The Stiletto Idealist

National Interest, The, Fall, 2000 by Adam Garfinkle

Yoram Hazony, The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel's Soul (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 400 pp., $28.

YORAM Hazony, a not yet forty year-old head of a Likud-leaning Israeli think tank, is a believer in the power of ideas. He believes that the idea of Zionism is under concerted attack in Israel by Israelis, that a small group of post-Zionist cultural leaders and intellectuals has succeeded in undermining the very foundations of Israel as a Jewish state. He believes that only the restoration of the Zionist idea can save the state from internal decay and, ultimately, one form of destruction or another. Yoram Hazony is an idealist, and proud of it.

The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel's Soul is not exceedingly overwritten, but, appropriately enough given the author's last name--derived from the Hebrew word for "vision"--it is a jeremiad. Its emotions are nevertheless generally under control; there is no cant or calumny unleashed here, except by indirection (of which more below), and the author is careful to evince nuance. He does not assert that Israel's cultural extremists are mainstream or that the majority of Israelis agree with post-Zionism, and he is not a Chicken Little announcing the imminent fall of the sky But the reader nevertheless gets the point: be frightened for Israel's future.

Since he believes that ideas matter more than anything else in politics, Hazony argues that, in light of the contemporary post-Zionist assault, the real history of Israel is not contained by the rivalry among Zionist factions, but by the struggle between Zionists and those Jewish intellectuals who rejected Zionism. "The more important the struggle over the question of the Jewish state becomes", writes Hazony, "the less interesting become the threadbare disputes between Ben-Gurion and Menachem Begin ... which take on the character of a squabble between the captain and the first mate of a sinking ship." This is a brash but brilliant reformulation of Israel's historiography, and makes perfect sense given Hazony's aim.

According to Hazony, Theodor Herzl himself understood the power of an idea, but neither Labor nor Revisionist Zionism after him took anything abstract seriously. While Zionists institutionalized themselves to found and then manage the state, busying themselves with the material requisites of military and economic power, anti-Zionists took up residence at the Hebrew University, occupying themselves with ideas--moral and political philosophy, in particular. Little by little, year by year, the jerry-rigged ideological marquee of Labor Zionism became dilapidated, while the anti-Zionists of academe and haute culture made continuous if quiet inroads into the national psyche. As Hazony sees it, this process has now reached a stage in which the anti-Zionists have virtually won. The powerful ideas dominating Israeli intellectual and cultural life, and increasingly its mainstream as well, are post- and anti-Zionist, and the practical implications in Israeli public policy are increasingly manifest. These ideas, or anti -ideas, will in the end destroy the state in the name of purifying and reforming it--unless the post-Zionist intellectual trajectory is somehow reversed.

WHAT ARE we to make of all this? There are post- and anti Zionists in Israel, and some of them, at least, are descended from the antiZionists of the pre-state Hebrew University; Hazony takes great pains, and many pages, to establish the lineages of the main players, from Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem and Judah Magnes on down. Still, the sources of Israeli postZionism have at least as much to do with the spreading plague of postmodernism and deconstructionism. There is such a surfeit of brooding self-alienation and narcissism at American and West European universities that some of it must spill over into Israel, whose academics are as afflicted by the hutz la-aretz (outside the Land of Israel) syndrome no less than its typical consumers. Charles Krauthammer has it about right when he defines post-Zionism as "really just Western counterculturalism applied to the Jewish Question."

Of these post-Zionists, whatever their pedigree, Hazony rightly says that there are those writing school textbooks, under the aegis of the education ministry, who make it seem as though Israel has been the aggressor throughout the Arab-Israeli conflict. There are post-Zionists who want to edit the national anthem, "Hatiqva", to expunge all reference to anything Jewish, and those who want to put a crescent on the Israeli flag. The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) code of ethics has already been re-written to expunge all reference to the Jewish people and the Jewish state. There are those who want to limit or repeal altogether the Law of Return. There are those Jewish Israelis who claim that for Israel to be Jewish in any but the most abstract universalist (and hence meaningless) manner contradicts Israeli democracy.

These people, vaguely left-wing secularists every one, are both mad and maddening. Their home-grown Israel-bashing is often perverse to the point of medical pathology. But Hazony exaggerates their influence on mainstream Israel. Sometimes the exaggerations turn on facts left unstated. For example, it is true that some outrageous history textbooks have been produced; one high school text, for example, discusses the onset of the June 1967 War without ever mentioning the Egyptian blockade of the Strait of Tiran, the remilitarization of the Sinai, or the congealing of the Arab war coalition. But Hazony lets stand the impression that such books are required reading and that through such texts a minority of post-Zionists is brainwashing the country. This is humbug. High school and middle school teachers choose their texts from an ample assortment. In fact, it is unclear if the execrable book to which Hazony points is used in even a single Israeli school.