On the Post-Zionist Battlefront
ROSENFELD, ALVIN H.
On the Post-Zionist Battlefront The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel's Soul By Yoram Hazony Basic. 433 pp. $28.00. Reviewed by Alvin H. Rosenfeld Professor of English and director of...
...is excessive...
...Regardless of one's view, the stakes are high...
...Yoram Hazony raises important questions...
...Because the Jews have no political standing, no Jewish army, no Jewish independence, and no homeland...
...Hazony adds little that is new to the historical record, but he succeeds in bringing out the bitterness of those intra-Zionist feuds and makes clear the anti-Zionist passions that have accompanied Jewish nationalist thinking from the start...
...Hazony is convinced that "the Jews of Israel are an exhausted people," and that specifically as a Jewish state Israel faces the prospect of "dissolution...
...Besides condemning these developments, Hazony tries to trace their roots and their appeal...
...Hazony, in other words, fails to provide a nuanced, differentiated analysis of present-day Israeli intellectual, political and cultural life...
...As his title suggests, the author's ultimate objective is nothing short of returning Israel to what he takes to be its essential mission as a Jewish state...
...The onagain, off-again talks with the Palestinians in the aftermath of the Oslo Accords seemed endless and, to some, hopeless...
...Reviewed by Alvin H. Rosenfeld Professor of English and director of the Boms Jewish Studies Program, Indiana University IN November 1942, David Ben-Gurion addressed the Jewish National Assembly in Palestine and described how Europe was being turned into "a vast Jewish cemetery": "Our children, our women...
...His historical chapters rehearse familiar struggles within the Zionist movement between those who favored political, or statist, solutions to the problems of Jewish homelessness and those who gave primacy to cultural Zionism...
...It has the effect of incriminating Hebrew University and, even more generally, "the professors" as the seat of all of Israel's present-day cultural turmoil...
...Together with Judah Magnes and a small group of others, he was active for a time in Brit Shalom, a movement that sought to harmonize Jewish and Arab interests in a binational state...
...The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel's Soul seeks to expose and account for the emergence of this dangerous strain in Israeli public culture, and to introduce an alternative vision...
...The outcome of the postZionist confrontations will seriously alter both the way Israelis think about themselves and the way others think about Israel and its future...
...every national hero from [Theodor] Herzl to Golda Meir, from the pioneer Joseph Trumpeldor to the fighter-poetess Hannah Senesh...
...the justice of Israel's actions during every one of its wars, as well as in its operations on behalf of Holocaust survivors and Sephardi Jewry...
...The signs of this assault, he argues, can be seen almost everywhere: "In the last 20 years, and especially after 1993, respected public figures have made it their business to demand not only repeal of the Law of Return [extending automatic citizenship to any Jew who chooses to move to Israel] but the de-Judaization of the Israeli flag and the national anthem, as well as the downgrading of the Jewish-national content in the public school curriculum, the Israel Defense Forces, and the country's constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court...
...The list could be extended, but the point is clear: Hazony believes Israel's cultural élite—its scholars, writers, painters, political analysts, leading journalists, etc.—basically loathe the Jewish state...
...Indeed, the post-Zionist ascendancy is "the story of Martin Buber's victory over Theodor Herzl," the culmination of Buber's "lifelong struggle against the idea of the Jewish state...
...absorbed and integrated millions of refugees...
...In 1998, when Israel marked the 50th anniversary of its establishment, one might have expected it to celebrate the occasion in similarly high spirits...
...But Buber has rarely been seen as having had a decisive impact on Israeli political culture...
...labored successfully to reclaim and resettle its ancestral land...
...To scholars of the history of Zionism, he is also well-known for his antistatism and his advocacy of a spiritualized, or "true," Zionism...
...Therefore, we are told, the post-Zionist thrust is in crucial respects "post-Jewish" and aims at the "dismantling of Israel's character as the Jewish state...
...for but one sin...
...Six years later, in an act that changed the course of history, Ben-Gurion declared the creation of an independent Jewish homeland, putting an end to centuries of political disenfranchisement, dispersal and persecution...
...And what cannot be de-Judaized by government fiat has been attacked publicly: the legitimacy of the concept of Jewish sovereignty...
...They transmitted the negative lessons of GermanJewish anti-Zionist philosophy to their students, who as the next generation of Israeli intellectuals and educators in turn carried on their teachers' legacy...
...and our aged are set apart for special treatment, to be buried alive in graves dug by them, to be cremated in crematoriums, to be strangled and to be murdered by machine guns...
...But most readers will not find his answers adequate to dealing with the problems now confronting a beleaguered Zionism and a Jewish state struggling to define itself anew...
...It is not surprising that the heroes of his narrative are Theodor Herzl and David Ben-Gurion, the visionary founder of political Zionism and builder of the Zionist state, respectively...
...state itself, to conform to their lessons—the most important being the conclusion that there is no theoretical justification for the claim that a state can be 'Jewish,' that anything specifically 'Jewish' about the state of Israel is, in principle, morally wrong...
...To be sure, many of the formative ideas that once gave shape and meaning to Israel as a Jewish state are being questioned and even attacked...
...A small, intensely intimate country could hardly overlook these things...
...Because the country's foundational ideas are "under systematic attack from its own cultural and intellectual establishment...
...the legitimacy of the academic discipline of Jewish history...
...fought a costly war for its independence and a series of subsequent wars to secure its survival and rights of national sovereignty...
...Within Israel itself, though, the celebratory mood was undercut by stirrings of a different sort...
...Syria remained recalcitrant about peace terms, and in southern Lebanon young Israeli soldiers continued to die...
...Israel, in short, was one of this troubled century's inspiring success stories...
...Why...
...For here was a country that came into existence against the historical odds...
...In the process, he produces a highly charged mixture of political and intellectual history, cultural analysis, ideological exposé, moral polemic, and Zionist manifesto...
...If Israel today is "undergoing a massive shift away from the ideas and norms that characterized it as a Jewish state," Hazony contends, it is owing to the influence of Martin Buber and members of his circle...
...The book's account of anti-Zionist tendencies in Hebrew literature and the arts seems similarly one-sided and relies too heavily on fragmentary quotations and selected references...
...Buber was no friend of Herzlian thinking or of Labor Party politics, but the author's relentless focus on the invidious influence of "Buber's circle," "Buber and his colleagues," "Buber and his associates," "Buber's intellectual grandchildren," etc...
...Although striking, this conclusion is not borne out by the evidence that Hazony presents, and as a reading of Zionism's fortunes it seems too often simplistic and reductive...
...the place in national life of the city of Jerusalem, the Western Wall, and the Passover seder...
...Yet there is a complexity to the post-Zionist assault that the author is unwilling or unable to recognize...
...The fundamental assumptions underlying the refounding of a Jewish state are thus being subjected to an ongoing critique...
...Depending on one's perspective, a post-Zionist stance represents either a maturation of Israeli self-awareness that should be admired and encouraged, or an expression of deep-seated confusion that must be warned against because it threatens to completely destroy what was once a confident sense of national identity and purpose...
...and developed a society, economy and culture that ranked among the freest, most vibrant to be found anywhere in the world...
...One of them was the long, sometimes bloody, unresolved conflict with its Arab neighbors...
...revived the language, vitality and hopes of its people...
...Buber is known in this country primarily for his writings on Hasidism and his philosophy of dialogical existence...
...They are intent on replacing Zionism's myths with a set of countermyths designed to "progressively reshape the...
...Under the "post-Zionist" rubric that debate continues with greater intensity today, reflecting the strong revisionary attitudes of many who are instrumental in shaping the nation's culture...
...The new State of Israel held out the promise that the Jews of the world could re-enter history as a free people and, like others, defend themselves...
...The fact is thatsomeprofessors.likeBenzionDinur, Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt and Joseph Klausner (who are hardly mentioned here) were devoted Zionists and almost certainly had more influence on their students than Martin Buber...
...This sudden movement from national catastrophe to national rebirth seemed to many nothing short of a miracle, and in more than one city around the globe there was dancing in the streets...
...Hazony, by contrast, regards him as the seminal thinker of anti-Zionism and someone who worked energetically and effectively to promote ideas hostile to the notion of a Jewish state...
...Perhaps even more, however, a tangentially related ideological debate taking place inside the country was tempering the national spirit—and causing concern among Israel's far-flung friends...
...What is surprising are Hazony's villains: Hebrew University and many of its leading professors, particularly Martin Buber and other prominent German-Jewish émigré scholars...
...Yoram Hazony, the young president of the Shalem Center, an institute for social thought and public policy in Jerusalem, enters the fray on the side of those who see the post-Zionist path leading to self-destruction...
Vol. 83 • May 2000 • No. 2
