Political Judaism and the post-Zionist era

Judaism, Spring, 1998 by Kevin Avruch

In one sense of course, as Davies notes at the close of his essay, it was the Zionists themselves, in advocating aliya, who brought the Land from the back to the front of Jewish consciousness: but hardly, especially in the early years of the movement, unproblematically so. Practically from the beginning, the powerful polemical voice of Ahad Ha'am (1856-1927) opposed the "political Zionism" of Herzl, arguing that the primary goal of the Jewish national awakening should not be a state-another state in a world of states-but rather a spiritual or cultural flowering of Jewish identity and peoplehood.(12) Furthermore, even the overtly political Herzlian Zionism, aiming at a "Jewish homeland" but also (as in the title of Herzl's epochal booklet) a Jewish state, faced at least one major crisis in the fleeting British offer of Uganda as the Jews' homeland. Herzl himself (after the Kishinev pogroms) accepted the idea of Uganda briefly and - this indicates better than anything else the radical change in religious Zionism - so did the leaders of Mizrahi, in 1903!

Thus the early Zionists did not speak univocally on the Land, even as they strove successfully to populate Palestine with Jews. It was in the transformation of religious Zionism into messianic nationalism that the Land is reconfigured as the sine qua non of Jewish redemption. For the activists in Gush Emunim, physical (re)possession of the towns and valleys and hills of Judea and Samaria, establishing Jewish settlements therein, is part of the Jews' personal participation in the People's redemption. In facing and overcoming all the obstacles to settlement, from the opposition of early Labor governments, to negative world opinion and political pressure, to the Arabs' response in the intifada, these Jews act to overcome these obstacles, to pass the "tests." Overcoming all obstacles - the greater the better - is how one demonstrates the readiness and deservedness of the People for their Redemption.

Religious opponents of Gush Emunim's messianic nationalism-not only the anti-Zionist Orthodox and the haredim but also dovish religious Zionists of such groups as Oz V'Shalom and Netivot Shalom - have seized on the issue of Eretz Yisrael as one of the most fertile areas for theological disagreement and engagement with the messianists. On one extreme, some haredim reject the messianists' apotheosis of Eretz Yisrael, calling it a kind of sinful, misbegotten, political fetishism: literally, in their lexicon, an example of avodah zara, idolatry. They argue that Gush Emunim has replaced the triadic basis of Judaism in God, Torah, and People with Torah, People, and Land.(13) Replacing God with Land the haredim see as evidence of idolatry. In a less extreme way - and significantly in the pages of Gush Emunim's own journal, Nekuda - the issue often gets framed as a conflict between two classes of religious action each justified by fundamental principles of halakha that contradict one other. One is the overriding principle of pikuah nefesh, the saving of life - for which even the holy Shabbat can be violated. This principle has been invoked by some of the leaders of Shas, the Sephardic ultra-Orthodox party, for example, who "expressed the dovish position that when Jewish blood was in danger of being spilled, territory would have to be ceded to the Arabs."(14) On the other hand, in a recent opinion survey the vast majority of Gush Emunim settlers in the West Bank agreed strongly with the halakhically framed assertion that "withdrawal from Judea and Samaria falls under the principle of yehoreg v'al ya'avor (that a Jew should give up his life rather than allow the area to be ruled by non-Jews)."(15) Among other things, a strict interpretation of Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria as falling under yehoreg v'al ya'avor is a prescription for serious civil disturbances, even civil war, should an Israeli government, as part of comprehensive peace accords, attempt to remove West Bank Gush Emunim settlers by force.(16)