The Basis for Hope

In his most recent dispatch, "A Country Called Hope", Daniel Gordis reflects on Last Summer's war with Hizballah, the sense in Israel that the country is rudderless at present while another war is brewing for the not too distant future. Gordis correctly recognizes the malaise as greater than a simple reaction to Israel's poor performance in the war or the loss of faith in the country's leaders and public institutions. I think he is correct in saying that the root of this unease stems from a loss of faith in Zionism - the country's stated raison d'etre. As he notes:

I was speaking with an Israeli Army general the other day and our conversation turned to the recent government scandals.

“How do you explain this country?” the general asked me. “In any normal country, people would be in the streets, burning tires, protesting by the thousands. But here, nothing happens. People are going on as if there’s nothing to get worked up about.”

Maybe, I said, but I look at it differently. Burning tires would suggest that a change in the government would be enough. But that would be delusional. The reason Israelis aren’t protesting, I think, is that they understand this problem is much deeper than the government or the corruption. It’s Zionism. No one frames it that way, but that’s the real issue. One hundred and ten years after the First Zionist Congress, people are beginning to wonder if Zionism hasn’t begun to fail.

As he rightly points out, this is not meant to imply that Israel as a State has been a failure. If anything, the State has prospered and has proven itself viable in more ways than one. To take only the Israeli economy as an example, Israel's GDP is greater than that of it's neighbors combined and the standard of living that it's citizens enjoy is unmatched by its neighbors. In fact, the economic opportunities are such that over 100,000 Palestinians have made their way into Israel since 1994 either through marriage or illegal immigration (If you don't believe me, check it out). Rather:

But Israel is not doing for the Jews what the original Zionists had hoped for. And that’s what accounts for the national funk.

A century ago, the early Zionist ideologues promised that if a Jewish state were created, there would finally be one place on earth where Jews would be safe. It might not be big, it might not be beautiful, but it would be safe. In Israel, it was said, Jews would be able to defend themselves. In Israel, it was said, they would be spared the capriciousness of the world.

While I do not disagree with Gordis that this was the goal of early Zionists and of Herzl in particular, I think it is long past due for Israelis and Jews to question the assumptions under which these hopes were formulated. Zionism developed as a political philosophy in Europe during the rise of the European nation states and is a product of that historical cauldron. The majority of Europe's Jews were living in close proximity with neighbors who strived for their own imagined states. In Europe of the 1880s there was no Poland or Hungary, no Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania nor Serbia, Slovakia or many other of the nations we presently take for granted.

To be fair, the modern world has not been terribly kind to tribal peoples - whether Gypsies in Europe or Native Americans in the New World. The Jewish people have long seen themselves as a "Tribe" and combined with a sense of chosenness, there is perhaps nothing that has infuriated our detractors more than this fact. The creation of a modern nation-state, was supposed to resolve this "problem" by leading the Jews into modernity and acceptance. Once the Jews had their own country, the Jews living in the diaspora would finally have a country of their own that would be responsible for them. Zionist Jews believed that if they could get the world community to agree to let the Jews have a state of their own, the Jews could finally be masters of their own fate and become "normal" in the eyes of their neighbors. As Herzl stated, "The resolution of the Jewish difficulty is the recognition of Jews as a people and the finding by them of a legally recognized home to which Jews in those parts of the world in which they are oppressed would naturally migrate". Zionism was conceived as the antidote to European Anti-Semitism.

With the birth of the State of Israel, Jews did finally have a say in the making of laws and governance that affected them and others. Yet the notion that this would spare the Jews from, "the capriciousness of the world" was unrealistic and I suspect that stems from a millenial mindset that confused the beginning with the end. I am not suggesting, as some have, that Zionism was a messianic movement - rather that the founding of the State of Israel following the horrors of the Holocaust, Israel's unexpected military victory in the '48 War after 2000 years of exile and oppresion seemed so unexpected and unreal - that the Jewish people can be excused for confusing this with the "birth pangs" of the Messianic age.

Actually, I think that the early Zionists knew that to truly be a master of your own destiny, you had to be able to grapple with capriciousness. Unfortunately, they failed to pass this knowledge onto their children. Instead they sold them false hopes of an imagined time when there would be no more need to struggle and suffer or of a time in the future when the Jewish "problem" would be resolved. It is hardly a wonder that so many Israelis have sought out normalcy elsewhere - moving to the United States, Australia and Europe when the capriciousness proved to be too much for them.

Unfortunately, the "capriciousness of the world" does not spare anyone and normalcy has always been an ephemera. The root of the problem actually lies in an approach that treats the Jewish people as a "problem" that needs to be resolved. The founding of the State of Israel should not be in order to solve some "problem", but rather because of Jewish self-determination and a historic right to a homeland - to their own homeland. If you make the raison d'etre of the Jewish state contingent on the resolution of a problem, then you get what we have today - either despair that the problem has not been "solved" or emigration to countries where Anti-Semitism is not tolerated and Jewish safety is no longer seen as a problem.

At a time when the State of Israel has been singled out among the nations and publicly villified to the point that the right of the State to exist is constantly being called into question, it is time that we reject the Zionist approach that seeks to solve the "Jewish Question". We should stop worrying about what our patrons might think and we should definitely not expect guarantees, approval or legitimacy from the international community. As long as we think of this as a "problem", we delude ourselves into thinking that if only we did this differently or conceded that point we would finally have the "solution". Let us publicly reject an approach that makes Jews a problem that needs to be "solved" and instead demand what are our natural rights as human beings.

To insist on Jewish rights implies that we are clear-headed and have the knowledge and conviction to demand sovereignty in our historic homeland with neither guilt nor hand-wringing. This is precisely what most of the world's nation states have done and no one questions their right to exist. Our enemies do not doubt that they have rights and are willing to unapologetically fight for these rights. It is time we abandoned the naive dreams of a bygone era, truly accept that we also have inherent rights while demonstrating our willingness to vigorously claim those rights. Frankly, this is the only basis for hope.