The Likud is dead. What killed it?



The official death of the Likud occurred when Benjamin Netanyahu was elected prime minister in May 1996. Mr. Netanyahu said his government would abide by the Oslo or Israel-PLO Agreement, an agreement born in deception. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon removed any doubt about the death of the Likud ? and of Zionism ? when he appointed the devious Shimon Peres as foreign minister after the February 2001 national election.



And so, the Likud is dead, and no one, including Moshe Feiglin, can resurrect that party. As the sages have said, ?You can?t make a crooked line straight.?



But why did the Likud fail? Mr. Feiglin would have us believe that the Likud has not been true to its Zionist principles. But the Likud was never a truly Zionist party.



What indeed is a ?Zionist?? Consider. The Likud won 38 seats in the January 2003 Knesset election. Most of their occupants regard themselves as ?political? Zionists; the rest boast of being ?cultural? Zionists. Therein is the failure of the Likud. Let us try to understand this.



It never entered the minds of political Zionists that the return of the Jews to the Land of Israel was to culminate in the construction of the Third Temple and the restoration of Jewish law. The founders of political Zionism, such as Herzl and Pinsker, started from the failure of liberalism to solve the Jewish problem, but continued to see the solution in liberal terms, as a merely human problem. As Leo Strauss has written:



?The terrible fate of the Jews was in no sense to be understood any longer as connected with divine punishment for the sins of our fathers or with the providential mission of the chosen people and hence to be borne with the meek fortitude of martyrs. It was to be understood in merely human terms: as constituting a purely political problem, which as such cannot be solved by appealing to the justice or generosity of the nations.... Accordingly, political Zionism was concerned primarily with nothing but the cleansing of the Jews from millennial degradation or with the recovery of Jewish dignity, honor or pride. The failure of the liberal solution meant that Jews could not regain their honor by assimilating themselves as individuals to the nations among which they lived or becoming citizens like all the other citizens of the liberal states: the liberal solution brought at best legal equality, but not social equality; as a demand of reason it had no effect on the feelings of the non-Jews.... Only through securing the honor of the Jewish nation could the individual Jew's honor be secured. The true solution of the Jewish problem requires that the Jews become "like all the nations," (I Sam. 8:20) that the Jewish nation assimilate itself to the nations of the world or that it establish a modern, liberal, secular... state.?



The political elite that led this movement succeeded in establishing a secular state, but they failed to solve the Jewish problem or restore the honor of the Jewish people. Political Zionism could not solve the Jewish problem because of the narrowness of its original conception. This was understood by cultural Zionism, which saw that political Zionism lacks historical and cultural perspective. The community of descent "must also be a community of the mind, of the national mind; the Jewish state will be an empty shell without a Jewish culture, which has its roots in the Jewish heritage." But as Strauss points out:



?One could not have taken this step unless one had previously interpreted the Jewish heritage itself as a culture, that is, as a product of a national mind, of the national genius. Yet the foundation, the authoritative layer, of the Jewish heritage presents itself, not as the product of the human mind, but as a divine gift, as divine revelation. Did not one completely distort the meaning of the heritage to which one claimed to be loyal by interpreting it as a culture like any other high culture? Cultural Zionism believed to have found a safe middle ground between politics (power politics) and divine revelation... but it lacked the sternness of the two extremes. When cultural Zionism understands itself, it turns into religious Zionism.?



The Likud never took an honest step toward religious Zionism, indeed, never understood what Zionism is all about.



The term ?Zionism? is obviously derived from ?Zion?, one of the most sacred words in the dictionary of authentic Judaism. Zion is the dwelling place of God's glory. It is the Sanctuary of the Torah, the Holy City that surrounds it, and the Holy Land, of which Jerusalem is the eternal capital. From Zion, from Jerusalem, the word of God ? the Truth ? shall come forth.



Viewed in this light, the Likud has been a paltry thing indeed ? ever distancing itself from the truth, concealing the oligarchic character of the state as well as the religious character of the Arab-Israel conflict. Not that the National Union coalition and National Religious Party, whose right-wing labels are laughable, have any claim to veracity or authenticity. Do they not collaborate with Ariel Sharon and thereby sustain his devious war against savages, which has claimed the lives of some 800 Jews? Not simply bombs and bullets, but lies have killed those Jews. It is those lies ? lies that have been broadcast from the City of Truth ? it is those lies, I say, that killed the Likud.