The Jewish State Doesn't Live Here Anymore. - Review - book review

Judaism, Summer, 2000 by Edward Alexander

The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel's Soul. By YORAM HAZONY. New York: Basic Books, 2000.

The Jewish State is one of the most important books to emerge from Israel since the founding of the state, in part because it is a broadside aimed at those Israelis who, in "a carnival of self-loathing" (339) are busily eating away at the Jewish foundations of that state. The book's very title is a conscious affront to Israel's branja, its "progressive" and "enlightened" experts whose views, according to Supreme Court Chief Justice Aharon Barak, should determine the court's decisions on crucial matters. For these illuminati have sought to enlist no less a figure than Theodor Herzl in their campaign to de-Judaize the state of Israel. Nearly all the "post-Zionists" discussed in The Jewish State claim that Herzl did not intend the title of his famous book to be The Jewish State at all, that the state he proposed was in no significant sense intrinsically Jewish, and that he believed in a total separation of religion from the state. Hazony argues (and massively demonstrates) that Herzl believed a Jewish state was essential to rescue the Jewish people from both antisemitism and assimilation, the forces that were destroying Jewish life throughout the Diaspora. (Most of Herzl's rabbinic opponents, of course, argued that Zionism was itself but a thinly veiled form of assimilation.)

Hazony's Jewish State has two purposes. The first is to show that "the idea of the Jewish state is under systematic attack from its own cultural and intellectual establishment" (xxvii). These "culture makers" have not only renounced the idea of a Jewish state--"A state," claims Amos Oz, "cannot be Jewish, just as a chair or a bus cannot be Jewish" (338). The writers who dominate Israeli culture, Hazony argues, are adept at imagining what it is like to be an Arab; they have much more trouble imagining what it is like to be a Jew.

If Israeli intellectuals were merely supplying their own illustration of Orwell's famous quip that there are some ideas so stupid that only intellectuals could believe them, their hostility to Israel's Jewish traditions and Zionist character would not merit much concern. But Hazony shows that they have had spectacular success, amounting to a virtual coup d'etat, in their political struggle for a post-Jewish state. "What is perhaps most remarkable about the advance of the new ideas in Israeli government policy is the way in which even the most sweeping changes in Israel's character as a Jewish state can be effected by a handful of intellectuals, with only the most minimal of opposition from the country's political leaders or the public" (52).

The post-Zionists have imposed their views in the new public-school curriculum, in the Basic Laws of the country, and in the IDF, whose code of ethics now excludes any allusion to Jewish or Zionist principles. The author of the code is Asa Kasher, one of Israel's most enterprising post-Zionists, who has modestly described his composition as "the most profound code of ethics in the world of military ethics, in particular, and in the world of professional ethics, in general"--so terminally profound, in fact, that an Israeli soldier "doesn't need to think or philosophize anymore. Someone else already ... did the thinking and decided. There are no dilemmas" (53, 56).

The ultimate triumph of post-Zionism, Hazony argues, came in its conquest of the Foreign Ministry and the mind of Shimon Peres. Both came to the conclusion that Israel must retreat from the idea of an independent Jewish state. In the accord reached with Egypt in 1978 and even in the 1994 accord with Jordan, Israeli governments had insisted that the Arab signatories recognize the Jewish state's "sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political independence" (58). But the Oslo accords with the fanatically anti-Zionist PLO conceded on every one of these issues; and if the agreement with the PLO was partly an effect of post-Zionism, it was an effect that became in turn a cause--giving respectability and wide exposure to post-Zionist political prejudices formerly confined to coteries in Rehavia and Ramat-Aviv.

Thereafter, Peres and his Foreign Office routinely promoted the interests not of a sovereign Jewish state but of the (largely Arab) Middle East. In a reversal of policy akin to that of the Soviet Foreign Ministry in the wake of Stalin's pact with Hitler, Uri Savir, and other Foreign Ministry officials exhorted American Jews who had for decades resisted the Arab campaign to blacken Israel's reputation to support U.S. foreign aid to the two chief blackeners, the PLO and Syria. They--it was alleged--needed dollars much more than Israel. Peres himself, carrying the post-Zionist campaign for assimilation and universalism to the global level, said in December 1994 that "Israel's next goal should be to become a member of the Arab League" (67).

The second (and much longer and more nuanced) part of Hazony's book has a two-fold purpose. The first is to write the history of the ideological and political struggle within the Jewish world itself over the idea of the Jewish state, paying particular attention to how that ideal, which a few decades ago had been axiomatic among virtually all Jews the world over, had so quickly "been brought to ruin among the cultural leadership of the Jewish state itself" (78). Hazony's second aim as historian is to demonstrate the power of ideas, especially the truth of John Stuart Mill's axiom that "speculative philosophy, which to the superficial appears a thing so remote from the business of life and the outward interests of men, is in reality the thing on earth which most influences them, and in the long run overbears every other influence." It was the power of ideas that enabled philosopher Martin Buber and other opponents of the Jewish state to break BenGurion and to undermine the practical minded stalwarts of Labor Z ionism. (Likud hardly figures in this book. The quarrels between Ben-Gurion and Begin have from Hazony's perspective "the character of a squabble between the captain and the first mate of a sinking ship" 179].)