‘The Jewish State’ at 100

By Yoram Hazony

Does anyone remember the ideas that founded the Jewish state?

Instead of producing the “normalization” of the country envisioned by the Post-Zionist intellectual elite, the years between 1967 and 1992 therefore saw Israel descend into a protracted struggle over the reemergence of a new national idea eerily reminiscent of Ben-Gurionism—yet all the less palatable to its detractors for its religious color. Archaic and dangerous Zionist missions, so recently suppressed, had been given a whole new lease on life, and for much of the 1970s, when the Merkaz-inspired neo-settlement movement was at its high point of activism on the West Bank and the Golan Heights, in Gaza and Sinai and East Jerusalem, it even seemed as though the ideological initiative in Israeli society had gone over to the new nationalism. The image of the coarse, powerful, anti-intellectual kibbutznik at the cutting edge of Israeli society was replaced by the coarse, powerful, anti-intellectual yeshiva student. The IDF’s elite units, once the exclusive preserve of the children of the collective farms, began finding themselves inundated by religious cadets whose motivation and willingness to sacrifice were the highest in the country—at a time when falling motivation had been widely feared as the gravest threat to the future of the Israeli military. And for the first time, observant Jews began to constitute the majority of immigrants and talent coming to Israel from the free world. Religious Zionism began to be understood not only as the last Zionism, but also as the last ideological force capable of motivating Jews to sacrifice on behalf of a nation which, in spite of everything, was still in need of such sacrifices.

Perhaps the most important effect of the renewed commitment to the Jewish state in religious circles was its impact on the mainstream political right. The Likud party, the political heir to the non-socialist Zionist movements of the center and right, had never really been a player in the high-stakes game to establish a political vision of the Jewish state. Having failed to found a college, a newspaper or any other serious organ for the development of political ideas, the “secular” right became culturally inert in the years after the founding of the state. When Menahem Begin finally came to power in 1977, it was principally through the alliance with the Merkaz-inspired settlement movement that Likud leaders were able to catch some of the adrenaline of the Ben-Gurionist revival taking place in the religious community and feel they stood at the helm of something grand. Some prominent figures in the Likud even fell into the habit of speaking of the “national camp” (Likud and its religious allies) as “the new Mapai”—using the old Hebrew name for Ben-Gurion’s politically and ideologically dominant Labor party.

With the benefit of hindsight, we now know that this triumphalism was, if not entirely misplaced, at least hopelessly premature. The fact is that in the struggle for the heart of the Jewish nation, Merkaz and its allies lost—and badly. The cultural wasteland surrounding the Likud remained pristine during fifteen years in power. And the settlers, despite winning widespread respect and admiration for their idealism, managed to leave the overwhelming majority of Israelis untouched by the spirit of the revival they represented. Even as Merkaz and the settlers sought to rally the country back to its Jewish mission by reminding it of what Labor Zionism had stood for, the majority was being drawn further away from Labor Zionist values with each passing year. No more clear-cut rejection of Merkaz’s message could have been imagined than the Oslo agreement with Yasser Arafat, which granted the PLO control over the geographic core of ancient Israel—and therefore explicitly rejected the return to these lands that the biblical prophets had promised. And yet by the time this deal was cut in 1993, nearly two-thirds of the Israeli public was (at least immediately after the signing) willing to accept it.

The rejection of Merkaz’s appeal to Ben-Gurionist values by a generation well along in its Post-Zionism can be found, for example, in the assessment of the settlers by the familiar media commentator Amnon Dankner:

They hoped that if they were to look the figure of the mythological Sabra, with his shirt hanging out of his pants, with a shock of unruly hair and a firearm, they would become accepted and loved. But their hopes have been frustrated, for they command no real presence in the cultural mainstream and in the cultural elite. What we see today in their doings is kitsch....²⁴

It would be a serious misreading of events, however, to blame Merkaz’s defeat on the overt popularity of Post-Zionism with the average Israeli. Outside of intellectual circles, the great majority of Israelis even today consider themselves Jews and Zionists; they see themselves as “traditionalists,” and wish their children knew more about Judaism. There is therefore no question that during the heyday of the Likud-Merkaz alliance, the opportunity existed to construct a hefty Israeli consensus around a renewed and attractive Jewish national idea. But no such “idea work” was done on the side of Jewish nationalism to match all that was being invested by the Post-Zionists. For all the effort that had been poured by the yeshivas into constructing a new Zionist philosophy, it turned out that the fruits of these efforts were in the realm of highly abstracted theological concepts, almost none of which were relevant to the practice of piloting or even inspiring the country as a whole. In all the areas of public life in which purpose and direction are so sorely needed if the Jewish state is to remain an attractive idea—what to do with its regimented economy, the chaos of its constitution, its endless diplomatic weakness or even its increasingly malignant cultural institutions—the new Zionists had nothing to say, and Jewish nationalism simply continued grinding out its crabbed old formula for success: Settlements, land, armies. And when this message of redemptive materialism was broached once more, it again failed to inspire belief in the desirability of a Jewish national life in Israel, just as it had when Ben-Gurion was selling it the first time around.

Merkaz failed not only in too faithfully adopting the content of Ben-Gurion’s political message; it clung too closely to his political method as well. Like the Labor Zionists, the settlers relied almost exclusively on a linear politics whose standard of achievement was an additional house built, an additional Jew moved out to the settlements. Their political tools were consequently the most primitive conceivable: Pulling strings with the government for budgets to build homes in the territories, speechmaking in synagogues. Merkaz poured heart and fire into building homes in the territories and speechmaking in the synagogues. But the sectors of the population reached by these methods were always those least capable of influencing the broader context of the life of the nation. The core of Merkaz’s support, even after decades of strenuous outreach, included few academics, journalists, authors, artists, jurists, economists, political thinkers—that is, shapers of the public mind. For every “fact on the ground” that the religious nationalists were able to generate, their opponents amassed another novel, another history text, another television production, cultural assets whose political influence was exponential, and which eventually outstripped that of the settlers by orders of magnitude.

Only now, after Oslo; and after the calls by members of the government to delete the Jewish references in the national anthem, Hatikva,so as not to offend Arab sensibilities; and after the establishment of an active PLO security apparatus functioning openly in the streets of Jerusalem; and after Shimon Peres’ calls for Israel to join the Arab League²⁵—only now have some in the “national camp” begun to understand the error. Only now have they begun to recognize that for a new Jewish nationalism to take root and ultimately triumph, there is no choice but to compete in all the realms of the mind in which Labor Zionism failed—and in which the Post-Zionists have invested everything.

For most Israelis, the idea that their country is powerful is axiomatic, unchallengeable. American Jews, too, despite their greater sensitivity to Israel’s vulnerability, are often willing to submit to the materialist illusion that factories and fighter planes are enough to make a nation strong. In this the liberal Jewish writer Leon Wieseltier gave voice to the wishful thinking of many when he wrote recently that:

The creation of Israel, the security of Israel, the peace of Israel: Who any longer thinks that these are experiments and dreams, efforts that may or may not fail, ideas and institutions still struggling to be born...? This is a country... [that] is fundamentally indestructible.²⁶

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