Written for the Danish paperback edition 2001 and the French Denoël edition 2001.
Events and Ideas. A Late Epilogue to Det förlorade landet, The Lost land.

THIS BOOK WAS written between 1992 and 1996. While at work I was frequently asked whether the rapid course of events in Israel during these years would not drastically change the significance of whatever I had to say. And whether I should not hurry up to catch the publicity boost from the next mind-boggling photo-op on the White House lawn.
Each year indeed seemed to provide yet another historic turnabout, another flip of the political map, another perspective of war and peace, another reason to publish quickly. When I set out to write the first chapter, Itzhak Shamir and his hard-nosed right-wing government were still in power, direct Israeli contacts with representatives of the PLO were still illegal and Yasser Arafat was still considered a terrorist.
Then things changed faster than most people could grasp. I remember sitting in a cramped room in the inconspicuous headquarters of the Israeli Labor Party on Yarkon Street in Tel Aviv on June 24, 1992 witnessing the newly elected prime minister Itzhak Rabin meet the Israeli press, with no one even imagining (perhaps not even the dry and laconic Rabin himself) that he soon would shake hands with Yasser Arafat. At the very moment he actually did, on September 13 1993, I was aboard a plane to Tel Aviv, still not knowing whether he would or not (I had bet he wouldn’t). Not even sure they were going to sign the Oslo Agreement.
” Did they sign?” I asked the girl at the car rental desk at Ben Gurion Airport. ”They shook hands”, she answered.
Then again, another unimaginable twist of history, the murder of the Prime Minister. And again, the hard-to-imagine victory of Benjamin Netanyahu. And then again, after having finished the book, the hard-to-imagine victory of Ehud Barak in the Israeli elections of 1999. And again, the even harder-to-imagine triumph of Ariel Sharon, the nemesis of the Lebanon War, in February 2001. An again, the traumatic and violent breakdown of the Oslo peace process and the return to the vicious cycle of occupation, domination and terror.
It was perhaps hard to imagine a book on Israel sailing through such turbulent waters without losing its course or running aground altogether. Or without at least running the risk of becoming obsolete. Unless of course it was a book trying to steer beneath the surface of events, wishing to explore the ideological depths of history rather than attempting to navigate its treacherous reefs. Which was the book I had set out to write.
So my answer to people who worried about the timing of my book, was that it would be just as timely or untimely whenever it was published. This was perhaps an overly audacious response, born out of the simple fact that no political events could have made me write this book any faster. But also a response that I believe was in accordance with what I actually was trying to achieve.
Hence I don’t find that subsequent events would have made me write a very different book. It is possibly true that the optimism brought about by the Oslo Accords and the prospect of a final Israeli-Palestinian settlement made me write it in a higher spirit than if I had been writing in the dark era of Netanyahu, not to mention the era of Ariel Sharon. It is also true that the last chapter of the book dwells in some detail on the contrasting visions of the two contenders for power in the 1996 elections. But as the moods of the conflict continue to swing, the same contrasting visions continue to clash.

YET, A FEW WORDS might perhaps be added when the book now appears in a Danish paperback edition. The relationship between human ideas and human actions is often hard to understand, sometimes even hard to perceive. The quest for rational models explaining the link between the one and the other has certainly not come to an end, but neither has the complexity of human behavior. Few people predicted the re-emergence of large-scale ethnic violence in Europe and the rejuvenation of xenophobic nationalism. Few people predicted the demise of secular Zionism and the rise of religious Messianism as a powerful factor in Israeli politics. In both cases it has become evident that human ideas (eventually hardening into ideologies), whether born out of genuine values or fabricated propaganda, may wield considerable power over human actions. Although this book emphasizes a strong messianic continuity in the ideas that shaped the modern state of Israel, it is evident that this messianic element is evolving and changing over time. Perhaps more now than before.
The Israeli nation, or the major part of it, is rapidly integrating into a world where technology and economy create an ever-greater interdependency between people and societies. It is also a world that in one way or the other is characterized by an increasing ethnic and cultural pluralism. The ideal of national-ethnic separation as a response to ethnic-national conflict is losing its moral and political clout. The armed conflicts of the late 1990’s have amply demonstrated the brutal face of exclusionary nationalism and the moral imperative to prevent the re-division of societies along ethnic lines. In Kosovo the international community (or a substantial part of it) actually waged a moral war in defense of the multiethnic society as an ideal. The European Union is in fact rapidly becoming such a society, further weakening the traditional links between culture, ethnicity and nation-state. In the United States, the multi-ethnic society par preference, the apparent weakening of a common national credo has widened the scope for ethnic strife, but also for new forms of pluralism. The multitude of modern human existence no longer allows for societies based on exclusionary visions of ethnic or cultural homogeneity. No decent or truly democratic society can pit the will of the majority against the basic rights of a minority, or the power of the state against the basic rights of the individual. Democracy is becoming a precarious balancing act between increasingly transnational principles of justice and the political desires of culturally embedded national opinions. In the homogenizing nation-state, justice and majority rule could for some time be perceived as one and the same. In the pluralizing societies of our times, they no longer can. Particular cultural, religious or ethnic demands must eventually conform with and connect to larger systems of justice. The options for radical separatist or nationalist venues are shrinking.
Israel has so far been a strongly homogenizing nation-state, not only trying hard to create and organize a common national identity, but also attempting to fuse it with the state itself. It has thus been a society with strong inclusionary mechanisms, wishing to make one people out of many, and at the same time a society with strong exclusionary mechanisms, wishing to keep out or keep down those who did not fit into the Zionist narrative of a Jewish nation. The definitions of whom belonged and who did not, permeated the institutions of the state and sustained a basic division between its Jewish and non-Jewish citizens.

IN THIS REGARD very little has changed. Israel still remains a state that explicitly adheres to the ideal of an ethnically or culturally or religiously defined state (depending how you choose to define ”Jewish”) and more or less openly shuns the ideal of ethnic, cultural and religious pluralism. Furthermore, it is a state that continues to define itself as the national home of millions of people who are not its citizens, while reducing to the status of ”national minority” millions of people who are both its citizens and its residents (present or involuntarily absent). Or as the Iraqi-born Israeli scholar Nissim Rejwan puts it in a perceptive study on ”Israel’s place in the Middle East”: ”[A]ny ethnically designated state must perforce identify itself with those of its citizens who have the same ethnic designation.” This particular ethnic designation thus perforce also becomes a nationality, to which a non-Jewish outsider can aspire only by converting to the Jewish religion, but to which any person born to a Jewish mother automatically belongs.. This fuzzy merger of nationality, ethnicity and religion is still at the heart of the Jewish State and effectively prevents it from becoming a state for all its citizens. It also prevents it from tackling the mounting challenge of its own inherent ethnic, religious and cultural pluralism.
The idea that the State of Israel embodies a worldwide Jewish nationality is also affecting a large number of non-Israeli Jews who might have another idea about who they are. From being citizens and nationals of France or Sweden or the United States, they are redefined as Jewish ”nationals” and potential citizens of the Jewish State. Comparisons between Israel-Palestine and other contemporary regions of ethnic and national complexity, concluding that Israel must conform to the same ideals of non-ethnic nationhood that the Western democracies have imposed on Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo, are invalidated with reference to the specific history of the Jewish people and the circumstances under which the state was created and still lives. Moral arguments for the disconnection of ethnicity from nationhood that seem justified in other parts of the world somehow lose their moral justification in the Israeli context. The image of an Israeli-Jewish nation permanently besieged by anti-Semitic enemies from the outside and fifth columns from the inside has served as an effective moral counterweight and as a strong ethnic adhesive.
This has also had the effect of blurring the distinction between the arguably illegitimate negation of the State of Israel as such, irrespective of its fundamental laws and principles, and a legitimate criticism of these very principles. The idea to uncouple the Israeli State from its ”Jewishness”, to separate ethnicity from nationality, is still considered a de facto negation of the State as such. Not only is a party that in such a way proposes to ”de-Zionize” the state by peaceful legal means banned from Israel’s parliamentary elections, but also the speaker of the Knesset may still block any bill with such an intention.
Still, current events are relentlessly hammering away at the idea that ethnicity can and should be the foundation of nationality. Or that a state can and should be defined by other principles (or serve other purposes) than those set forth by its own citizens. Not even the Jewish-Israeli case, with its undoubtedly specific characteristics, can in the long run withstand the ideological impact of global interdependence and individualized human rights. The former is rapidly changing Israel from a self-contained and inwardly looking society to an outward-looking, buoyant and competitive player on the global economic scene. The latter is effectively undermining the old Zionist institutions of collective identity and creating new room in Israeli society to a multitude of cultural and individual expressions. The irreconcilable ”pluralism” once associated with the Jewish-Arab divide is now supplemented by a growing pluralism within Israeli-Jewish society itself. The Jewish-Israeli recognition and the prospective creation of a Palestinian state, and thus of a distinct Palestinian nationality, might eventually lead to a reevaluation and redefinition of Israeli plurality itself. The idea of a Jewish State expressing a particular Jewish nationality is thus not only challenged by its non-Jewish citizens but also by diverging and at times fiercely antagonistic expressions of Jewish-Israeli identity.
The most decisive event in this development is undoubtedly the mental and physical demilitarization of the border between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. Whatever the political merits and faults of the Oslo peace process, it has irreversibly changed the way in which Israel must relate to its non-Jewish population. There is no longer an indefinite interregnum (awaiting Peace and Normality) to justify the exclusion of Israel’s Arabs from the fullest participation in the affairs of the State. There is also no longer any justification for waiting to confer Israeli nationality on the ”Palestinian” Arabs who choose to be citizens of Israel rather than of a future Palestine. The demand for a democratic State based on individual, non-ethnic, citizenship rather than on a preordained nationality will become ever more intense as the Arabs of Israel face a clear choice of national allegiance. This will subsequently highlight the long-term impossibility of a ”clean” solution to the conflicts of ethnic and cultural pluralism in the region. No matter how you partition the tiny territory between the Sea and the Jordan River, there will be ”wrong” peoples on both sides of the border. Israel will continue to house a very large and fast growing Arab minority, not to mention a swelling number of non-Jewish immigrants and ”guest-workers”. A future Palestine might have to contend with a number of Jewish settlements that will not agree to be dismantled. The enlarged territory of Jerusalem is in fact a ”labyrinth of ambiguity”, to borrow an apt phrase from the Israeli daily Ha’aretz (Jan 12, 2000). When the municipal authorities belatedly discovered that the tiny Arab village of Birauna actually belonged to the city and set out to inspect their ”new” subjects, they discovered that the only way to get to Birauna was to go via Beit Jalla, which is under exclusive Palestinian jurisdiction. In the refugee camp of Kalandia the municipal border actually crosses right through the camp, ”so a camp school on one side of the road is actually located in Israel. Should a Palestinian walk his or her child to school, it means crossing borders.” It is not hard to imagine hundreds of similar ”border” problems in any future scenario of ethnic-national separation, and the ensuing temptation to ”straighten out” existing patterns of ethnic and national entanglement.
This goes to show that any long-term solution of the Jewish-Arab conflict within the combined territories of Israel and Palestine (based on respect for individual human rights) must be founded on the acceptance of ethnic and national plurality. The historical and psychological need for territorial separation cannot conceal the fact that such a separation can only be temporary, symbolic and illusory. As Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs cannot (and will not) be territorially separated within Israel proper, neither can they effectively be so within the larger area of Israel-Palestine. The future of both states thus depends on their ability to overcome ethnically based institutions and reinvent themselves as truly pluralistic societies with open and transparent borders. It is also hard to imagine a future Israel-Palestine not developing common institutions and close cooperation in a number of political and economic areas.

HISTORY IS certainly not a rational process nor is it a progressive march towards a harmonious consummation. Perhaps is it not a process at all. Events and ideas combine and recombine in ever new and unpredictable patterns of individual and collective action. In unstable political settings like the Middle East, the potential for chaotic developments is high. Deep-rooted eschatological ideas and schemes of action remain powerful agents in this designated territory of messianic redemption. Strong national-religious myths and symbols can still trigger the most ”irrational” events. The short and erratic rule of Ehud Barak, the breakdown of the Oslo process and the electoral landslide of Ariel Sharon may serve as a case in point.
These events have seemingly given new credence to the old idea that Israel can “unilaterally” separate itself from its Palestinian neighbors, secure for itself the “safe” borders it needs, build for itself an impenetrable fence of security, and go it alone. This was in fact the ultimate vision of Ehud Barak, which in fact is very similar to the vision of Ariel Sharon, which in fact is the vision of an Israeli State with as many Jews as possible – and as few Palestinians.
It is true that Ehud Barak seemed more prepared than Ariel Sharon to exchange land for “an end to the conflict”, but it is also true that he endeavored to expand and strengthen the Jewish settlements on occupied land, in order to make the “Jewish” territory larger.
It is true that Ehud Barak seemed more prepared to accept a Palestinian mini-State (including certain quarters of Jerusalem), but it is also true that never envisaged the Palestinian State as an equal partner in the region, or the border between them as open and transparent. He entertained in fact far-reaching plans to build an advanced high-tech fence along the future borderline in order to separate effectively the two populations from each other.
It is true that Ehud Barak strove for an Israel that would be both Jewish and democratic, but it is also true that he did not utter a word of regret when Israeli police in September 2000 shot and killed thirteen of his own (non-Jewish) co-citizens.
It is namely also true that in Ehud Barak’s vision of Israel the Palestinians remain a problem, not necessarily because they are a threat to State’s security, but because they are a threat to its “Jewishness”. It is for this reason also true that Ehud Barak did not lift a finger to deal with what the former Israeli chief of the security police, Ami Ayalon, has characterized as “Jewish democracy with apartheid”.
The historical difference between the visions of Barak and Sharon has thus largely been about the means and not about the goal. Barak wanted to rule over as few Palestinians as possible by separating the Jewish society from a future Palestinian. Separation was more important to him than continued occupation. The Jews of Israel would no longer be burdened with the necessity to suppress another people, having to worry about its political ambitions and birth rates, having to suffer from the conscientious conflict between democracy and Jewishness.
In the world of Ariel Sharon Jewish territory is more important than democracy, colonization more important than separation. In the extreme version of Sharon’s ideology, “transfer” of the Palestinian population is still an option, but in that ideological mainstream to which Sharon now purports to belong, continued Jewish-Israeli rule over the Palestinian population is a necessary and sufficient condition for the survival of the Jewish state.
In spite the rhetorical difference between the two strategies, they nevertheless come together in the vision of an Israel where the Palestinians no longer constitute a “problem”, whether by as far as possible separating from them, or by as much as necessary suppressing them.
The latter strategy has since long come to road’s end, whether Ariel Sharon will realize it or not. Continued occupation is not only politically impossible but also a militarily.
Perhaps less evident is the fact that also Barak’s strategy has collapsed. The vision of a final separation from the Palestinians, of a “Jewish” democracy without apartheid, finally came to an end with the killing of thirteen Arab-Israeli citizens by the Israeli police. And by the resounding official silence that followed.

NEVERTHELESS, certain events irreversibly change the prospects for certain ideas. The idea that Israel must go it alone, that it must remain a fortress among eternal enemies is rapidly losing its force and credibility. The prospect of a permanent peace settlement with the Arab world, the ongoing ”Orientalization” of the Israeli polity itself, the recognition of a Palestinian nation and its claims to parts of the ”promised land”, have all clearly limited the political latitude for ethnically self-contained ideas and actions – on both sides. The religious-nationalist Zionist zeal of the 80’s and the early 90’s is waning in the face of yet another territorial-ideological border closing. So the idea of a Jewish State is somehow exempted from the inherent conflict between an ethnically defined society (a ”Jewish” State) and the political reality of ethnic pluralism. The internal pressure for an Israeli civic order based on individual rights rather than on collective identity is mounting, and I see no reason that it will abate anytime soon. Another manifestation of this process is the ongoing academic ”post-Zionist” reevaluation of Israel’s political and ideological past, a group of ”new historians” (as well as other academics and intellectuals) hammering away at the tenets of Zionist founding mythology.
Israel is thus facing the continuous weakening of its ideological foundations and the growing need to reformulate basic tenets of its polity. Can the vision of a ”Jewish” State be reconciled with the vision of a non-ethnic Israeli nationality? Can the ”artificial and baseless opposition between Arab and Jewish ‘nationalities’” (being propagated from both sides) give way to the true variety of the Middle Eastern scene? No matter how we delineate its nations, ”the Middle East seems destined to continue to accommodate a rich mosaic of cultures, languages and religious groups: Syrians, Iraqis, Palestinians and Israelis; Arabs, Turks, Persians, Kurds and Armenians; Muslims, Jews, Christians and Druse.” As former Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban remarked long ago, ”the destiny of this region lies in a pluralistic interaction of Asia, Europe, Africa; of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.” And as Nissim Rejwan logically concludes: ”In a pluralistic Middle East – where Asia, Europe and Africa, Judaism, Christianity and Islam interact freely – the Israelis too, will be called upon to cease viewing their country in exclusively Jewish terms.”
The Oslo process started in the right end, by the mutual recognition of the two peoples of the region, but ended in the unrealistic and destructive concept of their ultimate separation from each other. Notwithstanding the physical impossibility to separate two peoples, who are so deeply intertwined in each other’s lives and territories, the dream of Jewish democracy without apartheid can never be achieved by means of demographic dominance. The insistence on demographic dominance will only produce “Jewish democracy with apartheid”. The demographic trends are in this respect unequivocal. Already within five years the Palestinians will constitute the majority population with the combined region of Israel-Palestine. Within Israel proper (the prewar borders of 1967) their share of the population will grow from 18 to 25 percent by the year 2020. By the year 2050 the Jewish majority of Israel proper will have been reduced to a narrow 60 percent.
The time has thus arrived for new visions of how the long-term existence of an independent Jewish polity within the region of Israel-Palestine shall be secured and developed. These must be visions built on the true challenge of transnational partnership and power sharing, not on the false dream of separation and dominance.
Israel’s most crucial choices are still ahead.

READERS OF THIS BOOK have persistently put two questions to me. The first is solely a result of my neglect to answer it in the book itself, since I didn’t think it was important. Why did I leave Israel in 1964? Well, I left because my mother decided to go back to Sweden. To a single mother with two children (I was not yet sixteen at the time) and a traumatic life experience to bear, life in Israel proved considerably tougher than life in Sweden. There was no ideological drama then, only the trivial impact of day-to-day hardship – or perhaps the unpredictable power of events over ideas.
The second question concerns the title of the book, ”The Lost land”. Why would I call a book on Israel such a thing? Did I mean that the State of Israel was about to disappear? Did I perhaps even wish that to happen?
To my Swedish readers the choice of title appeared a bit more ingenious than to my foreign readers, since the wordplay inherent in the Swedish title gets lost in every translation. ”The Lost Land”, Det förlorade landet, is by only one letter distinguished from The Promised Land, Det förlovade landet. This juxtaposition lent to the original title an ambiguity that was very much intended. The idea of the Promised Land as the land of Jewish redemption (secular or religious) is indeed lost to me, and this book does hopefully provide the clues to my reasoning on this point. This does not mean that I regard Israel as a lost nation. On the contrary I find it an increasingly pluralistic, vibrant and exciting society with the capacity to greatly contribute to the spiritual and cultural wealth of mankind. It is a society with fascinating options and perspectives. It is a society that indeed is facing some tough choices, but it is also a society that to a large extent has these choices in its own hands. It can choose to hold on to the old promise of national-ethnic redemption in a world that increasingly must learn to accommodate ethnic and cultural pluralism. Or it can choose to replace the old promise with a new one, far more adapted to the human multiplicity of Israel itself, and of the region as a whole.
A land that promises a democratic and decent order of ethnic, religious and cultural pluralism is perhaps as utopian as the land promised so far, but to me a far more appealing one. And by no means a Land lost.

Stockholm in February, 2001