COMMENTS AND REPLIES
Schechter, Susan & Blair, Bob & Lee, Eric & Elshtain, Jean Bethke & Brinker, Menachem
An End to Zionism? Eric Lee There is a tremendous appeal to Menachem Brinker's thesis that Zionism is finished ["The End of Zionism?," Dissent, Winter 1985]. His declaration that the...
...Today Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and other Latin American states are coming under civilian rule...
...He reassures us that Zionism was merely a means to an end, and that the maximalist end of an independent Jewish state, with a majority of the world's Jews living there, has been achieved...
...It was a Zionism based on disappointment with the West, reflecting, inter alia, Herzl's profound disillusionment with France during the Dreyfus trial...
...Anyone who has talked with Soviet Jews, especially with Jews who are still inside the Soviet Union, with all their illusions about Israel and the West, knows that Jewish consciousness has not only endured, it has grown...
...Further, Brinker neglects the whole debate in the Zionist movement around the question of Jewish catastrophe, and the possibility of mass, emergency emigrations of whole communities...
...Take the Soviet Union...
...The implication is that Zionism's message can only be directed at Jews in the lands of sorrow...
...Yet, since I do not place much hope for a Zionist revival on persecution, I cannot see how this fact—regrettable as it may be—in any way endangers the future of Israel, or the future of the Jewish people as a whole...
...Brinker's understanding of Zionist history is re vealed by his statement, No one in the first two generations of Zionism, before the First World War, could have foreseen the awesome events that would result in million of Jews living in the homeland, less than a century after the birth of political Zionism...
...He does not understand what Zion ism is...
...The assertion that Zionism is finished, when 51 percent of the Jews are ingathered into Israel, is even more mistaken...
...He wrote from Vienna and turned Zionist in Paris...
...Thoughtful Jews who rejected the capitalist promise of equality were increasingly drawn to the left...
...His declaration that the Jewish people are being normalized, ingathered into their own state while those who chose to assimilate away their Jewishness may do so, is certainly uplifting...
...At a very early stage, the Jewish national movement acquired an overtly anticapitalist, that is, socialist, character...
...But we tant than assimilation or Aliyah—without realizing cannot regard the future of democratic values as that we are already reflecting on, and living in, a the most important issue in Israel (and therefore post-Zionist reality...
...That simple feeling—that turning of the Jewish state into "a state like any other"—is a catastrophe for Israel and for the Jewish people as a whole...
...Is Brinker right in erasing millions of Soviet Jews because they don't meet his standard of "Jewishness...
...I am speaking of the need for a real, effective, fighting Zionist movement...
...Fair enough...
...And he goes on to ask, "what sense is there in claiming that there are more than 2 million Jews living in the Soviet Union...
...Zionism is not only relevant for the Iranian Jews...
...One may say, of course, that "as long as there is one single persecuted Jew in the diaspora, or another single Jew who is troubled with his national identity—Zionism is still alive...
...There is still a need for Zionism...
...He was wrong by one year...
...I did say that their number has to be small as compared to those in Russia (and elsewhere) who are known to be of Jewish origin...
...The Zionist movement is not a throwback to an earlier era, when Jewish life in the diaspora was religiously motivated and held together with strong bonds...
...His is a Zionism reserved for the Ostjuden...
...It bred the Likud government...
...However, I prefer to say that such Jews guarantee the continuing significance of Israel for Jews who live outside its borders...
...It will teach, among other things, that Zionism and socialism went hand-inhand throughout Zionist history right up until the 1950s...
...The reality of a vibrant Zionist underground in the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s is anomalous COMMUNICATIONS and unexpected...
...It is their only hope...
...It is time to remind Israelis that Zionism sought a state that, in almost all important respects, would be "like any other [democratic] state...
...The declaration that the Jewish problem is solving itself in the diaspora may be consoling, but it is tragically far from the truth...
...Not so...
...One hesitates to imagine what kind of a welcome they would be receiving among Israelis today were there not still some form of Zionist ideology and Zionist movement...
...In that sense Theodor Herzl was a true Jewish prophet...
...Just like that...
...q pluralistic, and liberal values...
...So long as there is work to be done, there will be a need for a Zionist movement...
...Though I referred to this attraction as "little," compared to what Israel offered European refugees two generations ago (and to what simple Zionist propaganda still believes it can offer American Jews today), I did say that this gives us some hope for Aliyah, which is for me the only meaningful Zionist act...
...I specifically argued that preventing assimilation should be regarded as Israel's main attraction for all those Jews "in the lands of plenty" who care about the Jewish identity of their families yet respect democratic, atmosphere at official Zionist functions...
...2) I do not think that "Zionism's message (or what I would prefer to call the significance of Israel) can only be directed at the Jews in the lands of sorrow...
...Within a few months of the publication of Herzl's Jewish State there appeared the first great manifesto of the socialist-Zionist camp—Nachman Syrkin's essay on the socialist Jewish state...
...The hunger strikes, the petition campaigns, the open demonstrations, the letters and phone calls to the West, the Hebrew classes—is it possible to say that ordinary Russians who just happen to have Jewish ancestors are creating all this...
...For me, assimilation is a 20th-century reality, touching millions of people of Jewish origin...
...Nor malcy" is what happened in Lebanon...
...In this sense—its rejection of Western capitalism, its disbelief in the promise of equality—the Zionist movement was a revolutionary movement...
...3) The main issue that clearly separates Eric Lee and me lies elsewhere...
...But is it true...
...Many who do not understand the Zionist movement imagine it to be the product of Jewish backwardness, of the medieval (if not premedieval) shtetl...
...Just like America in Vietnam...
...Jews have not been so prone to this kind of thinking, and their religion has little good news to offer...
...Brinker declares that being a Jew entails "some minimal sense of solidarity and mutual responsibility...
...Eric Lee There is a tremendous appeal to Menachem Brinker's thesis that Zionism is finished ["The End of Zionism?," Dissent, Winter 1985...
...q...
...There are those who claim that things are much better in the Islamic Republic than had been expected...
...Israel be haved just like any other state...
...Brinker writes that we should not regret "that, for many Israelis, Zionist ideology has given way to a simple feeling of home and belongingness...
...This is not coincidental...
...Where in one sentence the reader can assume that there were a couple of million Soviet Jews, there is not a single Jew left a penstroke later...
...It is not the Zionism of Herzl...
...It is a Zionist task of the first order, then, to work for peace between Israel and the Palestinians...
...Was there no need for Zionism or a Zionist movement...
...or Canada, are really former Soviet or Iranian citizens of Jewish origin on their way to becoming Americans or Canadians of Jewish (or Russian-Jewish or Iranian-Jewish) origin...
...it was a result of decades of nationbuilding...
...Among other things, that simple feeling breeds racism...
...By that I mean not only the settlement of the Galilee and the Negev but the establishment of a secure Jewish state...
...It saw the solution of the Jewish problem not within the context of Western capitalist society but outside it...
...In the real world, where a real diaspora exists, where there really are Jews in the Soviet Union, there is a completely different picture...
...THERE REMAINS MUCH for Zionism to do...
...That in no way implies that the Zionist movement founded by Herzl currently exists...
...The creation of the Jewish State is also an unfinished task...
...Lee somehow manages to regard assimilation both as an imminent danger and an utter impossibility, a 19th-century illusion...
...So perhaps he will join me in thinking that many of those who leave Russia or Iran, and go to the U.S...
...Zionism was a revolutionary conception way ahead of its time, applicable and relevant to our time...
...I will also include those who become Americans or Canadians of the Jewish (perhaps we should say Mosaic) religion...
...But tomorrow...
...I don't consider that a source of pride...
...And not only in the Soviet Union...
...My encounters with Israelis, especially with Israeli youth, have convinced me of the direct opposite of this view...
...But it requires a thorough understanding of Zionist history to grasp it...
...Zionism," writes Brinker, "can have little to say to the Jews in the lands of plenty...
...He thinks that "that simple feeling—that turning of the Jewish state into 'a state like any other'—is a catastrophe for Israel...
...A Jewish state that survives only until one of its neighbors becomes militarily strong enough to destroy it is not what Herzl had in mind...
...Brinker's essay was no doubt written before the news came out of the massive airlift of some 10,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel in the past few months...
...France, the most progressive of European countries, the first to liberate the Jews from feudal shackles, is now a center of anti-Semitic resur gence, prompting in its wake Jewish nationalist responses...
...Racism in Israel is fed by the feeling that the uniqueness of Jewish history, especially its recent history, also makes Israel "an absolutely unique" state...
...Jacobo Timerman's book on his experience in Argentina should be reread by every complacent writer on the subject of the Jewish diaspora...
...Which brings me to the heart of Brinker's error...
...They have tended to figure out, over time, that most of what appears to be good contains something not-so-good for them...
...But those are illusions that belong in the 19th century, which knew nothing of Communist antiSemitism, or of Nazi death camps...
...The World Zionist Organization isn't much of a movement, and I share Brinker's disgust with the "unflinchingly festive" Menachem Brinker Replies (1) Nowhere in my article did I say (or imply) that there are no more people who consider themselves to be Jewish in Soviet Russia...
...There are conflicting reports on the life of the large Jewish community still in Iran...
...But it exists...
...There is a way to give new life and new meaning to the Zionist movement...
...His first contacts with organized Jewish communities and his first attempts to persuade Jews were in Britain...
...A rereading of Zionist history will teach us much about Zionism's future...
...I wish there were no need for such a movement, and that the Jews of the world were simply peacefully assimilating into democratic societies around them...
...Still, would any Jew in the West—would Brinker himself— trade places with a Jew in Khomeini's Iran...
...The Jews of France offer the most compelling argument that the diaspora is not fading away...
...The idea I expressed that belonging to the Jewish people entails "some minimal sense of solidarity and mutual responsibility" seems "fair enough" to Eric Lee...
...And that "that simple feeling breeds racism...
...Herzl's Zionism was first and foremost a Zionism of Western Jews in the "lands of plenty...
...At a time when the future of democracy in Israel is the most acute for the Jewish people at large)—much more imporproblem we face, we need them badly...
...Was their Jewishness fading away...
...To argue that with the proclamation of the state on May 14, 1948 the need for Zionism suddenly came to an end, strikes one as mistaken...
...The Zionist movement was always headquartered in the West, and relied on Western powers to grant the long-awaited charter for Palestine...
...Herzl's famous diary entry at the Basel Congress predicted the emergence of a Jewish state in 50 years...
...The ingathering of the Jews remains its primary task, especially from the lands of despair...
...There is nothing in Israel's role, achievement, or history to prevent us from judging its political choices, its social policies, its culture as we judge all other democratic societies...
...But that is precisely what we must learn to regret...
...The strategic decision of the Mapai leadership to turn right—to abandon the Histadrut school system, to invite the religious parties into the government, to dissolve the Palmach, to refrain from encouraging Aliyah [Jewish immigration] from America, and so on—this, and not the proclamation of the Jewish State on May 14, 1948, is what caused the crisis of Zionism today...
...This is, I think, a clue to understanding the paralysis of the movement today and the way out...
...The success of Christianity and Islam—two religions based on the spread of "good news"— demonstrates the readiness of people to jump to appealing conclusions...
...The argument has the appeal of wishful thinking...
...But he had no illusions about the fate of the Jew in rightist Argentina...
...The Jews of the Soviet Union, Ethiopia, Iran, and Argentina do exist, and their rescue remains high on the national agenda...
...With the (understandable) crisis and partial decay of socialist Zionism, we lost touch with the universalist elements in Israeli culture...
...It was a Zionism aimed at Jews threatened by assimilation...
...The drift of the Zionist movement to the left turned it into a movement of the masses, especially in Central and Eastern Europe...
...Herzl was a Central European, urban, assimilated Jew...
...Timerman, it will be said, suffered from many illusions about Israel and Zionism...
...The Jewish State was not founded at a particular moment...
...Life is better for everyone, including the Jews...
...37 years of Israel's existence should change, at the very least, our rhetorical preferences...
...I regret that these people do not share Lee's opinion that Zionism (by which he means Israel) is "their only hope...
Vol. 32 • July 1985 • No. 3
