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Liberalism, Democracy, and the Jewish State
By GADI TAUB
The future of the state of Israel is once again a topic of heated public debate. For good reasons: The possibility of a nuclear threat from a hostile Iran is one; deadlock in the peace process in the region, and the chance of a gradual shift into chronic civil war between Israelis and Palestinians, is another. But it has become common in some circles to ask not only whether Israel can survive, but also if it has a right to.
Some commentators believe that "the Jewish Question" that has been buzzing around in the West for some three centuries — the question of how this ancient people, the Jews, should fit into a modern political order — should be reopened. National self-determination for Jews in a state of their own, such critics say, can no longer be part of a morally acceptable answer. That is a telling development. As in the past, Western attitudes to the "Jewish Question" are reliable indications of larger political moods and of the shifting meanings of political concepts.
The first thing one senses about the framing of the topic today is hardly a surprise: the growing unease with nation-states. The horrors of Fascism and Nazism made us all wary of extreme nationalism. Until the 1970s, national-liberation movements in rapidly collapsing Western colonies still reminded the democratic world that nationalism is not always the enemy of liberty but sometimes its ally. But the decline of colonialism and the deterioration of liberation movements into third-world tyrannies, combined with the rise of the European Union and globalization, changed that. The postcolonial era gave rise to a hope of transcending nationalism, and has relegated nationalist sentiments in the West's political imagination to the parties of reaction. Current debates about Israel's future clearly reflect that trend. But they also indicate a less-obvious feature of the antinational mood: a growing rift between liberalism and democracy.
A recent wave of books on the future of Israel offers a glimpse into that tendency. The four discussed here (there are many others) are polemical rather than scholarly, and they are vastly different from one another. One is an autobiographical account, by Daniel Cil Brecher, a German Jew who immigrated to Israel and then back to Europe; another is the work of a French Jewish journalist, Sylvain Cypel, who spent more than a decade in Israel; the third is a fiery anti-Zionist exhortation, by Joel Kovel, a Jewish psychiatrist and now a professor of social studies at Bard College, who challenged Ralph Nader for the presidential nomination of the Green Party; and the last is an analysis of the challenges facing Israel, by Mitchell G. Bard, a pro-Israeli, Jewish-American activist. It is hard to imagine these four authors getting along around one dinner table. But they do share something: All are, to various degrees, uneasy with the idea of national identity.
Unease may be too strong a term for Bard's Will Israel Survive? A trace of discomfort does appear, though, in his understandable anger, as an American, toward those Israelis who insist that if you are Jewish and consider yourself a Zionist, you must immigrate to Israel. Bard's definition of Zionism is considerably more flexible. It includes all who generally sympathize with Israel. That helps sidestep the core of the original ideology: The founders of Zionism thought that under modern conditions, Jews would preserve their identity and sense of "peoplehood" only by shifting from a religious to a modern and national basis. They insisted that Jews have a collective right, like other peoples (as Israel's Declaration of Independence declared), to self-determination. Bard does not object to that idea so much as he is ambiguous about it. His justification of Zionism heavily accentuates anti-Semitism (especially from contemporary fundamentalist Islam) and downplays self-determination. His support of Zionism is thus more negative than positive.
In Walled: Israeli Society at an Impasse, Cypel, a senior editor at Le Monde, targets nationalism more directly. In his view, Israel suffers from collective egocentrism. Both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict see themselves as victims, and both deny the victimhood of the other. The key to any solution is therefore putting an end to denial. But Israel, Cypel thinks, has gone the opposite way: It has built a wall, and the wall is about blocking, not seeing, the other side.
Cypel greatly exaggerates denial. He takes little note, for example, of the fact that many of the harsh truths he discusses, and which Israel, he says, denies, were not unearthed from dusty archives by his own journalistic efforts. He relies heavily on works of Israeli scholars and on Haaretz, Israel's single highbrow daily newspaper. Those are hardly clandestine sources. Contrary to Cypel's assertion that none of the works of the Israeli historian Benny Morris, for instance, appeared in Hebrew until 2000, Morris's seminal The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-49 was actually published in Hebrew in 1991 and stirred a lengthy, high-profile debate in the Israeli popular news media. For someone who spent more than a decade in Israel, Cypel, now based in Paris, is curiously out of touch with Israeli politics.
It is still true that Israel's public, like Palestine's, dwells more on its own pains than on those of the other side. That is probably true of all conflicts, but Cypel nevertheless makes it the center of his analysis of this one. On that basis, he reasons that any resolution must first cure both peoples of the inherent collective egocentrism of their national narratives. Cypel, however, is a Frenchman, and France is both strongly republican and decidedly national. He also remembers the Algerian movement of national liberation. So he isn't easily tempted to say that doing away with the desire for national independence is the key to peace — or the necessary precondition for democracy. Instead he classifies Israeli and Palestinian nationalism as the wrong kinds of nationalism. The problem: They are "ethnic" national identities. Cypel does not make clear exactly how the term "ethnic" applies to Israel's national identity. But he clearly has in mind the contrast with France's brand of republican nationalism, which formally (although not necessarily in social practice) equates citizenship with national identity: If you receive French citizenship, you automatically acquire, at least in theory, a French identity.
A Stranger in the Land: Jewish Identity Beyond Nationalism, Brecher's book, is written in a more minor key, and details his personal search for an escape from the contradictions of identity. History and political analysis are woven into biography here. Brecher's parents fled Europe in the great upheavals of World War II, wound up in Israel, but never felt at home there. They finally settled in Germany in 1953. Their son, Daniel, however, was uncomfortable as a German Jew and immigrated to Israel in 1976. But its very nature as a national Jewish state was jarring to Brecher. His own humanistic view was shaped by the experience of "a minority group harmed by nationalism," and so he was uneasy with what he saw as Israel's drive for an "ethnically pure society." Falling out of love with Israel began with minor political dissent, greatly exacerbated after he served in a reserve unit in the first Lebanon war (which began in 1982). Brecher's stationing seems in retrospect singularly ironic: He served with other academics in a lecturers' unit assigned to raise soldier morale.
The book's tone is uniformly morose. But it does have a happy ending, with the author moving back to Europe and finding his home in the cosmopolitan environs of Amsterdam. The personal is also the political here: Brecher's reconciliation with himself, he believes, also applies to Israel. Israel should transcend nationalism and become "a state of all her citizens," he says, one where "the rights and development of the individual citizen are protected and promoted regardless of race and religion, where freedom and human rights stand in the foreground rather than the dogmas of Zionism."
In Joel Kovel's Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine, nationalism is even more clearly equated with evil. Kovel is a man of unequivocal judgments, and his verdict on Zionism, as a particularly bad kind of nationalism, is fierce. Israel is, he says, "absolutely illegitimate," a "monstrous venture" of "state-structured racism." The history of the Zionist creed interests Kovel very little, since the problem, in his view, begins with Judaism. Judaism, he says, always had two opposing tendencies: exceptionalism and universalism. Zionism is a direct descendant of the exceptionalistic side. Its origins are in the idea that the Israelites were God's chosen people. According to Kovel's slapdash Hegelianism, all forms of identity are negations of others: If they do not negate negation, they do not achieve universalism, and they are therefore malignant. Nationalism in general, and Zionism in particular, fail on that count. They define themselves by excluding others; thus they violate nothing less than natural justice (which Kovel more or less equates with liberalism).
A more vigorous editor would have done the book a great deal of good by tuning down Kovel's shrill evangelical tone and maybe counseling against zoological metaphors. It would have been wiser, for example, not to court charges of racism by comparing Jewish settlers to "those insects who lay an egg in the interior of the prey's body, whence a new creature hatches as a larva that devours the host from within."
But the truth is that Kovel is not a racist, just an absolutist kind of liberal zealot. His crusade for "overcoming" Zionism is militant because there can be no compromise with absolute evil. He strives for complete destruction of Zionism as a creed, by calling first for a blacklist of all those who support pro-Israel lobbies in North America; then for organizing cultural and economic boycotts of Israel; and finally for overwhelming the Jewish majority with returning Palestinian refugees. Only then can reconstruction begin. Kovel would have little truck with the suggestions of a binational state currently circulating. Reconstruction should aim for something like Brecher's non-national liberal democracy.
Before Israel was founded, a Zionist leader who was to become its first president, Chaim Weizmann, said Israel would be Jewish in the same sense that England is English. What is it, then, that makes the idea of a Jewish democratic state seem more contradictory to so many critics today than an English democratic state?
The issue does not seem to be the connection of the state to Judaism as a faith. From its outset, Zionism wrought a secularizing revolution in Jewish identity. That is why most Orthodox Jews initially objected to it. To this day, the large ultra-Orthodox minority in Israel, although it takes an active part in Israel's politics, abhors Israel's national identity. It is still true, however, that Zionism preserved many ties to Judaism as a religion, and often made concessions to the Orthodox. The result is no clear separation between church and state. Is that what singles Israel out as nondemocratic? Probably not. England has a state church, as do Denmark and Norway, and that doesn't seem to constitute evidence of a nondemocratic character. The Greeks identify their religious with their national identity; the Poles don't clearly separate Roman Catholicism from theirs. But those states, too, are considered democratic. Moreover, a strict separation of church and state — as, for example, in France — is not necessarily more egalitarian. France is extremely aggressive toward minorities whose religion has a public dimension (like Muslim women who cover their heads in school). Israel's Muslim minority is, in that respect, better off: Israel has a publicly financed Arab-language school system, for example, and a state-sponsored system of Muslim courts for marriage and family status. Arabic is one of the official languages of the state.
By GADI TAUB
The future of the state of Israel is once again a topic of heated public debate. For good reasons: The possibility of a nuclear threat from a hostile Iran is one; deadlock in the peace process in the region, and the chance of a gradual shift into chronic civil war between Israelis and Palestinians, is another. But it has become common in some circles to ask not only whether Israel can survive, but also if it has a right to.
Some commentators believe that "the Jewish Question" that has been buzzing around in the West for some three centuries — the question of how this ancient people, the Jews, should fit into a modern political order — should be reopened. National self-determination for Jews in a state of their own, such critics say, can no longer be part of a morally acceptable answer. That is a telling development. As in the past, Western attitudes to the "Jewish Question" are reliable indications of larger political moods and of the shifting meanings of political concepts.
The first thing one senses about the framing of the topic today is hardly a surprise: the growing unease with nation-states. The horrors of Fascism and Nazism made us all wary of extreme nationalism. Until the 1970s, national-liberation movements in rapidly collapsing Western colonies still reminded the democratic world that nationalism is not always the enemy of liberty but sometimes its ally. But the decline of colonialism and the deterioration of liberation movements into third-world tyrannies, combined with the rise of the European Union and globalization, changed that. The postcolonial era gave rise to a hope of transcending nationalism, and has relegated nationalist sentiments in the West's political imagination to the parties of reaction. Current debates about Israel's future clearly reflect that trend. But they also indicate a less-obvious feature of the antinational mood: a growing rift between liberalism and democracy.
A recent wave of books on the future of Israel offers a glimpse into that tendency. The four discussed here (there are many others) are polemical rather than scholarly, and they are vastly different from one another. One is an autobiographical account, by Daniel Cil Brecher, a German Jew who immigrated to Israel and then back to Europe; another is the work of a French Jewish journalist, Sylvain Cypel, who spent more than a decade in Israel; the third is a fiery anti-Zionist exhortation, by Joel Kovel, a Jewish psychiatrist and now a professor of social studies at Bard College, who challenged Ralph Nader for the presidential nomination of the Green Party; and the last is an analysis of the challenges facing Israel, by Mitchell G. Bard, a pro-Israeli, Jewish-American activist. It is hard to imagine these four authors getting along around one dinner table. But they do share something: All are, to various degrees, uneasy with the idea of national identity.
Unease may be too strong a term for Bard's Will Israel Survive? A trace of discomfort does appear, though, in his understandable anger, as an American, toward those Israelis who insist that if you are Jewish and consider yourself a Zionist, you must immigrate to Israel. Bard's definition of Zionism is considerably more flexible. It includes all who generally sympathize with Israel. That helps sidestep the core of the original ideology: The founders of Zionism thought that under modern conditions, Jews would preserve their identity and sense of "peoplehood" only by shifting from a religious to a modern and national basis. They insisted that Jews have a collective right, like other peoples (as Israel's Declaration of Independence declared), to self-determination. Bard does not object to that idea so much as he is ambiguous about it. His justification of Zionism heavily accentuates anti-Semitism (especially from contemporary fundamentalist Islam) and downplays self-determination. His support of Zionism is thus more negative than positive.
In Walled: Israeli Society at an Impasse, Cypel, a senior editor at Le Monde, targets nationalism more directly. In his view, Israel suffers from collective egocentrism. Both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict see themselves as victims, and both deny the victimhood of the other. The key to any solution is therefore putting an end to denial. But Israel, Cypel thinks, has gone the opposite way: It has built a wall, and the wall is about blocking, not seeing, the other side.
Cypel greatly exaggerates denial. He takes little note, for example, of the fact that many of the harsh truths he discusses, and which Israel, he says, denies, were not unearthed from dusty archives by his own journalistic efforts. He relies heavily on works of Israeli scholars and on Haaretz, Israel's single highbrow daily newspaper. Those are hardly clandestine sources. Contrary to Cypel's assertion that none of the works of the Israeli historian Benny Morris, for instance, appeared in Hebrew until 2000, Morris's seminal The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-49 was actually published in Hebrew in 1991 and stirred a lengthy, high-profile debate in the Israeli popular news media. For someone who spent more than a decade in Israel, Cypel, now based in Paris, is curiously out of touch with Israeli politics.
It is still true that Israel's public, like Palestine's, dwells more on its own pains than on those of the other side. That is probably true of all conflicts, but Cypel nevertheless makes it the center of his analysis of this one. On that basis, he reasons that any resolution must first cure both peoples of the inherent collective egocentrism of their national narratives. Cypel, however, is a Frenchman, and France is both strongly republican and decidedly national. He also remembers the Algerian movement of national liberation. So he isn't easily tempted to say that doing away with the desire for national independence is the key to peace — or the necessary precondition for democracy. Instead he classifies Israeli and Palestinian nationalism as the wrong kinds of nationalism. The problem: They are "ethnic" national identities. Cypel does not make clear exactly how the term "ethnic" applies to Israel's national identity. But he clearly has in mind the contrast with France's brand of republican nationalism, which formally (although not necessarily in social practice) equates citizenship with national identity: If you receive French citizenship, you automatically acquire, at least in theory, a French identity.
A Stranger in the Land: Jewish Identity Beyond Nationalism, Brecher's book, is written in a more minor key, and details his personal search for an escape from the contradictions of identity. History and political analysis are woven into biography here. Brecher's parents fled Europe in the great upheavals of World War II, wound up in Israel, but never felt at home there. They finally settled in Germany in 1953. Their son, Daniel, however, was uncomfortable as a German Jew and immigrated to Israel in 1976. But its very nature as a national Jewish state was jarring to Brecher. His own humanistic view was shaped by the experience of "a minority group harmed by nationalism," and so he was uneasy with what he saw as Israel's drive for an "ethnically pure society." Falling out of love with Israel began with minor political dissent, greatly exacerbated after he served in a reserve unit in the first Lebanon war (which began in 1982). Brecher's stationing seems in retrospect singularly ironic: He served with other academics in a lecturers' unit assigned to raise soldier morale.
The book's tone is uniformly morose. But it does have a happy ending, with the author moving back to Europe and finding his home in the cosmopolitan environs of Amsterdam. The personal is also the political here: Brecher's reconciliation with himself, he believes, also applies to Israel. Israel should transcend nationalism and become "a state of all her citizens," he says, one where "the rights and development of the individual citizen are protected and promoted regardless of race and religion, where freedom and human rights stand in the foreground rather than the dogmas of Zionism."
In Joel Kovel's Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine, nationalism is even more clearly equated with evil. Kovel is a man of unequivocal judgments, and his verdict on Zionism, as a particularly bad kind of nationalism, is fierce. Israel is, he says, "absolutely illegitimate," a "monstrous venture" of "state-structured racism." The history of the Zionist creed interests Kovel very little, since the problem, in his view, begins with Judaism. Judaism, he says, always had two opposing tendencies: exceptionalism and universalism. Zionism is a direct descendant of the exceptionalistic side. Its origins are in the idea that the Israelites were God's chosen people. According to Kovel's slapdash Hegelianism, all forms of identity are negations of others: If they do not negate negation, they do not achieve universalism, and they are therefore malignant. Nationalism in general, and Zionism in particular, fail on that count. They define themselves by excluding others; thus they violate nothing less than natural justice (which Kovel more or less equates with liberalism).
A more vigorous editor would have done the book a great deal of good by tuning down Kovel's shrill evangelical tone and maybe counseling against zoological metaphors. It would have been wiser, for example, not to court charges of racism by comparing Jewish settlers to "those insects who lay an egg in the interior of the prey's body, whence a new creature hatches as a larva that devours the host from within."
But the truth is that Kovel is not a racist, just an absolutist kind of liberal zealot. His crusade for "overcoming" Zionism is militant because there can be no compromise with absolute evil. He strives for complete destruction of Zionism as a creed, by calling first for a blacklist of all those who support pro-Israel lobbies in North America; then for organizing cultural and economic boycotts of Israel; and finally for overwhelming the Jewish majority with returning Palestinian refugees. Only then can reconstruction begin. Kovel would have little truck with the suggestions of a binational state currently circulating. Reconstruction should aim for something like Brecher's non-national liberal democracy.
Before Israel was founded, a Zionist leader who was to become its first president, Chaim Weizmann, said Israel would be Jewish in the same sense that England is English. What is it, then, that makes the idea of a Jewish democratic state seem more contradictory to so many critics today than an English democratic state?
The issue does not seem to be the connection of the state to Judaism as a faith. From its outset, Zionism wrought a secularizing revolution in Jewish identity. That is why most Orthodox Jews initially objected to it. To this day, the large ultra-Orthodox minority in Israel, although it takes an active part in Israel's politics, abhors Israel's national identity. It is still true, however, that Zionism preserved many ties to Judaism as a religion, and often made concessions to the Orthodox. The result is no clear separation between church and state. Is that what singles Israel out as nondemocratic? Probably not. England has a state church, as do Denmark and Norway, and that doesn't seem to constitute evidence of a nondemocratic character. The Greeks identify their religious with their national identity; the Poles don't clearly separate Roman Catholicism from theirs. But those states, too, are considered democratic. Moreover, a strict separation of church and state — as, for example, in France — is not necessarily more egalitarian. France is extremely aggressive toward minorities whose religion has a public dimension (like Muslim women who cover their heads in school). Israel's Muslim minority is, in that respect, better off: Israel has a publicly financed Arab-language school system, for example, and a state-sponsored system of Muslim courts for marriage and family status. Arabic is one of the official languages of the state.
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