The fight to clean up the Israel Prize and restore fairness to the judging committee didn't end with the announcement from the state attorney. We're still in the middle of it, and of the hypocrisy. Don't believe the cries of those who stifled good and deserving artists and intellectuals, and for years failed to honor them with prizes or lecterns in the liberal arts or social sciences, just because they belonged to a rival political camp. And always, always, the political group that was cruelly excluded, sometimes underhandedly and sometimes publicly, was the conservative Right. It's not by chance that our universities look appallingly homogenous, and it's not by chance that the cultural world does, too. The judging committees were one way (among several) to preserve the hegemony of the Left's atrophying elite. Did you think that Ariel Hirschfeld was doing any judging on these committees? Not at all -- he served as a doorkeeper, looking out for his own people. This is how they let the cultural world know that anyone who wanted respect would have to honor and identify with the "correct" opinions. Hirschfeld openly ruled out artists on political grounds, while many others did so more deviously. They knew how to use aesthetic pretexts to camouflage their choices. This is why the protest over the politicization of the Israel Prize must continue. Hirschfeld must not be reinstated as a judge; his presence will overshadow the prize's prestige. Look, who is defending the Hirschfelds? Author Amos Oz, the sad-faced spiritual leader. Oz did not protest object to Hirschfeld's disqualification of Hava Pinhas-Cohen, whose importance to Hebrew poetry is unquestionable, because of the crime of her "political opinions." Why should he? This group gave Oz himself his own fame. He might despise his great uncle, Professor Joseph Klausner, but not Hirschfeld, who amazingly enough sat in Klausner's chair in the Literature Department at the Hebrew University. I've asked more than a few professors how Hirschfeld earned his professorship, and they didn't know how to answer. Look into the promotion committees at the universities; they very often behave just like the prize committees. So Amos Oz doesnt want balance on the committees. He feeds off them, and not only because of the quality of his work. Here, I'm laying it out on the table: Some of Oz's work is very mediocre, but the great teacher's public relations are great. According to him, 70 percent of the people in Israel read Israel Hayom, but don't read literature, and therefore aren't worthy of representation on those committees. Read it closely, you bunch of ignoramuses: We are not deserving of representation. Who are we to ask for balance in academia, in prizes, in the media? This is how those committees worked, according to Oz's script. This is how Marx and Engels thought generations ago when they tried to rope writers and artists into a struggle against what they called "the false consciousness." We should depend on Oz and Hirschfeld and David Grossman; they will decide who is worthy of national respect and who deserves to be denounced and excluded. The murky puddle Oz has dropped most of the public in joins his earlier call for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to betray the country. Come on, he called, join the great traitors who changed history, and betray your values and your belief to fulfill the horrific vision of the Left. It's not by chance that the great teacher of the Left connected making peace with treason. The biggest betrayal is the blindness of a person like Oz and the followers who drift after him, whose eyes are blinded to the changed geopolitical reality and the sight of the many failed attempts that have ended in blood, fire, and pillars of smoke on the altar of peace plans. But we've heard something else here: the condescension of the crowd. This consistent condescension is mistakenly classed as elitism. Not at all. This condescension is designed to cement the hegemony of that same societal sector that Oz represents, and determine for all of what is culture, what is truth, and what is wisdom. "The intelligentsia thinks it can rise above the masses. ... This is a fundamental error, an error out of ignorance to the healthy side of natural awareness and senses. ... In their fundamental moral sense [the] masses [are] superior to the elite," wrote Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook. In contrast to this great philosopher, Amos Oz has chosen to gaze out the window like King Saul's daughter Michal and scorn the crowd. King David's reply echoes even today -- it's a great honor to be among that 70 percent: "And I will be yet more vile than this, and will be base in mine own sight: but of the handmaids of whom thou hast spoken, of them shall I be had in honor" (2 Samuel 6:22).
