Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 1998, pages 58-60

Jews and Israel

Finally—Israelis Are Confronting the Myths of the Country’s Founders

By Allan C. Brownfeld

A 22-part television series entitled “Tkuma” (Rebirth) has stirred widespread controversy in Israel.

This series, writes Joel Greenberg in The New York Times, challenges “the traditional Zionist tale of heroic return and nation-building in an empty desolate homeland” and has evoked reactions ranging from outrage to quiet approval.

“The widely watched program,” writes Greenberg, “is an unvarnished historical Zionist story with a variety of narratives, including the voices of Palestinians, Israeli Arabs and Sephardic Jewish immigrants resentful of their treatment by Israel’s European-born establishment.”

The re-examination of Israel’s beginnings, Greenberg points out, “reflects a process that began more than 10 years ago, when a few Israeli scholars began challenging conventional accounts of their country’s history.” Among the events highlighted by these “new historians” are the expulsion and flight of the Palestinians, “the killing of Arab civilians in border skirmishes and retaliatory raids and terrorist attacks in the 1950s, and what the scholars described as missed opportunities to negotiate with Arabs.”

Critics on the right charged that the series questioned the justice of the Zionist enterprise. Cabinet member Ariel Sharon urged Education Minister Yitzhak Levy “to ban the series from the schools.”

Aryeh Caspi, writing in the Israeli paper Ha’aretz, declares: “The anger at ‘Tkuma’ is because we don’t want to know and we can’t bear the sense of guilt. The establishment of the State of Israel was justice for the Jews, but it was accompanied by a terrible injustice to the Palestinians.”

Gidon Drori, the executive producer and editor of the series, said that, “There’s still disagreement over what the past is, and perceptions of the past are constantly changing. We’re dealing with unfinished business. The scars still haven’t healed.”

Tom Segev, an Israeli historian, said: “The justification for the State of Israel has been a certain interpretation of Jewish history, a Zionist interpretation. The minute you shake that, people get excited. History is more touchy than politics. Our past is more sensitive than our present.”

“Formal democracy was a mortal danger to Zionism.”

The New York Times reports that, “There are scenes in the series that are bound to be troubling to Israelis brought up on historical accounts that have justified Israeli actions while glossing over the pain of the other side. In one episode, an Israeli Arab stands in the ruins of his destroyed village, reciting a bitter poem about exile...Other segments include unflinching accounts of massacres and incidents of indiscriminate killing of Arab civilians by Israeli forces in the early years of the state, using interviews with former Israeli officers and Arab witnesses to reconstruct events.”

The critics of the series represent “parts of society that have not matured enough to take a more sober look at the past,” said Gidon Drori. “This series is a mark of maturity, and I doubt that something like it could have been produced by a television authority in another country. But I can’t expect everyone to handle it, or that it will be easy to digest.”

Leonard Fein, in his column in The Forward, points out that Israel’s 50th anniversary produced far more celebration in the U.S. than in Israel itself. There, he notes, “...disenchantment, quite literally, was in the air. The Founding Fathers were unveiled as having feet of clay. Revisionist historians, controversial in the groves of the academy, had successfully altered the public consciousness. Hence much cynicism, little trust, low morale.” The 22-part “Tkumah” program, “set out to ‘set the record straight,’ and so it did.”

In what some historians have called the “post-Zionist” era, Israeli intellectuals are beginning to question the basic tenets of Zionism. Of particular interest is the book The Founding Myths of Israel (Princeton University Press) by Zeev Sternhell, professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His previous books include Neither Right Nor Left and The Birth of Fascist Ideology.

In this book, Sternhell advances a radical new interpretation of the founding of modern Israel. The founders claimed that they intended to create both a landed state for the Jewish people and a socialist society. However, according to Sternhell, socialism served the leaders of the influential labor movement more as a rhetorical resource for the legitimation of the national project of establishing a Jewish state than as a blueprint for a just society. He argues that socialist principles were subverted in practice by the nationalist goals to which socialist Zionism was committed.

A Conscious Ideological Choice

Sternhell declares: “I contend that the inability of the labor movement under the leadership of its founders and immediate successors to curb aspirations for territorial expansion, as well as its failure to build a more egalitarian society, was not due to any objective conditions or circumstances beyond its control. These developments were the result of a conscious ideological choice made at the beginning and clearly expressed in the doctrine of ‘constructive socialism.’ Constructive socialism is generally regarded as the labor movement’s great social and ideological achievement, a unique and original product, the outstanding expression of the special needs and conditions of the country. But in reality, far from being unique, constructive socialism was merely an Eretz Israeli version of nationalist socialism.”

Modern Zionism is more rooted in the 19th century nationalism of Eastern Europe, in Sternhell’s view, than it is in anything in Jewish religious history. He notes that, “To the east of the River Rhine...the criteria for belonging to a nation were not political but cultural, linguistic, ethnic and religious. German, Polish, Romanian, Slovakian, Serbian and Ukrainian identities came into being not as the expression of an allegiance to a single independent authority but as a result of religion, language and culture, which were very readily regarded as reflecting biological or racial differences. Here the nation precedes the state. The thought of Johann Gottfried von Herder was most relevant to East Europe, not the teachings of Kant, Mill or Marx....In these regions the individual was never regarded as standing on his or her own and as having an intrinsic value; a person was never anything but an integral part of a national unit without any possibility of choice, and the nation claimed absolute allegiance.”

Liberal individualism, Sternhell points out, “suddenly appeared as a real threat to the continued Jewish people’s existence as a homogeneous autonomous unit. Thus, Zionism was not only a reaction to increasing insecurity but also a Herderian, not to say tribal response, to the challenge of emancipation....Zionism was from the beginning the preoccupation of a minority, which understood the Jewish problem not in terms of physical existence and the provision of economic security but as an enterprise for rescuing the nation from the danger of collective nihilism. Only with the closing of the gates of the United States did Palestine become a land of immigration, although even then it was not an entirely ordinary land of immigration. Even someone who had no choice but to land on the shores of Jaffa and Tel Aviv was viewed as fulfilling a national mission.”

All over Central and Eastern Europe, ethnic units were fighting for their cultural and political independence. “The Jewish national movement,” writes Sternhell, “was similar...it was no worse than other national movements, no more aggressive or intolerant, but also not much better....In the tense atmosphere of building up the country, where the main preoccupation of Jewish workers was ‘the conquest of labor,’ in other words, the dispossession of Arab workers in order to take their place—and thus the establishment of a solid infrastructure for an autonomous Jewish existence...a movement grounded in the universal values of socialism could not survive.”

What grew in Palestine, Sternhell shows, was a “tribal view of the world...What fell victim to national objectives was not only the rights of workers but the very aims of socialism as a comprehensive vision of a changed system of relationships between human beings...Ben-Gurion knew that a national movement does not function in a void and that Palestine was not an uninhabited territory...From the beginning he was convinced that settling Jews on the soil of Eretz Israel would mean a conquest of land and a rivalry with Arabs...Universalistic ideals such as justice and equality interested Ben-Gurion only insofar as they served national objectives and did not interfere with their attainment. Because he did not regard them as having any intrinsic value, it was not difficult for him to dispense with them at the first signs of incompatibility.”

The early philosophers of Labor Zionism, A.D. Gordon and Berl Katznelson, emphasized redemption of the soil in the service of a national resurrection. As they pressed their organic, nationalist agenda, the very idea of equality and universal rights for all men were largely abandoned.

For Gordon, Jewish life outside of Palestine was meaningless. Sternhell notes that, “For him, the existential danger was not anti-Semitism but liberalism...Gordon proposed a radical solution: ‘If we do not have a complete and absolute national life embracing our entire existence, it is better that there should be full and total assimilation.’” He rejected the liberal conception of the nation as a collection of individuals but argued that it was a living body and cannot exist uprooted from the soil in which it grows. It received its creative power from its roots in the soil. The concept of “purity of soul,” writes Sternhell, “was always one of the shibboleths of tribal nationalism. There is no doubt that one finds in Gordon’s teachings...an echo of Slavophile nationalism. In fact, one finds there not only echoes but a real intellectual affinity with integral nationalism.”

To such nationalists, the Jews of the Diaspora meant as little as the Arab residents of Palestine.

Even at the height of the Second World War, there was no change in the Zionist order of priorities. “It was not the rescue of the Jews as such that topped Berl Katznelson’s order of priorities,” writes Sternhell, “but the organization of the Zionist movement in Europe. In December 1940 Katznelson lashed out at Polish Jewry in areas conquered by the Soviet Union because they were unable to cope with the situation and unable to fight even for a few days for small things like Hebrew schools. ‘In my opinion that is a terrible tragedy, no less than the trampling of Jewry by Hitler’s jackboots.’ Indeed, this was the founders’ order of priorities from the beginning and the tragedy of the Jews in the Second World War could not change it. Zionism was an act of rebirth in the most literal sense of the term. Thus, every event in the nation’s life was evaluated according to a single criterion: the degree to which it contributed to Zionism.”

Soon after the Kristallnacht assault on Jews in Germany, Ben-Gurion expressed his opposition to a British decision to permit 10,000 Austrian and German Jewish children to come to England rather than settle in Palestine. He stated: “Were I to know that all German Jewish children could be rescued by transferring them to England and only half by transfer to Palestine, I would opt for the latter, because our concern is not only the personal interest of these children, but the historic interest of the Jewish people.”

In the case of the Arab residents of Palestine, Sternhell writes that, “Contrary to the claim that is often made, Zionism was not blind to the presence of Arabs in Palestine. Even Zionist figures who had never visited the country knew that it was not devoid of inhabitants. At the same time, neither the Zionist movement abroad nor the pioneers who were beginning to settle the country could frame a policy toward the Palestinian national movement. The real reason for this was not a lack of understanding of the problem but a clear recognition of the insurmountable contradiction between the basic objectives of the two sides. If Zionist intellectuals and leaders ignored the Arab dilemma, it was chiefly because they knew that this problem had no solution within the Zionist way of thinking.”

The ultimate Zionist argument as set forth by Gordon was: “For Eretz Israel, we have a charter that has been valid until now and that will always be valid, and that is the Bible, and not only the Bible.” The Gospels, the New Testament, he claimed were also the work of the Jewish people: “It all came from us, it was created among us.” And then the decisive argument: “And what did the Arabs produce in all the years they lived in the country? Such creations, or even the creation of the Bible alone, give us a perpetual right over the land in which we were so creative, especially since the people who came after us did not create such works in this country, or did not create anything at all.” Sternhell notes that, “The Founders accepted this point of view. This was the ultimate Zionist argument. The centrality of the Bible was responsible both for the importance of historical factors in the thinking of the movement and for the place given to religion and tradition. The dependence of the Jewish movement of national rebirth on history and religion necessarily gave it from the start a radical character that was unavoidable....Essentially, Gordon’s thought was anti-universalistic and anti-cosmopolitan and favored tribal segregation.”

The ideology which dominates Israeli life at the present time, Sternhell argues, is precisely the same nationalist ideology which gave birth to the state. He writes that, “The reason the Labor Party drew the country into an occupation of the West Bank was nationalism, not its intoxication with the military victory of the Six-Day War or a temporary deficiency in some humanistic values in Zionist thinking. And its denial of the legitimacy of the Arab national movement was not a form of blindness that afflicted only Golda Meir. The prime minister at the time of the Yom Kippur war was chosen as a successor to Levi Eshkol to ensure the perpetuation of a worldview that had begun with Gordon and continued with Katznelson. Like these major thinkers of Eretz Israeli Zionism, Meir appealed to history as proof of the legitimacy, morality and exclusivity of the Jewish people’s right to the country, to the entire country. For her, as for Katznelson, there was room for only one national movement in Palestine. That was also why she prohibited the use of terms such as ‘Palestinian national movement’ and ‘Palestinian state’ on state radio and television.”

Fundamentalism and Nationalism

The Gush Emunim, formally established after the war of 1967, which combines religious fundamentalism with extreme nationalism in pursuance of its aim of recovering the West Bank through colonization is correct, Sternhell declares, “in claiming that the settlements in Judea and Samaria or in the very heart of Hebron were the natural, logical and legitimate continuation of Zionism’s original intention. It is also right in maintaining that this movement is closer to the spirit of the founders than the ‘new liberal Zionism’ which it does not always recognize as Zionism at all. In effect, the secular Israeli Jew, looking toward the West and receptive to its values, has begun, in recent years, to forge for himself an ‘independent’ identity, detached from the mystical ramifications of his religion and the irrational side of his history. This is a revolution that the national religious Zionists and radical nationalist (and supposedly secular) Zionists are unable to countenance, and whose development they cannot watch with indifference....For the religious right and this supposedly secular radical right, a new front against Zionism was opened on the day the Oslo accords were signed. Rabin had become an enemy of the nation, a traitor to his people and its history....Rabin’s assassination was the work of a very small group, but it gave a tragic dimension to a fact that many people refused to acknowledge until then: Israel too has its Brownshirts, not only consisting of settlers in Judea and Samaria.”

A point stressed by Sternhell, and one which many contemporary commentators seem not to understand, is that the Zionist movement “represented a minority among the Jewish people, and the form of Zionism exemplified by the Eretz Israel labor movement was attractive to only a minority of the Jewish proletariat in Eastern Europe and the U.S. Most of the manual workers in the factories of Lodz and the workshops of Manhattan embraced non-Zionist socialism, read Yiddish newspapers, and participated in the struggles of the local socialist parties. In addition, the Jewish Yishuv was a minority in Palestine, and its representatives vigorously opposed any attempts to set up institutions of representative government in the country on the basis of majority decisions.”

In this respect, Sternhell writes, “Formal democracy was a mortal danger to Zionism...The justification of Zionism for the Yishuv did not depend on the support of the majority of the Jewish people, just as its implementation could not depend on the goodwill of the Arabs. ‘We think the concept of Eretz Israel suits the needs of the Jewish people, and thus we consider the Zionist movement a truly democratic one regardless of whether Zionism is embraced by the majority of the people or not,’ wrote Moshe Beilinson in one of the major articles on the subject to appear in the labor press. ‘We don’t insist on formal democracy. When Herzl or Weizmann spoke on behalf of the Jewish people, they were not officially authorized by a majority, and a formal concept of democracy would not have allowed them to speak on behalf of the people.’ He drew the conclusion that even if democracy were fully in control or ‘the sovereignty were in the hands of the people...the true course of life would nevertheless be charted by an active minority conscious of its objectives.’ This view accorded with a concept that was very common in communist parties: collective needs, like correct opinions, are grounded in objectivity. This objective existence cannot depend on the will, which by its nature is subjective...If only a minority of the Jewish people identified with Zionism, that did not mean that the movement had to submit to the majority...”

Post-Zionists in Israel argue that a lasting Middle East peace cannot be achieved within the framework of classical Zionism. What Professor Sternhell and others urge is a more pluralistic and tolerant Israeli society, one which can provide freedom within Israel and is prepared to make peace with the Palestinians as well. Whether a Western-style civil society can emerge from the 19th century organic nationalism which motivated Zionism’s founders is, of course, less than clear.

The growing debate in Israel is a healthy one and shows that, whatever its other failures, Israel’s commitment to free speech remains strong. In fact, there seems to be far more free and open debate in Israel than within the organized American Jewish community. Many American Jews who are sympathetic to Zionism might be less so if they reviewed the material presented by Zeev Sternhell and other Israeli critics.

Zionism, they would discover, is not an ancient Jewish philosophy but a creation of 19th century Europe, very much akin to the other nationalisms which emerged at that time, and sharing their narrowness and ethnocentrism. As we approach the 21st century, peace in the Middle East requires a different vision, on the part of both Israelis and Palestinians and others in the region. Perhaps the post-Zionist historians represent the beginning of such a vision.