THE END OF ZIONISM?
Brinker, Menachem
The task of Zionism is very nearly completed. That is to say, the problem that Zionism set out to address is just about solved. Soon we will be living in a post-Zionist era, and there will...
...It did this by preserving its own character as a grand coalition whose purpose was no more, and no less, than to alter Jewish destiny in one specific sense...
...We need not mourn...
...We need not supply a new set of hard and fast criteria in order to recognize that the old ones are obsolete...
...Hertzberg, concerned for the welfare of diaspora Jewry, seems almost to want to delay the day of normalcy...
...and since Zionism never agreed on a recipe for the character of the Jewish state, its job is done...
...Soon we will be living in a post-Zionist era, and there will no longer be a good reason for a Zionist movement to exist alongside the state of Israel...
...The open society takes care of it, gradually and gently, through its life styles, through social, professional, and even family relationships...
...The conditions of Jewish life— dispersion and its grievous twin consequences, persecution and assimilation—might never have given rise to Zionism if they had not been certified as "abnormal" by the adopted standard of "healthy nations...
...it needs to defend itself, build its economy, develop its culture...
...In the next circle are those who no longer live within an active Jewish community yet clearly and consistently identify themselves as Jews...
...Their relation to the classical schools of Zionist thought, however, is curious...
...Israel's difficulties, he says, have the effect of heating up interest in the Jewish community, intensifying the Jewishness of marginal Jews—particularly among the youth...
...It is time to begin asking ourselves how the state of Israel ought to look under normal conditions, that is, after Zionism...
...The more thoughtful Hebrew authors of the early Zionist period wrote that such membership requires certain prerequisites: a minimal level of emotional involvement and some minimal externalization of this sentiment in day-to-day life style...
...That prospect need not sadden anyone...
...they will differentiate between the Zionist movement, whose principal interest is promoting Aliyah (immigration to Israel), and other Jewish bodies that work to shore up Jewish life—in part by mobilizing support for Israel...
...Personally, I disagree with those of my maximalist friends who think we have a long way to go to reach their goal...
...The series was made possible by a grant from Mr...
...The number shrinks every year, because of biological attrition and the constantly declining attachment of many Jews to Jewish life...
...The continued existence of a Zionist movement is on the way to becoming not only superfluous but harmful...
...But this number is far greater than the number of persons who might be said to be currently affiliated to the Jewish people...
...For them the notion of peoplehood had a binding, normative significance, entailing some minimal sense of solidarity and mutual responsibility...
...The truth is the reverse: today's Zionist movement needs Israel to give it a reason for existence—as long as there are still large numbers of Jews living outside Israel, and a few of them are still candidates for ingathering...
...In accomplishing the major tasks it set for itself, Zionism won a smashing victory...
...Even when it came to play the role of a "state in the making," the movement never asked its members for uniformity beyond the united effort for statehood...
...I question whether those in the outer circle can really be called members of the Jewish people...
...In the American melting pot, Jews don't need to join a competing ethnic-religious group in order to free themselves of their Jewishness...
...There are not many candidates left for ingathering from the free world, and not many of those on their way out of the community could be persuaded not to leave the Jewish people...
...But we cannot ignore the fact that a secular Jewish culture and communal life barely exist anywhere outside Israel...
...The ingathering of a majority of the Jews into their historic homeland will be a reality, if not in this generation, then certainly in the next...
...These surveys are prima facie open to question, since they count all first-generation offspring of mixed marriages, and even persons boarding in Jewish households...
...Yet most of us would agree that such persons as Boris Pasternak or Marcel Proust, Rosa Luxemburg or Ferdinand Lassalle are hardly members of the Jewish people despite their Jewish origins—even when they are, like Proust, Jews according to rabbinic law...
...The aim of establishing a sovereign Jewish state was once considered by Zionists to be a maximalist approach, since many Zionists were willing to settle for less—a spiritual center, an organic Jewish community in Palestine, or a territorial concentration falling short of full sovereignty...
...This despite the fact that it was these very events that caused the unexpectedly rapid fulfillment of the Zionist goals—establishment of a state and national ingathering...
...But it seems clear that they are the only ones for whom authentic Zionism—meaning the idea of emigrating to Israel—can still have a personal meaning...
...My sympathies are with Peace Now...
...Zionism's success is in part a pyrrhic victory...
...One can, of course, always raise more ultimate questions...
...Peace Now uses it, with no less passion, when it warns that Israel is gradually becoming a binational state...
...Zionists differed among themselves as to the degree of uniqueness of Jewish life, but in one respect there was no argument: the fragmentation and dispersion of Jewish life must be eliminated...
...My answer is: unequivocally, no...
...A normal Jewish state, populated mostly by Jews, can exist only if its non-Jewish citizens enjoy certain rights in Israel that citizens of other states—even the most devout Jews—do not enjoy...
...It was widely accepted by the beginning of this century that membership in the Jewish people— like membership in any other national group— was not entirely dependent on the individual's ancestry...
...The Israeli author A. B. Yehoshua, in Between Right and Right, expresses the frustration of many Israelis when he suggests that Israel stop suckling at the overflowing teats of diaspora Jewry...
...At the center of the model stand the Jews who spend most of their life within the Jewish community...
...It seems to me that the This article concludes our series on Israeli society and politics, all written by Israeli contributors, which began in the fall 1983 issue...
...And if they know anything at all about their Jewishness, it pales in comparison to what they know about the culture of the lands where they live...
...The two perspectives stand together as blunt testimony to the fact that, as a nation, the Jews are a long way from the normal condition of a people standing secure...
...Gush Emunim uses the claim of "true Zionist ideology" to sanctify its goal of Jewish sovereignty over the whole historic Land of Israel...
...No, Jewish descent is not necessarily identical with membership in the Jewish people...
...The normalization process is still going on...
...And all Zionists agreed that in at least one key aspect, the Jews must be transformed into "a nation like all others": a majority of the Jewish people ought to live in its homeland...
...And now the diaspora continues to decline, confirming Zionism's gloomy forecasts...
...A healthy nation was taken to be one with a majority of its people living on their national soil...
...And in the outermost circle are those who are identified as Jews primarily by others, that is, by non-Jews...
...The robust character of the diaspora, a full 100 years after the dawn of Zionism, seems to him a barrier to normalization...
...Ultimately, the crucial questions facing Jewish history are those that are primarily Israelicivic, and only secondarily Zionist-ideological...
...Today Zionism can only have one meaning: it is a means to an end, which itself is finally only a means...
...and Israel is a means to guarantee the future of the Jewish people in history...
...For him Israel's victory would mean normalization...
...Such Jews are happy that the unseen ghetto walls, which only two generations ago divided them from their gentile neighbors, have come down...
...Its very existence creates the false impression that the Jewish state needs a Zionist movement to justify or guarantee its existence...
...These are important issues, but we might as well admit that we are looking at a rearguard action at the end of a transitional phase in Jewish history...
...Most Zionists debated over whether assimilation was likely to engulf whole sections of the Jewish people or only certain predisposed individuals...
...Zionism's success went hand in hand with great disaster...
...Zionism per se has nothing to say to the cultural and social issues dividing Israel's society, and we ought to admit it...
...Zionism has little to offer toward containing diaspora assimilation since the attrition process does not, in any case, follow the classic Zionist analysis...
...Both of the possibilities facing Israel today—a binational state in which one nation dominates, and a humanistic state with full equality and a Jewish majority—can be called Zionist options...
...The whole debate strikes me as terribly abstract...
...It's as if he wants the diaspora to languish, even at the cost of mass desertion...
...Yet it is clear that, beneath his candor, at least for this Zionist leader, a certain reversal of 80 priorities peeks through: a problematic Israel plays a positive role in the survival of the diaspora...
...A great many people live today at the outer periphery of the Jewish people...
...For this was the Zionist goal: the creation of a new kind of Jewish life, unselfconscious, needing no ideologies to explain or justify its existence...
...For some generations, the Zionist movement managed to paper over the abyss separating the two major subcultures of contemporary Jewry—the secular and the religious...
...The religious zealots of Gush Emunim wouldn't offer a Knesset vote to Brooklyn's Lubavitcher Rebbe, nor has anyone in Peace Now offered it to the Jewish dean of Harvard, though he supports its work...
...The Zionist movement was able to survive precisely because it respected differences within its ranks...
...But only then did Zionism appear and flourish...
...But I don't see how dragging Zionism into the debate helps to clarify the dilemma confronting Israel's citizens...
...Can we justify acknowledging, as a member of the Jewish people, any denizen of the farthest-flung Soviet or Canadian village, just because he remembers his parents telling him how they once celebrated Passover in their parents' home...
...He would confront all selfidentifying Jews in the diaspora with a stark choice: move to Israel or give up being Jewish...
...Now I cannot pretend to be neutral in the debate...
...As a ritual to be trotted out on Sabbaths and festivals (and the atmosphere at Zionist assemblies is unflinchingly festive) the line has a certain symbolic value...
...By my accounting, about half of the Jewish people now lives in the state of Israel...
...Zionism's finest hours were in the decades preceding and following the establishment of the state, when it offered a home to masses of Jews...
...They would be horrified at the prospect of restrictions shutting them, or their children, out of certain homes, schools, or workplaces...
...We have recently witnessed a campaign, partly spontaneous and partly organized, to put across a synthetic, idealized image of the "Zionist with Jewish roots...
...Most followers of this school believe that Zionism is a long way from completing its task, in a world where three-quarters of those identified as Jews still live outside the borders of the Jewish state...
...We overlook the fact that the normalization most Zionists aspired to—the concentration of the greater part of the Jewish people in its own state—is fast shifting from messianic dream to simple fact...
...Zionism would do better to direct its attention toward the ingathering of those Jews whose Jewish identity has not yet dissipated...
...Historical Zionism was not one ideology but a coalition of conflicting ideologies: liberal and religious, socialist and nationalist, joined together for one common goal...
...No one in the first two generations of Zionism, before the First World War, could have foreseen the awesome events that would result in millions of Jews living in the homeland, less than a century after the birth of political Zionism...
...It is even possible that this day has arrived and that we—prisoners of surveys that cannot survey anything important—have failed to notice it...
...But it still seems significant that, for the half (perhaps) of American Jewry that thinks of itself as Jews living in America—as opposed to Americans of Jewish origin—there is no other expression of Jewish identity...
...There now are a number of different ways of understanding the purpose of Zionism...
...It could never have grown into a mass movement if it had adopted the style of a top sergeant ordering the troops to close ranks...
...In any nonmetaphorical sense, Israel belongs not to all the Jews of the world but to those Jews— and non-Jews—who live there...
...These words will surely be disturbing to many who don't want to witness the end of Zionism...
...Yet today a maximalist conception of Zionism must mean something else: the concentration of a majority of the Jewish people in the state of Israel...
...It echoes with the concern every Jew feels, or should feel, for Israel's welfare...
...81 Equally un-Zionist is the debate raging between religious and secular Jews over the cultural fate of Israeli society...
...Yehoshua's vision is of Israel and diaspora locked in a battle to the death over the minds and hearts of each Jew...
...Political Zionism emerged as a response to a particular analysis of these conditions...
...The image takes the form of the pioneersettler tilling the land, phylacteries on one arm and a submachine gun under the other...
...In any event, more and more people are moving beyond that last circle...
...EDS...
...But the real question runs deeper...
...My own sense is that, for all its weaknesses, Israel today is already stronger than the diaspora, and the day of "normalization" is closer at hand than we suspect...
...Well, to the first question, only one answer is possible: the future of the Jewish people is a very important matter to those who happen to belong to the Jewish people, whether by choice or lack of options...
...Zionism was never meant to be "a little piece of eternity, fallen into time" but, rather, a historical movement that aimed to achieve specific historical goals...
...In the third circle stand the Jews who identify themselves as Jews only on special occasions and at times of crisis...
...In fact, the questions that divide Zionists from one another are more vital and critical today than the rather arcane questions that separate the Zionist from the non-Zionist...
...The ultimate meaning of Jewish fate, the various religious and secularist interpretations of Jewish history—all this was left to the philosophers and writers...
...Isn't there a role for an active Zionist movement, even after Israel has become home to most of the world's Jews...
...Beyond that, everything is wide open...
...Yehoshua's watershed is the period of letdown and emigration in Israel that followed the Six-Day and Yom Kippur wars...
...Israel is still struggling to survive, the reader will reply...
...By providing a refuge for Jews, the state would help relieve the guilt feelings of those who remain Jewish only because of an understandable hesitation to desert a sinking ship...
...Two recent books with opposing views on the relationship between Israel and the diaspora illustrate how obsessed we still are with this question...
...Opinions vary on the criteria for determining ethnic identity...
...But whatever the future holds, as of today there are no masses of homeless or persecuted refugees knocking down the doors of the homeland...
...Zionism is a means to perpetuate the state of Israel...
...And leaving is now easier than ever, since it no longer entails a religious conversion...
...Our interest here is in Yehoshua as a symptom: his fear that the power and wealth of the diaspora (as he sees it) will prove unbearably attractive to the citizens of the relatively poor Jewish state...
...And since many of them feel no motivation to make the effort, it is safe to assume that the dissipation of their Jewish identities will continue, despite all Zionist importunities...
...Yet this is the attitude we see more and more in Israel and in the diaspora...
...And yet, just as we failed to recognize the impending Holocaust for what it was, so today we are closing our eyes to the reality of a constantly shrinking Jewish people...
...Others reject any watering down of the original Zionist idea...
...The danger in regarding the Zionist movement as immortal is that it lulls people into thinking there are ideologically "Zionist" solutions to Israel's critical problems...
...The Zionist vision of normalization reflected a perceived 19th-century norm of "healthy nations...
...I conclude, therefore, that we are approaching the day when more than half the Jewish people will be living in the state of Israel...
...At the opposite pole, the American rabbi and scholar Arthur Hertzberg argues in his Being Jewish in America that Israel's troubles are good for the diaspora...
...There are, of course, the racialist theories, among them those of the Nazis or—for all their vast differences—of the Lubavitcher Hasidim, who take Jewishness as an inalienable 78 quality...
...Once this is done, the Zionist idea and the Zionist movement earn a place of honor—in history...
...Some respond by insisting that Zionism must change its ideology, give up the centrality of the ingathering, join forces with elements "combating" assimilation and reducing attrition in the diaspora...
...Abandoning the Jewish people altogether remains an ever-present possibility...
...Brenner went so far as to question whether the Jews were a people at all...
...What for...
...The issues that are primarily the concern of the Zionist movement are the encouragement of immigration and the combating of assimilation...
...Nevertheless, they want their children to choose Jewish mates and raise Jewish families (whatever that may mean...
...It would be better for Zionism, and for the state of Israel, if the Jewish diaspora had not been so weakened...
...Surveys conducted by the World Jewish Congress indicate that the world's Jewish population stands today at around 13 million...
...Under these circumstances, the number of potential clients for the Zionist idea must be small...
...Nor should it do more...
...Yehoshua's desire for a speedy normalization leads him to a sort of messianic impatience to end the Jewish dispersion...
...But does anyone seriously believe that intensification of Jewish and Zionist education— our national wonder-drug—will affect these issues more than the normal, nonideological factors, such as increased unemployment and recession in the West, that we see at work around us...
...For most secular American Jews it is not assimilation that requires an effort, as was once the case in Europe, but maintaining a Jewish identity...
...And there is no denying that certain issues, such as immigration, emigration, assimilation, dropping out (of Soviet Jewry, for example), are still highly charged with Zionist emotions...
...I don't know how many Jews are so con79 flicted...
...I don't know how many actual members of the Jewish fold there are among those millions counted in the surveys, but I suspect that an estimate of 8 or 9 million would be generous in the extreme...
...It is hard to believe in the future of a national survival instinct that must rest entirely on Holocaust memorials, fund-raising, and demonstrations for the endangered Jews of Russia or Israel, or a community life limited to holidays and religious rites...
...In this regard the Hebrew belles-lettristsespecially J. H. Brenner and M. J. Berdichevsky— showed more insight than most Zionist thinkers and leaders...
...It would be nice if young Israelis knew more about the Zionist roots of the Israeli experience...
...The attempt to prolong its life through artificial measures—as is happening today—can only yield negative results...
...Most of us consider membership in the Jewish people to be acquired through acts of identification— however minimal—and not through ancestry as defined by the orthodox rabbinate...
...Today there are Israelis by the hundreds of thousands whose nationalism is entirely nonideological: they are Israelis because they can't or won't live in a foreign culture, or simply Israelis because they live in Israel...
...For better or worse, the state of Israel is the cutting edge of Jewish history in our time, and no one knows this better than the Jews of the diaspora...
...They see it as a microbe (or, in Hasidic terminology, a divine spark) that courses through the veins, never dissipating regardless of changes in the individual's life or self-image...
...Zionism (as distinct from the warm Jewish feeling that impels a Jew to donate money to Israel) can only hope to appeal to one sort of American Jew: the person whose emotions are torn between loyalty to the democratic values of American society and a desire to preserve the Jewish national identity...
...And this analysis cannot be divorced from a broader contemporary vision of the need for—and the possibility of—changing the terms of national life...
...Despite the Zionist analyses that addressed the growing threats to diaspora Jewish survival, the Zionists were deeply shocked by the Nazi Holocaust, to the point of being unable to digest the truth at the time...
...But, taken literally, it is less than empty rhetoric: it just isn't true...
...These Hebrew writers, on the other hand, foresaw borderline situations that could allow a given individual to be a marginal member of the Jewish people, for example, and another, in effect, entirely part of another ethnic group...
...According to this line of thought, one of the first signs of normalization will be the end of our obsession with numbers...
...Persecution and assimilation had been the lot of Jews all through their history, on a scale no less fearsome than at the close of the 19th century...
...The Zionist movement had one simple goal: to bring a majority of the Jews to an independent state...
...The model that best represents Jewish identity is the concentric circle adopted by writers and theorists at the turn of the century...
...And the end of all this is something that appeals to only a select group— of which I happen to be a member...
...Of course, Hertzberg would hardly recommend that Israel remain mired in difficulties...
...Aren't these Zionist issues...
...Nor should we regret that, for many Israelis, Zionist ideology has given way to a simple feeling of home and belongingness...
...Yet the few wellknown examples cited above should suffice to debunk the biological-determinant theory...
...A major stream in classical Zionism—including no less a figure than Herzl himself—held that the Jewish state had a historical mission to ease the exit of those Jews who no longer wanted to be part of the Jewish people...
...Zionism is like the Talmud, or Marx, in that it can be used to justify almost anything...
...Zionism can have little to say to the Jews in the lands of plenty, so as to entice them to leave their homelands...
...It seems clear, in fact, that by the end of the century a majority will live there...
...And as to what the Jewish future in history is for: once again, it serves to guarantee to those people called Jews, as much as is possible, a life of freedom and dignity, a chance to grow to their fullest creative potential, and a decent place in the sun...
...normalization" of the Jewish condition in history— a goal shared by all wings of Zionism— is rapidly becoming a reality...
...This may sound odd, especially to anyone familiar with current statistics, but I believe I can explain it...
...t is standard fare at Zionist assemblies to declare that Israel belongs to all Jews, wherever they live...
...It is undoubtedly true, for most American Jews, that synagogue-centered Jewish life is largely a secular, ethnic impulse: a religious cloak...
...For the others, Zionism can be at most a philanthropic exercise in which Israel is forever receiving and they are forever giving—a state of affairs so utterly contrary to any Zionist vision that it poisons our very existence and reduces the state's meaning for the diaspora to a grotesquerie...
...Using this classic normative definition, what sense is there in claiming that there are more than 2 million Jews living in the Soviet Union, or nearly 5 million in the United States and Canada...
...For all our eagerness to include- in the fold the largest possible contingent of the famous, we simply cannot call someone Jewish when all he shares with the Jewish people is a common ancestry...
...Harry Kahn, and we wish to thank him for it...
...For Hertzberg the watershed Jewish experience is the Six-Day War, that moment of spiritual exaltation when the entire diaspora rallied to the beleaguered Jewish state...
...Assimilation requires no special effort...
...77 As it happened, the normalization process unfolded at a pace undreamed of by the early Zionists...
...The researchers, acting in what I assume to be good faith, have given us a more or less accurate count of the number of persons known to them to be of Jewish origin...
...There is a conceptual question that must precede any such census: who is a Jew, and who is a member of the Jewish people...
...This is not the place to deal with Yehoshua's fascinating if less than convincing argument...
...For example, who needs a Jewish future...
...They recall their affiliation once or twice a year...
...Where the analysis spoke of the abnormality of Jewish life, "everywhere a stranger and nowhere at home," the vision set itself to change that reality...
...Isn't this just the sort of normalcy the Zionists were looking for...
...For some Jews there is an emotional dualism that can be resolved only in Israel...
...The pressing issues of today are no longer issues for which Zionism has answers...
...That Zionist fulfillment no longer has any appeal for most diaspora Jews troubles the thoughtful Israeli...
Vol. 32 • January 1985 • No. 1
