IS THERE A FUTURE FOR ZIONISM?

Victor Bloom MD

Charles Krauthammer's review in the Weekly Standard (June 5 2000, vol. 5, number 36, URL---http://www.weeklystandard.com) of Yoram Hazony's recent book, "The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel's Soul" starts with this amazing quote:

"The most improbable story of the twentieth century is the return of the Jews to sovereignty in their original homeland. The establishment of a Jewish state after two thousand years of dispersion and powerlessness is an idea that just a hundred years ago, at the founding of the Zionist movement, seemed delusional.

The only thing more improbable is this: That after merely fifty years of independence, the Jews of Israel would tire of it, lose faith in the enterprise, and forfeit their redemption. As things are progressing now, the collapse of Zionism may be the story of the twenty-first century."

Hazony is a relatively young director of a Jewish intellectual think tank, a neo-conservative who is alarmed at a growing tendency within the Jewish state to question the philosophic and theologic basis of its existence. He recounts a history of Jewish philosophic antagonism to the principles of Zionism, promulgated by such thinkers as Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt. These German-Jewish intellectuals were a hated minority, but as the years have gone by and the conflict with the Arabs is unabated, moral questions have been raised about the use of force by the Israelis to assert their domain and protect their fledgling nation.

At the end of the second World War there was little question but that the world owed the Jews a place of refuge. The United Nations voted the partition of the then Palestine, a British mandate, to be a Jewish nation, alongside a Palestinian nation of Arabs. As we know, this partition never worked out, as the Arabs resisted the concept of a Jewish nation from the beginning. But in the war of independence, the Jews routed the Arabs and gained further lands for strategic security and self-defense. Reference back to this fundamental war and the Israeli victory is now called the '1948 Syndrome,' as if all further questions of Jewish hegemony goes back to this original victory. Might makes right. To the victor belong the spoils. Or so we thought.

More and more the plight of the displaced Palestinians has been sensationalized in the media, along with terrorist acts by the Palestinians and other Arab states on Jewish civilians through the years. In the famous six day war in 1967, the Israelis routed an imminent invasion force commandeered by Nasser, president of Egypt. In this war, the Israelis occupied even more strategic land, but since then has conceded more and more of it in an attempt to bring about a peace with the Arabs.

The Arabs have declared that they want nothing less than the complete destruction of the Jewish state. It is regarded as a thorn in the side of the Arab world, a conflicting advanced technology, a symbol of Western dominance and colonialism, and a provocation of feelings of inferiority, as the Arab world is still largely undeveloped and their people largely poor and illiterate. A basic Arab code is never to surrender an inch of sand, especially if there is some nearby source of water in the desert. This code has been ingrained as a necessary principle for survival. The Jews are also concerned with survival. And so the conflict has never been resolved.

Deeper yet is the religious conflict. The Moslems consider themselves yet another Semitic tribe, one which does not believe in the primacy of the Jewish tribe to God, so that there is a vicious and bitter underlying sibling rivalry. It is all family, and family disputes are the most bloody, as in Cain vs Abel.

Jewish intellectuals are in bitter disagreement among themselves, about whether Zionism is truly biblical or truly tenable. The Jewish liberals are following the Western trend toward postmodern deconstructionism and multiculturalism. Just as ultra liberal American academics decry the historic primacy of the while male, discarding Western canon as written by 'dead white males' (Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Shakespeare, Goethe) the new left Israelis are dismissing the biblical prophets and scholars, calling for a secular democratic society which is no longer Jewish, but has citizens of all religions and nationalities. That would be the end of the Jewish state as we know it and as it was planned, and without the Law of Return, it would no longer be a haven for displaced Jews from around the world.

American Jews are called upon to give moral and financial support to their beleaguered co-religionists on the other side of the world, but now many Israeli Jews are simply tired, war-weary and sad, seemingly wanting peace at any price. They are giving up on the axiom, "no land for peace," no giving in to terrorism, but after a half century of ongoing conflict, surrounded by more numerous enemies which are growing in power, the existence of Israel is in serious question again. It seems there is no end to Hitler's plan for a Final Solution.

Dr Bloom is Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Wayne State University School of Medicine. He is a member of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and on the editorial board of the Wayne County Medical Society. He welcomes comments at his email address--- vbloom@comcast.net.

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