REVIVING ZIONISM
Troy, Gil
REVIVING ZIONISM Gil Troy ONCE UPON A TIME, Zionism— support for Israel as the Jewish national homeland—was a powerful glue binding North American Jews with each other, Israel, and Jews...
...The prime minister looks at Arafat and says, "Now we can begin to negotiate...
...As the Russian-born cultural Zionist Ahad Ha'am insisted: "Judaism is fundamentally national...
...Some have been intimately linked to sovereign states, others have not...
...Zionism at its simplest is Jewish nationalism, the understanding that Jews are a people, that Judaism is not just a religion, and that Israel is the Jewish homeland...
...Zionism held something for Jews of all stripes...
...We Jews are blessed because we already have the solution...
...the natives...
...Zionism was communitarian, and it sought to resurrect a more integrated, authentic Judaism and Jew...
...T h e writing on the walls is Jewish—Jewish graffiti...
...Zionist denominationalism was passionate, divisive, and strangely constructive...
...After the 1967 Six-Day War, the plucky Jewish state was the apple of the American Jewish eye...
...Israel itself, embroiled in the war in Lebanon, became less universally popular...
...By redefining a new Zionism for the 21st century, Jews will learn how to express support for Israel, even if they occasionally disagree with Israeli policies...
...Religious Jews fell in love with the state that liberated Jerusalem's holy stones...
...Shlaim predictably proceeds to lambaste Israel, and despite writing a 600-page "authoritative" history, has no room to mention events that were seared into the Israeli national consciousness, and affected prospects for peace, such as the Palestinian terrorist attacks on schoolchildren at Kiryat Shmona and Maalot, or the Palestinian murder of Israeli Olympians in Munich...
...We can have Rome, and Jerusalem too...
...Affluenza is the malady of the huge house echoing from emptiness because both parents are working crazy hours, with teen-agers left on their own...
...Still, on paper, Zionism offered a recipe for Jewish renewal—^nation-building—that the American migration never did...
...The key to Zionism's popularity was its relative universahty—like the Torah, it offered many paths to understanding and fulfillment...
...In my history classes at McGill University in Montreal, I tell my students: "I don't worry about your economic futures...
...T h e early Zionists had widely varying agendas, and yet could unite behind the notion of Israel...
...Kevin envies his Jewish friend's sense of belonging...
...Even after the collapse of the most elaborate and sustained expression of Marxism—Soviet Communism—echoes of the old Marxist melody linger on, especially in the universities...
...It can address the low-grade fever that afflicts our community, which manifests itself in a chronic worry about "continuity" and a lethargic, dispassionate approach to Judaism...
...The United States and Israel withdrew...
...If Israelis cannot eliminate the Palestinians, if the Arabs cannot eliminate the Jews, each can at least invalidate the other's claims...
...7, 1999, found that poor and middle class children were more likely than rich children to believe their lives were better then their parents...
...Jews need to take back the term Zionism...
...Twenty-first century Zionism can advocate a return to the days when young Jews were known for attributing blue boxes that collected charity rather than for purchasing blue dresses from the Gap...
...It is time to stop internalizing our opponents' criticism...
...T h e higher up the class ladder you climb, the more the anxiety increases...
...It allowed many different people to find a foothold in the vast nation-building project...
...Karl Marx's vision of the workers of the world umting sought to unite—and divide—based on class distinctions...
...T h e flag is Jewish...
...To feel kinship with a certain community is natural, not racist...
...Territories in Lebanon, the Golan, and Palestine have been occupied by those who even killed the principle of equality when they claimed that God created a people distinguished above all other peoples," al-Assad said, adding that Israelis and Jews "try to kill all the principles of divine faiths with the same mentality of betraying Jesus Christ and torturing him...
...My dream begins as soon as I disembark," Portnoy declares...
...Revitalized Zionism, stressing victories that are emotional instead of territorial, can help us restore our communal energy...
...Anti-Zionism goes far beyond the question of the settlements or Ariel Sharon...
...Returned...
...I do worry," I say, "about your souls...
...Some of you will be richer, some of you will be less so, but all of you have proved that you can jump through the necessary social hoops to survive, and, for most of you, to thrive...
...Sadly, few associate such tolerant, humanitarian positions with "Zionism...
...I N The Wonder Years, the hit 1980s T V show about the 1960s, the young protagonist Kevin Arnold envies his best friend's bar mitzvah—not because of the gifts his friend gets...
...children of wealthy parents thought the older generation had it easier...
...Find a community, find a framework, find a way to bring meaning to your lives...
...An invigorated, expanded, historically-based Zionism can address the malady of "Jewfluenza...
...This romance continued in the 1970s through the dark days of the Yom Kippur War and the Palestinian terror attacks, culminating with the grassroots movement to save Soviet J e w r y by facilitating aliyah, immigration to Israel...
...Arafat agrees...
...But, at the end of the day, even a 4,000-year-old claim can't completely negate a 1,200-year-old claim, especially when there are millions of people who believe in that claim so intensely...
...North American Jews remain politically liberal and are uncomfortable with intense patriotism (at least before Sept...
...Today, attitudes of many American Jews are precisely the opposite of what they were in 1967...
...At bottom, each of the warring peoples would love to click their heels three times and make the other go away...
...Today, Zionism can go the other way: It can include Israel but embrace so much more...
...Martin Luther King Jr...
...The prime minister says: "When Moses was in the desert for 40 years the Jews got very thirsty and Moses asked the Lord for water and there appeared a beautiful lake...
...The prime minister asks if he might first tell a story...
...While Zionism once epitomized idealism, romanticism, and the best of nationalism to millions of Jews and non-Jews, Zionism today is considered politically incorrect...
...Kevin asks...
...Liberals lauded the democratic socialism of the kibbutz and the monolithic Histadrut labor union...
...Instead of the Enlightenment's formula for success—a J ew at home, but a Frenchman in the street—we have inverted the formula: A J ew in the street, and an American at home...
...Since the days of the American Revolution, hundreds of national, cultural, and ethnic expressions of collective identity have flourished...
...This joke reflects fundamental tensions in the Middle East...
...It is time to stop internalizing our opponents' criticism...
...Marxism, Communism, feminism—all of the "isms"—imply both an ideology and a code of behavior, and Zionism needs to become the same...
...A revitalized Zionism will bring substance to an identity that is currendy more of an external posture— simply a label—than a source of internal meaning, a way of life...
...Many of these lucky, coddled children of wealth feel neglected—the New York Times diagnosed it as "affluenza," a spiritual influenza of the affluent Affluenza is about "having it a l l " and feeling strangely empty inside...
...Moses did the same but when he came out of the water his clothes were gone...
...It is the denial to the Jewish people of a fundamental right that we justly claim for the people of Africa and freely accord all other nations of the globe...
...To be a J ew means the acceptance of neither a religious nor an ethical creed," Jacob Klatzkin, the Russian-German Zionist philosopher, wrote on the eve of World War I. "We are neither a denomination nor a school of thought, but members of one family, bearers of a common history...
...During the heyday of American Zionism, even Philip Roth, the enfant terrible of American Jewish writing, could not resist the Israel of Moshe Dayan and Golda Meir, the Israel of the sabra and Jaffa oranges...
...Nothing...
...We cannot make the same mistake too many 19th-century Zionists did and pretend that history was frozen after the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E...
...Zionism is being demonized...
...Even Jews who accept the Zionist trinity of peoplehood, history, and homeland, often recoil at the use of the word "Zionist"—shunning the label...
...At one anti-Israel rally, copies of the infamous anti- Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders ofZion were distributed, and demonstrators held aloft signs, including those stating "Hitler should have finished the job," "Zionism is racism," and "Israel is a terrorist state...
...Then things changed...
...Toward the end of the novel Portnoy runs "home" to Israel and cannot believe what he sees...
...In Portnoy s Complaint (1969), Alexander Portnoy (Roth's perverse and perverted Jewish neurotic) finds the land of milk and honey the perfect salve, the healthy contrast to his smothering American Jewish ghetto...
...On the first page of his book, The Iron Wall—Israel and the Arab World (2001), Shlaim embraces the French philosopher Ernest Renan's definition of a nation as "a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbors...
...In 1987, when the first Pdestdnian intirada erupted, Woody Allen, the bad boy of American Jewish celebrity, snarled at Israel: "My goodness...
...Despite the world's new romance with globalization hype, we still live in a world of nation-states and nationalisms...
...Who took them?' The Jews answered, 'The Palestinians took them.'" But Arafat quickly objects, "There were no Palestinians at that time...
...It is easy to forget that i n i t i a l l y Zionism was dwarfed by the mass Jewish migration to America...
...This is where it all began...
...It comes from "arriving" and then feeling "there is no there there...
...Anti-Zionism attacks the very right of the Jews to their homeland...
...Hey, here we're the WASPS...
...we just need to tap into it...
...As a professor, I stop there...
...Zionism gradually became delegitimized, as sympathy for Palestinians grew...
...once said, "When people...
...Zionism can emphasize the positive motivations for being Jewish, including community ties between Israel and America...
...11), religious fundamentalism, and militarism— yet Israel is often caricatured as committed to all three...
...As a result, each side is susceptible to arguments that negate the other's legitimacy...
...Moses shouted, 'Where are my clothes...
...I pose the challenge, not the solution...
...And what is anti-Zionist...
...Just been away on a long vacation, that's all...
...Most Americans bought into the Protestant notion that Judaism is "just" a religion and that each individual hews his own idiosyncratic path to God and goodness...
...THERE IS A JOKE CIRCULATING on the Internet: The Israeli prime minister sits down with Yasser Arafat to work out an agreement...
...T h e Jews first drank and then bathed...
...Marx, himself of Jewish origin, negated his Judaism to become a citizen of the world...
...What are we anyway, Mom...
...By the 1980s and 1990s, American Jews were more likely to see their gleaming suburban casdes as healthy contrasts to their Israeli cousins' cramped proletarian apartments...
...One young Israeli post-Zionist professor, Avi Shlaim, begins his history of the Arab-Israeli conflict by deeming all nationalist histories "one-sided and self-serving...
...Conservatives delighted in the patriotic nationalism of the Knesset and the Israel Defense Forces...
...Yes, Jews could engage in an academic exercise and prove again and again, in many different ways, that we got there first...
...THE ZIONIST REVOLUTION of the late 19th and 20th century defied the modern American trend toward individualism and the Jewish trend toward sectarianism...
...This approach helped foster great individual successes in America while causing some of the communal failures that have triggered today's Jewish identity crisis...
...It's time to take Zionism back...
...Twenty-first century Zionism must advocate a return to the days when young Jews were knowi for distributing blue boxes for charity instead of purchasing blue dresses from the Gap...
...Marxists—remember them?—negated nationalism...
...Zionism is more than simply pro-Israelism: It is a comprehensive Jewish worldview The Democracy versus theocracy debate in Israel further distanced American Jews from Israel and Zionism...
...Draft documents from the conference declared "Zionism is Racism" and deemed Israel an "apartheid" regime...
...Amid all their riches at the dawn of the 21st century, Americans are jumpy, lost...
...A newfound Zionism can help us realize that we don't have to choose between our human identity and our Jewish identity—between what Moses Hess 150 years ago called "Rome and Jerusalem...
...A renewed Zionism can also help Jews in Israel and abroad stop focusing exclusively on political Zionism and think about how Israel and Jewish nationalism can help revive Jewish culture, and Judaism itself...
...Zionism is more than simply pro-Israelism: It is a comprehensive Jewish worldview...
...A renewed community, an alternative to the more-more-more, rush-rush-rush, me-me-me, money-money-money modern world, can square the circle...
...The religious community, intensely anti-Zionist a century ago, is today overwhelrningly Zionist, while secular Jews are increasingly agnostic concerning the Jewish state...
...One of the hallmarks of Zionist vitality, and perhaps, one of its keys to success, was that it could accommodate many, often clashing, schools of thought Zionism came in many styles: political, labor, socialist, cultural, religious, and even revisionist...
...Theirs has been an anxiety-provoking prosperity...
...An Arab lawyers' union distributed a booklet of vile and ancient anti-Semitic caricatures showing Jews with hook noses and fangs dripping blood...
...Israel in the eyes of many Jews had become the aggressor, colonizer, and occupier...
...Secular Jews fell in love with the unholy pragmatism of Tel Aviv...
...A combustible combination of Israel's own mistakes, the Israeli elite's harsh self-criticism, the reality of Israeli power and prosperity, the contrast with Palestinian powerlessness and poverty, and the West's newfound politically correct romance with indigenous peoples, all ended up reinforcing the successful quarter-century-long propaganda campaign to demonize Zionism as racism...
...Most European Jews roundly rejected the British offer of a homeland in Uganda—which showed just how deeply Jewish most Zionists were...
...I am in an airport where I have never been before and all the people I see—passengers, stewardesses, ticket sellers, porters, pilots, taxi drivers— are J e w s . " Portnoy continues: "Awake who ever heard of such a thing...
...A New York Times/CBS News poll, published Nov...
...It is a sweeping assault that metastasizes into anti-Semitic rantings—such as when Syrian president Bashar al- Assad met the Pope in May 2001...
...Are these the people whose money I used to steal from those little blue-and-white cans after collecting funds for a Jewish homeland...
...Anti- Zionism has become an epidemic of attacks against Jews throughout the world, which spun off from the Palestinian intifada...
...In the Middle East today, however, history is irrelevant...
...These are (there's no other word...
...And that is why some form of accommodation is necessary...
...criticize Zionism, they mean Jews...
...REVIVING ZIONISM Gil Troy ONCE UPON A TIME, Zionism— support for Israel as the Jewish national homeland—was a powerful glue binding North American Jews with each other, Israel, and Jews worldwide...
...The renewed attack on Zionism overshadowed the United Nations conference held in Durban, South Africa, in August and September 2001...
...Critics regularly twin the term with a grab-bag of reprehensible "isms": expansionism, colonialism, imperialism, racism, and, most perversely, Nazism...
Vol. 27 • February 2002 • No. 1
