In the summer of 1994, the Israeli daily Ha'aretz published a lengthy
polemic by Aharon Meged entitled "The Israeli Urge to Suicide," in which
the well-known novelist--a thoroughly acceptable and otherwise noncon-
troversial member of the small clique that constitutes Israel's cultural estab-
lishment--accused the nation's intellectual leadership, almost to a man, of
conspiring to destroy the moral and historical basis for the Jewish state's ex-
istence, and with it the Jewish state itself.
"For two or three decades now," Meged wrote,

a few hundred of our "society's best," men of the pen and of the spirit--aca-
demics, authors, and journalists, and to these one must add artists and pho-
tographers and actors as well--have been working determinedly and without
respite to preach and prove that our cause is not just: Not only that it has
been unjust since the Six Day War [in 1967] and the "occupation," which is
supposed to be unjust by its very nature; and not only since the founding of
the state in 1948, a birth which was itself "conceived in sin" . . . --but since
the beginnings of Zionist settlement at the end of the last century.

Like overt anti-Zionists of the past, Israel's intellectuals had long ago
abandoned the view that Zionism, while engendering rare acts of injustice,

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