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Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life
Israel and the Future of Zionism
Is the 20th century revolution of Jewish life an astounding success or a colossal failure?
Some of the nation's leading journalists gathered in Key West, Fla., in December 2006 for the Pew Forum's biannual Faith Angle Conference on religion, politics and public life. Peter Berkowitz, a Hoover Institution fellow, and Ari Shavit, a columnist for the Israeli paper Ha'aretz, offered a brief history of Zionism and argued for the continuing importance of the Zionist movement. They discussed the internal and external challenges facing Israel today, including Iran's potential nuclear capabilities, the rise of "post-Zionist" ideology in Israel, the failure of Israeli party politics, and leftist, European hostility to Israel. The speakers and journalists also touched on Jewish attitudes toward Christian Zionism.
Speakers:
Peter Berkowitz, Associate Professor of Law, George Mason University School of Law; the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
Ari Shavit, Columnist, Ha'aretz
Moderator:
Michael Cromartie, Vice President, Ethics & Public Policy Center; Senior Advisor, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life
In the following excerpt ellipses have been omitted to facilitate reading.
PETER BERKOWITZ: Our assigned topic is Israel and Zionism's future. Like other such movements, Zionism's future can't be discussed reliably without understanding something of its present and past. Today I'm going to bring into focus certain features of Zionism's present and past, particularly the ideas that animated it.
I want to begin with three controversies in the present, or better still, three appeals to a persistent, ugly prejudice about Zionism's animating ideas.
On March 23, 2006, the London Review of Books published "The Israel Lobby" by University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer and Harvard University political scientist Stephen Walt. A longer, scholarly version with more than 200 footnotes has been posted as a working paper on the website of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Mearsheimer and Walt's paper immediately provoked both enthusiasm and outrage, but it did not attract attention by advancing the unexceptionable argument that the Israel lobby in America is real and powerful. Rather, Mearsheimer and Walt put forward the incendiary claim that the past 30 years or so of American foreign policy in the Middle East, particularly the decision to invade Iraq in 2003, had been decisively determined by the Israel lobby. American foreign policy today, they argue, is no longer a function of a realistic assessment of American strategic interests – military, diplomatic, economic – because it's been hijacked by Israel and its supporters in the U.S. Moreover, argue Mearsheimer and Walt, the Israel lobby has led American foreign policy astray not innocently but under false pretenses. The Israel lobby insists Israel has a moral claim on the U.S.: that the U.S. ought to give high priority to Israel's interest because, among other reasons, Israel is a liberal democracy in a sea of authoritarian governments. But, maintained Mearsheimer and Walt, Israel on moral grounds is undeserving of U.S. support. Israel, in their judgment, is guilty of betraying the essential principles of liberal democracy. I quote here:
"Some aspects of Israeli democracy are at odds with core American values. Unlike the U.S., where people are supposed to enjoy equal rights irrespective of race, religion or ethnicity, Israel was explicitly founded as a Jewish state, and citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship. Given this, it is not surprising its 1.3 million Arabs are treated as second-class citizens or that the recent Israeli government commission found that Israel behaves in a "neglectful and discriminatory manner" towards them. Its democratic status is also undermined by its refusal to grant the Palestinians a viable state of their own or full political rights."
This paragraph from Mearsheimer and Walt, whose purpose is to deny or cast into doubt Israel's liberal and democratic credentials and call into question the vitality of Zionism, is a tissue of lies and malicious distortions.
First, Israel is not founded on the principle of blood kinship. To be sure, it is a Jewish state, and the law of return grants automatic citizenship to Jews, but Israel's declaration of independence proclaims, "Israel will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex. It will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture. It will safeguard the holy places of all religions, and it will be faithful to the principles of the charter of the United Nations." Moreover, non-Jews can become naturalized citizens in Israel in accordance with procedures similar to those in other countries.
Second, as in many liberal democracies, certainly in the U.S., some minorities -- in Israel's case, its Arab citizens -- lag behind the majority; in some cases far behind. The lags in income, literacy and health of its Arab majority are indeed an urgent problem in Israel, not only for Israel's Arab citizens, but also for Israeli society as a whole. But contrary to Mearsheimer and Walt's argument, these lags have many sources and not because Arab citizens lack equality of rights, the defining feature of a liberal democracy.
Third point, as Mearsheimer and Walt write, a recent Israeli government commission [released Sept. 1, 2003] found Israel behaves in a neglectful and discriminatory manner towards its minority Arab population. This should be seen as a triumph of liberal democracy in Israel, not, of course, the neglect and the discrimination, but the effort by the government to confront its own democratic inadequacies, face up to its failure, make good on the promises of its declaration of independence, and find democratic means to remedy the problem.
And fourth, while it's true Israel's democratic status is threatened by the absence of a viable Palestinian state, Israel more than any state in the world stands to benefit from the creation of one. The majority, perhaps a substantial majority, of Israelis recognize this. Today, however, contrary to Mearsheimer and Walt, the chief obstacle of the creation of a viable Palestinian state is not Israel, but the Palestinians' refusal to renounce terror, to develop their economy, to protect individual rights and to establish democratic political institutions.
Notwithstanding the vulgarity of their charge, Mearsheimer and Walt are not original. Only this season Jimmy Carter published Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Carter's title trumpets the charge leveled by Mearsheimer and Walt: Israel is a racist state, akin to South Africa, the foremost racist state since World War II. But contrary to Carter, in Israel, despite the genuine obstacles they confront, Arab citizens are not condemned to inferiority by law, which was the defining principle of apartheid. Along with the Jewish citizens of Israel, Arab citizens of Israel vote, attend university, practice law, form political parties, serve in the Knesset and sit on the Israeli Supreme Court. It's no exaggeration to say the freest Arabs in the entire Middle East are Israel's Arab citizens.
This equation -- between Zionism as embodied in the state of Israel and racism -- has always been outrageous, but the outrageous equation does take advantage of genuine tensions within Zionism, particularly between the claims of Jewish nationalism and the claims of freedom and equality at the heart of liberal democracy. In facing this tension, Zionism is not distinctive, since tensions arise between all forms of nationalism – German, French, American, Japanese, Palestinian – and the claims of liberal democracy when these nationalisms seek expression in a sovereign state.
Zionism is distinctive in its genesis and in the manner it's grappled with these tensions. Before the 19th century, Zionism as we now think of it barely existed. Before the Enlightenment, virtually all Jews recognized the authority of the Torah, or Jewish law. From the point of view of traditional Jewish authorities, dispersion or Diaspora was punishment for Jewish sins. One day it would be terminated, but that day would arrive in God's good time with the coming of the Messiah and the return by divine intervention of the Jewish people to their ancient homeland.
It was only in the 19th century that some Jews began to take the matter of the return to Zion into their own hands. To be sure, the first Jewish reaction to the upheavals created by the Enlightenment and the spread of liberal principles was not Zionism. Initially, some Jews called for the reform of Jewish religion in order to harmonize Judaism with the demands of liberal modernity.
But political Zionism was jolted into existence in the 19th century in response to two shattering political events -- the Russian pogroms of 1881 and the Dreyfus affair of the mid-1890s. [These] differed in a crucial respect. In Russia, Zionism arose in large measure in response to the failure of the Enlightenment to arrive. In contrast, Zionism arose in Western Europe in response to the Enlightenment's failure, 100 years after it arrived, to deliver on its promise to accept Jews as men and women, full citizens equally endowed with individual rights. The most important Zionist voice coming from Russia was Leon Pinsker.
Pinsker was born in 1821 and trained as a physician. He was active in Jewish affairs and hopeful the Enlightenment would one day come to Russia, enabling Jews to assimilate into Russian life and embrace Russian culture as their own. The pogroms of 1881 dashed his hopes. Appalled by the horrible spectacle of collaboration among common people, cultural elites and the government, and by indiscriminate violence against Jewish communities, Pinsker left Russia for Europe. In 1882 he came out with the first great work of political Zionism, called Auto-Emancipation: Appeal to His People by a Russian Jew.
[In his concluding summary, Pinker argues that] the civil and political emancipation of the Jews is not sufficient to raise them in the estimation of the peoples [of the world]. The proper and only remedy would be their emancipation as a nation among nations by the acquisition of a home of their own. Pinsker does not identify the name or location of that home. Nor does he do more than allude to the process of organizing the Jewish people for the purpose of creating a Jewish state. These tasks fall to Theodore Herzl. His hopes for Jewish assimilation were dashed by the Dreyfus affair, which he covered as a Paris correspondent for a Vienna newspaper. In 1896 he published The Jewish State, which is a seminal work of political Zionism. The root of the Jewish problem, according to Herzl, was that despite their loyalty, sacrifice and economic and cultural contributions in all the countries in which they lived, Jews had failed to achieve assimilation [because] the dominant national culture everywhere refused to accept them. Rights could make Jews equal in the eyes of the law, but it could not command equality in the hearts of their fellow citizens. The only honorable and effective response to these harsh truths was for Jews to form a nation-state of their own.
In The Jewish State, Herzl insists Palestine is the Jews' "unforgettable historical homeland," even though as leader of the world's Zionist organization, he did famously entertain a proposal by the British that a temporary Jewish state be created on land in Uganda. But it was Herzl who firmly set the course of world Zionism on the path to the creation of a Jewish state in the land of Israel. It was Herzl who created the organizational structure, and it was Herzl who recognized such a state would require Jews to cast off centuries of habits and attitudes and become artisans, manufacturers and farmers, among the many other occupations necessary to run a modern nation-state.
But, some argue against Herzl, political Zionism could never be enough. Physical, material and political existence, in the last analysis, was inseparable from spiritual existence. Foremost among the cultural Zionists was Ahad Ha'am [who] urged cultural renewal based on a conception of Judaism "that shall have as its focal point the ideal of our nation's unity, its renaissance, and its free development to the expression of universal human values in the terms of its own distinctive spirit." [The Law of the Heart,1894.]
But, argued the religious Zionists, cultural Zionism could never be enough, for the deepest dimension of Jewish culture was the Torah, [which] demanded to be read and taken seriously as God's law, dictated to Moses and binding on God's chosen people. The imperatives of Jewish faith, according to religious Zionists, require national renaissance in Israel. All of these strands went into the formation of Zionism that helped create Israel.
The tensions within political Zionism give rise not only to the development of cultural Zionism and religious Zionism, but also to the great secular challenge to Zionism within Israel known as post-Zionism: The loss of faith among some Israelis today in the ability of Israel to harmonize these conflicting elements – in other words, the loss of faith in the Zionist dream. While Israeli authors and artists once sang the praises of hardy settlers, brave soldiers and wise statesmen, much post-Zionist literature routinely portrays Zionism as a repugnant ideal and a Jewish state as a miserable country. Post-Zionist scholars have sought to show Zionism is in essence an anti-democratic and even totalitarian ideology. Post-Zionism activists have sought to abolish the use of the symbols and institutions of the state to promote Jewish culture. The cultural and educational resources of the state should instead be reserved, in the post-Zionist dispensation, for advocating the universal goods of democracy and human rights.
If you step back and view it generously, post-Zionism can be seen as one of political Zionism's successes, certainly one of its offspring. Post-Zionism is not only part of a larger culture war and political program, it also embraces a thoroughly secular conception of the good life, [visible in] the World Cup soccer obsession, the beaches crowded every Sabbath and holiday, the Tel Aviv nightclub scene. Post-Zionism places hedonism over heroism and modern consumerism over piety. It reflects a desire on the part of many Israelis to cast off the rigor and, in their eyes, rigmarole of Judaism. But in all these things, post-Zionism follows a powerful strand in Zionism, which sought to enable Jews to live like all the nations. Post-Zionism differs from Zionism not in wishing to live like all the nations, but in believing that in order to [do so], Israel must slough off also, and especially, the burdensome heritage of Zionism itself.
Modern Zionism is, then, a dynamic but vulnerable synthesis. By giving priority to the sovereignty of the Jewish people, it set aside the sovereignty of the Torah. Israel's founding declaration promised "complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex." In making this big promise, it rendered suspect all forms of particularism, including Jewish particularism. Post-Zionism draws on all these themes, but it often does so recklessly and resentfully. It radicalizes Zionism's quest for normalcy, the desire to live like all the nations, and the commitment to the natural freedom and equality of all human beings. But it has a tendency to forget what is central – the conviction that a Jewish state, with a respect for the Jewish tradition and special concern for the fate of its people, can also, because of that respect and special concern, protect freedom and equality for all.
The contemporary struggle between Zionism and post-Zionism is not a struggle between Zionism and its antithesis, but rather a struggle within Israel's soul between competing principles out of which Zionism was forged.
ARI SHAVIT: Let me begin with a confession. I'm a Zionist. I'm a critical Zionist. Sometimes I'm a skeptical Zionist. Much of the time I'm an anxious Zionist. Almost always I'm a tormented Zionist. I know our sins too well. I know our faults and our flaws extremely well. And yet at the end of the day I'm a Zionist.
Why am I a Zionist? Because I am a Jew, a secular Jew. As a secular Jew I'm committed to Jewish life. As a secular Jew I'm committed to the existence of a non-Orthodox Jewish civilization. As a secular Jew I believe there is no way to secure the future of a non-Orthodox Jewish civilization without maintaining a Jewish home. For me Zionism is just that: It's home. It's the attempt to build a home for a homeless people. It's an almost desperate, last-minute attempt to save a people and their civilization by giving them a home.
In order to understand the deep rationale of Zionism, one has to understand Jewish exceptionalism. Jewish exceptionalism is not about exceptional genes, exceptional virtues, faults or looks. It's not even about exceptional Woody Allen or Jeffrey Goldberg humor. Jewish exceptionalism is about an exceptional challenge: How to survive as a people for a millennium and a half without a territory or kingdom. How to maintain your unloved existence among others without vanishing into thin air.
The exceptional answer Jews gave to the exceptional challenge they faced was composed of two G's – God and ghetto. It was the closeness and the remoteness of the non-Jewish other that enabled the Jewish people to survive its Diaspora. An intense love affair with an Almighty, a stormy and yet intimate relationship, gave a sense of meaning, pride and even privilege to an otherwise unbearable life. The walls of the ghetto gave this life some protection, some sort of shield. Hence, God and ghetto became the two pillars of Jewish existence.
By the end of the 19th century, both G's were diminishing fast. Jews were losing their eye contact with God, and they were watching the walls of the ghetto crumble. If the Jews were to survive as a people, they had to act. In order to save themselves, they needed to go through the greatest and most radical revolution any people ever had to go through.
In this sense Zionism was a stroke of genius. Its founding fathers and mothers had a profound historic insight. Half a century before Auschwitz, they realized in a godless and ghetto-less world, Jewish physical existence is in jeopardy. They realized our beloved Mother Europe was turning into a Medea, with the spark of nationalism in her eyes, along with the bigotry, the xenophobia, anti-Semitism and the insanity of hating post-ghetto Jews even more than ghetto Jews. But the founders of Zionism had another insight equally important: That even if there were no physical threat to post-ghetto Jews from without, they would still be faced with a cultural, spiritual threat from within.
In the United Kingdom of 1895 and 1905, Jews were not persecuted, and they were not about to be persecuted. Disraeli was cherished; Rothschild was a financial czar. Yet when my great-grandfather looked around him over 100 years ago, he realized what many Jews in Western Europe and North America realize today – that by moving from Whitechapel to St. John's Wood, he had made it as an individual, but he had risked it all as a Jew. He realized his Cambridge-educated sons and Virginia Woolf-type daughters would find it difficult to preserve their Jewishness in an affluent, enlightened British surrounding. At great personal cost, and enormous collective cost, something radical had to be done.
Something was done. Something of enormous proportion. Because of the day-to-day trouble in the Middle East, because of the attrition caused by ongoing violence, we tend to ignore the historical significance of what was done. The 20th century turned out to be the most dramatic century in the Jews' rather dramatic history. The first half of the 20th century was our worst ever. We saw one-third of us evaporate. One-third. And yet the second half of the 20th century was our best ever. Best for at least 2,000 years. Why is that so? Because from 1945 on, we saw two amazing Jewish success stories develop. One was the success of Zionism, the breathtaking achievement of renewing Jewish sovereignty against all odds. The other was just as astonishing: the establishment of the perfect Jewish Diaspora in this country. In many ways the 20th century was the Jewish Big Bang.
This revival was achieved at great cost. In order to establish the Jewish home, we Zionists have committed three major sins. First, we have sinned in abusing the land. We have taken the terraced hills of Judea and turned them into fortress-like settlements. We have taken the Plain of Sharon and the orange groves of Jaffa and turned them into an urban cement megalopolis that in many ways is faceless and banal. There is much talk of Palestinian refugee camps. Rightly so. But metaphorically speaking we have turned the Holy Land into an enormous refugee camp for the Jews, squeezing a haunted people to a very narrow strip of land that cannot sustain it.
Second, we have sinned in uprooting the Palestinians. Without getting into the details of the war of 1948, without drowning in the muddy debate about who is to be blamed for the Palestinian Catastrophe of that year, the bottom line is clear. We have dispossessed hundreds of thousands who have now grown to be millions. We have replaced another people in much of our shared homeland.
Our third Zionist sin was towards ourselves. In order to make this gigantic leap back into history, in order to turn a politically passive nation into an active player on the world stage, we had to transform ourselves. In many ways we had to betray ourselves, turning our back on Jewish tradition and Jewish sophistication, turning our back on Jewish morality and Jewish identity, losing much of the creativity Diaspora Jews have, losing much of the flair and imagination and character richness, losing some of that subversive constructive spirit of those with multiple identity, losing that Woody Allen and Jeffrey Goldberg humor.
For years that was the balance: three sins versus a mind-blowing historical adventure. Three sins and a miracle, if you wish. Over the last decade, especially since the collapse of the peace process in 2000, 9/11, the Hamas victory of February 2006 and the second Lebanon war of July 2006, a notion has appeared that the Zionist entity is getting out of balance, spiraling out of control. In some ways this notion is exaggerated. The Israeli economy is booming. Israel is the greatest research and development laboratory for the high tech industry outside the United States. Israel has more companies on the NASDAQ than France, Germany and Italy put together. Israeli society is vibrant. Among other things, the birth rate of secular Jews in Israel, let alone Arabs or ultra-Orthodox, is higher than in any other OECD country, even the United States.
Just as the anti-Zionists were wrong about the life expectancy of the Zionist endeavor in the 1900s, just as the State Department officials were wrong about the life expectancy of the Zionist enterprise in 1948, so the alarmists of today might be wrong. They all underestimate the enormous vitality of the Jewish state, for in many ways the story of Zionism is the story of vitality against all odds.
Yet, there is room for concern. One can say the three sins of Zionism are now challenging the miracle. First, Israel – north of Beersheba – is already the most densely populated country in the West. In 20 years time the population explosion of both Jews and Arabs will make life in the Holy Land unbearable. Not only will the landscape be gone, but it will be very hard to maintain even any semblance of reasonable life in that tormented land.
Second, the Palestinian issue is not going away. The hope of solving it with an elegant peace treaty is basically gone. No realist would believe today there is any brilliant formula or shining piece of paper that will end the Palestinian-Israeli tragedy in our time. The conflict is there, and the conflict will go on. No end is in sight, definitely not a happy one.
Third, the difficulty Israelis have with themselves, with their identity and their Jewish past was masked for two or three generations by the powerful Zionist ethos. As that ethos has weakened in recent decades, and especially in recent years, a vacuum has revealed itself. The disintegration of the labor movement, the kibbutzim and the pioneer spirit is not arbitrary. The profound leadership crisis and the decay of the political system are not arbitrary either. They all spring from a deeper ideological and even spiritual crisis, which was exposed as the [Zionist] revolution lost its conviction and inner might.
Now we are challenged. First, there is the nuclear issue. If Iran goes nuclear, Israel is not immediately doomed, [but it] is back in a real existential fight for its survival. Even if no mushroom cloud appears in the blue skies over Tel Aviv, the notion that mushroom cloud might appear would change the region, and change dramatically Israel's standing in the region.
Then there is the occupation issue. Israel is caught in a dilemma. If it does not end occupation and retreat, it will lose both its integrity as a Jewish democratic state and its international legitimacy. But if Israel does end the occupation and withdraw without a peace accord, which is not in sight, that will be perceived by its neighbors as an act of weakness and will expose Israel to new waves of attack, terror, low-intensity warfare, and, eventually, total war.
The third challenge I refer to as the inner Israeli challenge. If it is to survive facing the external challenges, Israel must pull its act together. It must reform its political system; it must come up with decent government. But it must do more than that. It must create a new, relevant narrative that can keep the nation together and give meaning to the hardship it faces.
Zionism was a revolutionary movement. It achieved what it achieved by cutting our traditional Jewish roots, by creating a new and somewhat superficial Israeli culture whose foundations are not deep. Israel's Jewish complex, almost anti-Semitic at times, prevents Israelis from being relaxed about their Jewish identity. This creates an identity limbo. It creates the deep crisis of Jewish Israeli culture. Israel must deal with that. It must write the new narrative that will help us endure what is awaiting us, just as the old God-based narrative helped us endure nearly 2,000 years of Diaspora life.
What do these three challenges tell us? The question of Zionism is still an open one. Zionism was insightful in its critical analysis of the Jewish condition in the modern world, and it was astonishing in its ability to move from critical analysis to the creation of a new form of Jewish life, which has proven to be vibrant, energetic and exciting. But the jury is still out on whether the Zionist solution works. It is up to us Israelis of this generation to decide whether the 20th century revolution of Jewish life is an astounding success or a colossal failure.