The State of Israel recently celebrated its seventy-fifth year of existence. If someone had told us way back in 1948 that the country would count nearly ten million people as its citizens, eight million of them Jews; that it would lead the world in technological innovation; that it would be a regional superpower — we would have told them to keep dreaming. Of the countries founded in the era of decolonization, Israel has been one of the most successful, in spite of the intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But in the past year, barely the blink of an eye in the state’s existence, the Israeli government and its prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been trampling and traducing the hard-won achievements of numerous governments. They are undermining the economy and scaring off foreign investors, leading to a devaluation of the currency and to global financial institutions losing confidence in Israel, a country which until recently had been considered a pillar of stability and good governance in a part of the world famous for instability and poor governance. Worst of all, they are generating a profound rift, a terrifying chasm, within Israeli society, the likes of which we have never witnessed before. There is something magical, in Jewish history, about the number seventy-five: the two independent Jewish kingdoms that existed in the Land of Israel in antiquity each lasted about that long. Both were conquered by powerful empires that ruled the region. From the east came the Mesopotamians, Assyria and Babylonia, and then from the west came Rome. The Israelite commonwealth and then the kingdom of Judea refused to make peace with foreign rule, so they revolted to restore their independence. The Jewish population typically split into two large camps, the peacemakers and the warmongers. Those spoiling for a fight usually carried the day. A traditional Jewish prayer states that “we have been exiled from our land on account of our sins.” This encapsulates a truth even for the non-religious: internecine fights between moderates and extremists are usually won by the latter, who invite imperial wrath upon them both. A lack of political shrewdness, an inability to maneuver between great powers, and a tendency to value extreme positions are what led to our great national tragedies in the past. The Jewish propensity to duel over trivialities, to defy authority, and to schismatize — we have a veritable gift for schism — brought about the downfall of the Jewish kingdoms of the First and Second Temple eras. The Zionist movement was ambivalent about the Jewish revolts of antiquity. On the one hand, an emergent national movement needed heroes who embodied a refusal to accommodate themselves any longer to circumstances. On the other hand, Zionism was rational and pragmatic in its pursuit of realizing the impossible — the establishment of a modern Jewish polity in the Land of Israel — by shrewdly taking advantage of current realities rather than working to deny them or overturn them. Zionism existed in tension with itself: it aspired to change everything about Jewish existence, from language, culture, and daily living to the collective self-image and the image projected to non-Jews, while uneasily working within the political status quo, with those in power, first the Turks and then the British, to achieve its goals. This tension was an expression of the longing for national pride and Jewish resurgence coupled with the sober recognition that the world cannot be changed overnight even in an historical emergency, and that in the meantime one must locate fissures and opportunities in the present state of affairs to exploit in order to make the Zionist dream a reality. Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, in the first century BC, who abandoned Jerusalem when it was under Roman siege to found a yeshiva in the coastal town of Yavneh, was spurned by Zionist myth as a weakling who was resigned to reality and capitulated to the strong. Instead the Zionists turned Masada into an emblem of strength and fortitude. Shimon Bar Kokhba and his rabbinic patron Rabbi Akiva, who declared him the long-awaited Messiah, were idolized by Zionists. Recall, though, that Judaism itself might have been defeated with Jerusalem if Rabbi Yohanan had not dissociated it from the holy city and made it portable, and that the courageous garrison of Masada died by mass suicide, and that the Bar Kokhba revolt half a century later resulted in destruction and carnage on a far more massive scale than occurred during the original Judean revolt. Moreover, Rabbi Akiva did not have a monopoly on the identification of the Messiah, but dissenting voices, like those of most moderates, were lost in the clamor of the extremists. One can admire the courage and the freedom struggles of zealots over the generations, but the significant historical fact is that the survival of the Jewish people was owed not to them but to their opponents. Masada became an integral Zionist symbol of strength only in the twentieth century; for two thousand years the tale of mass self-immolation languished in obscurity and Jewish culture was more or less indifferent to it. From its very inception, then, Zionism has been split between the admiration of defiance and self-sacrifice and the recognition of the need to work within the confines of reality by means of realpolitik. Modern Zionism was founded as a secular cause by intellectuals and activists who had a broad European education and had been exposed to the nationalist currents blowing through Europe in the nineteenth century. The Zionist ideal of returning to the land of the Patriarchs, however, is not at all modern. It is deeply rooted in Jewish tradition, which is fundamentally religious. There has always been a dissonance within Zionism between the secular nationalist project of self-liberation, anchored in the modern world and the unique problems that it poses for Jews, and Judaism, which serves as the oldest justification for such a movement of return and restoration. As we will see below, some fundamentals of Israeli culture originated in the Jewish religion and
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