Let us speak of Zionism-knowing before we begin that any conversation about Zionism is bound to come to no conclusion.

Why speak of Zionism just now? Perhaps because during the opening session of a remarkable symposium in Washington, D.C., on May 1 and 2, convened by the American Jewish Committee to celebrate its 100th anniversary, the Israeli author A.B. Yehoshua delivered a series of remarks that limned the Zionist debate quite clearly and apparently stunned the audience. We will get to those remarks in a bit.

Zionism, as Abba Eban was fond of pointing out, was a nineteenthcentury prescription for what was then perceived as “the Jewish problem.” The problem was that there appeared to be no safe place for the Jews, no place free of anti-Semitism, in Europe. That was Theodor Herzl’s core understanding. Stripped to its essence, Herzlian Zionism asserted that if you could not free Europe of anti-Semitism, then you had best free the Jews of Europe. The Jews needed a place of their own, a Jewish home. Given the enthusiasm of the time for the nation-state, a “home” morphed fairly easily into a state.

The formal transition from “a national home for the Jewish people,” the words of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, to a sovereign state did not happen until the Biltmore Conference of 1942. The two dates are separated by only twenty-five years-but also by a catastrophe that almost no one foresaw until it was upon us. (Each time I write here a declarative sentence, I realize that there are footnotes galore that qualify it. I happily leave that task to others, if they are moved to take it on.)

Zionism actually began before Herzl, who is usually described as “the father of political Zionism.” In its earlier versions, it embraced a brutal critique of the distorted Jewish life that had developed in the Diaspora- or, to use Zionism’s word, a word rich in Jewish resonance, in exile. That critique persisted and persists still. Later it was supplemented by a predictive assertion: The Jews of the Diaspora would either fall victim to assimilation (as the German Jewish community seemed to be demonstrating) or to anti-Semitism. We would either be seduced or be raped; either way, we were doomed.

And Zionism was very nearly right. Indeed, it is entirely possible that the Jewish people has by now “lost” as many people to assimilation as it did to slaughter. Yet, obstinately and irritatingly, here we are.

Zionism, loathe as any ideology to acknowledge its error, continues to predict the Diaspora’s demise. And who knows? Who with total confidence can say that America’s Jews, notwithstanding their very low birth rate, notwithstanding the evident disaffection of so many Jews, will still be a thriving community a century from now?

(I know, of course: Who can say with total confidence that Israel will still be a thriving Jewish state a century from now? But that, in this context, is quite beside the point.)

In any event, Zionism foresaw neither the Holocaust nor the rise of so vigorous an American Jewish community, two events that have, together with Israel’s birth, radically changed the course of Jewish history. And there were other things it did not foresee, could not foresee, that have profoundly affected the world it sought to shape: the rejection of Israel by all those Jews who voted with their feet and chose to go elsewhere, and the bitter and bloody conflict in which Israel has been involved since its inception.

For all that, Zionism delivered on its main promise. It became the sought-for haven; it created a nation-state that is strong, productive, resilient, ever so lively.

Now, the question that A. B. Yehoshua raised at the Washington symposium is, essentially, a post-Zionist question: What is the relationship between the State of Israel and the Jewish people? Yehoshua’s answer to that question is, as I understand it: Nothing. Israel is a nation “like other nations,” like France or Thailand or Argentina. People who live in Israel are Israelis. Their Jewishness (Yehoshua recognizes that there is in Israel a “national minority,” like the Basques in Spain, but his remarks were intended to deal with a different matter) is in the language they speak, in the air they breathe, in the vital (as also the mundane) ways they choose to exercise the power and the responsibilities that come with statehood. He evidently believes that there is no future for the Jews outside the Land, that they live in an illusory world, that the old Zionist analysis (seduction or rape) remains correct, that the professed (but waning) affection of the Jews for Israel (“Next year in Jerusalem”) is an empty gesture, that there is no substance to “Judaism” beyond Israeliness.

Predictably, his remarks, delivered at considerable length and with great passion, kicked up a storm. I have listened very carefully to the tape of the session (available on line at www.ajc.org) and commend it to you. Yehoshua did not strike me, as he apparently did many who were present, as rude. By the end of the session, he did seem a bit overwrought, but the reaction, I think, was due less to perceived rudeness than to the clarity with which he proclaimed his post-Zionism. Now that there is a Jewish state, he argued, there is neither purpose nor future for this odd thing we call “the Jewish people.”

Yehoshua is hardly the first to put matters so starkly. He is not all that different from a group, in the early years of the State, who called themselves “Canaanites.” Now that the Jews have returned to their land, the Canaanites argued, it was also time to return to their natural history. The entire Diaspora experience was a distortion; their “natural history” meant their pre-exilic history. That argument is not so weird as it may at first blush seem. David Ben-Gurion wanted the teaching of Jewish history to regard the Diaspora experience as a kind of parenthetical period in the real history of our people.

Had not Zionism, from its inception, argued that the Diaspora was a distorting experience? Was not shlilat hagolah, negation of the Diaspora, a conventional component of Israeli wisdom, and is it not still? And does not the Arab (or Palestinian) resident of Nazareth, who speaks a fluent Hebrew and whose fate is bound up with Israel, have a far closer relationship to Israel than the Jew of Great Neck?

The response to Yehoshua at the symposium came principally from Leon Wieseltier, who insisted (correctly, in my view) that the idea of Judaism is prior to and larger than the idea of Israel.

Indeed. Amos Oz used to (and may still) argue that the great achievements of the Jews in the last century-the resurrection of the Hebrew language, the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the creation of the kibbutz-all happened in Israel. Here in America, Oz asserted, we’d accomplished nothing-that is, nothing that mattered Jewishly. Yet, for all my respect for Oz, I believe he is simply wrong about that. American Jews have been Jewishly important in their liturgical and even theological innovation, in their advocacy of feminism, in their Jewish scholarship. And if Yehoshua is correct, Israeli Jews have been Jewishly important simply by virtue of their being.

The argument about Zionism comes down to an argument about Judaism. If there is substance to Judaism, then the lack of Jewish selfconsciousness that Yehoshua appears to recommend is a defect; if there is no substance to Judaism that deserves recognition, if Judaism amounts to no more than Israeliness, then we here are meaningless as Jews (and doubly so as “Zionists”).

The late Ben Halpern once wrote of a distinction between “Exile” and “exile.” The lower-case “exile” is a geographic allusion. It comes to distinguish between Jews inside the Land and those outside it. That exile is anywhere that is not Israel. The upper case “Exile” is an existential description. So long as the world remains unrepaired, all of us are in that Exile, whether we live in Boston or in Jerusalem.

Halpern was a Zionist as I am a Zionist. He understood that the State of Israel is the most important and consequential project of the Jewish people in our time. (Whether it was a mistake for Halpern or for me not to have cast our lot with Israel, not to be more intimately part of that crucial project, is another matter.) It is that perception that “entitles” us to care as deeply as we do for what happens in Israel, for how the Jews manage the difficult task of creating a nation-state that is benign rather than, as so many nation-states are, malignant. That task is made easier by a lively sense of Exile.

AIPAC Jews who know nothing of Judaism, whose Judaism consists of their advocacy on Israel’s behalf, are no different from Peace Now Jews who know nothing of Judaism, whose Judaism consists of their (substantively quite different) advocacy on Israel’s behalf. And “mere” advocacy on Israel’s behalf is not a sufficient definition of Zionism. If there is any point to the continued use of the word, and of its elaborate institutional expression (altogether a very big “if ”), that point must somehow include a link between the Jewish state and the Jewish people. If it does not, if Yehoshua’s logic prevails, then Zionism will not merely have outlived its utility, but will have rent the Jewish people. How odd: Neither seduction nor rape will have led to our demise, but Zionism itself.

May 8, 2006 Reprinted with permission of PeaceNowConversation.org.

 

 

Leonard Fein is a writer and teacher who founded Moment magazine, Mazon: The Jewish Response to Hunger, and the National Jewish Coalition for Literacy.