Zeev Sternhell's The Founding Myths of Israel

...Sternhell sees Ben-Gurion and Katznelson as Orwell's Napoleon and Squeaker, and the kibbutz as Animal Farm...

...Nationalism cannot be wished away, but it can be reconfigured and imbued with liberal and humanist sentiment...

...the same is true for east European nationalism in its various forms, and for Zionism...

...and even the formally Marxist Po'alei Tsiyon (Workers of Zion) was robbed of its socialist spirit by its leader, David Ben-Gurion...

...The final step, in Sternhell's view, was the creation in 1930 of Mapai (the Land of Israel Workers' Party), which involved a union, of a kind unprecedented in the history of social democracy, between Ahdut ha'Avodah, which was at least technically socialist, and the stridently antisocialist Ha-Po'el Ha-Tsa'ir (The Young Worker...

...During the 1930s, Ben-Gurion and his colleagues earned at most $2,000 per year, while WZO officials and representatives of American Jewish philanthropies made salaries five or six times greater...

...The Zionist trade union, the Histadrut, founded in 1920, was designed from the start to mobilize Jewish workers for nation building, not for class struggle and the attainment of social equity...

...Generalizing from the cases of France, Germany, and Austria, he claims social democracy to be incomparably more democratic, rationalist, humanist, and pacific than the Labor Zionist miscreant...

...All nationalisms are rooted in myths of common historical experience, and for many peoples religious bonds have served as a powerful source of collective identity...

...rather, like all forms of nationalist socialism, it welcomed the role of "productive" capital in the building of the nation...

...The Histadrut was in no way hostile to private capital...

...Sternhell is shocked that the Labor Zionist bosses earned significantly more than agricultural laborers, and that Ben-Gurion wallowed in the luxury of a four-room apartment and—gasp!—had the money to give his daughter piano lessons...

...Admittedly, the cleavage between Labor and Revisionist Zionism is often exaggerated, particularly by self-righteous Labor Zionists...

...The same was true for oppressed west European nations such as the Irish...

...Its brutal treatment of Arabs within Israel's boundaries blocked the writing of a constitution, which would have had to guarantee equal treatment under the law...

...Although the book focuses on the period between 1904 and 1940, in his epilogue Sternhell breathlessly attributes all of Israel's major problems since 1948 to the obsessive statism inherent in the Labor Zionist project...

...Ironically, Sternhell compares Ben-Gurion and Katznelson unfavorably with the French socialist Jean Jaures, when in fact much of Jaures's worldview—his pragmatism, ambivalence about class conflict, and Jacobin militarism —was similar to that of his Labor Zionist contemporaries...

...But Israel, it appears, is not destined to join the periphery of nations, to become yet another small state, a Middle East Ruritania...

...Sternhell claims that despite a thin veneer of secularism, "the burning embers of DISSENT / Winter 1999 117 the Jewish tradition" smoldered in the heart of Labor Zionism...

...How true for Zionism, which is at heart nothing but a variety of nationalism, the most compelling form of collective identity in the modern world...

...Such factors are, in Sternhell's view, epiphenomenal...

...All non-Marxist forms of socialism, such as populism and Kropotkinesque anarchism, are depicted as wormholes leading straight into the abyss of nationalist socialism...

...For the Jews, those bonds were central throughout most of their history...

...Sternhell's infatuation with European social democracy is so bathetic that it brings to mind a schoolgirl crush on Titanic's Leonardo DiCaprio—it grows all the stronger for the knowledge that the big ship is doomed to sink...

...But Labor and Revisionist Zionism make up, whatever the linkages between them, distinct conceptual universes...

...The assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995, the election of the hawkish Benjamin Netanyahu half a year later, and the near-total deterioration of the peace process since then are symptoms of an existential crisis within Israel: unresolved and escalating conflicts about the very nature of the state, about its relationship with its citizens and with the Jewish faith...

...Finally, and most disturbingly, Sternhell denies any fundamental conceptual differences between Labor and the militant Revisionist Zionism of Vladimir Jabotinsky: "[Berl] Katznelson described 'socialist' Zionism as an enterprise of conquest...

...East European Jewry was being economically strangled due to a virulent combination of anti-Semitism and developmental backwardness...

...In the early 1900s, European Jewry's greatest enemy was not private capital, but rather the oppressive consequences of a deprivation of capital...

...In eastern Europe, according to the historian Ezra Mendelsohn, "the oppressed minority nations—the Lithuanians, Latvians, Belorussians, Ukrainians, and so on—were often nearly identical with oppressed social classes—the peasantry and the proletariat...

...Sternhell is correct that nationalism "can exist and develop on the basis of rationalism, individualism, and genuine secularism...

...Time and time again, when Sternhell comes across a fact or quotation that appears to contradict his thesis, he conjures it away by claiming that his subjects "knew very well" that things were as Sternhell believes they were...

...These critics write in the spirit of Julien Benda, who, in 1927, attributed the decline of the French Third Republic to the "treason of the clerics," intellectuals who had abandoned Cartesian rationalism for a politics of passion and a brutally instrumental view of humanity...

...But why should they have created an adversarial subculture when the entire society was a blank slate, a nation to be created from scratch...

...Not all Irish nationalism is nationalist socialism...

...To invoke Isaiah Berlin's distinction between foxes, who have many ideas, and hedgehogs, who have one grand idea, Sternhell is a quintessential hedgehog...

...Zeev Sternhell, a distinguished, albeit controversial, historian of European fascism, is a prominent member of this group of critical Israeli scholars...

...For example, he refuses to take seriously the ideological differences between Ahdut ha-Avodah and HaPo'el Ha-Tsa'ir...

...But do we really want to hold up as models of benign, inclusive nationalism the historical experiences of western Europe and the United States— lands of conquest, plagued by social inequities, and tarnished by outbreaks of chauvinism and even (in the case of France) homegrown fascism...

...Sternhell writes with a sense of mission...

...Antirational and antidemocratic, nationalist socialism claimed to esteem the common laborer and to fight for social justice, but its appreciation of labor was purely instrumental, deriving from the worker's function as the lifeblood of the nation...

...But why, then, did Russian Jewish radicals, contemporaries of the early Zionists, establish collective farms in the relatively hospitable United States...

...DEREK PENSLAR holds the Zacks chair in Jewish history at the University of Toronto...

...Sternhell is troubled not merely by the Zionist elite's level of comfort but by their unwillingness to instill into the Yishuv working class a proletarian subculture through a separate educational system teaching Marxist values...

...Revisionist Zionism never had any other objective...

...In the case of Zionism, taking a fundamentally sympathetic stance toward Jewish nationalism and appreciating its complex relationship with the Jewish religious tradition is a necessary step for anyone seriously interested in softening Israel's harsh political climate...

...If this is so, I wonder, why did bourgeois groups in the World Zionist Organization (WZO) campaign against Labor throughout the 1920s, slash funding for collective settlement, and throw Labor out of the WZO executive in 1927...

...If Sternhell wishes to criticize Labor Zionism on absolute, moral grounds, he may have a case to make, but his rigid separation of Labor Zionism from interwar social democracy cannot withstand even the most superficial historical analysis...

...Finally, Sternhell is right to portray the Histadrut as an oligarchic political machine whose relentless pursuit of nation building at the expense of social democracy alienated many of its working-class members...

...Moreover, European social democracy was riddled with leadership cults, visceral nationalist attachments (which soured relations between French and German socialists), and religious motifs (for example, Italian socialist baptisms, where the name of Ferdinand Lassalle was piously invoked...

...Sternhell lumps Labor Zionism with European nationalist socialism and separates it from European social democracy...

...On the other hand, Sternhell is quite willing to relegate the role of ideology to the sidelines when it suits his purpose...

...In The Founding Myths of Israel, as in his other work, Sternhell shows himself to be a DISSENT / Winter 1999 115 remarkably ahistorical historian: occasional remarks about historical context, contingency, and discontinuity are overwhelmed by an essentialist and teleological historical narrative...

...Sternhell's rigid west-Eurocentrism supports an aggressive anticlericalism (aggravated, no doubt, by the Kulturkampf between secularism and Orthodoxy in contemporary Israel...

...But this argument misses the crucial distinction between religious sentiment and a sense of religious heritage...

...Its indifference to social policy led to discrimination against the Middle Eastern Jewish immigrants of the 1950s...

...Thus BenGurion's subordination of the working class to the needs of the nation and state had a social democratic pedigree, or at least parallel, after all...

...As Mitchell Cohen noted in his 1987 book Zion and State (a work with a similar purview to Sternhell's, but far more credible and balanced), Otto Bauer, the leader of the Austrian social democrats, justified his party's actions with the claim that the republican state balanced competing class interests...

...And its territorial aggressiveness, fueled by atavistic religious zealotry, set off the war of 1967 and promoted the colonization of the West Bank under Labor governments during the next decade...

...Sternhell plays down the extent to which Zionism originated as a response to the physical plight of East European Jewry...

...So, for example, according to Sternhell, Labor Zionism's rejection of revolutionary socialism had far more to do with the early-twentieth-century writings of the philosopher A. D. Gordon than with the challenges of constructing a homeland in an area with few Jewish workers and even fewer entrepreneurs: a land starved for capital, under foreign rule, and confronted by an Arab majority that wholeheartedly opposed the Zionist project...

...Although the nationalist fervor of some Israelis is fiercer than ever, for others it has dimmed and been replaced by a comfortable, if rather weary, sense of at-homeness...

...Sternhell has to make his wild claim in order to justify a book that savages Labor while almost totally neglecting Revisionism, the true legatee of European nationalist socialism within the Zionist movement...

...There is nothing wrong with this comparison, but it tells only half the story...

...As befits a hedgehog, Sternhell has sharp quills...

...When divested of both God and rabbinic authority, however, Judaism metamorphoses into a nontranscendent feeling of historical continuity—a liberal and humanitarian approach to the Jewish religious tradition...

...The state of Israel is now fifty years old...

...In France, Leon Blum's Popular Front strove for social reform within the existing capitalist framework, and his nationalization of military industry was designed to fortify France against its enemies—a statist enterprise worthy of Ben-Gurion himself...

...This leaves him incapable of accounting for the rivalry throughout the 1920s between the two parties, or the reasons for their merger in 1930...

...His writing, always barbed, becomes downright venomous when he turns his atten114 DISSENT / Winter 1999 tion on to Zionism...

...STERNHELL holds the Zionist labor movement to absurdly high standards...

...For example, we are told that "the Eretz Israel bourgeoisie knew that it had nothing to fear from the labor movement...

...Whereas the leaders of Labor Zionism were country bumpkins, unfamiliar with socialist literature and incapable of producing a theoretician of substance, Europe's social democrats were led by superior intellects and gentle souls...

...He comments bitterly that Palestine's Jewish leaders did not send fighters to the defense of the Spanish Republic during the 1936-1939 civil war—without mentioning that at this time the Zionist leadership was preoccupied with a Palestinian Arab revolt...

...Ben-Gurion oversaw the liquidation of the Po'alei Tsiyon when, in 1919, it joined with formerly unaffiliated "independents," such as the Zionist ideologue Berl Katznelson, to form Ahdut ha-'Avodah (Unity of Labor...

...One group of scholars, however, mainly historians and sociologists at Israeli universities, points an accusing finger at the Zionist left itself, at the labor movement that built the country during the interwar period and dominated the state of Israel for half a century...

...he is determined to show that Labor Zionism was nothing but a carbon copy of European nationalist socialism...

...There is little difference between BenGurion's statement of 1919 that "the national question depends on the social question" and the Irish socialist James Connolly saying, in 1898, that "the Irish Question [is] at bottom an economic question" and that English and Irish socialists must organize separately...

...There is a fundamental intolerance as well as disconnection from reality behind Sternhell's argument that the only legitimate type of nationalism is the utilitarian variety that Sternhell claims has flourished in western Europe and the United States...

...Sternhell is onto something here...

...His idee fixe is the belief that fascism originated as a mutation of Marxist social democracy into an ethnocentric "nationalist socialism...

...Why did Ben-Gurion have to engage in feverish electoral campaigning among the Jewish masses in eastern Europe in order to attain Labor hegemony over the WZO during the early 1930's...

...Although the two engaged in a bit of "mutual mudslinging," the bourgeoisie was pleased to become the Laborites' junior political partner...

...The seeds of Zionist nationalist socialism, according to Sternhell, were present from the beginning of the Second Aliyah, the Zionist settlement of the period 1903- 1914...

...And in Austria, when the social democrats briefly participated in postwar governing coalitions, they did not declare war on private capital, nor did they seek to transform the state 116 DISSENT / Winter 1999 into a dictatorship of the proletariat...

...In any case, Sternhell lays out the concept of the oppressed nation only to condemn it as a fiction and inherently protofascist to boot...

...Most of the youthful pioneers who came to Palestine from Russia belonged to non- or antisocialist political organizations...

...Israeli intellectuals, most of whom are secular and leftist, tend to blame the rightist and Orthodox camps for the increasingly ethnocentric and fundamentalist qualities of Israeli political culture...

...Ideologies shape institutions and overpower socioeconomic conditions...

...He wishes to thank Keven Callahan and Russel Carlberg for their insights...

...Chaim Arlosoroff, the number-two man in Mapai before his assassination in 1933, wrote a major treatise on the "Jewish people's socialism," whose rejection of class warfare and call for national unity did in many ways resemble the program of European intellectuals who describe their country (rather than any class within it) as "proletarian," in need of collective liberation through national renewal...

...He ignores the undeniable political and social reality of oppressed nations and their strong economic links to a particular class...

...On another point, Sternhell claims that the Zionist agricultural collectives were a purely pragmatic response to the scarcity of resources and Arab labor...

...Yet during the first half of this century, the enormous difficulty of creating a Jewish state and the need to combat Zionism's many ideological rivals endowed the Zionist project with an intensity unprecedented in the history of nationalism...

...It fits his thesis far more neatly to present Zionism as a movement of ethnocentric self-assertion, a battle against assimilation similar to that waged by other stateless peoples in Europe's polyglot empires...

...The two forms of Zionism differed only in their methods...

...Crucial to Sternhell's argument is his tight association between nationalist socialism and Labor Zionism's "constructive socialism...

...WHATEVER INSIGHTS the book offers, however, are drowned out by splenetic outbursts and plain errors...

...Such an approach is bound to accomplish more than hurling bitter recriminations at the fallen Titans from Israel's mythic past...

...He contributed the section on Zionism to the Illustrated History of the Jewish People (Harcourt, Brace, 1997...

...To be sure, Ben-Gurion found it exceedingly difficult to form governing coalitions with doctrinaire socialists...

...Unlike social democracy, which aspired to alter the economic environment in order to increase human freedom, nationalist socialism cynically manipulated the individual in order to promote the nation's control over its spatial environment...

...Like Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's controversial best-seller, Hitler's Willing Executioners, The Founding Myths of Israel brings considerable power of mind to an important subject, only to fritter away the book's potential through polemic and exaggeration...

...Similarly, since the Likud triumph of 1977, some in Israel have blamed the fall of the secular republic on the treason of the apparatchiks, the bosses of Labor Zionism, who are accused of caring less for democracy and social justice than for state building, and of pursuing a militaristic and expansionist agenda...