Understanding Israel

Political, Societal and Security Challenges

Joel Peters, Rob Geist Pinfold

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317297758
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Políticas de Oriente Medio

The State of Israel is an unlikely powerhouse in a troubled region. Since 1948, Israel has retained its status as a democratic state without interruption. An investor-friendly environment and skilled workforce have led to a thriving economy, whilst the Israel Defense Forces are one of the most powerful armed forces in the world. Yet Israel is also blighted by a plethora of foreign, domestic and security challenges, some of which threaten the very fabric of the state. The cost of living continues to soar; political corruption appears endemic and the conflict with the Palestinians divides domestic opinion and sours Israeli foreign relations. Thus, contemporary Israel remains perplexing, resisting any straightforward categorizations or generalizations.

This book provides a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary analysis of the external and internal threats, opportunities and issues facing contemporary Israel. The book comprises sixteen chapters written by recognized authorities in the field of Israeli Studies. Together, the chapters offer a detailed overview of Israel while separately they provide stand-alone coverage of specific topics under discussion. Part I examines the Israeli Political System, such as the Knesset, political parties and extra-parliamentary politics; Part II addresses issues in Israeli society, including the Israeli economy, the divides between Jews and Arabs, religious and secular Israelis and the struggle for gender equality; and Part III focuses on security, geopolitical and foreign policy challenges, looking at relations between Israel and the Jewish Diaspora, Israeli foreign policy, borders and settlements and regional security threats.

By filling an important gap in the study of contemporary Israel, this book is of interest to multiple audiences, most notably students and scholars of Israeli politics, the Middle East and comparative politics.

1

Zionism in the twenty-first century?

Arieh Saposnik

The walkway to the exit gates of Ben-Gurion International Airport in January of 2017—as Israel prepares to mark its seventieth anniversary year—is adorned with an exhibition of photographs and images from the history of Israel and Zionism. At its culmination, the largest of the posters seems to be not only a summary of the history depicted in the images, but a proclamation of the state’s most fundamental message to itself and to those passing through the halls of this main port of entry and exit (ironically, perhaps, it is those who are on their way out who get to see the exhibit). “I once called Zionism an infinite ideal,” the poster quotes the early Zionist leader, Theodor Herzl, who is depicted, larger than life, stating that:

it will not cease to be an ideal even after we attain our land, the Land of Israel. For Zionism[…] encompasses not only the hope of a legally secured homeland for our people […] but also the aspiration to reach moral and spiritual perfection.

This is a striking quote from the Zionist thinker perhaps most closely identified with the idea of a Jewish state as the most central endziel, Zionism’s most important goal. It seems a worthwhile starting point to explore what Zionism might be and what it might mean in the twenty-first century.

This essay sets out to propose some thoughts concerning the theme of “Zionism in the twenty-first century.” It is an essay, in other words, that is more about the present and future than it is about the past. It is written, however, by a historian, fully aware of how difficult it can be to interpret, make sense of, and paint a picture of the past, let alone attempt to envision the future, or to understand the passing present. These are, then, musings about where Zionism might go, where it might wish to go, and how it might attempt to understand itself in the coming decades. Stepping away from writing that is strictly historical in focus, and concentrating instead on present and future, it is necessarily also the musings of an Israeli Jew, hoping to suggest some directions for meaning in the increasingly trying and challenging times that the early twenty-first century is turning out to be. In order to begin to consider where Zionism might turn, then, and what it might seek to be in the coming century, this essay will attempt to provide some clearer understanding of what it has been in the foregoing century.

The quote from Herzl that begins this essay is remarkable, not only given its presentation of statehood as a station along the way, rather than the ultimate end of Zionism. It is also striking given the contrast with an opposite current that appeared in embryonic form even before Zionism had attained its goal of statehood, and then in fuller form after it had been attained. In the immediate wake of the Israeli declaration of independence, there were those who proclaimed that now that the state had been established, Zionism as an ideology, as a movement, and as a set of institutions that had been erected, ostensibly in order to attain statehood, had fulfilled its historic mission, and it no longer had a raison d’être.

To be sure, it would only be some decades later—in the 1990s—that the term “Post-Zionism” would come to refer to a more ideologically ripened position that held that Zionism had become obsolete after 1948 (this would be one among a range of ideological positions associated with the term). As early as the 1950s, however, internal Zionist debates surrounded the notion that the establishment of the state had been a dramatic watershed moment in Jewish history. So profoundly revolutionary was the existence of a Jewish state after two millennia of Jewish statelessness, this argument went, that it raised a host of questions regarding the continued existence of Zionism.

In the early years of the state, even David Ben-Gurion, the towering leader of the Zionist Movement and Israel’s first prime minister, stopped just short of suggesting that Zionism had outlived its usefulness. The institutional structures of the Zionist movement, he claimed, had reached the end of the road, now that a sovereign Jewish state had come into being. The World Zionist Organization, Ben-Gurion famously quipped in 1960, had been but “a scaffold to aid the construction of Israel,” adding that “scaffolds are taken away when the building has been completed.”¹

Going deeper, Ben-Gurion questioned the meaning of “galut,” or “exile” and the status of those Jews who chose to remain outside of Israel after the foundation of the state. The so-called Zionism of Jews choosing to live outside of the state of Israel after 1948, Ben-Gurion famously determined, was at best a “pseudo-Zionism” (Shimoni 1995, pp. 11–36). Faced with the paucity of American Jewish immigration, Ben-Gurion stated that he could no longer distinguish between Zionist and non-Zionist organizations or Jews. For Ben-Gurion, a central meaning and implication of commitment to the Zionist idea entailed the personal choice to live in Israel. Faced with a Zionist organization whose core and leadership continued to be based in the Diaspora (out of choice, now that the state had been established), Ben-Gurion would consequently go so far as to proclaim on occasion that he would no longer consider himself a Zionist.² Even the historiography of Zionism has at times evinced the notion that Zionism came to an abrupt end on May 14, 1948. As Gideon Shimoni has pointed out, some historians have presented the history of Zionism as ending with the establishment of the state, after which only a history of the state of Israel, or histories of those international bodies known collectively as “Zionist,” remain possible.³

If such understandings of Zionism began to develop as early as the 1950s, and were given renewed emphasis during the 1990s when the discourse of “post-Zionism” was at its height, it seems hardly possible to shy away from similar questions in the early twenty-first century. Perhaps historical Zionism—whether it is assessed negatively or positively—has run its course and we are today in a “post-Zionist” age? Can there be any possible meaning to the word today, other than as an indication of some form of Israeli patriotism or, as some would have it, unquestioning loyalty to (usually right-wing) government policies? Of course, disagreements over the reality or desirability of the continued existence of Zionism after 1948 is really a debate over what Zionism in actual fact was (or is), and what it can or cannot be, should or should not be, in historical circumstances in which one of its key desiderata has been fulfilled.

Modern Zionism emerged in the nineteenth century, in an age of ideologies and “isms.” It was conceived in response to what was known during that century (and into the first half of the twentieth) as “the Jewish question,” or the “Jewish problem.” In addition to casting itself as a response—in its more ambitious forms, a solution—to the Jewish problem itself, it was also as a response to previous responses, which Zionists deemed to have been partial or complete failures.⁴ Zionism, in short, was in its very essence a child of the nineteenth century, and an attempt to provide solutions to the predicaments and distress confronting Jews and Jewish life in the nineteenth century. Its aims—though various and at times conflicting—can collectively be deemed revolutionary: It sought a total and complete transformation of Jewish life, culture, social structures; everything from Jewish geography—where Jews lived—to the language they spoke, to so intimate and fundamental a matter such as the Jew’s body itself—were all to be transformed.

Despite constituting a child of the nineteenth century, the bulk of Zionism’s achievements would come about over the course of the twentieth century, most notably during its first fifty years, before the ruptures of World War II, and then in its immediate aftermath. By the second half of the twentieth century, it was already a very different world—the changes in Jewish life were particularly dramatic with the transfer of the centers of Jewish life from Eastern Europe to North America and Israel, the establishment of the Jewish state, and the extermination of six million Jews at the hands of the Nazis. The dramatic events that shaped the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first have come at an ever-accelerating pace. All of this raises a critical question regarding Zionism: As a set of proposed solutions to a list of nineteenth- (and perhaps twentieth-) century problems, in what sense can we talk about Zionism in the twenty-first century? Some seven decades after the establishment of the State of Israel, any attempt to assess Zionism in the twenty-first century is equally bound to begin with an attempt to understand just what Zionism has meant and what it might mean today and in the future.

Which Zionism?—the “problem of the Jews” and the “problem of Judaism”

The critiques that engendered the rise of Zionism were, from the outset, extremely diverse and focused on differing aspects of Jewish life and culture. Zionism emerged from divergent and often conflicting understandings of just what the “Jewish question” was, and different currents within Zionism consequently offered differing visions of the solutions they sought to offer. One of the defining divergences, as early Zionist leader and philosopher Ahad Ha’am phrased it most famously, was based on the question of whether Zionism aimed to create a solution to the “problem of the Jews” or to the “problem of Judaism” (Ha’am 1997, p. 266). This distinction remains an important one in understanding Zionism (and what the word might mean) in the early twenty-first century.

The problem of the Jews: Zionism and the elimination of anti-Semitism

It is probably most common to think of Zionism primarily in political terms, as a political movement that set out to establish a state for the Jews in Palestine (or, as some suggested in Zionism’s earliest years, anywhere on the globe). As understood by Theodor Herzl, the anticipated result of establishing a state for the Jews would be the elimination of anti-Semitism and the end of the kinds of social discrimination faced by many individual Jews in late nineteenth-century Europe. To Herzl and others, it was this that was the fundamental problem that Zionism would and should set out to rectify. Herzl’s Zionism, in other words—although more complicated—was aimed principally at addressing the problem of the Jews.

Echoing his own biography, Herzl had become convinced by the final decade of the nineteenth century that although Jews had “sincerely tried everywhere to merge with the national communities in which we live […] It is not permitted us” (Herzl 1896, p. 209). Most integrated and Western-educated Jews in the nineteenth century understood anti-Semitism as an unfortunate remnant of the so-called “dark ages,” a morsel of religious prejudice that had accidentally found its way into their age of enlightenment and progress. Even Herzl himself, in his foundational Der Judenstadt (The Jewish State, 1896—the work widely seen as the starting point for political Zionism) still holds onto at least pieces of this notion, characterizing “the Jewish question” as “a misplaced piece of medievalism which civilized nations do not even yet seem able to shake off, try as they will” (1896, p. 208).

Nevertheless, Herzl had come to see that, medieval though it may be in its origins, anti-Semitism was far from a spent force. Indeed, anti-Semitism in his own day, he wrote, was only increasing in strength and was making “the position of Jewish lawyers, doctors, technicians, teachers, and employees of every description […] daily more intolerable” (1896, pp. 215–216). Indeed, for many Western Jews such as Herzl, the conversion to a Zionist stance stemmed in large measure from a radically new understanding of anti-Semitism as something that was fundamental to modernity, and that bore the clear marks of the modern age—whether through the addition of racialized thought (a point explicated as early as Moses Hess’ 1862 proto-Zionist pamphlet Rome and Jerusalem) or as the outcome of opposition to emancipation, as Herzl also stressed.

The idea of Jewish statehood was, perhaps, the most immediate and obvious Zionist response to the problem of anti-Semitism. Out of this renewed understanding of anti-Semitism as a permanent feature of the modern age, Zionism—and the State of Israel in its wake—was conceived by some of its proponents as a project aimed at providing a safe haven for Jews who might need a place of refuge. Indeed, evaluated from this perspective, Zionism’s response to anti-Semitism appears to have been a very successful one. Since Israel’s establishment, numerous groups of Jews—Holocaust survivors in the early years of the state, alongside Jews from various parts of the Islamic world, and in later years Jews from such disparate places as the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia—have immigrated to Israel en masse and have made it their home (an increasingly multilingual, multicultural and diverse home as a result).

Yet Zionism’s response to anti-Semitism went beyond the creation of a refuge. At least in some of its interpretations, Zionism was expected not only to offer Jews shelter, but to have a deeper impact as well: In the long run, many (Herzl among them) assumed, the realization of the Zionist aim of establishing a Jewish state would eliminate the need for such shelter, by eliminating anti-Semitism itself. As it turned out, anti-Semitism has proven more persistent than such predictions anticipated. A range of indicators suggest that not only has it failed to disappear in the wake of the establishment of the State of Israel, but anti-Semitism has also in recent years undergone a resurgence.

The fact of its persistence, however, now in differing form, is not to say that Zionism and the establishment of a Jewish state have not had an impact on the history and manifestations of anti-Semitism. The use of at least some expressions of anti-Zionist and anti-Israel stances as a camouflage for what some scholars have argued is a new anti-Semitism⁵ suggests that if anti-Semitism has not disappeared as Herzl hoped, it has certainly been dramatically transformed. (This is not to suggest, of course, that any and all criticism of Israel or Zionism is tantamount to anti-Semitism.) Although some of the old tropes remain (the internet has countless versions and interpretations of the famous anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, for example), one of the new characteristics of anti-Semitism today is to be found in its target and imagery: At its center now one often finds an image of “the Jew” that, at least in certain key respects, has been transformed by the Zionist project of creating a “new Jew.” The target of anti-Semitism today, in other words, is often no longer the emasculated, effeminate, weak exilic Jew of the nineteenth century (admittedly also conceived as covertly and furtively powerful), but rather a Jew who is now conceived as overtly powerful—politically, through what has often been labeled as “the Israel lobby” or “the Jewish lobby” interchangeably (referring primarily to the United States), or militarily, with the image of the Israeli as militaristic oppressor often taking center stage.

To be sure, this reflects a change in Jewish reality as well. The American Jewish commentator Peter Beinart rightly notes that “we live in a new era in Jewish history in which our challenges stem less from weakness than from power” (Beinart 2012, p. 161). It is not only the imagery that has undergone a shift, in other words, but the very tangible reality in which anti-Semitism operates. The impact of Zionism in transforming the reality and imagery of Jewish life, manifested so clearly in Israel’s emergence as a significant regional and military power (contrast this with the eighteenth-century notion that Jews could not be emancipated because they were unfit to serve in the military) has not eliminated anti-Semitism, but it has undoubtedly transformed its discourse, imagery, and thinking.

The problem of Judaism: Zionism as Jewish cultural revolution and renaissance

But to see Zionism as fundamentally reducible to a response to the question of anti-Semitism is to fail to understand the multi-vocality that was always part of Zionism. This approach fails to understand the deeper, underlying motivations that led some Jews to become Zionists, as well as the goals that stirred much of Zionism, most of the time. To be sure, the push of anti-Semitism, inevitably tended to ensure that statehood was perceived as a key objective. The Zionist enterprise of cultural renaissance and revolution, on the other hand—rooted not in the external push of anti-Semitism, but rather in an internal critique and self-criticism that led to a diagnosis that held that Jewish life and culture in the Diaspora had reached a dead-end—did not reject statehood, but laid its major stress elsewhere. Central though the goal of statehood was for many currents of Zionism at important historical junctures, what motivated an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsement
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Introduction: Israel—a nation of contrasts and cleavages
• 1 Zionism in the twenty-first century?
• Part I The Israeli political system
• Part II Issues in Israeli society
• Part III Security, geopolitical and foreign policy challenges
• Index