The Ashkenazi Revolution

273concerned only with one mission, and who clings, because of this, to aspecific morality that is merely a refined form of group egoism. In thesocial sphere, the representatives of the values of the Labor movement,who fit in with a monastic, or quasi-monastic, civilization, sought to attachthemselves to the goals of the masses that prefer the dimensions andabundance of mass culture over the refinement and spartanism of amonastic culture. The Labor movement sought to create a mixture of Jesusof Nazereth and Avraham Stern. This mixing, which was formed at thevery beginning, put the Labor movement, from an ideological perspective,on a slippery slope, and brought it to actions and goals that are thecomplete opposite of those that it had initially set for itself. Thismovement began as a war against Arab labor and ended up facilitatingArab labor within the Jewish economy. It started, to a large extent, as apacifist movement and ended up as a militaristic one, and so on. Theaverage person who preaches the values of the Labor movement is a manwho promotes the kibbutz but settled in the city, promotes socialism butturned into a petit bourgeois, preached for the integration of exiles, but isterrified when confronted with the chance that his son or daughter mightmarry a non-Ashkenazi. Such a man is a liar, but the blame is not entirelyhis own; it is also the blame of the contradictory marriage of ideologicalvalues and the values and the goals of the masses. The main blame for thisunfortunate situation can be laid upon the ideological upper echelon thathides the ideological contradiction, and leads the masses to false hopes.At the same time that the failure of the ideological upper echelon isbecoming obvious, we should emphasize the victory of the pioneerworkers.This victory is so great that it has left the boundaries of thepioneer-worker activism and yielded ideological fruit. The collectedideology that has been accumulated by the pioneer-workers is a betterstandard for the management of the State of Israel than the ideology of thefollowers of the old values. Pioneer-workers are able, today, to puttogether a better Israeli government than that which was put together by P.Lavon and Professor Rotenstreich. The ideological auther, who defendsLabor values, gradually loses his right to exist, and he turns into a nuisance.