Whose Israel Is It? | A Brief History of Things

Over time, these different founding intentions and visions — and the people who held them and the people who inherited them — shaped the course of Israel's history in all sorts of ways, and they are still at work on Israel's present and its future.

At first glance this looks like a false question: Israel is of course the Israel of the Jews. But that answer blurs both the history and the present.

Israel has always had a large Arab population inside its borders, and that would still be true even if Israel were willing to pull back behind the lines that existed before the 1967 Middle East war. Israel was never built on empty land, whatever some Zionists claimed; many Arabs had lived on the land of Palestine for generations, for hundreds of years.

And the Jews have never been a single thing either. Jews from different countries and different regions of the world, carrying different cultural inheritances and different historical marks, made the composition of Israel — a Jewish state — mottled and complicated.

O Jerusalem!, a book about the years around Israel's founding, describes a man sent to command a unit made up of volunteers who had just arrived from all over the world together with local native-born Jews. He found himself in a Tower of Babel: almost no one could understand what anyone else was saying. After a thousand years of dispersion, many Jewish communities had held on to the basic rites and cultural inheritance of Judaism, but many others had chosen assimilation. Either way, by the time Israel was founded, the languages Jews spoke were as varied as their visions of a Jewish state.

Just as Europe is made up of several Europes, European Jews came in several types. Jews from Western Europe, for instance, had been through the "Jewish emancipation" and lived mostly in cities, and they could not help thinking themselves a cut above their Eastern European kin. There is a detail in Life and Fate, by the Soviet writer Vasily Grossman: a group of Jews from Germany and Central Europe arrives at a camp in Russia, and even in that brutal place they try to keep up the manners of the urban middle class — and even with death in front of them, they still look down on their fellow Jews from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

Different kinds of Jewish communities and ethnic groups produced different versions of Zionism and different ways of practicing it. They set out with different founding intentions and different visions, and together they built the state of Israel. Over time, these different founding intentions and visions — and the people who held them and the people who inherited them — shaped the course of Israel's history in all sorts of ways, and they are still at work on Israel's present and its future.

Western European Jews, among them the Zionist pioneer Theodor Herzl, grew up in the disenchanted world of the late 19th century, and to them Zionism was an extension of their cosmopolitan European lives. Highly assimilated, this group tried to export a better version of European life to the Middle East in the form of a Jewish nation-state in Palestine. Jews from Eastern Europe were narrower and more stubborn, harder to compromise with, more religious and more politically radical.

History settled the argument. Neither the Western European nor the Central European version of moderate, liberal, middle-class Zionism came to a good end; only the radical, half-militarized Zionism of Eastern Europe, with its socialist coloring, lasted to the end.

As My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel points out, Zionism took a winding road: from the Rothschild colonies to the utopian commune at Degania to kibbutz socialism. The bourgeois colonies — built on liberal values, a middle-class way of life and a market-regulated economy — could not stand up to the weather of history, and vanished without a trace amid economic swings and local hostility. The utopian commune at Degania, deeply marked by Tolstoy's ideas, did not work either: freedom, intimacy and individualism could not be squared with duty and mission.

From the ruins of those failed utopian experiments rose colonies of a socialist kind. Large, tightly disciplined, Bolshevik-style kibbutz communes flourished. This looked like the perfect union of Russian radicalism and Central European liberalism: without the idealism and the moral high ground that the socialist tint supplied, the Zionist movement would have lost its legitimacy and turned into a plain, unjust colonial movement.

For a time the kibbutz looked like Zionism's only option — a practice that carried European civilization forward while curing its ills. Through this humane, ecologically minded socialism, Jews could seek redemption twice over: for the Jewish state and for the Jewish individual.

In hindsight, though, all this did was drape a socialist coat over the aggressive nationalist expansion that radical Eastern European Jews were carrying out in Palestine. From first to last the kibbutzim were in conflict, and in armed clashes, with the local Arabs. In fact, even at the time, the Revisionist Zionists around Vladimir Jabotinsky were not afraid to say bluntly that what Jews were after in Palestine was not progress but a state.

As the well-known British Jewish scholar Tony Judt saw it, Israel today is governed by the heirs of Jabotinsky's Revisionist Zionism, not by that awkward mixture of Russian left-wing utopianism and Central European liberalism. Likud, a decisive force in Israeli politics, was built mainly out of Herut, the party led by the late hardliner Menachem Begin, and Herut grew out of the Revisionist Zionist movement Jabotinsky led between the two world wars.

At the time, though, this heavily socialist-tinted Zionism managed to fool even the calculating Stalin. Stalin — whom Judt called "the midwife of Israel" — believed that a state built mainly by socialist-leaning Jews from Eastern Europe and Russia would hand the Soviet Union a handy tool for controlling and penetrating the Middle East. He soon saw that Israel would naturally grow into a state loyal to its Western patron.

That was in fact the choice Israel could not avoid. The Middle East and the Mediterranean mattered more and more to Western security and Western economic interests. And historically the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe and the Tsarist empire had plainly suffered more, while those in the United States and Western Europe had seen more emancipation and more rise in status.

Judt notes that the international left was slow to grasp this, and that through the whole of the 1950s and on into the 1960s Israel stayed close to the mainstream political and intellectual left abroad, and was admired by it. Israel itself seemed happy enough to indulge its own left-wing myth: for the 30 years either side of its founding, the country was run by a political elite made up entirely of assorted "self-declared social democrats."

That myth was smashed after the Six-Day War of 1967. What Israel did to its Arab neighbors was, to the international left, unforgivable. During the war Tony Judt, who had come to Israel as a volunteer, understood for the first time that Israel was not a "social-democratic paradise" of peace-loving Jews living in the countryside. This was a culture and a nation utterly unlike the one he had understood, or imagined.

The junior officers he met all came from towns rather than kibbutzim; the Jewish state's center of gravity turned out to be in the cities. These city boys were full of chauvinism and racism. They opposed Arabs on racial grounds and felt no unease about killing them, and at the same time they despised the Jews living outside Israel, the "children of the Holocaust." The illusion of a socialist Israel fell apart completely, and Judt saw that Israel was a country that looked down on its neighbors and, by seizing their land, was opening a disastrous Middle Eastern quarrel that would last a generation.

Decades later, Judt made a shrewd observation: today's Israel resembles the small nation-states that appeared in Eastern Europe after the Tsarist empire ended. Had Israel been founded in 1918 rather than 1948, like Romania, Poland or Czechoslovakia, it would not have differed much from the cramped, fragile, resentful, unification-minded, unstable and ethnically exclusive states thrown up by the First World War. But the Holocaust gave it a moral coloring, and the blessing of Zionists who were not there themselves led to an obsessive use of Holocaust memory.

There is a caustic saying that the most devout Zionists are the Jews who have no wish to go and live in the real Jewish state, but who pay the bills for the Jews who do. Such people are, without question, most numerous in the United States. American Jewish support for Israel comes out of a double guilt. The first is not having taken part in building and defending the Jewish state. After the Kishinev Easter pogrom of 1903, in what is now Moldova, about a million Jews fled Eastern Europe, and fewer than 35,000 of them went to Palestine; the richer ones went to the United States. The second is that when European Jews were being persecuted, their fellow Jews in America did not speak out bravely — the United States then had both a loud antiwar movement and a fairly strong streak of antisemitism, and American Jews were afraid that denouncing the German Nazis too fiercely would get them charged with stirring up war.

Besides, nearly every minority in the United States has a mother country, and American Jews needed one too. With a Jewish state, with Israel, they could claim a marker of identity and a positive connection without actually having to move there.

But in Judt's view, Israel has to change its own character, and change it deliberately. On one side, support from American Jews will fade sooner or later, because American Jews keep merging with other groups; on the other, Israel today is in substance a culturally plural society. So the real choice Israel faces in the future comes down to two options: expel the Arabs from the territories it occupies, make "Greater Israel" real, and go on living with an endless cycle of bloody violence; or build a state that joins Jews and Arabs, in which Israelis and Palestinians live side by side as two peoples, and so climb out of the trap of the single-ethnicity Jewish nation-state once and for all.

Tony Judt has been dead nearly 10 years, and "whose Israel" is still an open question. As long as it stays open, peace and quiet in the Middle East remain a long way off.

Recommended reading: Thinking the Twentieth Century, My Promised Land

Cover image: huffingtonpost

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