Ze'ev Chafets

Ten years ago, when The Jerusalem Report first opened its doors, Israel's ideological battlefield was the West Bank and Gaza. In an early edition of the magazine, I wrote an article calling for an end to the occupation and the establishment of a Palestinian state. At the time this notion was so controversial that one of my best friends, the late Eliahu Ben-Elissar, broke relations with me over it. By the end of the decade Eli was ambassador to France, representing a government committed to Palestinian statehood in all of what he liked to call Judea and Samaria. (I don't know what he made of this irony; he never spoke to me again.)

Another friend I lost was Natan Sharansky, who began (and ended) his journalistic career as an editor at The Report. When we were colleagues, I liked and admired Natan for his humor, humility, intelligence and integrity, and when he entered politics, in 1996, I endorsed his party, Yisrael ba-Aliya, in my column.

It was an endorsement I came to regret. Natan turned out to suffer from an excess of Yiddishkeit that made him vulnerable to the fake pieties of the Torahcrats. He ran for office convinced that he could find a middle ground, but there is no DMZ in the war over Israel's future. Somehow he blundered into the camp of the jingoists and radical rabbis, leading several hundred thousand Russians with him. When I took exception to this political malpractice, he took it personally. In any event, he no longer speaks to me either.

Naturally I lament the loss of good friends, but it goes with the job. More important is the fact that Sharansky, like Ben-Elissar, is on the wrong side of history. After a decade of getting pushed around by cynical orthodox pols, main-stream Israelis (including the majority of Russians) have had enough - a fact reflected in the public's overwhelming support for Ehud Barak' s "civic revolution."

Some pundits doubt the prime minister's commitment to his own secular-democratic agenda, dismissing it as merely a means to pressure Shas and the National Religious Party to rejoin the ruling coalition. Even if that's true, it hardly matters. Barak has broken the spell of the rabbis by calling for an open, egalitarian society, a modern market economy, peaceful borders and constitutional democracy. The great majority of the public (including Sharansky's Russians) long for this kind of country and, now that the battle cry has been sounded, they will punish any secular politician who tries to stand in the way of progress. This is a war that, appearances to the contrary, the good guys are going to win.

So I remain what I was 10 years ago, an optimist. In fact, I'm willing to bet a month's salary (not a daunting sum, I admit) that by The Report's 20th anniversary, Israel will be a richer, safer and freer country than it is today. I hope to be around to say, "I told you so." That is, if anyone's still speaking to me.