Memoir recollection of 1967 Tel Aviv culture and personal traits

Chapter Seven If you’d visited Tel Aviv in July 1967, you would have sensed a new spirit of confidence, not cockiness exactly, but a sort of spring in the collective step. This was not just due to the Six-Day War. It was because the city, if not yet the rest of the country, had shed the economic austerity of Israel’s first two decades and was beginning to experience at least some of the consumer comforts which Western Europe, or America, took for granted. But we were still a decade away from the first shopping malls, or the upscale cafés and restaurants which nowadays give places like Dizengoff Street, a few blocks back from the seafront, the feel of London or Paris on a summer’s day. Television had been introduced only a year before the war. Color TV was still nearly a decade away. I can’t say I was surprised to learn, when the archives were opened a few years ago, that a committee of moral arbiters in our Ministry of Education vetoed plans for the Beatles to perform in the city. “No intrinsic artistic value,” they pronounced. “And their concerts provoke mass hysteria.” Even in Tel Aviv, and certainly the rest of Israel, a kind of cultural austerity still prevailed, an emphasis on modesty and self-restraint. It was a legacy of 1948, a reflection of the years of shared sacrifice, physical labor, and the life- and-death struggles which I, like most Israelis at the time, had experienced within our own lifetimes. That may help explain why I can remember no one remarking on an aspect of my character which, once I rose to public prominence, would attract attention, frequent comment, and sometimes criticism as well: the fact that I seemed so se/f-contained, reluctant to engage emotionally with people beyond a circle of close friends or confidants. My lack of smalltalk, and the kind of gladhanding and schmoozing that are the currency of political life. At the time of the 1967 war, I was not yet a public figure. Yet to the extent those around me would have taken note — family, university classmates, sayeret comrades, or officers in the Airya — my slight emotional aloofness, my focus on simply getting things done, and the way I internalized setbacks, even tragedies like the death of Nechemia Cohen, was not exceptional. It was, in many ways, simply Israeli. Yet as Israel, Israeli society and my place in them changed, it would be suggested to me more than once — not always kindly, when it was from critics or rivals — that I had a “touch of Aspbergers” in me, a reference to those on the more benign reaches of the autism spectrum with a special facility for math, 98 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011569