The Zionist dream at 75

Israel in 1948 was a manifestation of an ideal at the time it was created. Namely, this meant Jewish self-determination in their ancient homeland, a nation-state like all others, brought about by a liberation movement that worked with and ultimately against the world’s greatest imperial power, and which was the culmination of decades of patient organizing and building, all set against the horrific backdrop of the Holocaust.

But these are among the features—self-determination, nation-state, imperialism and anti-imperialism—that fuel the current argument that founding father and first prime minister David Ben-Gurion’s Zionism has become a dream that has gone sour. It articulated an unattainable utopia that would never come to fruition because of the inevitable gaps between the idealism of Zionism and the statecraft of Israel that is the embodiment of Jewish nationalism.

Today, 75 years later, this paradox of the ideal against the real is on full display. Is it cause for alarm or celebration?

Historian Shlomo Avineri wrote in his classic study The Making of Modern Zionism:

Israel is thus the new public dimension of Jewish existence, the new Jewish parhessia. As it replaces the old religious-communal bonds that circumscribed Jewish existence in the past. Today, due to modernization and secularization, Israel is a normative expression of this collective existence of the Jewish people, of Klal Yisrael. This may also explain why so many Jews continue to support Israel. It is their symbol of collective identity, even if they disagree with the policies of their government. Support for Israel is not necessarily support for a policy of even an ideology; rather, it is an expression of Jewish self-identity.

Normalcy and Jewish self-identity have been at the center of Zionism since the beginning, but they have also become part of the struggle for the Diaspora as it comes to terms with what the Zionist enterprise built, warts and all.

Having a state means having the power to create and to destroy—in literal and visceral terms—an unfamiliar condition in the past two millennia of Jewish history. A consistent side effect of the Zionist enterprise is that 75 years after the State of Israel came about is a growing wedge between Israelis and the Diaspora, driven largely by guilt and presumptions of moral superiority. Arguably, at the root of the problem is that too many American Jews are uncomfortable with power.

As the Zionist enterprise began to lay the foundations for statehood in Mandatory Palestine, Jews there began to accumulate power—economic, political and military—that caused other Jews to immediately question the morality of the enterprise itself. Old anti-Semitic tropes came to the forefront; a Jewish state would be based on “exploitation” or even Zionist “world domination,” something that generated non-Jewish hostility and, among a Jewish minority, feelings of guilt. Decades before the state was founded, Reform rabbi and Hebrew University founder Judah Magnes expressed the trepidation: “It is not only the end which for Israel must be desirable but what is of equal importance, the means must be conceived and brought forth in cleanliness.”

But states are never clean, and nations must be watchful of deeds done in their name. Magnes thus subscribed to the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform adopted by the American Reform movement, which among other things stated:

No state has or could achieve the desired level of purity, particularly one surrounded by implacable enemies. But armed with “monotheistic and moral truth” powerlessness was (for a small fringe of Reform Jewish leaders) the preferred, even ideal situation.

Still, a century after the Balfour Declaration, the strength of the Pittsburgh statement remains grounded in the moral understanding that Jews are indeed a religious community, a people united by text and tradition with eyes turned towards their place of origin. Its weakness was the uniquely American rhetorical sleight of hand that denied this community was in fact a “nation” deserving of a “state.”

Outside this small and safe circle of American Reform thinkers, however, the necessity of a Jewish nation-state was a foundational premise no matter what their political persuasion. That understanding came to be shared by the vast majority of American Jews, particularly in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

Today, however, the idea of Jewish statehood is no longer a unifying principle but a wedge issue for American Jews. In the post-colonial era, states accused of being “settler-colonialist” like the United States and Israel are unique villains, and unlike every other state on earth, Israel’s circumstances of birth and human-rights record are deemed to invalidate its continued existence.

That a small but meaningful minority of American Jews believes this represents the substitution of left-liberal ideals, which are unapplied to other states and peoples, for even a rudimentary sense of Jewish community, not to speak of nationhood.