The State largely controls capital, dispensing it to favorites and for anti-market objectives.

Consider Intel. The California chip maker, whose existence in Israel serves no special economic purpose, just arranged a deal for itself which explains why it's there. Former Finance Minister Avraham Shohat, typically a servant of Israel's protected manufacturers and the bureaucrats who wish to keep the economy closed to market conditions, offered Intel $600 million to build a factory (that would employ 1,500 people, and, operate in violation of GATT by manufacturing only for export). Intel was pleased to accept.

But when Mr. Shohat subsequently announced Israel couldn't pay the money all at once, Intel balked. Rather than chance losing the PR benefits of having Intel in Israel, Shohat came up with the money, essentially loan guarantee money, on Intel's terms. Israel's failure to pay the money at once provoked Intel to charge Israel interest on undelivered money, in this case an additional $200 million.

In the eyes of seemingly well-meaning American boosters, many of whom profit from involvement in Israel's socialist system and the effective lockout of non-Jews, this looks like economic growth.

Israel counts Intel in the category of DFI -- $800 million in the Intel year, for example. In effect, however, this investment is a U.S. subsidy to an American firm, putting competitors such as Sun Microsystems, at a disadvantage. Calculated into the GDP and growth rates of Israel, the Intel deal and others distort the macroeconomic record, itself a distorter of what really happens in people's lives.

Given deals of this sort, it is not difficult to see where Israeli economists get the idea that even economic data is, literally, negotiable. Two years ago, for example, Israel's embassy economists in Washington visited the Heritage Foundation after it published a (correct) ranking of Israel as "mostly unfree." A subsequent Heritage Index showed Israel had pulled up its standing.

The Israeli policy community treats this sort of thing as normal. It also regards the aid component as a normal and acceptable feature of economic calculation.

Aid is the Cornerstone

The fact is Israel gets more free money than any country in history or in the world (excepting tiny Cuba, an anomaly in all respects, which has at times received more than 100 percent in aid and in-kind transfers).

When Alvin Rabushka, American inventor of the flat tax, took the measure of the Israeli economy in a series of IASPS studies in the 1990s, he was shocked to discover that Israel's economy is dominated by free money, and, almost as important, that the country's economic policy elite overlooks the fact. He learned, too, that there is a penalty for calling attention to the country's "whopper."

Israel's many "expert committees," in effect six to a dozen economists repeatedly called in to show how the economy can be liberalized while remaining socialist, have a tight lock on policy. These committees (the Brodet Committee is the most recent) typically propose Israeli-style free market reforms. These are endless tinkerings of government-controlled aspects of economic life with still more controls. Israel is the economic equivalent of pre-Copernican astronomy, a system of excruciatingly complex epicycles built upon earlier ones, all choking freedom and the human spirit. Although this is being written before Mr. Netanyahu's much fanfared budget cuts and privatizations are to go into effect, nothing will change, anymore than in the peace process itself. Aid is the reason.

Given Israel's East European milieu and background in communist ideals, its lack of a democratic tradition and of free standing institutions between the government and individuals, it is not surprising that there is a pattern of almost Swiftian obscurantism in Israeli economic policy. Rather than make clear that Israel's tax rates are confiscatory, for example, Israeli economists employ sophistries such as the net tax burden. Since subsidies and other favors are "paid back" to taxpayers, Israel's real or "net tax burden" isn't so high as people say.

Of course Israelis aren't stupid. However, they are cynical, and Israeli life is brutish in consequence. People do not outdistance their institutional experiences. Israelis have built experiences of this type into what they have been taught about "democracy," namely that it is state power in opposition to freedom. Freedom, understood in the opposite Anglo-American way, as limits to state power, is not in the Hebrew vocabulary or in the Israeli experience. This statist understanding of freedom, as we will see shortly, has bred institutions that have facilitated the peace process, when traditions of freedom and limited government could have restrained it.

And the thing most obscured is free money and its role in keeping Israeli socialism alive. The Labor party and Bank HaPoalim [workers' bank], the government's unofficial bank, consistently report Israeli growth. Comparisons, with graphs and charts, show how Israel stacks up against other countries. But because the charts omit the fact that Israel gets 12 percent of free money in the national account, and the other countries don't, or that Israel's trend lines rest on money the economy doesn't earn, the comparisons, like the growth rates, are specious. How can they get away with it?

The Israeli policy establishment (and its U.S. counterpart) wishes it to be understood that getting this free money is a legitimate economic goal. Economic debate on aid does not exist in Israel. Aid is called the policy "tovotainu:" for our good. For example, a recent HaPoalim report poses the finding of billions in new free money as an economic challenge to continue the growth rates of 1990-1995.
Israelis have the impression it is reasonable to run a country on free money the country doesn't earn. This imparts an odd, even Kafkaesque glow to a discussion of almost any Israeli subject. And it is massive sums we are talking about: 12 percent plus of the GDP is nearly $10 billion/year: $3 billion from the U.S. government; $2 billion in loan guarantees; $757 million in German reparations to citizens; other personal remittances (net) $2.2 billion; institutional remittances, $1.1 billion; sales of Israel bonds, $1 billion (also many bonds are not redeemed).

Most of this is money the state can spend, and later, in the case of loans, tax its citizens to pay back. What's more, the false claim about Israeli growth obscures the most important point of all -- free money retards growth and promotes out-migration. It is used to prop up a massive socialist, statist structure.

Now that Israel has itself begun to talk about cutting aid, it is possible to correct the view of Israel's friends and enemies, all of whom suppose that free money is good for Israel.

Free money is Israel's greatest foe.

It is an impediment to growth and to national existence simply. It has reduced Israel's critical mass -- the size and caliber of population, land mass, infrastructure, capital -- to a point where only a peace process seems able to save the remnant. Created in large measure by aid, the peace process is the foreign policy equivalent of the Israeli economy. Indeed, the two spheres are directly related.

The peace process may in some sense be called an economic policy: the failure of the socialist system translated into foreign policy. Israel is now plainly on a downward path in the direction of still greater loss of critical mass. Think of the peace process as a kind of contra-Jacob's ladder fitted to this downward path.

The Economy and the Peace Process

Although aspirations for peace on the part of ordinary Israelis and politicians are certainly genuine, this is not what drives the peace process. The essential elements of the process have been visible for some time, actually from the beginning of the process in 1992. Among the first to recognize and record these essential elements of the peace process were Arabs. The following commentary by Rami G. Khouri is penetrating.

Writing in 1993, Khouri pointed out: "Israel has made an economic/political retreat from eastern Palestine [the West Bank]; it camouflages this retreat in the vocabulary of 'security,' for it cannot speak the words of the truth of its failure. Following its partial retreat from South Lebanon a few years ago, this is an important development.... It will be followed soon by a steady demographic retreat...and then a military retreat in the context of a negotiated peace accord that should come to fruition in the next ten years."41

The peace process is in fact, retreat, camouflage, and an Israeli inability that cannot speak the words of the truth of its failure.

But what is Israel retreating from? The answer is Israel is retreating from nation-state existence. This is something almost new under the sun.

The Israeli peace process, as merely reflexive decline, is a response to the persistence of Arab force. The Arabs, as the present prime minister's brother Jonathan observed in his autobiography, just keep coming. How, he asked, can they be stopped? Of course the answer is, they can't be stopped, so long as Israel is going "downhill," as it were. Israel's decline, as Khouri intimates above, is a lure.42

Israeli justice minister in the Rabin government, David Liba'i, spoke at least some of the words of truth of Israel's failure when he said: "If we had a population of 10 million, I would be for keeping the whole land of Israel."43 Israel could easily have had this population if it had grown at the rates of Taiwan or Hong Kong, or, indeed, at the rates of Israel itself in its first decade. Socialist then, too, the State had not worked its way up to taking fully 60 percent of GDP. It took 30 percent then. Again, it was aid, starting in 1974, that made the socialist system work -- provoking some of the era's most spectacular out-migrations, economic stagnation and, above all, providing means to the State to undo nationalist impulse and institutional life.

Today, Israel is sinking fast. It is approaching the line of minimum critical mass that qualifies Israel as a nation-state. The peace process, its terms and character, is itself the fullest authentication of this decline. Instead of a population of 10 million, Israel is among the world's biggest net exporters of population, about 20,000 people a year -- 30,000 in 1993. The hemorrhage began with the upbuilding of Israeli statism in earnest in the 1970s.

But the "camouflage" of the truth, even during the Rabin years when it seemed clear that he at least had no agenda beyond party power, wasn't hard to penetrate. Of course the Israelis were not admitting they were making peace from weakness. Stress was also placed upon the common view, again especially among those represented by Rabin, that the Arabs were not a real "existential threat." Israelis have been unwilling to face the peace process for what it is: failure. We simply "can't cope," says Liba'i. For those, represented today by Mr. Peres, there is dialectic in this, pointing toward ultimate success.

Section IV: THE PEACE PROCESS IN POLITICAL CONTEXT

The claim that the peace process was driven by the "people's desire for peace" ought to have provoked skepticism. From the Declaration of Principles (DOP) of September 13, 1993, and on through both Oslo agreements, the Labor party government deceived the public, and made use of police brutality to control and intimidate opponents. The Labor party relied upon a parliamentary majority composed of five Arab-PLO Members of Knesset. The government, said one brave Jewish judge, meekly enough, was only technically legitimate. By the time of Oslo II, police intimidation, torture and public brutality against protest were all essential to government policy.44

In addition, Jewish parliamentary votes were openly bought. The most notorious instance came at the time of Oslo II. The deciding vote whether to turn West Bank cities over to the PA, to authorize what is now a shooting 50,000-man PLO army (plans for which the government revealed to MKs the night before), was decided, 61-59, by a man who had been elected on an anti-peace process ticket. Mr. Rabin offered him a deputy minister's position and a Mitsubishi. When a long-time peace supporter, President of Israel Ezer Weizman, protested, Knesset Labor Committee Chairman Dedi Zucker introduced a bill that would have made it illegal for the President to state his opinions in public. 45

The Jewish population was not pressing for a peace process. Long before Mr. Peres took over the government, after the murder of Rabin in November 1995, it was clear what the camouflage was hiding, if not why it was. Israel was after money.

The Peace Process as a Gimmick for Aid

The proposition that the peace process was a gimmick or a contrivance for aid was made and argued from the start. 46 However, until Mr. Netanyahu's defeat of Shimon Peres four years later, on May 28, 1996, by which time Mr. Rabin's assassination had been manipulated literally to criminalize opposition to the peace process as "ideological crime," the mounting evidence supporting this proposition was rejected, almost out of hand and almost by everyone.47 But Mr. Netanyahu's victory loosened the grip of peace on at least the pro-market mainstream media in America.

By July 10, 1996 in Europe, and on the 11th in the U.S., the day after new Prime Minister Netanyahu's address to a joint session of Congress, The Wall Street Journal editorialized, "aid and the economic inefficiency it has encouraged have enticed Israelis into a dangerous foreign policy dependent on foreign money and characterized by incessant Arab demands of 'land for peace'.... A cease-fire (such as it is) that requires constant bribes and concession is no peace at all." 48

But exactly "bribes and concessions," and no peace at all, is what the peace process is at its heart. Rabin, always the brash realist, said openly that "Israel has a right to U.S. aid money." 49 Certainly he did not hide that the peace process was rooted in aid. "Shimon [Peres] will talk...about visions," said Rabin, who did not understand the visions or how he was bringing them to pass, "just get me the money." 50

But what was the aid for, really? Of course it was for socialism, for not permitting markets. And what was this for? It was for stepping away from nation-state existence, from the Golan, and, of course, again, from markets. Unlike Peres whose vision of the peace process is the new order, Rabin's idea of peace was nothing more than Zionism in action. Rabin was guided by, actually embodied, the Zionist political order -- socialism, really communism in decay.

Building on the Ben Gurion-Weizman strategic doctrine that Israel cannot beat the Arabs without sacrifices to the West for the sake of "Zionism" (i.e., for the State and the Labor party), Rabin thought he was saving Zionism (that is, the State and the party). It did not occur to him that Israel could defeat the Arabs without Western help. Accordingly, it did not occur to him that Zionism has destroyed Israel. Exactly Zionist strategy created the cowardly students he complained about who did not thrash an Arab terrorist, or the Tel Aviv residents who fled in panic from Saddam's missiles in 1991, or, for that matter, Baruch Goldstein's murder of Arabs in Hebron, and the almost daily display of Jewish soldiers in tears in the press. These are the institutional expression of the Ben Gurion-Weizman strategic doctrine, and beyond this, of the failure of Jewish aid-based socialism as a political order.
In sum, the Jews of Israel act on what they know best, what they have been taught: the state of Israel can't protect them. Instead, the Zionist order that once valorized "restraint" along with betrayal of Jews to the British for the sake of Zionism and the State idea, now valorizes peace and sacrifice for aid, for the sake of Zionism. Terrorist victims are called "sacrifices for peace."

The other, or Peres’s direction, toward a dialectical "success" -- to arise from swapping the nation-state and Jewish nationalism for the sake of Zionism as peace against "nationalist fascism" -- was not in Rabin's ken; he needed money. "I can't run the country," said Rabin in the winter of 1994, if people have the right to choose their own occupations. 51 And so Mr. Liba'i, Minister of Justice, promptly overturned the new Basic Law on the subject (even though its purpose had only been to take yet more power, in this case from the religious community, as a means to hollow out the private sphere). 52

Markets separate the State from the private sphere via law. The limitation of the State by way of law is exactly the foot in the door for "self reliance." This is how former head of the Histadrut, Chaim Haberfeld, referred with loathing to the dangers of markets in Israel. 53 And after self-reliance comes the "primordial" instincts of nationalism, what Rabin himself called "racism."54 In Rabin's eyes it was a simple matter of power to the State, and, as he said, a matter of who signs the check. 55

"What!" Rabin exclaimed, at the time of the Jordan agreement which promised aid in several forms to King Hussein, "do you think the PLO would have joined the peace process without aid." He went still further, adding that America has "a duty" to give money to Jordan, just as it gave it to the PLO (now the Palestinian Authority or PA). 56 The Americans have taken up Rabin's position. In July 1996, when Israel's new Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said he wanted Israel to cut aid, President Clinton objected.57 Mr. Netanyahu did not protest.

The Israeli press, especially the Israeli-style free market editors of Ha’aretz, Israel's The New York Times, understands the relationship of aid to peace. Unrelenting in its support of the peace process, Ha’aretz demanded that opponents, "and not only settlers" be "sequestered."58 Ha’aretz’s economics editor Nehemiah Stressler pressed early for the U.S. to give Israel billions to undertake a "new Marshall Plan."59 What was the role of these billions of American taxpayer dollars for peace?

Never clear about peace, Rabin was clear about the role of money in controlling the Arabs, and in bringing money into Israel. What won Rabin over to Peres's peace process was his discovery that it was an instrument for aid, in turn the means to keep Labor in power. But then came the unexpected election of a Republican Congress in November of 1994. The Israel media greeted the Republican victory with hysterical descriptions of "American rightists" Gingrich and Dole as something close to antisemites. 60 In a matter of days, on November 17, Rabin was off to Washington.

What until then seemed clear -- the aid basis of the peace process, if incredible and unproved, was now verified by Rabin. He explained Israel's peace based upon aid, and what was behind Israel's strange willingness to see U.S. troops implanted on the Golan Heights. He also made it clear why Israel was turning West Bank Arabs over to Yasir Arafat and other well-known Arab terrorists who had already made Jericho into the smallest totalitarian state in the world.

Israel had a new idea about peace. Instead of the traditional cement that holds nations at peace, the balance of power, Israeli peace offered something else: aid. Money would keep the peace now being crafted between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

Rabin had already made clear how aid works in Israel and how he expected Arafat to use it -- "The Americans suggested opening a bank account to pay [Arafat's] police directly but Arafat would not agree.... I understand Arafat," Rabin said. And then he asked the following rhetorical question, clarifying the Israeli view of aid as well. "How will he rule?" Rabin demanded to know. Answering his own question, he said: "He who doesn't sign the check is worthless. Is it any different with us?"61

The aid basis of peace appealed to Rabin's experience as an Israeli politician. Did he also see the threat this posed to the balance of power, and the still greater threat behind this to nation-state existence?

Now, on his plane to the U.S. after the U.S. elections, he explained the peace process to Israeli journalists, people as devoted as he to the imperative of U.S. aid which provides Israelis with a standard of living 12 percent higher than the country earns, and, in their view, like his, worth a peace process.

Of course Rabin knew Gingrich and the Republicans weren't antisemites. And, far from being opposed to aid, they were more reliable than even the Democrats on this score. So what worried Rabin, and why was he flying to Washington? The Republicans, especially the most pro-Israeli ones such as Helms and Gingrich, were opposed to putting U. S. troops on the Golan.

The Golan Heights: Linchpin of the Process

The Golan deal brings the two parts of the peace process together -- getting aid, Rabin's concern, and vacating the nation-state, the socialist result. Rabin was a cunning political manipulator. He was also a patriot, a Zionist. Rabin made his point to the journalists by way of an attack on Likud, the opposition party, then lobbying Congress against the Golan part of the peace process.

Calling these lobbyists "liars...hypocrites...irresponsible," Rabin made the key point. Opposition to the Golan land-for-peace-and-troops proposal would "torpedo the peace process," and this (here making the conclusion for his Israeli audience and to Likud), "would endanger U.S. aid."62 Likud was endangering aid by opposing the Golan part of the process, clearly the center-piece or linchpin of it.

The political point against Likud's three lobbyists was the telling if lesser commentary, pointing to the larger, on-coming clarifications beyond Rabin, by Peres, the true architect, the visionary, and, as it turned out, the executor of the peace process. Rabin correctly, with characteristic incivility, described the lobbyists. Likud had not even then -- some say Likud still has not -- grasped what the peace process had done to their party and aims.

Israel had two political issues before 1992: land and, more profound but less accessible to political radicalization, aid. Rabin radicalized the land issue, essentially transforming it. Although Likud was slow to catch on, this transformation deprived it of its issue, less because the territorial question had lost political salience than because Likud is more wedded to getting aid and free money than even Labor.

And so this was the point: the Golan was the key to peace because it was the key to aid. See what a brilliant political stroke this was. Likud had rushed in to protect the Golan, only to be trapped by Rabin. Was Likud prepared to forego aid? Hadn't Likud just lost an election in 1992 because people like Yossi Ben Aharon, one of the lobbyists and formerly PM Shamir's chief advisor, had not figured out how to get the loan guarantees from U. S. President Bush and Secretary of State James Baker? This was Rabin's challenge to the lobbyists. As for the challenge to Rabin, involved in supplanting the balance of power with aid and U.S. troops, it was typically blurred by the whirl of more immediate purposes and his passions.

Still, had Rabin been trapped in his own right by Peres? Peres, for his part, is prone to think in "stages." "The world," he wrote in 1993, "has begun to recognize ultranational [i.e., supranational] organizations as a political entity in their own right [sic]. These include the United Nations and its branch organizations, and regional organizations like the European Community."63

And so "a new type of citizenship is catching on, with a new personal identity.... [We are at] the threshold of a new international reality based on peace and economic competition."64 What stands revealed in the juxtaposition of Rabin's achievements and Peres's words at the start of his prime ministership is this: the Golan is the linchpin. But what of Peres's visions? Could anyone look at the Arab world and see a new international reality? As for a new type of citizenship and new personal identity, the referent must be Kohl's Europe. Is it catching on, again? What was Peres's referent? How could he be so hopeful?

In truth the most astonishing part of the peace process as an event is the "disconnect" between Jewish talk about peace, and the reality. Here the nihilist penetration of modern social science -- and the Jewish susceptibility to it, fitted puzzle-like to the Jews' constitutive crisis mentioned earlier -- is most apparent. The technical source of the problem, arising from what Voegelin calls a hatred of reality and a desire to transform it, is that reality is not invoked as the test of propositions, but rather every man's "ideal."

Typically, observers are obliged to credit the words and proposals of everyone as "objectivity." But these words and proposals are not to be checked against reality. This "system" worked so long as Western civilization went along with the game, relying on still surviving habits of honesty and common sense. Now, such habits having been set aside as racist, the sole check on propositions is each man's ideal and interpretation.
The Platonic distinction between opinion as a claim to knowledge, and doxa, popping off about words for which everyone has his own meaning, is collapsed into a single, absurdist subjectivism. Newsweek quotes Israeli chief negotiator, Uri Savir: "Peace between Israel and Syria and Israel and Lebanon would end the conflict between Arabs and Israel."65 The speaker is undoubtedly an intelligent individual, but there is no meaning in these words, an empty tautology composed of definitions. And, while this kind of talk is common among policy people, here, as with the peace process itself, Israel is out front.

When Israel Kastner of the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee told the court in 1955 that Himmler, Eichmann, Becher and others helped him rescue Hungarian Jews, when in fact he was helping these Nazis murder them, he was asked: "Who then was murdering Jews?" Of course he had been caught in lies. But it wasn't only lies. Kastner was supported by the Ben Gurion government to the last (when he was murdered by what looked like a State operative), because, in the end, neither Kastner nor the State was clear about what a Jewish state or people is -- naturally enough, even though the contradiction at the heart of Zionist order, apparent now, had not emerged. Israel's institutional superstructure, and the language it imparts to report each man's ontologically real struggle for order is defective, blurring acts and thoughts about them. It is not less defective today. Reality exacts a high price of political order rooted in its evasion. Israel's crisis of representation or failure of order is about to disqualify Israel from acting in history.

As for Mr. Uri Savir's words, they bear no connection to the fact that the Eastern Middle East is now entering a life and death struggle over Iraq. At issue between Arabs and Israel is not a "conflict." Reality is obscured by calling it a conflict. Formulations of this type, however frequently they are to be found in Newsweek and universities, reflect the radical divorce between words and real world referents that make it possible for everyone to suppose a very hard subject, politics, is not a hard subject but only a storehouse of definitions and opinions, "doxa," about them.

Peace and Terror

Having reviewed the "first...[or] economic aspect" of Israeli socialism as the introduction to the peace process, Israel's "ladder down," I return now to the main theme. The peace process is striking in the way it reveals itself as a fulfillment, and as a forward-looking step in advance of undertakings like the EU or the UN, Enlightenment revisions of Western civilization. We approach this great and extraordinary topic by way of the "pursuit of peace."

When Prime Minister Rabin packaged the pursuit of peace and aid to make an aid-based peace, he was also preparing a replacement of the balance of power, especially on the Golan Heights. At the same time, Rabin fell in with corollary activities, on the one hand, simply to support and elaborate his foreign policy, and, on the other hand, because others of his party, the Peres or so-called left wing, were pursuing a radical social agenda in the direction of centralization and a far reaching statism.

Only the briefest review of these points -- the Golan and the balance of power; the elaboration of Rabin's foreign policy domestically; the pursuit of a radical social agenda -- can be made here. I have strictly limited the exposition to what is necessary for treating the peace process in its primary role as a re-ordering or policy crisis in Western civilization.

The Golan and the Balance of Power

The peace process under Rabin proposed to withdraw from the Golan Heights, a 40-mile-high ground separating Israel and Syria. It is one of the most valuable strategic sites in the world, and the linchpin of strategic balance in the northern Middle East. It is doubly significant that Israel did not propose to vacate the Heights in favor of Syria, but instead to turn defense responsibilities over to the U.S. This showed clearly what is transparent in any case, that Israel certified the strategic value of the area to itself. At the same time, however, Israel's proposal that the U.S. man the Heights showed a willingness to relinquish participation in the most rudimentary and also the most self-defining function of nation-states, the balance of power. And, as we shall see, relinquishing this function was to be balanced by relinquishing its domestic aspect: protecting its own citizens.

More important still, than the substitution of U.S. troops for Israeli ones, is the substitution of aid for the balance of power as such. While this is the meaning or inference from events, in this instance we have Rabin's own authentication in his airborne remarks about the Likud lobbyists who were trying to squash his Golan policy.

Here is Rabin's ladder down, by way of a substitution of aid for the balance of power, of socialism for markets, statism for nation-state, human rights and Mankind for national rights and Jews. The process carries the transformational energy, along with the horror of terrorism in Jerusalem, needed for police state activity, for the absorption of terrorism, and on, toward the liberation from disorder by Mr. Peres. A people that can produce a leader who can seriously compare his revelation, that of peace, to the constitutive leap in being of Moses which founded a people and a civilization, has, in its perverse way, a claim upon us and upon the ideal of recharting civilization, this time along opposite lines. 66

The lobbyists, Rabin said, weren't taking the aid dimension into account. In particular, he said that failure to get U.S. troops on the Golan, would "torpedo" the entire process. The Likud lobbyists certainly hoped this was true, but not for the reason Rabin gave. The peace process, he made perfectly clear, is aid based. When he said this applied to the Golan, too, his Likud opponents didn't understand. Rabin was proposing a "modification" of Israel's nation-state status. Most of all, this modification was being made for the sake of aid -- to Israel.

In other words, Rabin was explaining the ultimate, to him and to Likud, meaning of the peace process as it touches the central anomaly of the Israeli economy, its on-going, "Kafkaesque" reliance upon outside money, thus upon socialism and its roots in radical human disorder. He was saying, "I have found it. You tried loan guarantees, and we, Labor had to come along and actually get them. Now, we've done the near impossible. We're going to get aid for peace, just the way I got it for war all those years." And, in fact, this is close to what he said, as follows: If you don't stop agitating against my Golan policy, "there is a danger to the future of American aid to Israel." 67

Baldly put, U.S. troops on the Golan would act as a tripwire for on-going aid, to Israel, to shore up the peace, more exactly the peace process. This is the gimmick, in actual application, or would be if the Golan deal goes ahead.

Almost surely Rabin associated none of this with Peres's doctrines of comprehensive peace. What he saw instead, impelled by the centralizing empowerings of the peace process in all respects, were the advantages and imperatives of gathering power into the Labor party -- which Rabin explicitly identified with the State. At the same time he identified Labor policy with law and with the State ("We represent the...state and not your interest," Rabin shrieked at a Labor party Central Committee meeting, June 15, 1995).68 He did more. He intermixed the police and the army. And the army, then under Ehud Barak, moved quickly to isolate "rightists" and religious soldiers. Barak, an individual who appears to fit the style of what liberals call a proto-fascist or "gunslinger" in Peres's words, is poised to inherit the mantle of Peres and Rabin. 69

Politicizing the police, who immediately undertook a campaign of widespread, daylight intimidation and brutality toward opponents of peace, Rabin empowered the political intellectuals in the universities and on the courts. Preventive detention, torture, spying, and three pliant justice officials (the Attorney General, Mr. Ben Yair, the Justice Minister, Mr. Liba'i, and the Minister of Internal Security, Mr. Shahal) effectively transformed Israel into a police state. It was, in truth, a masterful performance by an extraordinary politician who understood the system. 70

Rabin's tenure marked the first stages of Israel's statist, centralizing assault upon civil liberties, and, more broadly, upon what had existed in Israel of a "constitution," and mediating, voluntary institutional life.

The Peace Process in its Domestic Setting

When Rabin turned to implement the peace process domestically, he did not have to overcome modern Jewish customs and ideals, because they are favorable to state power. Israeli culture and laws are also bent in the direction he wanted to take them. Israel's peace process, pointing beyond Israel, draws on Jewish history and diaspora culture, much of which, in the context of would-be national life, have the look of the West turning against itself.

There are many reasons why the Israeli peace process is different as an instance of the crisis of Western order from Maastricht I & II. Maastricht, it is true, authorized the "greatest voluntary transfer of sovereignty in history," and with almost no one paying attention.71 But Israel's peace process, to which everyone pays attention, concerns a transformation, and contemplates a transfer of power, reaching to the roots of Western life, to Israel and therein to habits of order.

The peace process reaches back to Western and Jewish beginnings constitutive of Western civilization. Israel's peace process calls to mind the sweeping remark of Leo Strauss about the Jews. He said, "it looks as if the Jewish people were the chosen people, at least in the sense that the Jewish problem is the most manifest symbol of the human problem insofar as it is a social or political problem."72

In support of a statist, aid-based policy, Rabin needed only to kick against the already open doors of an aid-based, statist political culture. He struck first against the State's strongest (but not very strong) institutional opponent, religion. Jewish religion in Israel is the site, in part, of nationalism, and of Israel's only (unwritten) constitutional limitation upon the State. This is the so-called "status quo," a compromise between the country's religious and anti-religious publics. Rabin quickly set this limitation aside.

With surpassing skill, Rabin made repeated use of an entrapping strategy against his opposition. At length he was able to equate religion with racism and with base tribalism. And his foes were no match for him. Although he did to them all what he, and later others accused them of doing to him, using it to "destroy their world and their souls," as Professor Zev Sternhill said, as if applauding him, no citizen, and no opposition politician could compete with Rabin. 73

He was undoubtedly the right man at the right time. Most of all, he was in the right place.

He egged them on, almost herding them into his traps. Really, what Rabin did was re-invent left wing anti-semitism for an Israeli constituency in pursuit of peace for liberated, enlightened Jews. Spinoza springs to mind, and his once puzzling but now ironic prediction that the Jews would return to Israel "if the foundations of their religion did not effeminate" their minds. 74

Opposition to peace as I have noted already became literally criminal: the work of "ideological criminals," or just "incitement." Had Rabin lived, he would have perfected what his assassination nearly perfected for others less able.

Pursuit of a Radical Social Agenda

By the time of Rabin's assassination, peace-Israel was poised to regard religious Jews as "a cancer."75 For a month, in November 1995, the press, media and universities rang with the most heartfelt anti-Jewish language ever heard. To cite Professor Zev Sternhill of the Hebrew University once again, Jews were Nazis.76 No wonder Environmental Minister Sarid said, "the democracy must exterminate those" who threaten it. Likewise, Mr. Shahal made it clear where the democracy would draw the line: "All expression of delegitimization, spoken today about Israeli democracy, the rule of law and the elected leadership of Israel are not protected by free speech."77

Ehud Barak was among the first to hear the call of Shahal and sought ways to quickly institutionalize Shahal's red lines. He claims he has prevented "rightist" Jews from entering Israel, and was on the lookout for still other "out of control people." 78

The assault upon civil liberty in speech and in thought (Israel jailed Mr. Avigdor Eskin for thinking about making a cabalistic curse), has not been well understood in context of the Israeli peace process. 79 What has gone mostly unnoticed about it and related developments, for example, Israel's transforming of elections into substantive, constitutional acts of "popular sovereignty," was that every ratcheting up of the power of the State was matched by an attempt to refigure the relationship of the State and individuals.

This development, to be sure, like Rabin's simpler up-building of the police state potentialities in Israeli statism, drew upon existing constituent factors in Israeli and Jewish life. For example, intermixing the police and the army, or unleashing police riots with scores of slugging, laughing policemen all wearing the same nameplates, seemed only an excess of what Israelis have always known from the police. Israel, for all its unrelenting self-advertisement as the sole democracy in the Middle East, has not aspired to be more than an East Bloc-style communist state, sentimentalized and customized to meet the constraints imposed by circumstance, mostly getting American money.

The matter of refiguring the relationship of the State and individuals, an impulse set loose by the peace process among the intellectuals in the Knesset, and at large, within the universities and the bureaucracy, similarly drew upon what already exists in Israeli and Jewish liberal culture. But in both the simpler case of police tactics, and in the more self-conscious elaboration of peace, there is more than something additive.

This more articulate, self-conscious elaboration of the peace process at its core brings us closer to the crisis of order which makes the peace process important.

The "Basic Law"

Every forward step of the peace process has been accompanied by a corollary addition of power to the State or public sphere at the expense of the private sphere.

Essentially this accompaniment process is what I have described as a hollowing out of the private sphere. This is the destruction of mediating institutions so that ultimately nothing will stand in the human environment but the State and solitary individuals. Recall the cleansings of Canaan, and the French Revolutionary slaughter of even aristocratic chickens and cows. This is the unitary and homogeneous state, the realm of freedom.

For example, just as soon as Oslo I passed the Knesset, the Law Committee started handing in new pieces of what is called the Basic Law. It is instructive to understand that this basic law or constitution was being created by a parliamentary committee (then chaired by one of the country's most extreme anti-Jewish political intellectuals in the traditions of Radek, Zinoviev and Trotsky), for passage into law without so much as an explanation to citizens.

Clearly, Israel is already far along in the direction of a unitary state. The people or nation represented by a parliament that can act in this manner is an atomized mass; an abstraction that drains rather than feeds the institutional integrity of its people. The constituent crisis that afflicts the Jews (one that is traceable from the "exodus" from Israel -- the "diaspora") is reflected in this example of stunted and deformed representation. The Jews' susceptibility to the anti-Western temptation, mentioned earlier, comes in part from this failure to develop genuine representation for people who can act in history. The Basic Law episode shows this stuntedness as part of the larger deformation of representative order which is the peace process itself. Both policies are directed to preventing Jewish representation in the pertinent sense.

Rabin set loose these radical energies. He did this by calling his opponents names minted by the political class, for example, "racists," and by articulating the radicalism embedded in his acts. As for the Basic Laws themselves, they are transparent vehicles to transfer power to the state at the expense of mediating institutions, religious institutions most obviously. Written in a way to mean nothing and everything at once, they are not based on constitutional history or precedent. 80

Advertized as a constitution, the process and the Laws themselves are, alike, clear testimony to the deepest failures of Israel to have created representative institutions. The Basic Law, like most all of Israeli institutional life, is little more than a device to facilitate unlimited government, in this case by means of Israel's judges, the High Court most of all. It effectively codifies the Emergency Powers act that has been in force since 1948, giving the State absolute power. The word for freedom, a point noted before, as limited government, does not exist in Hebrew.

The Basic Law is an attempt to take every possible freedom and power from groups, families, institutions of every kind, and turn them over to the State, for the purpose of liberating individuals from exactly these institutions. Israeli jurisprudence is today pursuing this course under Chief Justice Aaron Barak. Judges routinely hand down decisions such as the following, from district Judge Joshua Pilpel: "It is forbidden," Judge Pilpel ruled, netting families and religion at once, "for a parent to spank his child as this is against the Basic Law of human rights."81

Of course this process goes on elsewhere in the West, and especially in the United States. The role of Jews in this enterprise is known. Too, the Jewish people in Israel as in the U.S., have been mobilized to act, as it were as carrier ants, transferring the powers of the private sphere into the public sphere in the name of their own liberation -- from antisemitism, from racism. Israel, at all events, is now on the other side of the mirror.

Section V: THE PEACE PROCESS AS A REORDERING CRISIS

But here too, on the side of reality where liberalism does not lie to totalitarianism, the peace process certainly has not produced peace. It has increased war, especially terror. As for the dream of comprehensive peace, a variation by Mr. Peres on the EU, which he commends as "the next step" beyond "particularism" and nationalism, it is not in sight either. Actually, the only achievement of the peace process in keeping the peace is a Chinese Wall-style divider between Arabs and Jews, to be paid for by the Americans, not Mr. Peres's ideal of soft borders and a community of Mankind.

The Wall wasn't built, but the policy is in place. And, every time the border is re-opened, Arabs kill Jews at the borders. On these occasions Mr. Arafat gives a speech in praise of the martyr Ayash, the inventor of human bombs, and promises, with thanks to him, he'll take Jerusalem. In September 1996, the PA instructed its army to fire on the Israeli army, using the guns Messrs. Rabin and Peres gave them.

These are certainly contradictions in context. Instead of "soft borders," to fit the new age of "Mankind," there are walls. But there is contradiction within these contradictions: the more terrorism there is, the more the peace process is said to be the right policy. But it is literally true that the process moves best when there is terror. But again, this point conflicts with the conventional wisdom which holds that terrorists are opposed to the peace process and trying to kill it.

We approach the "religious" aspect of our subject here. Is it peace, or is it war? An ordering vision that can't tell the difference has misperceived order. More exactly, it has eliminated the reality known as disorder.

Consider, in view of what we can see, if the peace process is an inversion of the famous principle of Clausewitz that "war is the continuation of policy by other means." Here we seem to have peace as the continuation of war by means of policy. What could this policy be or portend?

"The conqueror always likes peace (as Bonaparte constantly claimed)," wrote Clausewitz. And Raymond Aron tells us that Lenin was mistaken in his view that Clausewitz was making a joke. 82 Arab polls support a Leninist reading, however. The Palestinian Arabs want peace, too. Like Bonaparte, they also want possession and guns to shoot Jews.

The polls show that the Arabs expect peace to finish Israel since they look upon the transfer of territory, rationally enough, as possession. Finally, this being the joking part, the Arabs are "fighting back." The process isn't peace, but still "Bonaparte [the Arabs]...likes peace," and desire possession. The Israelis, who don't desire possession, like peace even more.

The Israelis are actually the conquerors and, as per Clausewitz, they are offering peace -- but to unpossess. And the Arabs are taking defensive action while the Jews aren't attacking. This reverses Clausewitz. But this reversal points us toward a fruitful line of inquiry that will answer our questions about the peace process. Consider the following response of Mr. Peres to Arab terrorism.

In February 1995, two Arab suicide bombers killed two full bus loads of Jews in Jerusalem. The government, with the U.S., convened an anti-terrorism summit in Sharm el Sheik, Egypt. Hamas, and also Iran were blamed for terrorism. The summit ended.

Since that time, terrorism has blossomed world-wide, especially against the Americans. The U. S. Congress thought it best to pass new laws on the subject.

But everyone knew at the time of the bus bombings by Hamas in February 1995 that those responsible were, for the most part, at the summit: the PA itself. Additionally, everyone knows today that the killers of the 19 Americans killed by a bomb in Saudi Arabia have links to Syria (which attended the next anti-terror summit in Cairo).

Consider Hamas and the PA collaboration, presumed to be the least tolerable breach of the Oslo accords. The basis of their actual agreements was not hidden. Negotiations in December 1995 between the PA and Hamas were published in the Israeli and Arab press, and in the U.S. Their agreement was that attacks on Jews would not originate in areas controlled by Mr. Arafat. And what of Israel's role?

Israel and Terrorism

Israel, odd as it seems, was also a partner to these agreements on several occasions. The Peres government stipulated that attacks on Jews would not take place prior to elections, and at other sensitive times. Peres personally made a deal with Hamas before the 1996 election, offering to let convicted murderer Sheik Yassin out of jail if there were no attacks before the elections. Israelis were mildly shocked. Actually, they feared Peres' s motive wasn't cynicism, but high idealism and peace.

What appears to run against the expectations of common sense is that these things take place openly, and, just as openly, they are denied or said to have no importance. Exactly this sequence has been followed in the matter of the PLO Covenant in which the destruction of Israel is repeatedly stressed. Mr. Peres made this document's emendation a condition of the Oslo agreement, saying later when the PA announced the document was emended, this was "the greatest ideological change of the century." But, in October 1996, when it was clear that no changes had been made at all, Mr. Peres's protege, Mr. Beilin, said the document was "irrelevant," and, anyway, that it had been emended. 83

The view of David Rousett, quoted by Hannah Arendt, that "normal men don't know that everything is possible," originally meant only that men could not imagine the horrors of totalitarianism.84 The peace process now deepens Rousett's insight. Peace as war, the "absurd oxymoron," is a literal reversal of government's role -- from protecting its citizens to arming others to kill them. But this also means the law of non-contradiction is false. Normal men will not know everything is possible because they will not know anything at all.

When the American press learned of these strange developments, at least one newspaper, The Washington Times, drew the obvious logical conclusion, but still the wrong conclusion that "Oslo is Dead." The Times wrote a famous editorial. The comments of Selim Za'anoon, PA negotiator with Hamas, made at a December press conference, were quoted in the editorial. "'We see it as sufficient,'" the Times quotes, "'to obligate Hamas not to embarrass the PA.... We are not the defenders of the Israeli entity.'"

Next, Mr. Za'anoon added the second most important point about PA-Hamas collaboration. "'If Israel wants to spare itself Hamas attacks,'" said Mr. Za'anoon of the PA, "'it had better hurry and withdraw from the rest of the territories.'" In other words, no one, including Mr. Za'anoon, assumed any sort of contradiction between terrorism and the peace process. 85

Terrorism does not slow the process down, or threaten it, in the PA-Hamas view. Although the near-universal opinion is that terrorism (Hamas, Hizbollah, the PLO, Syria) is "opposed to peace," the Arabs see it differently. Indeed, the election of Mr. Netanyahu, widely, and again mistakenly believed to be ready to stop the peace process, prompted still another summit, this one in Cairo. Its purpose, backed by Messrs. Assad of Syria and Quadaffi of Libya, was to protest any stopping of the peace process.

If the second most important point about PA-Hamas collaboration is their view that terrorism is good for the peace process, what is the first most important point about their collaboration? It is that Israel is part of their collaboration. This fact, seemingly preposterous, should be taken with the point made just above, in reference to remarks by the Israeli chief negotiator, Mr. Savir, about peace with Syria, above, and in connection with what is to follow regarding Israeli complicity in terrorism.

These otherwise disparate behavioral pieces fit a pattern of utterance and activity for which the only real precedent and guide is what Arendt describes as "ideological" reasoning.

Ideological, processive-based thinking, she writes, can "achieve...emancipation of thought from experience...because it thinks in terms of process.... Ideological argumentation... [achieves]...emancipation from reality and experience...because its thought movement does not spring from experience but is self-generated, and...because it transforms the one and only point that is taken and accepted from experienced reality [the shaking of hands with Arafat, the Kojèvean idea of comprehensive peace and the model of the EU in being] into an axiomatic premise, leaving from then on the subsequent argumentation process completely untouched from any further experience."86

And, perhaps most of all, none of these facts are hidden. Israel's role is public record. Israel knows that terrorism does not impede the peace process but hastens it. And there is a final point which gives us the clue to solving this extraordinary string of relationships, and of mutual commitments to terrorism and to peace.

Mr. Peres, responding in a public forum, actually in the Israeli Knesset, made the following points. When he was asked about the agreement between the PA and Hamas announced by Mr. Za'anoon in December, he said: "I don't know anything about an agreement between the PLO and Hamas." And then he added another phrase, as if to set this utterance aside: "nor do I care." 87

We are now in sight of the lines of force, pointing toward reorder.

Mr. Peres knew about the PA-Hamas collaboration, just as he knows, along with the others who participated in the Sharm el Sheik summit, that summits and spectacles, above all the television, do not picture reality so much as mirror it, therein reversing it. Men will speak the language of bees, but not just because they have first been schooled in a politicized relativism. Rather, reality will now be evaded by pictures of it. The making reality virtual was a philosophic derailment much before it became a technology, a result of the derailment. Television, a picture, transforms the particularity of ordinary existence by showing the particular picture, say of terrorism.

But the picture always tells the same story. It is as if "terrorism," the word, had become the reality, drawn from the "concept," the pictures. The particular thing pictured is now the abstraction: a complete reversal of common sense. A word, say "terrorism," is worth a thousand pictures; and the "word" is the thousand pictures. Reality, now in the guise of pictures, has become the concept. This is the same, here pictorialized, abstraction that we noted in the word "conflict." The word conveys moral equivalence because the speaker's "experience" of what he speaks about is ordered by words, not reality.

Today, in the world crafted by the political class, by the university and social science, people suppose there is some "problem" of news and television. They feel that common sense is being tampered with, but can't quite get hold of how, even though it defeats them. The conservatives call it "liberal bias." But it is the reduction of every particularity to an abstraction and the turning of experience as sensed into a concept. But a reversal has taken place. Experience, sense and thought have all been reversed. Faced with two apparently opposed fanaticisms, one for definitions, the other for subjectivism, the intelligent bystander, seeking to be fair and objective (but who doesn't see he shares the social science suppositions baffling him), must settle for epistemological and political compromise.88 But this, of course, is exactly "peace."

The positivistic abhorrence of "theory," trivialized today as "value," has at last begun actually to turn experience into man-made concepts, for ordinary people and for intelligent leaders -- not just for radical artists who need drugs for themselves and murder for others. This non-objective politics is the politics of dreams, everyman's idea of what is true or good. Plato conveyed the agony of this nightmare, beginning with the famous Ring of Gyges tale in The Republic.

Hannah Arendt has taught us the Nazi and Communist ideologies functioned exactly to force reality to conform to words outweighing any countervailing considerations of perception. Of course murder or terror was needed because reality cannot be changed in fact. Process is an overcoming of reality, a grinding of time into place. But the process of peace implies a displacement or distancing of murder.

When a man says the Oslo accord means the PA fights terror, but it doesn't, and instead has an agreement with Hamas, and the man says, "nor do I care" if there is an agreement, what is he doing?

The Washington Times says the man is lying and concludes "Oslo is Dead." But the man doesn't think Oslo is dead at all. He is not lying. He is telling you that peace is coming at the end of the process. But this means he is preparing terror. How do we know this? Because it is what we see before our eyes -- and don't know if we can believe what we see.

Ideology accomplishes "emancipation from reality and experience." Moreover, this emancipation is accomplished "in terms of a process...the movement of...natural or historical processes." What Arendt describes but incompletely explains is clarified by Voegelin as follows: Ideology is dedicated to the denial of reality, on principle.89 What principle?

The principle of the process. This refers to the "preparing" of terror. Recall Arendt explains Nazi descriptions of dying populations as preparing their death. This kind of "movement" is what convinces Arendt that normal men do not know everything is possible, since no one could be convinced by hearing about such behavior, or even by seeing it. Denial of the Holocaust has common sense on its side. It's not the enormity of the deed. Rather, it is why anyone should undertake the project at all. It conflicts with reality; it defies order. Voegelin outraged academics when he said contemporary political intellectuals, and he named some, were preparing murder by assaulting Western civilization in the name of peace, or of democracy.

Process, movement toward peace, is the principle that permits Peres to deny the reality that Hamas and the PA agree on terror, and to add -- the explanation of it all -- "nor do I care." As an intellectual consideration, this means Peres expects the terror and understands it is part of the process of peace. "Nor do I care," means terror is not distinguished as to time and place or persons as reality. He abhors "terror" of course. But what he abhors is the abstraction, "terror." Like "conflict," the reality of terror is the living word, not the dead bodies. The actual dead bodies are part of the process. It, not the existence of the bodies, gives the bodies, as it gave the live Israelis, their real life. The politicization of life really does mean murder, at last. We will see in a moment what this comes to in actual leadership practice. In making his assertions as a Jewish leader of Israel Peres places Israeli Jews in exactly the relationship to Israel that the Hungarian Jews were placed by Kastner in 1944. In both instances Jewish representation reverses the commonplace relationship of the individual to his nation, for example in wartime. But it is time to review.

A Summary of What has been Covered to this Point

We have now provided a provisional answer to the question, posed above, asking what is meant by peace as the continuation of war by policy. The answer is, peace places possession of lands in the hands of the Arabs, outwardly said to be for the sake of peace, but stimulating war, thus reversing the relationship of "friend" and "enemy," actually of "nation" and "another nation." Rabin made this his motto -- making peace with enemies, while suppressing the correlative that a nation makes peace with its enemies after they are conquered. Naturally, this does not fit the reality of what nations are and what governments do in representing them -- i.e., terror continues. For a good reason -- nations do not behave this way, or rather cannot.

The step down from the balance of power on the Golan, is also a step away from the meaning or reality of government as the representative, acting in history, for some society or order. The more "peace," the more terror, the more democracy or government, the less existential representation or group being, and the need for police brutality and outside terror. The roots of Israel's government's collaborating in terror, as it were without looking ("nor do I care"), and thereby applying a terrorist policy as an instrument of social control, reside here.

Terrorism in the Mirror

Now, Peres is a glib speaker. And the peace process does not depend on him alone. Still, Peres's words fit with his view that the peace process is part of the process toward "intelligence" and away from "materialism and violence." History, he said, is like "yesterday's snow," it's dead. "We can't learn anything from history."90

And no one will be tempted to rebut this remark with some ready maxim. Peres means process is more important than any treaty. Peres has no more regard for Oslo than for the PA. He has regard for peace as process. But terrorism is murder. The first responsibility of government is to protect its citizens. Today, people blame Peres for giving guns to Arabs who now shoot Jews. His response is people who say this should be jailed for incitement. This is not a "conflict" of views about reality. The newspaper version of this problem, so to speak, would be: peace versus a nation-state, or dream and vision versus the status quo of "conflict." These propositions reflect a disordering of existence, like the description of "Israel" and "Syria" being in "conflict."

Again, recall Rabin's repeated protests that Israel could not protect citizens against terror "unless there will be peace." This utterance contradicts the meaning of representative existence of a people; it shows Israel is not a nation-state. But recall what Roger Scruton said of Chancellor Kohl's threat of war unless national sovereignties are subdued by the EU; this is the language of "the Nazis and Communists." Finally, see how far advanced the Peres position is compared to Kohl and even Rabin.

In explaining the role of ideology in Germany and Russia in the 1940s, Arendt makes clear a distinction. She notes that the "totalitarian element" of ideology is not Nazi racism or Communist classism. There is a "deceptive impression that only racism and communism are totalitarian in character."91

The Nazi and Communist ideologies were alike totalitarian because they attempted to transform reality. And while Arendt speaks of several defining characteristics of totalitarianism, and, more usefully, distinguishes totalitarianism from other forms of tyranny, the ultimate criteria are process and murder, or terrorism. Certainly they are central in the Israeli peace process.

But if we consider the role of terror in the Israeli peace process where its outward form is feverishness and unconcern, -- "nor do I care," -- we come face to face with the inner heart of the peace policy. We are looking at the first, halting operations of the sole form of centralized government in the period opening before us. How will this government act? Who will act? If the standard of order is Mankind and His Rights, a state of order that precludes the political and has actually overcome it, what is right? Who may hold a gun?

Peres gives us a presaging, drawing upon the uniquely flawed representative character of Jewish leadership. His context is "openness," "toleration," "democracy" and Basic Law, the practical meaning of which is the unlimited Israeli State where the distinction between private and public has been erased by socialism, propped up by U.S. aid sustained by State lawlessness.
The essential thing, certainly, about tyranny, is that it is prepared by the elimination of limits, above all the limit between the public and the private realms. The German boast in 1942 was that "the only person who is still a private individual in Germany is somebody who is asleep."92 If there is a single tendency of the peace process and socialist Zionism, it is the elimination of the private sphere. This is what is important about the combined domestic meaning of the peace process as a step down from the balance of power, and a step away from the private sphere.

Israel's political order recalls the maxim of Aristotle that men should not despise constitutions "because they are our salvation." The Israeli view is that the State is our salvation. Only angels, Aristotle says, don't need constitutions, or those who can do no evil. Israel's desperate plight and confusion was conveyed by a liberal Jewish reporter, impressed to learn that Israeli youth could "identify" with the State following Rabin's assassination.93 Recall that Rabin, and more so Peres, identified the State and the party with the peace process.

This identification, in Israel as elsewhere, is what Arendt found underserving the process that emancipates men from reality. Let us follow Arendt here.

We are taking it as established by Arendt that process and terror are the totalitarian means to achieve "emancipation from reality and experience." If so, the point about peace as process and terror should be understood as an obversion, like looking in the mirror. Your right hand appears on the left side of the image, and vice versa. An obversion of All a is b, would be: No a is Not b.

This would mean, in our example, that all terror and process achieves emancipation from reality and experience, and, the obversion, no terror and no process is not emancipation from reality and experience. The peace process has both process and terror. And, since the intention is to achieve something that doesn't exist in experience, and which the Western tradition deems contrary to the human condition so that if you attempt it you will get the reverse, Peres is seeking "emancipation from experience and reality."

Someone who wishes to achieve something that doesn't exist, peace as Human Rights in a community being notched down from a nation-state to a statist peace state (the thing that doesn't exist in the world), has only an "image" of it; he has no experience of it (since it doesn't exist). In order to achieve "emancipation from experience and reality," you create an image; a dream.

When you have an image, like the image of yourself in the mirror, everything is exactly what the reality is, except, literally oppositely -- it does not exist. (This is another way of saying anything you literally create can be only a word or an insensate thing. If it were more, you would be a "bad man or an angel." The aspiration to create a sensate thing, and the belief that you can or have done so, is the totalitarian aspiration.)

So, you say peace and raise your right hand. But this causes the left hand of the image to rise. It "says" war, not peace. Since your intention is good, you're protected, as it were, because you do not intend war or want your left hand to rise -- you really do want to rescue Hungarian Jews, you want to run a real democracy, you want peace. But because you have substituted your "ideal" for order, and therein your dream for reality, you are in fact substituting radical disorder for order. This is the dream world. "Peace," your "peace process," will put real guns in the hands of real people, who behave like your hand in the mirror. Ideals, mirrors essentially, replace the divine ground so that every man may become the philosopher of the myth and the creator of it. When the pertinent everyman is also able to arm people to shoot the people he represents, the meaning of governance, having already reversed the ground of order, is reversed in practice. Still, the process is insidious. Only the mirror is evil.

Reconsider how the peace process reverses Clausewitz. A war plan that sacrificed citizens by way of collaboration with the enemy would be a high kind of treason. A peace plan that sacrifices citizens "for peace" by way of cooperation with the enemy who uses terrorist means, what would this be called? Evidently it would be called totalitarian, according to Arendt's analysis, for the reason that terrorist means serve the process. And the process, to repeat, is the down-building of the nation-state, and the hollowing out of the private sphere by the State, in the name of benevolence, in this case the high benevolence of peace.

Nationalism is Representation to act in History

Failure to represent, that is, to uphold Israel as a nation-state or, rather, hollowing out a nation-state to a residue of solitary liberated individuals, each one a self-less person identified with the State, deprives the actual state or its representative of anything to represent.

This hollowing out process is the hallmark of modern states. Naturally there is a great distance from the easy equality of first names to radical indistinctness, to no names at all, first or last. But the road is charted, and, in Israel at least, it's open. The man with no name is an Emersonian condition in which men see through a "transparent eyeball."

We arrive by a different route to the realm of freedom: the withering away of the State by way of peace and process. The process puts disorder beyond our vision. Disorder, like the nation-state, or any mediation between the sole, uniform and central authority or State, has been extracted from the human environment.

Unlike this century's first pass at totalitarianism based upon murder when there was world-wide opposition, there will be no opposition to peace. Nazi thought ran along these lines -- the "Jews are the people of ego;" we "will destroy the curse of egos." But this was still a tyranny with links to the past. Peace promises something new.

Derailments of existence as ordered (for example, as ordered by the Pentateuch, by its revision or Christianity, by philosophy of the myth), are the terms of the Western tradition. Now, the counter tradition is to break this pattern in the direction of reversal; by "obversion," in which the ground of being is replaced by a man's idea of what exists. There can be no disorder where there is no order, or, to repeat Kojève: where suicide affects order by replacing God with Man, disorder is vacated. Modern history to the present moment, and beginning with the Cartesian, science-based resistance to the founding orderings of Western civilization, is composed of counters; of attempts to roll back and reverse the founding orderings.

If one supposes there was an original founding effort to counter the founding order of Western civilization, say that of Descartes's "suicide of philosophy," described by Etienne Gilson, the peace process is plainly a part of it. It may be the point of departure at last from the Western tradition. Gilson meant that Descartes -- certainly not an arbitrary point of departure -- erased the middle. He "thingified concepts," Gilson said.94 Recall the earlier observation about TV. The control of images or "pictures" thingifies concepts and eliminates reality. Mr. Peres has observed that the peace process will prevail because everyone can see it on TV.

A politics, familiar everywhere today, that seems not to fit the classical typology of proper and degenerate categories, is evidently upon us. We are not seeing regimes or corruptions of regimes, only the management of masses by elites. Israel is not a regime in any sense. Aid-based, it is not clearly a country.

It is an emergent form against government and order. It is barely even a form by which elites move and manage people. Of course this describes much of the West as well, with the important difference that the most advanced Western regimes are also the most protected by mediations of history and institutions, including the institution of the nation-state itself. Israel, for reasons I have elaborated at length respecting its representative or constituent crisis, has no such protections.

If, to recall Tocqueville, there are ages now opening before us for which the peace process is to be the model and type, we will at length distinguish among modes of totalitarianism only. The aim will be to make government radically superfluous, and likewise philosophy. Perhaps it is not too much to say that the reason the peace process has been taken seriously, to say nothing of "comprehensive peace," is because it is a kind of "delayed reaction" to long accomplished facts of life in the West, as Kojève himself said some time ago. Now Israel is taking the first steps in real time.

Section VI: IS THERE AN ACTION ITEM?

Men, we know, cannot destroy reality. It is not impossible, however, that a peace-based totalitarianism could succeed where earlier tyranny failed. Perhaps this is what is new, along with the fact that tyranny, always seductive, is, in peace, institutionally compelling. It is more absolutely compelling than any previous tyranny has been. Still, the policy meaning of Voegelin's leaps in being and subsequent derailment is, as policy, common sense.

Institutions, the products of founding myth ("leaps in being"), are what men live by, not explorations of the ground to which the myth refers, and upon which institutional life rests. But the myth as the object of re-enactments by others, in the middle space, the ontologically real struggle by the philosophic, could that be pacified?

A tyranny that would destroy the search would also destroy the institutions created by the search. We have reviewed just such a process. One might think no one could doubt the possibility of peace- based tyranny, or mistake it. However, doubting it, or rather never so much as suspecting it, is what is most characteristic of the peace process at this moment. The conservative policy community that would be expected to challenge the process has yet to do so.

Israel, in the grip of the peace process, is a convincing, but still a heart-rending spectacle -- human life in radical untruth is alluring. But not to see, only to do. Jeremiah was shocked by the fact that the Jews deserted the God of Israel to run after false gods, breaking with the habits of mankind's idolaters who are mostly loyal to their false gods. The impenetrable history of Jews throws out few hints about its tragedies, and yet the continuing betrayal of this people by its representatives numbs.

Recall again Leo Strauss's remarks about Zionism, particularly his observation that Zionism taught a lesson about liberalism and the separation of the public and the private. He said that Zionism showed how this separation failed the Jews. It allowed discrimination, and thereby encouraged it.

It turns out otherwise, with a vengeance and much irony. Zionism and Israel have confounded the Jewish problem, tangling it wonderfully -- but back toward what is recognizable. Exactly the "lesson" Zionism is supposed to have taught is transfiguring Israel, and would transform the West.

Israel's action item for policy and where the West is concerned about Israel, is to push hardest toward the separation of the public and the private. Practically, this means Jews should bend every effort to develop markets in Israel, with the lawfulness essential to them. New institutional tracks need to be set in place by way of impetus toward markets, for example, the profit motive, so that Jews can be lured into becoming merchants, bankers and the like, as a means to founding laws and a constitution -- their salvation. As everyone knows, "separation" is the Jewish principle, par excellence.

Section VII: CONCLUDING COMMENT

It is important to point out that it is the middle that is at stake in the exchange between modern political science and its policies, and what modern political science rejects. The exchange between Voegelin and Arendt is to be seen in this light. Arendt is holding to the middle as between theory and fact.

This middle is liberalism or openmindedness for the "values" of religion on one side, and science or anti-religion (the radical Enlightenment) on the other side. "Liberals," she says, opposing Voegelin, "are clearly not totalitarians."95

But this is so only if there is a middle between order founded in the divine and the rejection of this, as another possible position. Of course this is exactly the position of liberalism, what Strauss calls the moderate Enlightenment.

But this liberal middle is the rejection of the middle. Voegelin counsels Arendt to keep in mind that the separation she defends between facts and theory is nothing less than rejection of the only possible source of order. This distinction, as we observed at the outset of this essay, is not philosophically neutral. It is intended to divert our attention from the fact that the moderate Enlightenment is a disguise, self-understood or not, for the radical Enlightenment.

As a practical matter affecting policy, the liberal distinction is effectively that between values and facts. The ordering principle or "values," becomes history. And has Arendt not demonstrated in The Origins of Totalitarianism that this ordering principle is the absence of anything, or Nothing, as Strauss demonstrates in Chapter II of Natural Right and History, or as Voegelin has done? There is no middle as between the divine, as the source of order, and Nothing.

Liberalism, that is to say, is implicated in the totalitarianism Arendt has written about and traced to its core as the rejection of reality on principle. "The true dividing line in the contemporary crisis," says Voegelin, "does not run between liberals and totalitarians;" they are on the same side.96 His point, which Arendt missed here and always, as theory, is there is no middle as between human order, ordered with reference to the divine ground, and rejection of the divine ground. In the first case you get man as we see him; in the second you get murder -- face to face or in a mirror.

Or, the liberal idea of a middle ground is radically empty; there is no middle ground where the middle itself is concerned. The middle is in-between the divine and the human, not between human as all-in-all and, say, a "belief in God." Voegelin is not posing a "belief" in God, and certainly Strauss is not. Beliefs, in Santa Claus or gods or dreams, belong to Plato's category of doxa: transparencies for Nothing.

Implicit in the liberals' rejection of the middle is a false middle; history. It is sustained by a distinction between facts and theory. This distinction is based on the primacy of time or history as creative of order, for example, by way of factors.

(Arendt, making her case, has recourse to "elements" that "crystalize into totalitarianism, some of which are traceable" and so forth. These are the "counters" and "factors" I spoke about before. But this is the world of temporality, at once contingent, but also fatalizing for lack of a measure. Voegelin wishes to show that the cause of the fact "totalitarianism" is the hatred of reality on principle whose only possible source or cause is the loss of order, the loss of the middle. "History" cannot replace the Beyond as the source of order. The loss of order is not a wrong theory, but a loss of theory.)

Arendt says totalitarianism did not exist "before it had not come into being." Implicit in the distinction between facts and theory as founded in a middle that permits Nothing to compete with the Divine as the measure or source of order, is the view that history has meaning. Or, as Voegelin put it in the exchange we have used, to treat events as "social situations and change, as well as of types of conduct determined by them, is apt to endow historical causality with an aura of fatality.... [B]ut they do not determine response."97 What does determine response then? What is policy?

The historicized view of man, actually historicism in our centuries, by which the mean or measure is time and place, suggests human order resides in circles or in lines: man is "going somewhere." If so, "fixing it" has to do with getting there.

But the source of order is outside of time; over the sun, not under it. So too, in essential part, is the situs of order, the soul, the "sensorium of transcendence." Is order or history about lines or directions?

Voegelin struggled with this. His history is about order, actually a series of so-called "leaps in being." The lines of history are "toward" and "away," from order. The pertinent activity of man, while it takes place in time and place, is not understood or ultimately bound by these coordinates. The pertinent "historical" dimension is not circular or linear at all, but as it were up and down within the temporal and spatial bands.

What counts in this case is ordered living: right and wrong, good and evil. Consider only the simplest case of the middle -- does the typical determine the extremes or the reverse? Recall the description of man as a political creature as being logically prior because of speech respecting good and evil. Of course we noted the answer respecting the typical is it determines the extremes, not the reverse.

Man's environment is the third region in addition to those of space and time. We reside in the "cuts," along the lines of space and time. History is found in the line, not on it or by it. The movement, including the "differentiation" or development that Voegelin perhaps over-stressed, is that of order and derailments. If so, the greatest part of what passes for understanding man, in history and political science, is shadow made by slicing lines, straight or curved, deeply against their dimensions.

Policy takes its bearing from reference to these, the leaps in being or ordering devices. The first men who discovered, wearily, that history over time and place seems like senseless din, also returned to their existentially meaningful struggle. After 6,000 or even 10,000 years, although not a long time as this struggle goes, our Western policy elites are advising, stop the din and stop the struggle.

It's the worst of all worlds: radical contingency and unfreedom; above all, the shriveling of the existential struggle, the death of the soul.

Right policy with respect to the peace process, if it is what this review suggests it is, would be exactly freedom, the first of three necessary human conditions for existence in truth.

Having been brought to the brink of the universal and homogeneous state by a realization of institutions based upon a rejection of the divine as the ordering principle, we at least know that institutional realization is man's existential milieu.

The institution that has brought us to our present pass is the State, with equality and centralization acting as the instruments to step away from nation-state existence and to hollow out the human soul.

In this context, then, the way out of the dark cave Israel, lies with an institutional course that will rescue freedom, separating selves from the State. This would be markets (private property), and peace (the balance of power): the nation-state.

Israel's Action Item, its policy for dealing with the peace policy which has arisen from an assault upon policy as such, should be clear. The peace process is an anti-policy, built upon and generating radical disorder; the murder of Jewish people and the dismantling of the Jewish nation-state. A return to order requires the valuing of the search for order. In the Jewish case, the search for order as such is given in the principle of separation, the Jewish principle par excellence with respect to order in the state and in the soul. Accordingly, Israel's policy should be to seek order, first by separating the public and the private, re-making instead of stamping out this founding distinction at the heart of the Western tradition and of its search for order.

Practically speaking, this course of action will require Israel to cut every form of aid immediately, limit the state with a real constitution that establishes law and private property and drop the peace process in favor of the balance of power.

Is any of this possible as policy? This question forms the basis of The Peace Process: An Introductory Essay (Part 2).

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Robert J. Loewenberg is president and founder of the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies

"IASPS Research Papers in Politics" are published by the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies in Washington, D.C. Nothing written here is to be taken as necessarily representing the views of IASPS or as an attempt to aid or hinder the passage of legislation in Israel or the U. S.

NOTES

1. Leo Strauss, "An Epilogue," in Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York, 1968), 203-223.

2. Brent Staples, "Undemocratic Vistas, The Sinister Vogue of Leo Strauss," The New York Times, 11/28/94.

3. Eric Voegelin, "The Origins of Totalitarianism," Review of Politics, 15 (January 1953): 68.

4. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago, 1952), 29, 30. Compare Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, 90b 14. "Never yet by defining anything...did we get knowledge of it."

5. Eric Voegelin, Order and History (Baton Rouge, 1957), III, 192. In Gorgias Plato explains the condition of this struggle is the politician's ranking of death above life. "...no man who is not an utter fool and coward is afraid of death...but he is afraid of doing wrong." (522) Note that justice or the "ethical" is commanded by the truth of Being. The position Socrates-Plato refutes in this dialogue, that of Polus, Callicles and Gorgias, and in every sense a reversal, is "peace."

6. Ibid. Voegelin's use of the metaxy of Plato was specific: between transcendence (being) and existence (becoming), the latter being susceptible to "the epistemological strand." 194. The site of the in-between is the soul or "sensorium of transcendence."

7. Leo Strauss, Philosophy and Law (New York, 1987 [Berlin, 1935]). The typical is determined by the extremes in modern times, i.e., is relativistic, reversing the classical relationship; an in-between.

8. A senior Iraqi opposition leader, no more misled by the peace process than other Arabs who support it as Israel's decline, has observed: "Israel must rejuvenate and revitalize its moral and intellectual leadership. It is an important -- if not the most important -- element in the history of the Middle East." Meeting with Ahmad Chalabi, head of Iraqi National Congress, with David Wurmser at IASPS/DC, 6/12/96.

9. Voegelin, Order and History, III, 192. "Myth" describes the authentication of a fruitful search of the ground, of being as given, such as Voegelin has transmitted of Plato's search and subsequent "philosophy of the myth." "Myth" as a word meaning false, whether as non-empirical or as something poetic or "higher," are alike discreditings of theory in the development of policy.

10. Harry Neumann, "Torah or Philosophy? Jewish Alternatives to Modern Epicureanism," The Journal of Value Inquiry, XI (Spring 1977): 16-28.

11. Charles Krauthammer, "The End of the Illusion," The Washington Post, 3/7/96.

12. The nation-state was also assaulted by Arendt, an instance of the work's bearing "the scars of the unsatisfactory state of theory." Voegelin, "The Origins," 69.

13. The exchange between Voegelin and Arendt, "The Origins," 80, illumines the point of this paragraph. Arendt responds to Voegelin's criticism that her critique is mere liberalism because she misses the point that totalitarianism is a problem of order or theory, is a positivist, thus: "I proceed from facts and events instead of intellectual affinities and influences." And yet her textual exegesis at its best is a description of Nazi facts and events as gnostic, i.e., her analysis is Voegelinian.

14. George Gilder, National Review (July 8, 1991): 27.

15. The two totalitarian efforts of the 1940s certainly count in the category of pursuing the anti-Western tradition. But, as I note elsewhere in this essay, they were both heavily burdened with past, non-liberal modes of tyranny. These modes preserve selves -- tyranny based in force is by definition opposed. As a matter of practice, no totalitarian effort can fail to generate opposition, therefore murder. But totalitarianism differs from tyranny because it aspires to eliminate opposition or egos as such. The attempt to defeat the Western tradition, at the heart of which is the struggle of every self for order, is at war with reality. But how is war to be peace? This is what the peace process is teaching us. Its still humble tools are TV, and murder by inadvertence. The peace makers facilitate terror, but say: "I don't know" that the PLO and Hamas are working together, and "nor do I care" who is doing the murder -- Mr. Peres's words. See below.

16. Metaphysics, B, in which the relativist Cratylus is reduced to abandoning speech, and is left with gestures. Compare the legal status of gesture as speech.

17. Alexandré Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Lectures on the Phenomenology of the Spirit (New York, 1969), 160, note to the 2d edition.

18. Ibid.

19. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1958), 299. Arendt is herself a subfield, including her connections with Martin Heidegger. Consult Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of her Political Thought (New York, 1992); Elzbieta Ettinger, Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger (New Haven, 1995).

20. The Jerusalem Post, 11/3/96.

21. Shimon Peres with Arye Naor, The New Middle East (New York, 1994), 69.

22. Ibid., 62.

23. Yedioth Aharonoth, 12/14/94.

24. The European Wall Street Journal., 2/8/96

25. Kojève, Introduction, 247.

26. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed., J. P. Mayer (New York, 1969), 673, 674.

27. Voegelin, Order and History, III, 193.

28. Kojève, Introduction, 161, note to the 2d edition.

29. Ibid., 159. It will be obvious to the reader that Kojève is the "unknown Superior" of the political intellectuals for the same reason he is the pertinent thinker for any serious discussion of order who is not simply what Voegelin calls a "swindler." He does not sidestep reality but instead attempts to destroy or transform it, for example by suicide.

30. Ha’aretz, 11/13/95.

31. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York, 1992). It is unclear if the author of this popular volume understood he was presenting Kojève's Marxist position. He was seen as a market advocate.

32. The Jerusalem Post, 11/17/95; Ha’aretz, 7/16/95; Yedioth Aharonoth, 7/16/95; Yedioth Aharonoth, 11/16/95; Ha’aretz, 6/16/95; The Jerusalem Post, 9/11/95; Ha’aretz, 11/22/95.

33. The Jerusalem Post, 2/24/95; Jacob Talmon, The Rise of Totalitarian Democracy (Boston, 1952).

34. Voegelin, Order and History, III, 62-63.

35. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self Reliance," in Robert E. Spiller, et al., eds., The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (2 vols.; Cambridge, 1971, 1979), II, 81.

36. Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf (New York, 1925, 1927 [1939]), 417, 487. "The Jew is...nothing but pure egoism."

37. Quoted by Arendt, Origins, 322. Again, Arendt's rejection of a liberal/Marxist use of "ideology" to describe all political thought, mitigates Voegelin's criticism of her as positivistic, and also weakens her defense of not being theoretical in Voegelin's sense: ideology here means gnostic.

38. See David Wurmser, "Coping with Crumbling States: A Western and Israeli Balance of Power Strategy for the Levant," IASPS Research Papers in Strategy, 2 (December 1996).

39. David Levhari, "The Israeli Capital Market: Change and Reform," in Alvin Rabushka and Steve H. Hanke, eds., Toward Growth: A Blueprint for Economic Rebirth in Israel (Jerusalem, 1988), 83.

40. The Israeli state system has pursued a campaign to make this point. For example, in response to Jack Kemp's essay on the subject in The Wall Street Journal (7/10/96), taken from his foreword to an Institute publication, Israel's economic minister to North America responded, saying Israel's growth was now 7.1 percent. The Wall Street Journal, 8/5/96.

41. Rami Khouri, "Racists, Monkeys and Settler States," Jordan Times, 4/20/93, in Mideast Mirror, 3/20/93.

42. The "downhill" tactic gets poignant comment in Book II of The Gallic War. Thinking the barbaric Gauls tamed, Caesar sent Galba into the Alps vastly outnumbered. But an "enormous host" attacked: for three reasons, the second being their downhill advantage. Calculating "not even their first onset could be withstood," they poured forth. But the Romans, warlike, and placing "all hope of safety in courage," made a sudden sortie and defeated the downhill coming hordes. By contrast, the Israelis have turned the peace process into a Galba lure for the Arabs. Thus Israel must not sacrifice peace to terrorists, giving them a veto. A thin argument on anyone's reckoning, perhaps, its importance lies in its being an obversion (see below). It comes to realize the denial of reality on principle, as if the Arabs should not come downhill when lured. In The Gallic War, H. J. Edwards, trans. (Cambridge, [printing] 1986), 143, 145.

43. The Jerusalem Post, 8/25/95.

44. Examples from the press, which did not stress this most salient aspect of the peace process, include: Yedioth Aharonoth, 6/9/95; Ha’aretz, 8/7/95; Yedioth Aharonoth, 8/9/95; Ha’aretz, 8/25/95, 8/28/95.

45. Ha’aretz, 10/25/95.

46. For example, IASPS, Quarterly Report, (Fall 1994), and the present author's commentaries in The Washington Times, 8/7/94; 3/9/95; 10/25/95.

47. Police arrests for "crime of damaging the peace process." Ha’aretz, 11/26/95.

48. The Wall Street Journal Europe., 7/10/96; The Wall Street Journal, 7/11/96.

49. Ha’aretz, 11/18/94.

50. Ha’aretz, 9/22/94.

51. The Jerusalem Post, 2/15/94.

52. The Basic Law is explained below.

53. The Jerusalem Post, 3/1/94.

54. Ibid., 7/30/95.

55. Maariv, 7/26/94.

56. Ibid.

57. Ha’aretz, 7/10/96.

58. Ha’aretz, 2/28/94.

59. Ibid., 8/5/94.

60. Yedioth Aharonoth, 11/10/94, Dole "an opponent of Jews." Gingrich "a conservative demagogue." The views of economics editor Sever Plotzker.

61. Maariv, 7/26/94.

62. Maariv, 11/22/94; Ha’aretz, 11/18/94.

63. Peres, The New Middle East, 98.

64. Ibid.

65. Interview, "Better Neighbors," Newsweek, 1/22/96.

66. "I created the peace process," Shimon Peres, Interview, BBC 9/27/96; "[I]t is the greatest event in the 4,000 years history of the Jewish people." Mr. Peres has made this second remark in various forms since the election of May 1996. For example in a speech on the occasion of Mr. Rabin's death, and in Maariv, 11/4/96.

67. Ha’aretz, 11/l8/94 (italics added).

68. Ibid., 6/16/94.

69. Ibid., 11/15/94.

70. The Jerusalem Post, 6/1/95; Yedioth Aharonoth, 6/23/95; Ha’aretz, 7/4/95, 7/23/95.

71. Jeffrey Gedmin, The Wall Street Journal Europe., 3/28/96.

72. Strauss, "Preface to Spinoza's Critique of Religion," in Liberalism, 230.

73. Maariv, 11/5/95.

74. Strauss, "Preface to Spinoza's Critique of Religion," in Liberalism, 229.

75. Ha’aretz, 11/12/95.

76. Maariv, 11/5/95.

77. Ha’aretz, 11/19/95.

78. Ibid., 11/12/95; Maariv, 11/20/95.

79. Ha’aretz, 3/7/96.

80. Israel's Basic Law, following the suppositions of the Israeli peace process, is conceptually indistinguishable from Ralph Waldo Emerson's idea of law as Whim, developed in his famous essay of 1836 called Self Reliance in which he exposes what he calls "foolish Israelites" for failure to see that man is God. See the present author's, "Emerson's Platonism and the 'terrific Jewish Idea,'" MOSAIC: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, XV (1982): 104.

81. Reported in Ha’aretz, 10/29/96. Compare U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg, as reported in San Jose Mercury News (10/26/96): "The [U.S.] Constitution's text is very skimpy on individual rights [such as housing and health care]." Adding that it "could use...fleshing out," she deplored that "the document instead focuses on preventing government from depriving people of their rights," and that "attempts to add individual rights" to the Constitution would be defeated.

82. Raymond Aron, Clausewitz, Philosopher of War (Englewood Cliffs, 1985), 148.

83. Peres in Yedioth Aharonoth, (4/25/96). Yossi Beilin in, "A lot of needless fuss," The Jerusalem Post, 10/30/96, and said that it had been on CNN the next day.

84. David Rousset, The Other Kingdom (New York, 1947), quoted in Arendt, Origins, 303.

85. The Washington Times, 3/25/96.

86. Arendt, Origins, 471.

87. The Washington Times, 3/25/96 (italics added).

88. A pertinent recent example comes from one of America's most thoughtful journalists, who, writing on these problems, arrives at this conclusion, supposing "there is no objective truth" about political subjects. Robert L. Bartley, "Consensus, the Enemy of News," The Wall Street Journal, 11/27/96

89. Voegelin, The New Science, 168. "In gnosticism the nonrecognition of reality is a matter of principle."

90. Ha’aretz, 5/27/96.

91. Arendt, Origins, 470.

92. Quoted in Arendt, Origins, 339.

93. Joel Greenberg, "Rabin as a Saint of Peace: Secular Israelis, Too, Have a Faith," The New York Times, 11/19/95.

94. Etienne Gilson, "Concerning Christian Philosophy. The Distinctiveness of the Philosophic Order," in Raymond Klibansky and J. J. Paton, eds., Philosophy and History. Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer (New York, 1963), 64.

95. Hannah Arendt, "A Reply," in "The Origins, 80.

96. Voegelin, in "The Origins," 75.

97. Ibid., 73.