The Collapse of Zionism
by Charles Krauthammer
May 28, 2000   
   
   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.
   
   For the last twenty years, Israel has been in retreat. One can make
   reasonable strategic arguments for some or all of the specifics. But
   the fact of retreat is undeniable. In the south, Israel gave up Sinai,
   three times the size of Israel, for a cold and hostile peace with
   Egypt. In the north, Israel is in the midst of a retreat from Lebanon
   that will leave its northern cities vulnerable to terrorist attack for
   the first time in a quarter century.
   
   Israel has already conceded to Syria the entire Golan Heights. The
   only thing that keeps Israel from carrying out this withdrawal is
   Syrian insistence on making it as humiliating as possible. Syria
   refuses to offer the minimal courtesies in negotiations or the minimal
   gestures toward real peace. Even Israelis on the left, such as the
   novelist Amos Oz, have come out against a deal with Syria and against
   Israel's abject negotiating stance. Assad, said Oz, is "demanding not
   just peace, and not even just the Golan, but that Ehud Barak should go
   to meet him dressed only in his underwear, with his hands raised in
   surrender, and, if at all possible, wearing a bandana on his forehead
   inscribed with the motto 'Israel sucks.'"
   
   And on the most important front, on the Palestinian front, Israel has
   been engaged for seven years in a thinly disguised unilateral
   withdrawal. The Palestinians have not tempered their demands one iota
   since 1993. All the while, Israel has been ceding territory,
   authority, and legitimacy, while violating its own "red lines" on
   everything from final borders (the Jordan Valley is for the first time
   on the block) to a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood.
   Just last week, Arafat instigated widespread rioting to remind
   Israelis that the military option is his to exercise whenever he
   wants. How did Prime Minister Barak respond? Even as Palestinian
   police were firing live ammunition at Israeli soldiers, he got his
   cabinet to approve the transfer of three villages in the Jerusalem
   area as a show of goodwill.
   
   Some call such displays of magnanimity a sign of maturity. Another
   word for it is demoralization. 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.
   
   These doubts, and the relentless attempt by Israel's intellectual
   elites to instill them in the mainstream of Israeli culture, have been
   chillingly catalogued in a new book by Yoram Hazony. The Jewish State:
   The Struggle for Israel's Soul lays bare the debate that has been
   raging in Israel-in Hebrew, and thus beyond the ken of most Western
   observers-about the necessity, indeed the morality, of a state that
   defines itself as Jewish.
   
   Hazony is the young head of the Shalem Center, a Jerusalem think-tank
   that publishes the intellectual journal Azure. He's also a leading
   Israeli neoconservative (an admittedly small group), and he begins his
   book with a review of those voices in high Israeli culture-writers,
   artists, philosophers-that question the entire Zionist enterprise. He
   then offers a history of Zionism, probing into the great divisions
   between the followers of Theodore Herzl and those who opposed the idea
   of an exclusively Jewish state. In the last part of The Jewish State,
   Hazony tries to trace the influence of these early opponents on
   contemporary "post-Zionism."
   
   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, 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 Six-Day War. If ever there was a just war, a war of
   self-defense, it was Israel's war of June 1967 when its existence was
   threatened-indeed, its eradication promised-by the ring of states led
   by Egypt. President Nasser ordered U.N. troops out of the Sinai, where
   they had been acting as a buffer to guarantee Israel's security after
   its withdrawal from the Sinai in 1957. He blockaded the Straits of
   Tiran, cutting off Israel's southern access to the sea-an
   internationally recognized act of war. He massed a hundred thousand
   troops, concluded defense pacts with Jordan and Syria, and
   waited-either for war, or for Israel to collapse under the weight of
   mobilization. (A country with a very small standing army cannot
   function when its entire male population is at the front.) Israel
   struck on June 5 and won the war.
   
   Now, observe how this is portrayed in the modern ninth-grade history
   textbook issued by the Ministry of Education. There's no mention of
   the closing of the Straits of Tiran. No mention of the blockade. No
   mention of the expulsion of the U.N. troops from the Sinai. No mention
   of the military pacts among the countries ringing Israel. What single
   military event is mentioned as precursor to the war? Israel shooting
   down some Syrian jets on the northern border in May.
   
   The textbook is full of other such travesties. The previous textbook
   had a map of Israel at the time of the War of Independence with arrows
   marking the invasion routes of the five Arab countries that attacked
   the infant state. In the new textbook, the map has no arrows coming
   in, just arrows going out representing Palestinians fleeing the
   country.
   
   Another striking omission is 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."
   
   Over the last seven years, this quest for the pure and the moral has
   found expression in Israeli diplomacy and government. Of course, those
   in power are hardly going to call openly for the Jews to give it up
   unilaterally. How then to attain purity? The most ingenious solution
   to this conundrum comes from the architect of the Oslo accords, Shimon
   Peres.
   
   Peres has discovered that power as traditionally understood does not
   matter anymore. In his astonishing 1993 book The New Middle East, he
   declares that "the traditional concept of national defense, which
   depends mainly on military and weapons systems...has changed." How?
   "The physical considerations of the traditional strategy-natural
   obstacles, man-made structures, troop mobilizations, location of the
   battlefields-are irrelevant." Or as he told the army's head of
   intelligence in a cabinet meeting: "There is economics and the
   military, and only a country which goes over to economics will win.
   Choosing between ten army emplacements and ten hotels, the ten hotels
   also constitute security. I'm for the European model, which emphasizes
   economics."
   
   These statements would boggle the mind coming from anyone. But coming
   from the man who was only a few years ago at the helm of a besieged
   country, they are particularly ominous. Peres sees the Middle East as
   some sort of Benelux, where harmony and tolerance prevail, where power
   and weaponry are obsolete.
   
   A lovely dream. And quite mad. The first problem is that Israelis seem
   to be the only people in the region who believe it. And it takes more
   than Jews to tango. Egypt has built a massive American-supplied
   military. Syria is trying to negotiate a huge new weapons deal with
   Russia. Iraq and Iran are acquiring weapons of mass destruction and
   missiles aimed at Israel. Syria already has missiles tipped with
   poison gas. Lebanon's Hezbollah vows to fight the Jews until Jerusalem
   is liberated. And the Palestinians have been building up their
   forty-thousand-man "police force." Its mission is not the arrest of
   burglars.
   
   The idea that the Arabs have transcended the need for and use of power
   is simply delusional, as is the idea that they are prepared to enter
   into a kind of European Union with Israel. When the next war comes,
   when Arab tank forces come rolling through the Jordan valley (that
   Israel will have given up to Arafat in the current peace
   negotiations), we will see how much protection will be afforded Israel
   by its Maginot line of five-star hotels.
   
   Peres's vision is not just geographically but historically adrift.
   Europe does represent a different model of co-existence. But that came
   only after the nations of Europe spent the better part of five hundred
   years in almost constant warfare with each other. The Middle East is
   where Europe was a few centuries ago-with very young and unstable
   nations still violently contending for primacy and power. Forget about
   Israel. Look at Iran-Iraq, Iraq-Kuwait, Syria-Lebanon, Syria-Iraq.
   Where in the Middle East do you find any model for Benelux?
   
   Even assuming the Arabs were, inexplicably, to fall into line with
   this fantasy, what kind of vision is this new Middle East? During
   millennia of exile, the Jews of Persia and Babylon, of Poland and
   Spain, of Baghdad and indeed Belgium, dreamed and struggled and died
   for a return to Zion. So they could become Belgians?
   
   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. Best known of these is the philosopher Martin Buber,
   who opposed the establishment of the Jewish state at the time and, in
   Hazony's view, never reconciled himself to the reality of Jewish
   power. Hazony traces the intellectual influence of these professors
   through their students, and their students' students, on Israel's
   small but powerful intellectual elite.
   
   Now, it is true that David Ben-Gurion and his Labor Zionists were more
   interested in concrete than culture. Farmer-soldiers are not very
   given to philosophy. They were too busy creating facts on the
   ground-an army, a new economy, a government, a state-to bother very
   much with ideas. They did leave that field open to their ideological
   enemies in the academy.
   
   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.
   
   The worst disaster suffered by the United States in the last
   half-century is Vietnam. Yet within a few years, America had
   cauterized the wound and recovered. Israel cannot so easily shrug off
   catastrophe. It has no safety net. It has real enemies standing at the
   gates. If the army issues a code of conduct with no mention of loyalty
   to the Jewish people, that will have consequences. If its young people
   are brought up to believe that the Six-Day War-and thus the
   acquisition of the occupied territories-was anything but defensive,
   that will have consequences. If the Supreme Court begins striking down
   laws that shape the Jewish character of the state (such as the Law of
   Return) in the name of universal democratic principles, that will have
   consequences.
   
   The West can indulge visions of its own corruption and moral
   bankruptcy without risking extinction. For Israel, such visions are
   mortally dangerous. They are already having their effect in culture,
   law, and diplomacy. The most dangerous threat to a political entity is
   demoralization, for before the Fall-of the ancien régime in France, of
   the Pahlavi dynasty in Iran, of the Soviet empire in Russia-comes the
   loss of faith in one's own mandate from heaven.
   
   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.