To Praise Zionism, and To Bury It
Avishai, Bernard
to praise Zionism and to bury it_ Bernard Avishai Now that in the wake of Anti-Zionist slanders by the Kremlin and the General Assembly we have all become defiant Zionists again, it may be...
...Israeli society can no longer entice Jews with some vague promise of "self-determination...
...But now, of course, over 100,000 West Bank Arabs work in the Israeli economy—virtually all in industrial and construction jobs—so that there has come to be a substantial economic interest in retaining the present arrangement...
...Moreover, the Labor Party leadership cannot very well lay claim to a different Zionist tradition when it was that very tradition over whose dismantling it so comfortably presided for so long...
...The best defense of Zionism may well be a grateful and loving epitaph...
...But when it comes to making sense out of these professions, the leaders of Labor Zionism end up debating the issues raised by their historic opposition, now the Government: how to give up as little of the West Bank as possible...
...Living there requires an act of mature love, not an act of moral excellence...
...Israeli society is eclectic yet unmistakably Jewish...
...Israel has become, as it were, "natural...
...to praise Zionism and to bury it_ Bernard Avishai Now that in the wake of Anti-Zionist slanders by the Kremlin and the General Assembly we have all become defiant Zionists again, it may be somewhat indelicate to ask: do we need Zionism and Zionist ideas today...
...The theory required men and women who would have a personal stake in modest practical achievement, who wanted to be "rebuilt by rebuilding," as an early song put it, who could draw inspiration from a revolution that was to take place one dunam (a quarter of an acre) at a time...
...But it is less clear, particularly since the 1973 war, that historic Zionism has delivered so well on the promise of ending Jewish vulnerability...
...integrate the North African Jews who were arriving, and tax the North American Jews who were not...
...Israel is, gratefully, too real to be the darling of Utopian moralists...
...Begin, Sharon, and Zevulun Hammer will give us all a last fling at "Zionism...
...A synthesis of traditional Jewish practices with modern values and aesthetics is being worked out...
...We think we know that America is good for the Jews...
...The vast majority of Israelis are secularists and remain moderate and open-minded about the status of the occupied territories...
...And when they propose a more pragmatic approach to, say, the occupied territories, they appear to be suffering a failure of nerve...
...it is an argument about the Jewish staying...
...Instead, it was the politically more modest but culturally more ambitious strategy of Achad Haam, reinterpreted by men like Weizmann...
...It is true that these sentiments were never completely absent from the Zionist movement...
...It thus becomes easy to represent it as flaccid, played-out, purposeless...
...Like Winston Churchill, who confessed "Zionism" to Weizmann in 1948, anyone with a decent concern for Israel's survival calls himself a Zionist...
...In fact, the achievements of historic Zionism are so obvious that they are often overlooked...
...It was this society which was to prove itself a substantial political fact...
...Instead, they allow the Likud and Gush Emunim to re-define it, and the "Zionist" debate comes to be about solidarity vs...
...There was nothing left for Zionists to say about the security of the Jewish nation except to admonish the Israeli government to be brave and wise...
...This was the great alliance, the alliance between "practical" Zionism and socialist pioneering, which gave rise to the State of Israel, in due course...
...Between 1881 and 1914, two million Jews left the Russian-Polish Pale of Settlement...
...The Jewish people of Eastern Europe had been murdered...
...On the contrary, they obscure the fact that historic Zionism held out the promise of a new Jewish civilization, not an old one...
...Israel has not proven to be a more effective refuge than North America, neither does Israeli society possess some unique and forceful moral charm...
...cowardice, Judaism vs...
...The Holocaust, apart from murdering practical Zionism's organic constituency, caused an endemic preoccupation with defense and rescue...
...If there is nothing creative left to the Zionist movement, that too is a measure of Jewish relief...
...For many Western Jews, vicarious "Zionism" is a serious (and final...
...There could no longer be for such Jews an established body of Jewish concerns, Jewish belief, and Jewish liturgical practice...
...And why not...
...For the two fundamental promises of the Zionist movement—to modernize Jewish cultural life by means of a cooperative, national experience, and thus to end the peculiar vulnerabilities and fears of Jews in class-divided, Christ-revengingEu-rope—have more or less been delivered upon...
...Achad Haam's contribution was to provide the guiding principles for the evolution of a Hebrew-speaking culture, principles which were both gradualist and anti-colonialist (i.e., refraining from the employment of Arab labor...
...And, beginning in 1905, they came...
...bureaucratic regulation to voluntaristic expression...
...Withdrawal from the West Bank will involve no repudication of Zionist principle...
...one satisfies one's needs within the culture and institutions of the Jewish nation as constituted in Israel or one remains an active, vigilant Jewish participant in Western democracies...
...Indeed the vitality of the movement was manifest in its discord...
...this was, as we have seen, the very point of the Zionist project...
...It is thus the legacy of the Zionist movement, the great westward emigration after 1881, and tragically, that of the Third Reich, that the choices for free Jews have not been more plain for a century: one lives in Israel or one does not...
...The neo-Zionists, including Likud's leadership, argue that they cannot renounce their claim to Hebron without renouncing their claim to Tel Aviv...
...So, at least, it seems in light of the increasingly evident circumstance that the only activist "Zionists" of our day turn out to be a group of right-wing fundamentalists whose passion masks their own slipshod understanding of what Zionism once was and what it has achieved...
...It is the word they expect in editorials but not from friends...
...But this activity and these sentiments ought not to be confused with historic Zionism...
...This was a new problem for Israel, but as far back as 1881 the Zionists had expressed their apprehensions regarding the "spiritual traps" of Eretz Yisrael, regarding the very atmosphere of the country and the ZIONISM Continued from page 20 permeation of that atmosphere by atavistic memory...
...Gordon, Katznelson, Ben-Gurion, Brenner and the others, rejecting New York, undertaking collective settlement, fashioning a Jewish-socialist polity within the Mandate state, constructing a Jewish society that was not only economically independent and militarily defensible but also culturally distinctive...
...expand the economy...
...It needs not an independent state, but the creation in its native land of conditions favorable to its development: A good sized settlement of Jews working without hindrance in every branch of culture, from agriculture and handicrafts to science and literature...
...Europe had simply become so grotesque that the political agenda had become not only compelling but also realistic...
...when the only plausible Zionism is one which sets goals inherently beyond its reach...
...Herzl played on these dreams with great panache, "calling on" the Sultan, the Kaiser, the British Colonial Office...
...The "Zionist idea" has conquered the Jewish world in this generation by transforming itself into a celebration...
...Life in the Pale had taught them that such national goals can be pursued outside the realm of high politics...
...Partition" today (read return of the territories) would involve "return" of a critical element of Israel's labor force...
...Chaim Weiz-mann would achieve a kind of synthesis between the two in subsequent years...
...But that majority has long-since lost the ability to make its case in Zionist terms...
...Zionism has become a term which suggests how right it is for the trees in the valley of Jezreel to be green...
...coalition politics to constitutional reform...
...Who needs Zionist heroes...
...Perhaps they had no choice, but the consequence is that severe class divisions now tear at Israel's social fabric, and the inflated Orthodox bureaucracy has found new champions...
...And since he could not understand what held the Jews together apart from gentile anti-Semitism, he thought the Jews' state could be situated anywhere—even thousands of miles from historic Eretz Yisrael...
...The traditional elite of Israel is either unwilling or unable to refute this dogma...
...mode of Jewish expression, and anyway, their money is indispensible...
...We may observe a subtle principle in Achad Haam's argument, one that was to become central to Zionist ideology once Herzl's diplomatic house-of-cards collapsed in 1904...
...The new "Zionist" purposes became self-evident, beyond debate: hold off the Arabs...
...But those undergrounds were consistently ostracized by the movement's mainstream leadership, and were cautiously accepted—and temporarily—by Ben-Gurion and his associates only when the pressures of the Mandate government became intolerable...
...Neo-Zionism But heroic Zionism is back on our minds, even on our agenda, put there as a consequence of the occupation...
...It is an argument not about ideology-fulfilled, but about genocide-contemplated...
...The recurring complaint, voiced mainly by American-Jewish visitors to Israel during the 1950s and '60s, that Israel is not "Jewish" enough, not sufficiently committed to traditional religious authority and legal principles, thus betrays a profound misunderstanding of original Zionist goals...
...who could also persuade themselves that growing Arab resentment was but an aspect of a world soon to be superceded...
...But in the end, Herzlian Zionism did not really inspire anyone to build much of anything...
...The traditional Zionist's hope to furnish Jews a "refuge" has become increasingly ironic ever since 1948...
...Even bitter critics of such policies and practices grudgingly acknowledge the "idealism" and "Zionism" of the settlers, refer to them as the "new chalutzim," "heirs" to the authentic tradition...
...This is because Zionism has commonly become a term which merely suggests how right it is for children to be raised on the Hebrew language and for the trees in the Valley of Jezreel to be green...
...Too many wills have already run their course...
...to give up a substantial portion of the land, especially now that it is under Israeli control, is to diminish Zionism...
...Such men and women wanted to be culturally self-determining, scientific, secular—and Jewish...
...it is certain that it does not owe them the West Bank...
...And this was because the priorities of cultural Zionism appealed to the movement's only reliable constituency, the one from which would come the pioneers who would actually attempt to live in Israel...
...by and large, they earned it, and inflicted a minimum of injury on Arab residents when they appropriated part of it...
...Beleaguered Russian and Argentinean Jews now acknowledge this openly by their actions...
...Little wonder that for most Israelis the word Zionism— Tziyonut—has come to mean showy moralism or patriotism...
...Gush Emunim and its supporters can lay claim to a historic tradition, but it is not the tradition of the Zionist movement, or of the chalutzim...
...Zionism today is all answers...
...But it is difficult to persuade the Arabs of this if we have not yet persuaded ourselves...
...and this may be a long time indeed, at least for a self-conscious minority...
...The images of Zionism today have been appropriated by a resilient and dangerous dogma that Zionism had historically repudiated...
...apostasy...
...They may well derive a very different conclusion from that which is intended: indeed, they may say, the right is no different in the one place from the other, and it is no right at all...
...But regarding the "aUyon" (ascent to Zion) of Western Jews, the traditional claims of the Zionist movement reflected in Ben-Gurion's imperative have become increasingly unrealistic...
...These were mainly workers, students and petty bourgeois intellectuals whose Orthodox origins had become something of an embarrassment to them...
...Mainstream Zionism, as I have already suggested, was exhausted by its own success...
...But writers like Philip Roth are not similarly distressed...
...The Zionism which did inspire foundation work was, as I have already suggested, the Zionism of men who thought primarily in social and cultural categories, not political ones...
...Old Zionism: The Rise In 1893, four years before the first Zionist Congress, Theodor Herzl openly proposed the mass conversion of Jewish children to Christianity...
...I do not mean to denigrate such sentiments or to dismiss lightly the formidable political apparatus which they have engendered...
...Such Jews who choose to live in the Jewish state will not want to do so in order to make their homes in Hebron...
...Begin's victory has made this much obvious...
...Is it not, however, time to acknowledge openly that for Western Jews, at least, Zionism was a revolution with coherent goals u hich have been substantially achieved, and to insist that the present debate be about what it is in fact about—annexation, peace, decency, security—and not about Zionist authenticity...
...The battles of the Six Day War ended with Jewish control of sites so ancient and so powerfully symbolic that strident and atavistic redefinitions of Zionism became virtually irresistible...
...But the argument today is no longer an argument about historic Zionism...
...He saw in Zionism a method of Jewish self-development, a way of keeping the Jewish people together even after the Halachic glue had come unstuck...
...Historic Eretz Yisrael was a means, not an end in itself...
...These perceptions are sensible, and even useful: Israel has outgrown the Zionists' awesome sense of history, and Israelis, like their Arab neighbors, must now come to terms with the fruit of the Zionist revolution...
...they were mainly promoted by the Irgun and Stemist undergrounds after Jabotinsky's death...
...Defiance offers a kind of satisfaction, especially for Jews a generation after the Holocaust, but it can also be counterproductive...
...Few thought it worth pointing out that these were not Zionist purposes but post-Zionist purposes...
...Post-Zionism lews are, after all, living in an uncertain post-Zionist age...
...Achad Haam and Weizmann created the ideological and institutional framework in which the plodding and revolutionary work of Labor Zionism could be initiated...
...not artificially, not by fiat...
...The heroic and macabre images of political Zionism would be eclipsed until the more tragic 1930's when Jabotinsky would revive them in the Revisionist movement...
...For Achad Haam, the gradual, "organic" development of a Jewish nation in Palestine would provide the basis for a viable Jewish civilization after theological categories were no longer persuasive...
...And Western Jews conspicuously display such decency today at fund raising dinners, at rallies, or on their car bumpers...
...That policy—partition—was the outgrowth of a commitment to a Jewish society based on Jewish labor...
...Preoccupied as they were with the challenge of creating some national, hence novel, way of living as Jews, and buffetted as well by the ideological crosscurrents of the Europe of the day, Zionist theoreticians, especially those from Eastern Europe, were as various as they were intolerant...
...Zionism and the chalutzim were primarily and explicitly concerned with rebuilding a people, not a land...
...But early on, these two approaches were at odds in practice...
...For if Jews inside and outside Israel persist in stressing the view that Israel's borders are not yet final because the Zionist revolution is not yet over, they will squander twenty-five years of international recognition of the 1948 borders...
...There is, of course, a healthy streak of realism in this diluted "Zionism...
...Those who argue most vociferously for its retention— Gush Emunim and the Land of Israel Movement—couch their claims in attractive and familiar terms: the land of Israel, promised to the Jews by God, has always been the central object of the Zionist revolution...
...But today there are no mainstream Zionists left to oppose the mystical and militarist appeals which, since 1967, have monopolized Zionist images and prestige...
...for the most part, they behaved (to Achad Haam's suppressed delight) as if their movement were not about some abstract notion of Jewish power or solidarity, but rather about the concrete ways in which Jews ought to be living in the modern world...
...If highminded and disciplined Jews would go to Palestine to work on themselves and on the development of a Jewish society, they would eventually become the decisive political fact—naturally, organically...
...Regardless of what Achad Haam would think about them, Western Jews can deal better with their English-speaking, pluralist surroundings than they can with any intensely Jewish ones...
...and much of modern Israel would vindicate their fears...
...Achad Haam, on the other hand, represented those Zionist priorities deriving from the still vital—but already withering— Jewish life of Eastern and East Central Europe...
...Semitism, vulnerability, the "degradation" of Jews in Western societies...
...Quite apart from the substance of this disagreement, it highlights the most conspicuous feature of early Zionism: dissension...
...No doubt, Israelis still have far to go before meeting the standards of their culturalist mentors...
...The Arab world, for example, must be made to admit that a vital Jewish nation in Israel already exists, and is an end in itself...
...it is dangerous...
...vitality for Judaism in a rapidly secularizing world was as important to him as safety for Jews in a continuingly hostile world...
...The Labor Zionist leadership whose third generation is now trying to figure out what it means to be an Opposition may have been born to parents knee-deep in Labor Zionist acitivity, but it is more readily the offspring of the modern Israeli army and state bureaucracy...
...Old Zionism: The Decline More recently, it has been a symptom of the Zionist movement's eventual triumph that disharmony, activism, and social experiment appear superfluous...
...Alex Portnoy thought it prudent to ask his mother if "Jews believed in winter...
...But it was not his exotic nationalism that prevailed...
...we shall not be better for the experience...
...religious concessions to Kulturkampf...
...Thus Jewish settlement, which will be a gradual growth, will become in the course of time the centre of the nation . . . and when our national culture in Palestine has attained that level (the highest degree of perfection of which it is capable) we may be confident that it will produce men . . . who will be able, on a favorable opportunity, to establish a state which will be a Jewish state and not merely a state of Jews...
...It was not until 1942 that the Labor Zionists decided to struggle for sovereignty, and then it was not because they had converted to the more strident Revisionist approach to Zionism, but because of the radical change in Jewish circumstance...
...to give up the West Bank entirely is to betray it...
...In a society otherwise grown so urbane, so middle class, so normal, it is easy to confuse passion with pioneering...
...The pioneers needed the land...
...Irving Howe once remarked to me that this depends on how long American Jews can live on their questioning...
...They were, consequently, moved by Herzl's elegant vision of Jewish corporate power: the Jewish State, employing Jewish statesmen and Jewish ministers who exert the power and ape the savoir faire (Herzl insisted that Nordau change into a morning coat at the Basel Congress) of Austro-Hungarian officials...
...There could be only a Jewish "spirit" embodied in a language, a literature, a complex of symbols, and a scientific understanding of Jewish history...
...But it is a parody of Zionism to propose that annexationist agitation is an extension of the practical Labor Zionism of old...
...These priorities are not put forward for the sake of wooing Arabs—what do Khaled or Sadat care for moderation or democracy?—but for the sake of Israelis, who deserve something better than interminable territorial and constitutional confusion...
...For Herzl, the Jews were a people of fate, inherently cosmopolitan individuals reluctantly drawn together by the chronic hostility of the gentiles...
...At least and at last, the question of Jewish vulnerability had been transformed into a military and diplomatic matter...
...The physical dangers and economic adversities now faced by Israeli Jews seem today far more stark than anything they would encounter in Western democracies...
...It is a perverse reordering of fact and a disservice to mainstream Zionism to make what was a splinter into the main plank...
...Zionism and the chalutzim were primarily and explicitly concerned with rebuilding a people, not a land...
...That Zionism never placed at its center a cozy relationship with God's will...
...Like his contemporaries, Herzl had also been proposing a radical—even spectacular— redirection of Jewish life...
...Moreover, if neo-Zionist ideas and rhetoric are persistently employed to justify the occupation of the West Bank in principle— that is, apart from legitimate security requirements, in the name of some higher truth—the consequences could be diplomatically disastrous...
...Most early Zionists thus rejected Herzl's emphasis on purely political solutions, agreeing instead with Achad Haam's rebukes (1897): "(For) the emancipation of ourselves from the inner slavery and spiritual degradation which assimilation has produced in us . . . Judaism needs at present but little...
...Israelis who stay put do so despite the danger that surrounds them, and most Israelis now cling to the classic Zionist conviction that all Jews should come to Israel...
...If we are usurpers in the West Bank, then we are usurpers in Tel Aviv, for the justification for our being anywhere in the Holy Land is our justification for being everywhere in it...
...Indeed, most of them abandoned the movement just when it stopped making headlines and began making history...
...the advent of statehood in 1948 and the struggle for its preservation since then have made debate of the old kind irrelevant...
...But the equation of land with redemption, and of both with "Zionism," is nevertheless a powerfully new ideology which speaks an old and visceral language to Israelis and to Jews abroad...
...And even if this is a road to assimilation, the Jews who are on it are hardly troubled by "self-effacement...
...But since the terms of the old Zionist debates are no longer thought relevant, then the vocabulary for the new Zionist debate is, sadly, fixed by the new Zionists...
...even the historian Salo Baron has called post-War America the Jews' first real experiment with "emancipation...
...As Ben-Gurion suggested 25 years ago, political-Zionism has become a truism within the Jewish State and an affectation without...
...This dispute between Achad Haam and Herzl precurses the major tension in Zionist thought, a tension which would plague the movement for the following half-century—between "cultural" Zionism, primarily concerned with modernizing Jewish life, and "political" Zionism, concerned mainly with saving Jewish lives...
...This cult of the land is, of course, reinforced by security considerations in the face of a bloody-minded PLO...
...Political sovereignty was not the primary concern of the practical Zionists...
...And so it is that ultranationalist and flamboyantly religious groups such as Gush Emunim claim to be reviving Zionism by agitating for settlements on the West Bank, and settling them...
...Israelis themselves should be reassured that if a way can be found to end the occupation consistent with Israel's security requirements, withdrawal from the West Bank will involve no repudiation of Zionist principle...
...subversion, land vs...
...It was, instead, the politically astute and culturally attuned Zionists, those whom Weizmann came later to call the "practical" Zionists, who if fact created what Herzl had barely willed...
...Though Herzl soon tired of his quarrelsome army of "Ostjuden" —in his diary he dismisses them as"shnorrers, boys,andshmucks" —the followers of Achad Haam, such as Weizmann, recognized in their own dissension an exuberant desire for "self-expression and not merely for rescue...
...The apprehensions were well-grounded: we have finally reached the time when the only serious "Zionists" are those who view the redemption of the land as a prelude to some millenium...
...Weizmann's contribution was to transform the Zionist Organization into a financially solvent and diplomatically agile sponsor for labor Zionist settlements...
...Final political structures were of less interest to him than the process of nation building...
...There is more at play here than some dry deliberation over diplomacy and defense...
...For them, the kibbutzim and moshavim look like farms, the Histadrut looks like a trade union, and the Hebrew University looks merely pompous...
...The "common front" that was thus forged did not even last beyond the War of Independence...
...Nor is it only the diplomatic community that would be reassured by a recognition that Zionism has long since achieved its fundamental goals, and that, therefore, the future of the West Bank should be determined on the basis of security and diplomatic considerations alone...
...But, Pat Boone notwithstanding, Israel's democratic supporters are not likely to be impressed with God's promises...
...The Jews in Israel are a nation "like all others" today, not because of their government's exercise of military and diplomatic power, but because the nation in Israel is now too intricate to be readily transformed by any person's revolutionary will...
...Of course, a substantial number of early Zionists, mainly the Western, already assimilated variety that idolized Herzl, were most concerned about antiBernard Avishai is Assistant Professor of Political Science at York University in Toronto...
...But finally secure or not, when Jewish State power was consolidated in Israel the question of the vulnerability of the Jewish nation—the specific European vulnerability to which Zionism addressed itself—had been transcended...
...They preferred economic expansion to socialist planning...
...It is not simply the material comfort and political security of North America which is an issue, but the very authenticity of North American Jewish life...
...The Zionism that had built this Yishuv was a movement of social revolution, not of political reflex...
...That Zionism was secular, pragmatic, preoccupied with the moral and social dilemmas of modern Jews...
...Achad Haam believed that assimilation was itself the looming threat to Jewish life, and despised men like Herzl who came to Zionism only because assimilation was not working...
...Yet Zionist slogans, ideas, and symbols are fetters on our current possibilities...
...This conviction, however, arises not out of fear for the destiny of Western Jews, but out of fear for their own...
...the nation in Palestine had a state...
...only 40,000 attempted settlement in Palestine...
...It is not an argument about the justice of the Jewish coming...
...a "spirit" which could only make sense in the context of a national-territorial experience...
...It was this society that was able to absorb thousands of Polish and German refugees when the crises of the 1930's became terrifying...
...Not that the two were in principle incompatible...
...As early as 1931, at the 17th Zionist Congress, Ben-Gurion made a spirited defense of the principle that the land had to be shared by two peoples...
...the Zionist revolution hatched Israel, and inevitably inherited the consequences of its own success...
...how to appease but not integrate the huge minority of Israeli Arabs...
...They never promoted some casuistic "historic right" to the whole of it...
...Achad Haam (Asher Ginzberg) thought otherwise: he knew his East European Jews to be an organic people, united in the exercise of their unique religious-cultural heritage, language and social institutions—of which, he rightly suspected, Herzl was pitifully ignorant...
...Men like Peres and Rabin feel that it would be impolitic openly to abandon Zionist professions, even though they have long since transcended Zionist practices...
...But genuine Zionist questions are no longer among those being posed by American Jews...
...Even more unfortunately, the traditional policy of Labor Zionism towards Palestinian Arabs was greatly subverted after 1967...
...Israel is a sovereign nation, not a movement, and it is time for that sovereign nation to put aside dogmatic and clearly obsolete rhetoric and to deal with more urgent matters: drawing final borders, developing the economy, writing a constitution...
...The rabbis of Bavaria knew what they were about when they conspired to prevent Herzl from holding the first Zionist Congress in Munich...
...The former are moving to Canada and the United States now in far greater numbers than they are moving to Israel...
...Yet, in contrast to Herzl's analysis, these were men and women whose feeling for Jewish language, ethics and aesthetics made the prospect of assimilation unthinkable...
...We cannot expect the Arab world to approve of historic Zionism any more than we can expect any Jew to denounce it...
...The Israel-lobby and the fund raising network of the UJA are tapping deeply felt devotion and are highly accomplished instruments of Israeli policy...
...In the West, moreover, "Zionism" now comes even cheaper...
...Herzl's followers—those who had been consumed from the beginning by a vision of the Jewish State—never had the patience to create it...
...For today's universal "Zionism" no longer provokes Jews to search out new forms of Jewish culture and social enterprise—to rehabilitate their lives within a national setting— but merely to applaud and support the Jewish State's existing achievements...
...The land has been settled, and so have the old debates...
...the best defense of Zionism may well be a grateful and loving epitaph...
...He believed that Jewish cities, diplomats, bureaucracies, and flags would make the Jews more "progressive," more dignified, and more "acceptable" by conventional European standards—the only standards he respected...
...But we do not know how long "Jewishness" will be persuasive to Americans of the Jewish persuasion...
...It is not clear that Israel owes Western Jews anything...
...Consensus was unlikely...
...So the Labor Zionists cannot have much to say about old-fashioned Zionism...
...There is also a more subliminal origin to our current Zionist malaise...
...If there is nothing creative left to the Zionist movement, that too is a measure of Jewish relief...
...Herzl, for example, opted for the vigorous pursuit of an imperial charter which might enable Jews to migrate en masse to Palestine—or to any available territory...
...Israel can only be what it is: a complex, already determined society to be mastered...
...He lived in Israel from 1972 to 1976, and has written often on Israeli affairs for The New York Review of Books...
...When professed too vigorously it is taken as a cheap form of self-congratulation...
...The Zionists enjoined Jews to emancipate themselves, first of all, by employing new categories—those of enlightenment history, philosophy, and sociology—in defining themselves as Jews...
...Achad Haam then, and Weizmann later, saw that there was an intrinsic connection between social relations and political structures...
...The old attraction of the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine has dissipated along with the Utopian elan that is possible for a revolutionary-resistance movement whose future is still before it...
...The spectacle of Western secular Jews now becoming fundamentalist neo-Zionists is not ludicrous...
...Jews can get along without them as easily as they can do without the peculiar cultural crises and historical horrors which provoked Zionist heroics...
...The status of the West Bank has opened a new chapter of quasi-Zionist discourse...
...Israel is entitled to bargain with the Arabs on the basis of its own social priorities and onjhe basis of what Israel is, not on the basis of what some right-wing activists, inside and outside the government, insist it has still to become...
...Zionism was widely presumed to be about living, not just resisting, a perception which invited no end of dispute about the look of the living space...
...how to keep Diaspora Jews in line...
...So the land of Zion represented, in the first instance, not so much the chance to exercise national power as to engage in what might be called national therapy...
...When Ben-Gurion demanded a "commonwealth" at the Biltmore Conference in 1942, it was because he could now feel sure he had behind him a solid national community that was capable of organizing a state and of protecting authentic Jewish interests...
...Israel is too real to be the darling of Utopian moralists...
...And building a new Jewish society was something Achad Haam saw as very different from acting out the panicky frustrations of assimilated Viennese-Jewish dramatists...
...It would be hypocritical of them to praise it, and they lack the courage to bury it...
...This is why Ben-Gurion believed that Jews could perform—must perform—only one last Zionist act: namely, come to Israel...
...This "Zionism" is based on and encourages religious-mystical attachment to the land, post-Holocaust cynicism, and messianic militarism...
...The same logic which holds that "because Tel Aviv, therefore Hebron" can readily be turned inside out, and made to read "because no Hebron, therefore no Tel Aviv"—or, more likely, "no Nazareth...
...Is it not ever so much bolder, more visionary, even more authentic, to speak of liberated territories...
...Not only were purely "political" questions to be relegated to the margins, but it would in any case be the socioeconomic and demographic and cultural facts created by Zionist pioneers which would ultimately determine the political outcome...
...Nor were the leaders of Labor Zionism long indifferent to the practical necessity of seeing the land in conjunction with those Arabs who lived upon it...
...In its formative years, especially after Herzl's prestige began to wane, the Zionist organization was regularly torn apart and pieced together by an extraordinary variety of groups: socialists, anarchists, liberals, advocates of cultural as well as political-territorial Zionism, and even a few religious mystics...
...The neo-Zionists who wishfully call the Arab city of Nablus by its ancient Hebrew name, Sh'chem, or display similar affectations, do not get us a jot closer to Zionist aspirations...
...Revolutions finally exhaust themselves, in new institutional problems and old banalities...
...And as to love, in spite of their overtly Zionist sentiments, Western Jews yearn for Zion a good deal less than they used to...
...Herzl left behind a brilliant example of sacrifice, a bureaucracy, and a bank, but he died a failing, brooding hero...
...But whatever its other failings, a modern and deliberately Hebraic-Jewish life is growing splendidly in Israel and has been since the 1930s...
...And so it is that hard-line annexationists like General Ariel Sharon call now for a "Zionist" revival...
...Zionism's future is behind it...
...For such sentiments, the prestige of Zionist history is just a convenient smokescreen...
...We would thus do well to have another glance...
Vol. 2 • October 1977 • No. 10
