After presiding over the first meeting of the World Zionist Organization, Theodor Herzl wrote in his diary in August 1897 that he had just founded the Jewish state. Herzl added that he would not say this in public, because he would be mocked, but he was sure that in fifty years the state would exist. The prediction was off by a matter of months. The State of Israel became a reality on May 14, 1948.
Theodor Herzl had come to Zionism from the outside, from the life of a very assimilated man of letters and journalist who was based in Vienna and wrote in German. He became a Zionist in very pained reaction to anti-Semitism, which was on the rise all over Europe in the 1890s. In Vienna the voters kept electing as mayor an avowed enemy of the Jews, Karl Lueger. In Paris, where Herzl was serving as foreign correspondent in the mid-1890s, a military court condemned Captain Alfred Dreyfus as a traitor on flimsy evidence because he was a Jew. Herzl came to believe that a minority of the Jews of the world might avoid their enemies by totally abandoning their Jewish identity, but he added that the anti-Semites would never leave them alone if even a trace of their Jewishness remained. The vast majority, who wanted to remain Jews, had only one option, he believed--to create a state of their own in which they would again become a "normal people." The Zionist endeavor would then offer Jews a choice between emigrating to become nationals of their own state or disappearing into the majority. In theory, Herzl set no limits on the culture and style of life that might evolve in the Jewish state. He did not suggest that its language had to be Hebrew or that its culture had to have deep roots in the Jewish religion and in traditional learning. Herzl imagined a secular, high-minded republic with great respect for the rights of its citizens in which religion would be totally separate from the state.
Ahad Ha'am lived in tsarist Russia, where Jews were much more threatened by their enemies than anywhere else in the world, but he did not view anti-Semitism as the central problem. He presumed that Jew-hatred was, and remained, an endemic disease of the majority society; it went through cycles of rise and decline, but it never quite disappeared. Ahad Ha'am insisted that Jews could not solve the problem of anti-Semitism, even if a Jewish state were to be created. As in all the preceding generations, he argued, Jews could at best find ways of surviving their enemies. Herzl's Jewish state was no cure because it could not succeed in "normalizing" the Jewish people. The large majority of the millions of Jews in the world would not move to Palestine. The Jews of the Diaspora would continue to exist in large numbers, and the tensions between the Jewish minority and the surrounding majorities would not abate.
But Ahad Ha'am was a Zionist, the leader of "cultural" Zionism. He preached and worked for the establishment of a Jewish national community in Palestine, hoping that the settlers would eventually build a state in which they could refashion their inherited traditions. Ahad Ha'am had accepted as a given that modern men and women no longer put faith in religious Orthodoxy, the doctrine that Jewish existence was based on divine revelation as recorded verbatim in the Bible. He believed, instead, that the Jews in the modern age had created their own unique values and a rich Hebrew literature independent of the absolute imperative of religious doctrine. Ahad Ha'am proposed that a Jewish settlement on its own land, autonomous in the conduct of its own affairs and free to redefine its own culture in the reborn Hebrew language, was required as the contemporary laboratory for the Jewish spirit.
For Ahad Ha'am, the new Zionist community in Palestine, and the independent Jewish state that he hoped would follow, were not ends in themselves. They would radiate the influence of this redefined tradition to all the Jews of the world and effect a cultural revival. The cultural Zionists displayed none of Herzl's grand vision of a battered minority triumphantly reclaiming a land of its own. They simply wanted to find a way of reinvigorating the Jewish people for the next stage of the Jewish existence, certain that new challenges would follow. The state, therefore, was imagined not as the culmination of Jewish history but as an instrument of world Jewry to help it survive in the modern era.
Until 1904 to the end of his life, Theodor Herzl fought hard, even implacably, against any attempt to add qualifications to his demand for a state to which all the Jews who wished to remain Jews should come. He opposed those who insisted that modern Hebrew be the language of the Jewish state because it might provide those who preferred Yiddish or German with a reason to oppose Zionism. The cultural Zionists wanted a modernist, secular culture in the revived language. This appalled traditional believers, who regarded Hebrew as a holy language, and most of their leaders became vehement opponents of Zionism. Herzl's vision did not prevail. On the contrary, even in his own lifetime, seven competing movements arose that blended Zionism with various contemporary political ideologies, such as socialism and nationalism.
This tendency became even stronger after Herzl's death. Ten years later, in the United States, Louis Brandeis found his way to Zionism by casting the nascent Jewish community in Palestine as one that would realize the ideals of American progressiveness in its purest form. A decade later still, in the early 1920s, Martin Buber held out the kibbutz as the one place in the world where individuals would encounter each other in their full dignity, and where people would live in harmony with nature. Cumulatively, these visions painted the future Jewish state as a kind of Shangri-la, where what was wrong with humankind would be righted. The Jewish state would no longer be an answer to anti-Semitism or the place in which Jewish culture would be revived. It had become for many the bearer of the myth and mystique of tomorrow; it was to be the shining star for humankind.
By the 1960s, toward the end of Israel's second decade, two opinions had evolved about the meaning of the state. The accepted view in Israel was at odds with the dominant opinion of Jews in the United States and elsewhere in the free Diaspora. Israelis knew that the Jews in the United States were not likely to move to Israel of their own free will, but they believed that anti-Semitism would eventually force all of the Jews in the world to flee to Israel. They believed with even greater certainty that they bore the decisive responsibility for preserving Jewish culture. Therefore, the State of Israel had the right to call for the support of all the Jews of the world. Even more important, the efforts for Israel took precedence over all other Jewish needs and purposes because Israel would survive and the Diaspora would likely wither. The new state might not immediately realize Herzl's dream of a complete ingathering of the Jews or Ahad Ha'am's vision of a thoroughly revitalized Jewish culture, but it would accomplish both purposes in the course of time.
The Zionist movement in the United States approved of aliyah but put little passion or hard work into that approval. American Jews took increasing pride in Israel's cultural achievements, but few of even the most committed lay leaders bothered to learn Hebrew. Nonetheless, American Zionists believed a phrase that they were then repeating almost like a mantra: "the centrality of Israel" in American Jewish life. Their efforts on behalf of Israel, they believed, were increasing morale and giving content to the American Jewish community. These supportive endeavors became a "substitute religion" for contemporary Jews and would be handed on, so they thought, to the generations to come.
The Jews of Israel and the Jews of America were thus talking past each other in the 1960s. In those days the Israeli colonels and generals featured on United Jewish Appeal speaking tours returned home wondering why the American Jews were not leaving for Israel, where they would share in the dignity of the new Jewish state. At the fundraisers in Brooklyn or Kansas City, the hosts looked at the uniformed Israelis and beamed with pride that part of the Jewish people, in renascent Israel, now had an army of its own, and that the courage and prowess of the Israeli Defense Forces were conferring a new respectability on their American relatives. But they saw their own future in America.
The primary purpose of the state, according to the messianists, was not to rescue Jews from anti-Semitism or to create a new Jewish culture; it was to carry out God's manifest purpose of creating a Jewish society that would act to hasten the imminent Redemption. The State of Israel did not, therefore, have the right to decide on any matter by democratic consensus. Everything that the state might decree was under immediate divine judgment, and any decisions the messianists opposed could be defied in good conscience. This new thinking acquired enough public support and political influence to become a force in public life, providing right-wing extremists with religious sanction for the murder of their enemies.
Israel had become divided almost equally between those who continued to think of the nation as a contemporary democratic state run by its people (who could decide to divide the land with the Palestinians) and those who insisted for religious or ultra-nationalist reasons that all of the "Promised Land" was inalienable. In the name of this doctrine, Dr. Baruch Goldstein felt justified in committing the mass murder of Moslem worshipers in Hebron on February 25, 1994. The same thinking influenced Yigal Amir, who assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on November 4, 1995.
For a number of years Jews in the United States and the rest of the Diaspora attempted to paper over this quarrel by pretending that it did not exist. It was far more comfortable to imagine that the Israeli maximalists were really hard bargainers who would, eventually, reach a compromise much more favorable to Israel's interests than one which could be achieved by Israeli moderates. This opinion was supported by the feeling that the religious faction, the believers in the imminence of the Messiah, were really a picturesque small minority who sometimes would defy the government with such outrageous acts as settling a handful of zealots in the very center of hostile Hebron, but the mainstream of the ultra-nationalists were secular people who would be open to compromise.
In the 1970s this theory that almost everyone in Israel was ultimately willing to compromise was never tested because the Palestinians and their supporters in the Arab world kept rejecting any suggestion of accommodation. Prime Minister Golda Meir, then the head of the moderate Labor Party, kept saying to those of her own supporters who urged negotiation toward compromise: "With whom shall we negotiate? With ourselves?"
It took the decade of the 1980s for the American Jewish community, or at least large parts of it, to recognize that this second view was correct. Jewish settlements in the West Bank (the biblical Judea and Samaria) kept increasing. Some were established in the name of security at border points such as the Jordan River, but others were scattered, especially when the Likud Party was in power, all over the West Bank, with the avowed purpose of making it nearly impossible to detach this territory from Israel as a whole.
At the end of the decade, American pressure on Israel to accept the principle of "land for peace" caused confrontation between the two allies. Prime Minister Itzhak Shamir--even more of a maximalist than Menachem Begin--could not reject America's demand that he attend the Madrid peace conference in the fall of 1991. Sitting with representatives of the neighboring Arab governments and the Palestinians, he kept insisting on the rights of the Jews to remain in possession of the land of their forefathers, the "undivided land of Israel." Jewish opinion in the U.S. could no longer believe, or pretend to believe, that Shamir's concern was solely a matter of security.
Israel's internal quarrels now began to be echoed in the U.S. Whereas in the 1950s and 1960s American Jews supported Israel as a whole and stayed far away from its partisan politics, this was no longer true in the 1980s. During the Begin-Shamir years, major figures in the Jewish intelligentsia, and even significant elements in the organizational establishment, made public their identification with the "peace camp" in Israel. In reverse, after Yitzhak Rabin displaced Shamir as prime minister of Israel in 1991, the supporters of the "undivided land of Israel" went into vehement opposition in the United States. While most American Jews rejoiced in September 1993 at the sight of Rabin and Yasir Arafat signing a document on the White House lawn, which set the framework of movement toward peace between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel, American supporters of Israel's right wing were hurling charges of treason at Israel's prime minister and foreign minister.
Consequently, the Rabin government could not presume that American Jews would loyally endorse its political and social policies. In the Diaspora, the support for Israel became ever more precise and differentiated. Orthodox believers identified with the yeshivot and with the settlements of the ardent religious nationalists. Conservative and Reform Jews sent their children to various programs in Israel under their own sponsorship, or to other frameworks in institutions belonging to political and religious moderates. So it went, and continues to go, across the whole spectrum of Jewish opinion. Israel remains very important to the Jews of the Diaspora, but each school of thought is in primary relationship to that segment of Israel which it finds congenial and like-minded.
Thus, the central religious-cultural battle of a hundred years ago is being refought even more vehemently in this generation. Those who want a modern, essentially secular Jewish society and those who demand that the ultra-Orthodox set the rules for any Jewish society are in a battle which neither side can afford to lose.
The Jews of the Diaspora are not watching these struggles from afar; they are engaged in the battle, as they were a century ago. These questions do not belong to Israel alone. They are concerns in which every caring Jew anywhere in the world is deeply and personally involved.
The future relationship between Israel and the Diaspora will not be one relationship but many. Each school of thought and each of the strongly held values that are present in the Jewish Diaspora will continue to draw closer to its counterparts in Israel. The greatest task of Jewish statesmanship will be to find a way of making this complicated, very plural, and often very angry set of factions reach some lasting accommodation. They will not conquer each other, and they are not likely to convert each other. And the time will come, in a decade or two, when the need for peace among the factions will well up from the deepest level of their Jewish souls.
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