ShareThisAsked to name the forces that led to the state of Israel, almost every Israeli would say Zionism and the Holocaust.
If those same people were asked just a few years ago which Israeli was likely to become prime minister, the name most often given would have been Avraham Burg -- son of a prominent rabbi and founder of the country's National Religious Party, former paratrooper, leading member of the Labor Party, speaker of the Knesset and head of the powerful Jewish Agency.
For more than 20 years, Avrum Burg, as he likes to be known, was a pillar of the Israeli establishment.
However, four years ago Burg turned his back on all that and wrote a powerful book that was an indictment of how Zionism and the Holocaust have been used.
In "The Holocaust is Over; We Must Rise from its Ashes," Burg slams what he calls the "omnipresence of the Shoah," or Holocaust, in Israeli society. He urges his countrymen to move beyond Zionism, going so far as to say that Zionism has become an excuse for racism. The statement is not far removed from the infamous 1975 UN "Zionism is racism" resolution to which Israel, and many other countries strenuously objected, and had rescinded in 1991.
When his book first appeared in Hebrew a year ago, Israeli reaction was fast and furious. Overnight, the man once voted the most popular politician in Israel became one of the country's most reviled political figures. This fall, the book that so outraged Israelis has been published in English.
"I was outraged by the book," says Ari Shavit, a prominent columnist in the Haaretz newspaper, who marched with Burg to protest against the war in Lebanon in 1982. "I saw it as a one-dimensional and un-empathetic attack on the Israeli experience."
With his close cropped hair and a thick Germanic accent, Burg looks and sounds a lot like Arnold Schwarzenegger, a comparison he seems to appreciate. Like the California governor, Mr. Burg, 53, relishes his role as a maverick trying to save others, even when they don't necessarily want to be saved.
Burg says he decided to write his highly critical book in large part because Israel had become aimless. "It's a kingdom without prophecy," he writes. "Where are we headed? No one knows."
He wrote to open the eyes of Israelis to a vision based on trust and optimism, not fear and loathing.
He believed that the Holocaust had paralyzed Israelis. The mantra of "never again" had meant that every possible threat to the country was treated as another potential holocaust.
Opposition Leader Benjamin Netanyahu, in Burg's eyes, plays on people's fears when he likens Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Adolph Hitler and says, "It's 1938 all over again."
"Give me a break, Mr. Netanyahu," Burg says. "Did we have a state in '38? Did we have an omnipotent army in '38? Did we have the entire Western superpower world supporting us in '38? No we did not."
"Because of the Shoah, Israel has become the voice of the dead," he writes in his book, arguing that even military victory cannot overcome the great bereavement.
"A state that lives by the sword and worships its dead is bound to live in a constant state of emergency," he concludes, "because everyone is a Nazi, everyone is an Arab, everyone hates us, the entire world is against us."
As for Zionism, Burg says he sees it as "a kind of scaffolding that was supposed to enable the Jewish people to move from (exile) to sovereignty." In the past 150 years, that mission was accomplished, he says.
"Now it's about time to remove the scaffolding," he said.
(E-mail Patrick Martin at pmartin(at)globeandmail.com)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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