A beautiful and illuminating article on the 75th anniversary of Israel's founding
A beautiful and illuminating article on the 75th anniversary of Israel's founding
The Jewish state has lived up to its miraculous creation, but not in the way its founders expected.
By Elliot Kaufman
Wall St. Journal, April 25, 2023
How
did Israel, a liberal cause at its founding 75 years ago, become
right-wing? You could begin the tale in 1935, when a Jewish state was
still far from assured. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the father of right-wing
Zionism, despised by the socialist mainstream, made a promise and a
threat to David Ben-Gurion, the Labor Zionist leader of Palestine’s
Jewish community:
“I
can vouch for there being a type of Zionist who doesn’t care what kind
of society our ‘state’ will have; I’m that person. If I were to know
that the only way to a state was via socialism, or even that this would
hasten it by a generation, I’d welcome it. More than that: Give me a
religiously Orthodox state in which I would be forced to eat gefilte
fish all day long (but only if there were no other way), and I’ll take
it. . .. In the will I leave my son, I’ll tell him to start a
revolution, but on the envelope, I’ll write, ‘To be opened only five
years after a Jewish state is established.’ ”
That
Jabotinsky’s heirs kept his promise and threat allows us to trace the
nation’s journey from left to right as the world’s most successful
postcolonial state.
In
1944 right-wing Zionists revolted against the British, the colonial
power blocking desperate European Jews from immigrating to Palestine.
Ben-Gurion, focused on a postwar settlement, opposed the revolt. His
forces betrayed hundreds of members of the Zionist underground to the
British. This turned Jew against Jew and could have easily spiraled into
civil war. But it didn’t. “There will not be a fratricidal war,” said
Menachem Begin, successor to Jabotinsky. “Perhaps our blood will be
shed, but we will not shed the blood of others.”
A
worn-down Britain withdrew from Palestine in 1948, and Ben-Gurion
declared Israeli independence. Rather than create an Arab state
alongside it, as the United Nations had envisioned, five Arab armies
invaded Israel immediately. The Irgun, Begin’s paramilitary, sought to
smuggle in weapons to resupply Jerusalem during the fighting. Ben-Gurion
knew, however, that a state with private armies would be a tinderbox.
He suppressed Israel’s far-left military faction and ordered his new
Israel Defense Forces to fire on the Irgun’s weapons ship, setting it
ablaze. Again, Begin refused to retaliate: “It is forbidden for brother
to raise a hand against brother.”
East
Jerusalem, with Judaism’s holiest sites, fell to Jordan, which expelled
every last Jew. Yet Israel emerged with one army under a single
command, loyal to the state. This unity, achieved via the ruthlessness
of the moderates and the restraint of the extremists, allowed the
country to develop the social solidarity to hold off repeated invasions,
integrate hundreds of thousands of refugees, liberate Jerusalem and
stand firm against terrorism—all while flourishing as a democracy.
Labor
Zionists, secular and Ashkenazi, governed Israel for its first 29
years. But Jabotinsky’s envelope had been opened. The “Second Israel,”
led by traditional Mizrahi Jews expelled from Arab lands, powered
Begin’s 1977 election victory, known as ha’mahapakh, the upheaval. The
right would push for a more-Jewish state and attempt to break the power
of the left-wing Ashkenazi bastions, from kibbutzim to state
corporations, unions and, most recently, the Supreme Court.
Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose father had been Jabotinsky’s
secretary, led free-market reforms in the 1990s and 2000s, unleashing a
dynamic Israeli economy with a gross domestic product per capita
exceeding Britain’s. In 2020 Mr. Netanyahu secured the Abraham Accords, a
diplomatic flanking maneuver that junked the liberal consensus on a
moribund peace process. Now, as the country shakes, he leads a
once-unthinkable all-right-wing government into uncharted territory.
One
man who foresaw Israel’s transformation was political theorist Leo
Strauss, a Jabotinskyite in his youth. In 1956 he wrote to the editors
of National Review with a then-outrageous argument: Zionism was
conservative. When “the moral spine of the Jews was in danger of being
broken” with false promises of European emancipation, he wrote, Zionism
had held Jews to their Jewishness. “Zionism was the attempt to restore
that inner freedom, that simple dignity, of which only people who
remember their heritage and are loyal to their fate, are capable.” It
“helped to stem the tide of ‘progressive’ leveling of venerable,
ancestral differences; it fulfilled a conservative function.”
Even
a purely political Zionism, he explained in a 1962 speech, was bound to
raise deeper questions of culture: How should citizens of a Jewish
state live? A serious cultural Zionism, in turn, had to conclude that
Jewish culture’s most profound sources and purposes are religious. The
logic of Zionism, he said, leads to Judaism.
Welcome
to Israel, the new global center of Jewish life and learning. Israel
has experienced a religious and cultural renaissance, leaving the old
socialist Sparta in the dust. Scripture is woven into hit songs and
novels, lives of piety the stuff of TV dramas. Birthrates remain
elevated among all types of Jews. The “national-religious” lead a
settlement movement to return Jews to Judea and Samaria, the biblical
heartland from which Jordan had expelled them. These Jews, piling into
the officer corps, may one day lead the army.
Meanwhile,
Israel’s Labor Party, discredited by the waves of Palestinian terrorism
that answered Israeli peace offers, has been reduced to four Knesset
seats out of 120. Only foreign pressure and an increasingly aggressive
Supreme Court, protected from ideological change by its unique selection
mechanism, preserves the left’s power.
Israel’s
opposition is now center-left and center-right, led by new parties with
little vision beyond stymieing Mr. Netanyahu and his religious allies.
They can be formidable, however, when the right forgets that favorable
demographic trends for the future don’t settle disputes today. The
judicial-reform fight has proved that. But here, too, is a confirmation
of change—even the opposition to the right has shifted rightward,
dropped all talk of surrendering territory, and draped itself in the
flag.
India,
founded a year before Israel, provides a parallel. Jawaharlal Nehru,
India’s secularist first prime minister, stopped short of crushing
religion, even making certain concessions to help legitimate the new
state his party would dominate for decades. Like Ben-Gurion, he was
confident that traditional religion would wither away with progress.
Over
time, however, some Israeli Jews and many Indian Hindus sought deeper
meaning for their states. Had they won sovereignty merely to modernize
along British lines? Looking for a different source of values and
solidarity, both nations have seen a conscious return to religion, in
many cases yielding not at all traditional national-religious fusions
with great vitality and expectations.
The
outcomes in Israel and India may be as different as Judaism and
Hinduism, but the challenge for the right is the same: to marshal the
best in its tradition to revise what is no longer sustainable from the
old regime. The worry is that it will marshal the worst to squander its
national inheritance.
Once
upon a time in Israel, the left-wing majority knew how to lead, and the
right-wing minority knew when to hold fire. The combination produced a
state worthy of its miraculous creation. Now, as Israel’s third
generation beckons, the roles are reversed and neither side is content.
The right struggles to consolidate control; will its flailing only
tighten the no longer subtle restraints on its power? The left convinces
itself that the greatest danger to Israel is the majority of its fellow
citizens; will it ever accede, like Jabotinsky and Begin did for a
time, to a different kind of Jewish state?
Only
Mr. Netanyahu keeps his eyes fixed on Iran rather than internal
squabbles. Increasingly it seems that he must solidify the state and
redeem the revolution or be devoured in its wake.
Mr. Kaufman is the Journal’s letters editor.
Very interesting! Very interesting. Thanks for sharing! |
Comments
Post a Comment