Writing in these pages last week, Emmanuel Navon dissected a lengthy lament by Israeli intellectuals that appeared in Haaretz earlier this month, in which they mourned “the decline in the intellectual’s public value” and sought to explain it. Some of their explanations were simply nonsensical: Far from needing to conform lest a “vengeful” public “hit him in the pocket,” for instance, the average tenured Israeli academic enjoys far more financial security than many great intellectuals of previous centuries. Others, like the claim that television’s sound-bite culture has reduced public interest in sustained intellectual argument, have some validity, but as Navon noted, these don’t explain why intellectuals in other countries (he cited France’s Bernard-Henri Levy as an example) do still seem to command public attention.
Navon correctly identified one important factor that Haaretz‘s interviewees studiously ignored: their disregard of reality. As he noted, mantras like “the occupation is the source of all evil” and “the advent of peace depends on Israel alone” might have seemed daring and intriguing two decades ago, but few Israelis find them even remotely persuasive now, after the Palestinians have rejected three separate offers of a state in virtually all the territories; after Israel’s serial withdrawals – from large parts of West Bank in 1994-95, from Lebanon in 2000 and from Gaza in 2005 – produced not peace, but, respectively, the second intifada, the Second Lebanon War and years of rocket fire on southern Israel; and after even the most “moderate” Palestinians have repeatedly refused to recognize the Jewish state or give up their dream of destroying it demographically via a mass influx of Palestinian refugees.
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