The end of Zionism:
Cantor, Norman F.
THE END OF ZIONISM NORMAN F. CANTOR THE RENEWAL OF DIASPORA JUDAISM The Rabin-Arafat accord has been...
...But the prospect that external investThey lie over each other...
...Jewish umphs has been the hallmark of Diaspora Judaism, now set on opinion, and under Norman Podhoretz's editorship for long a course of reversal by the prospect of peace with the hithervehemently Zionist, has had a very hard time expressing en- to intransigent Arab states and especially by accommodation thusiasm for the Rabin-Arafat agreement...
...First, as the era of political Zionism It skitters frantic lapses, there will be a reversion to the cultural Zionism adto escape vocated in the second and third decades of this century by the final conflagration...
...with its secret powers...
...Israelis are underemployed...
...The other prime with the hated Palestinians...
...With not telling the secret...
...there has been only a moderate acclaim of approval for the Its validity does not detract from the reality that Jewish selfinauguration of an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement...
...Twenty years from now the Arab-Israeli wars there is a boy could seem as remote and strange as the Roman-Jewish conleft out in a game of hiding...
...in policy could be for millions of Diaspora Jews, especially in It is a river running English-speaking countries, whose public culture, in so far as back to its nest, it had a Jewish ingredient, was predicated on the maintenance a brown headband of the course of political Zionism...
...Peace with the Palestinians and My words keep secrets Arabs would remove, it was believed, the greatest impediment from running home...
...Israel's highly skilled Jewish work force is currently I am alone, much underutilized, and 300,000 recent Russian immigrants the world runs through me, in addition to at least half-a-million highly educated native charred pit for a mouth...
...It was easy enough to say-and Israelis always said it-that the Diaspora Jews provided only moral and fiscal support while NORMAN F. CANTOR's history of the Jews, titled The Sacred Chain, will be published in 1994 by HarperCollins...
...with the Arabs so that Israeli security would be immeasurably With gasoline, the men enhanced, thus enabling Israel to turn to its festering economic blow it to high heaven...
...Asher Ginsberg (Ahad Ha' am) and Judah Magnes...
...Commentary, the leading organ of U.S...
...that knows the inside The Rabin government was pressed to reach a settlement of everything...
...This view had substance, gloating of the White House officials, and with although it undervalued the fiscal and political support of Israel the exception of the ideological peaceniks on the Jewish Left, from American Jewry which made Israel's survival possible...
...THE END OF ZIONISM NORMAN F. CANTOR THE RENEWAL OF DIASPORA JUDAISM The Rabin-Arafat accord has been greeted by the the Israelis personally endured repeated wars against the Arabs Diaspora Jewish populations in the United States, and frequent danger from terrorist attacks, that the Diaspora Canada, and England with a notable restraint...
...Jews were vicariously engaging in an exploitative projection Contrary to the huzzahs in the media and the onto Israeli heroism and blood-letting...
...Now he is last...
...Arab workers into a dynamic engine of industrial and comIn one life, mercial growth...
...I suspect that the accustomed clear vision of the Jewish identity is in course of deconstruction and steady erosion as a reDavid Applebaum sult of the Rabin-Arafat accord, and I doubt if the Israelis have Returning to the Nest thought for a minute about what the reversal of the course of Zionism of the past half century would do for Jewish identity The young copperhead in the Diaspora-how devastating this revolutionary change is all alone...
...dinosaur labor unions...
...Now that will be attenuated, perhaps in a short had felt that the majority of its readers strongly supported the accord...
...one...
...The security and triumph of Israel has been regarded, at least since 1948, as the integrating element in the public culture of Diaspora Jews, the single most important ingredient by far in the affirmation of a Jewish consciousness...
...Identification with embattled Israel and pride in its trifelt, I think...
...The identity in the past forty-five years of the Diaspora has depended, applause from the great majority of Diaspora Jews has been in my opinion, much more on political Zionism than on reliformal, politically correct, but very cautious and scarcely heart- gion...
...flicts...
...Since the 1950s a Jew in America, Canada, and England was someone committed to political Zionism, which meant an independent Jewish state in perpetual victorious conflict with its Arab neighbors, and, at least since 1967, the subordination of Arabs within Greater Israel or their exclusion entirely...
...The ultimate reason for this moderate response, I would argue, has been the still only partly conscious perception that the Rabin-Arafat accord represents the end of Zionism...
...problems...
...Commonweal 19 November 1993: 11 time fully superseded...
...They must find the nest Diaspora Jews can only wish Rabin-led Israel well in this &join it, pursuit, but they may feel an aching emptiness right now...
...There will Its love is feared...
...The political and military triumphs journal of opinion circulating among American Jews, the in- of Israel were the counterbalance in the mind of Diaspora Jewry ternational edition of the Jerusalem Post, has communicat- to the impotence that the Holocaust signified...
...IN hen the numbness slowly wears off, three consequences will follow, espeThe last life cially among bicoastal American Jewry, runs home through me joined by groups in Toronto and London...
...Israel can possibly become the Singapore, perhaps the They weave Japan, of the Middle East, absorbing Palestinian and other no finished plait...
...so far as it had a Jewish character...
...be much-enhanced investment from English-speaking Jewry I say prayers in the currently impoverished and somnolent Israeli univerfor the youngest...
...Zionism has been the kernel of their spiritual consciousness in Once there were many boys...
...Israel will also All lives I have lived have to go further toward deregulating its demand economy live still, and reducing the obstacles to development represented by its in a nest of ribbons...
...The second outcome of the waning of political Zionism 12: 19 November 1993 Commonweal...
...Running alone...
...to the inflow of investment that would develop Israel's hightech economy and maximally use its workforce...
...sities and research institutes, and a flurry of personnel exI do not say where changes between the Israeli centers of learning and science the nest is and American universities, facilitated by Jewish philanor who will find him there, thropy...
...the prospect of the dissolution of the political Zionism Diaspora The sun is cold Jews have known for so many decades, I suspect there is a huge & reptilian gap emerging in their cultural-and religious-lives, for running home to the stars...
...They were the ed clearly the actual hostility of most of its editorial staff to energized and integrating force in the shaping of a universal the agreement, something it would not have dared to do if it Jewish identity...
...It was as simple as that: If your heart was warmed and your brain positively stimulated by this prospect, you had an identity as a Jew, whether you lived in New York, Toronto, or London...
...ment for high-tech development will follow an Arab and sisters & brothers Palestinian peace is a good one, and in view of the profound of one house, discontent of well-educated Russian immigrants, a necessary quarrelsome & loving...
Vol. 120 • November 1993 • No. 20
