‘The Jewish State’ at 100

By Yoram Hazony

Does anyone remember the ideas that founded the Jewish state?

There are those who argue that there was no choice but to adopt the materialism of the Labor Zionists given the circumstances of a land lacking in basic infrastructure and “absorptive capacity.” Others believe the opposite—that it was the ZO’s devotion to subsidizing Labor movement kibbutzim and socialized industries at the expense of all other sectors which precluded the possibility of massive Jewish immigration, delaying the birth of the Jewish state by a decade and helping to doom the very European Jews whom Jewish settlement in Israel was supposed to save. But in either case, it is difficult to deny that the Jewish state that came into being in 1948 reflected Labor’s priorities and not Herzl’s—and still does.

In retrospect, we can see that even before the founding of the Jewish state, there were two foci of resistance to the materialist Labor Zionist theories that considered the Jew who was not “a worker in Palestine” to be unproductive and parasitic: The first was the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, which became a hothouse of humanist-universalist resistance to Ben-Gurion’s nationalist views, publishing and teaching that the state could not organize itself around socialist Zionism without gravitating towards messianism and fascism; the second was the Orthodox yeshiva world, within which a new tradition-based Jewish nationalism gradually began to take shape as an alternative Zionist ideology.

By the time Ben-Gurion finally fell from power in 1963, after three decades of unbroken domination of the country, the substantially more developed ideas emanating from these two sources had already begun to displace the terminally immature idea of Labor nationalism as the conceptional framework within which to construct a rationale for life in Israel. In particular, Ben-Gurion’s last years in power were marked by increasingly acrimonious public broadsides from “the professors,” who considered his Labor Zionist ideas to be “dictatorial” and “totalitarian,” and whose attacks did much to discredit him and hasten his fall. And when, after retirement, he called for a new generation of Labor Zionist pioneers to join him in settling the wastes of the Negev, he found that he had failed to raise up a next generation willing to make the sacrifice with him; the Negev remains mostly barren to this day.

The machinery of the Labor party, preoccupied as always with guns and factories, seems hardly to have noticed the gaping cultural void created by Ben-Gurion’s departure. But among the professors and their disciples, the demise of “the old man” was received as the first opportunity to create a more “normal” Israel, which would apply itself less to archaic and dangerous Zionist missions, and more to obtaining peace abroad and personal self-fulfillment at home—what we would today call a “Post-Zionist” Israel.

Far from being a sign of advancing materialism, as is often claimed among Zionist diehards, the turn towards Post-Zionist values in Israel after Ben-Gurion was precisely the opposite: It represented the search for something higher on the part of many intelligent, even spiritual Jews, for whom trying to persist on the inspiration of Labor Israel’s actually rather mediocre physicality meant suffocation. Thus the prominent novelist Amos Oz recalls his alienation as a youth from what he calls the “sub-civilization” that was classical Labor Zionist society:

They had contempt for everything I was. Contempt for emotions other than patriotism, contempt for literature other than [nationalist poet Natan] Alterman. Contempt for values other than courage and stout-heartedness, contempt for law other than the law of “strength makes the man.”²³

Among today’s Post-Zionists, there are competing conceptions as to what must be done to satisfy the longings of many Israelis for freedom, creativity, intellectualism, constitutionalism, internationalism and a touch of universalism—all things which Labor Zionism, in its tribalism, provincialism and materialism, had never been able to provide. Some believe that the “New Israel” will be constructed through the elimination of Judaism and the Jewish people as motive interests of the state, since these are said to lead to racism and the corruption of Israeli democracy. Some advocate stripping Judaism of anything national or particularistic, since such associations are said to corrupt the humanism of the Jewish faith. Some, including former prime minister Shimon Peres, argue that the era of the national state is in any case coming to an end, and that Israel would do untold economic or cultural or political harm to its citizens were it to resist the trend towards falling borders and the abandonment of old, battle-scarred identities. But the bottom line is always the same: In academia and in the media, among writers and artists and in the legal establishment—indeed, in every corner where a non-observant Jew might seek to come to meaningful terms with his country and his world—the idea of the Jewish national state is understood to be destructive, undesirable and certainly passé.

Precisely as Herzl had feared, the absence of a compelling national idea has rendered the interest of the Jews in the Jewish national state “temporary.” Many in Israel have simply tired of it, and have gone on to pursuing other dreams.

Many, but not all. It was four years after Ben-Gurion’s resignation from government that the Six Day War brought the Jewish state back to most of the places to which the biblical prophets had foretold the Jews would one day return. No greater vindication could have been imagined for Herzl’s understanding of the role of religious centers in building the loyalty of a nation than the consequent upsurge of the national idea among observant Jews—many of them able to make pilgrimage for the first time to places they had only read about but had always believed to be “home.” These feelings were given the most powerful intellectual expression by theories emanating from the Merkaz Harav Kook yeshiva in Jerusalem. Since the 1920s, “Merkaz” had offered religious sanction for the Ben-Gurionist idea that the toil of Labor’s non-observant farmers was in fact the first step towards the redemption—since the prophets had foretold that a physical restoration would precede the restoration of the spirit. But such “Kooknik” notions had remained distant from the consciousness of most devout Jews so long as Israel was merely another unimpressive levantine republic, without access even to Old Jerusalem. It was only with the return to hundreds of ancient Jewish battlefields, capital cities and gravesites, in places such as Hebron, Bethlehem, Shiloh and Jericho, that the yeshiva world for the first time began to feel that Israel really could become something much more significant than the disappointing reality it had been. Herzl’s religious centers had finally come into being, and with them a new generation of Jewish nationalism was abruptly born.

The change was most rapid and most dramatic in the “religious Zionist” community, which until 1967 had been little more than an ideological appendage of Labor Zionism, touting Ben-Gurionist socialism as the message of the prophets, and trumpeting its egregious youth-movement slogan, “Tora and Labor.” Politically, the religious Zionists had supported the leadership of Labor Zionism in virtually all issues of foreign and economic policy, reserving their power for securing minimum government conformity to Jewish ritual and state funds for their institutions—an agenda seemingly designed to earn the contempt of all but their most immediate constituency. The evaporation of Labor Zionism, however, led to a dramatic turning of the tables. Within a handful of years, it became evident that the only Zionist idea with any kick left in it was the yeshiva nationalism of Merkaz, and the religious-nationalist leadership, suffused with a new sense of responsibility to lead the nation, ran forward to pick up where Ben-Gurion had left off. Thus it was that despite drawing from a substantial canon of new Zionist philosophical teachings, the practical imperatives championed by Merkaz turned out to be absurdly similar to those of the original Labor Zionism: The “worker” was replaced by the observant Jew in the van of the new movement’s struggle for redemption, but the materialistic concerns that had been at the heart of Labor—Jewish settlement of the land, Jewish immigration, military service and even farming—remained virtually unchanged.

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