Post-Zionist thinking calls the very survival of Israel into question by weakening the ideological fiber of the country. This “collapse of Zionism” can be attributed to Israelis' war weariness, guilt feelings about the “original sin” of Israel's founding, and the adoption of Western anti-nationalist and nihilistic ideas. These ideas are misplaced and dangerous to the State; they could lead to Israel's “liquidation through internal transformation.”
The most improbable story of the twentieth century is the return of the Jews to sovereignty in their original homeland. The establishment of a Jewish state after two thousand years of dispersion and powerlessness is an idea that just a hundred years ago, at the founding of the Zionist movement, seemed delusional. The only thing more improbable is this: That after merely fifty years of independence, the Jews of Israel would tire of it, lose faith in the enterprise, and forfeit their redemption. As things are progressing now, the collapse of Zionism may be the story of the twenty-first century...
In a recent essay in Commentary, Daniel Pipes pointed out the remarkable asymmetries, moral and material, in the Middle East today. On the surface, Israel has the appearance of a powerful, almost invincible, Middle East presence. It has a vibrant democracy, a highly developed economy, and continued technological superiority. (It is, for example, one of the world's Internet powers.)
Israel's Arab neighbors have none of these, but they do have will. Indeed, a half-century into their struggle with Israel, the Arab will to prevail is more powerful than ever. True, paper treaties have been signed. But the animus toward the very existence of the Jewish state has grown deeper, finding religious sanction in fanatic Islamicism and becoming the staple of official propaganda and popular culture. The Israelis, war weary and desperate for peace, willfully overlook these signs and search endlessly for just the right negotiating formula, just the right territorial concession, just the right dose of placation to bring them an illusive final peace.
The retreat is not just territorial. Israel's physical withdrawal is an epiphenomenon, a surface manifestation of a far more profound withdrawal: psychological and, ultimately, ideological. The territorial retreat tries to grapple (however mistakenly) with the question of how a Jewish state can survive; the ideological retreat raises serious doubts about why a Jewish state should survive...
The central contention of post-Zionism is that the idea of a Jewish state with its unique calendar, flag, anthems, rhythms, ethos, and history is atavistic, a throwback to the romantic nationalism of the nineteenth century that begat, among other things, fascism and Nazism. In the modern world of the Internet, the global economy, European integration, and growing transnational interdependence, this ethnic particularism is hopelessly retrograde. The advanced peoples of the West are surrendering sovereignty. Israel should, too.
There is something wildly out of place about this idea. This is all well and good for Liechtenstein. Unfortunately, however, the neighborhood in which Israel finds itself shows no sign of giving up nationalism, particularism, or religious fanaticism to join the global bandwagon. No matter. The post-Zionists are morally offended and aesthetically appalled by the grubbiness of their neighborhood and the brutal provincialism of their compatriots. One leading Israeli poet, Dalia Rabikovitch, parodies the longing for the Return in early Zionist poetry with this twist on the twenty-third psalm:
As for me,
He maketh me lie down in green pastures
In New Zealand...
Truehearted people herd sheep there,
On Sundays they go to church
In their quiet clothes.
No point in hiding it any longer:
We're an experiment that didn't turn out well,
A plan that went wrong,
Tied up with too much murderousness.
Aesthetic revulsion is compounded by a profound moral guilt about the Israeli experiment. In The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel's Soul, Yoram Hazony highlights how much Israeli cultural production focuses on the original sin of Israel's founding and how the "new historians" consciously subvert traditional Zionist history with a version that places blame for the suffering and dispossession of Palestinians on Jewish aggression, terror, and hunger for power.
But the new historians are hardly content with exposing original sin. They insist on the view that Israel has lived in sin ever since. Take, for example, the striking omission from the modern ninth-grade history textbook issued by the Ministry of Education of any mention of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. This might seem merely odd, unless one understands that antinationalist intellectuals deplore the glorification of that World War II uprising as a fetishistic celebration of the Jew as fighter, and thus symbolic reinforcement of Israeli militarism.
What does post-Zionism mean in practice? It means that Israel should be not a Jewish state, but a "state of its citizens," a democracy like any other with no particular commitment to the survival or advancement of any one culture or people. Thus the most fundamental law in the Israeli canon, "the Law of Return" that guarantees refuge and citizenship in Israel for any Jew in the world (and which David Ben-Gurion considered the most important law of the land) is under attack for being nationalist, particularist, even racist. A democratic state, it is said, would have no such ethnic tests.
Nor is it just the Law of Return. Respected public figures, writes Hazony, have advanced the demand to de-Judaize the flag (with its Star of David) and the national anthem (Ha-Tikvah, "The Hope," which speaks of the Jewish longing to return to the homeland), and drain school curricula, the army, and the constitution of their distinctive Jewish national character. "The Jews living in Israel are now being asked not only to give up on geographical territories. We must also implement a 'redeployment' or even a complete withdrawal, from entire regions in our soul," writes the celebrated Israeli author David Grossman. And what does this psychic withdrawal, this Reformation, mean? "Giving up on power as a value. On the army itself as a value... Refining a new existence for ourselves. One which is no longer drenched to the point of suffocation with the myth of our exile from the land, or with the myth of Masada, or with a one-dimensional lesson of the Holocaust."
Post-Zionism aches for freedom; a new, quite un-Zionist kind of freedom: freedom from myth, freedom from chosenness, freedom from history, and, above all, freedom from power. Power is corrupting. The post-Zionists prefer incorruptibility. They yearn not for Zion, but for the purity that Jews enjoyed before they reacquired sovereignty. As one leading Hebrew University professor said decades ago in opposing Israel's founder, David Ben-Gurion: "We are burying a dream, . . . the dream of a land of Israel, the state of the pure and the moral"...
The fundamental idea of Zionism was for the Jews to once again enter history as actors, not just as acted upon. And that meant acquiring sovereignty and power, and exercising both on behalf of the Jewish people. This idea is now under attack within Israel itself. Where did this loss of will come from? Why the loss of faith in the necessity, the legitimacy, indeed, the glory of a reconstituted Jewish commonwealth?
Hazony attributes this ideological collapse to the intellectual influence of a small group of universalist German-Jewish professors who dominated the Hebrew University, which in turn dominates cultural life in Israel...
Nonetheless, to blame the collapse of Zionist will on the professors is to give them too much credit. There are more parsimonious explanations.
One is simple exhaustion. It's not the professors but the people who are tired of the price of Jewish power. It is the people who agitated for retreat from Lebanon and the territories, in search of respite. It is they who have suffered not just war but isolation, reprobation, often vituperation from everywhere - including their erstwhile friends in the West. They are tired of being outcasts. They are tired of the hard life of sustaining the Zionist vision.
Who can blame them? They have fought five wars in fifty years. They look across the ocean and see their fellow Westerners and their fellow Jews living prosperous and serene, while Israelis get buses blown up at home and lose sons in an endless guerrilla war in Lebanon. Beginning with the War of Independence when Israel lost one percent of its population (the American equivalent would fill fifty Vietnam memorials), Israel has been bleeding for half a century. It is hard to blame a people who have endured so much for so long. To maintain Jewish independence in a hostile Arab sea requires enormous determination. Israelis have been fighting for three, often four generations. How many generations can sustain a pioneer spirit?
Another explanation, fuller than Hazony's, would situate Israel within the broader intellectual context of the West. In their anti-nationalism, anti-patriotism, cosmopolitanism, and distrust of power, Israeli intellectuals are no different from their counterparts in America, Britain, France, and the rest of the West. Indeed, Israelis are just catching up with deconstructionism and multiculturalism, with Lacan and Foucault. Modern Israeli art and dance and theater offer almost comical attempts to imitate the nihilism of the Western avant-garde. Post-Zionism is really just Western counterculturalism applied to the Jewish Question.
But that Western style of counterculturalism has far more serious consequences in Israel than anywhere else. The West is rich, secure, and dominant enough to play at cultural revolution. It can afford the luxury of oppositional and subversive elites. The tragedy for Israel is that it does not enjoy such luxuries. It lives on the edge. It has no buffer zone, geographic or ideological...
In an interview last year, the leading Palestinian author and activist Edward Said ruminated about the prospect of eliminating the Jewish state. "We must find freer, more creative, more inventive means...I am speaking of a cultural battle...Israeli historians themselves . . . are in the process of reconsidering Zionist myths. We must use the contradiction and dissent that exist in the heart of the Israeli population." Said opposed the Oslo accords and broke with Yasser Arafat over them. He believes that there is no armed solution for achieving Palestinian goals. But he does hold out one hope, the hope that within Israeli society there are now voices that understand the true nature of the Jewish state and will seek its liquidation through internal transformation. "Do you think the Israelis will renounce Zionism one day?" the interviewer asked. "Some have begun to speak of it," Said replied. "I think that the most intelligent among them are in the process of realizing that, despite their incredible power, their situation is untenable."
Israel's enemies see the future, a future Israelis themselves may now be creating: a world without Zionism, a world without Israel.
Questions for Discussion
1. Do you feel that toning down public Jewish symbols and making Hatikvah nationally neutral could weaken the State militarily? Argue for and against.
2. Is it appropriate for Jews who live outside of Israel to actively support or debunk post-Zionism in Israel?
3. Krauthammer clearly delineates his view of how and why post-Zionism threatens the survival of the State of Israel. What do you think should be the action plan of Zionists, living both in and outside of Israel, who are moved by this article?
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Zionism > Zionism Revisited
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