While much of this will doubtless come as a shock to Hazony's American Jewish readers who have been celebrating a mythical peace process, there is actually little new here, and Hazony describes the entire disaster in the first 70 pages. The bulk of the book is devoted to Hazony's original contribution--his explanation of why it was that Zionism burnt out so swiftly, leaving its elites, a mere 50 years after Israel's birth, to vie with each other in dismantling the state. And here, for all the persuasiveness and clarity of his analysis, Hazony falls short, leaving out an important part of the story.

The great merit of Hazony's analysis is his focus on the importance of a small group of thinkers whose influence has been badly underrated because for so long they were viewed as marginal to the hard-core Zionist enterprise. These are the cultural Zionists, above all Ahad Ha'am and Martin Buber, both of whom turned against Theodor Herzl in his lifetime. Ahad Ha'am emphasized

Why did Zionism burn out so swiftly, leaving its elites, a mere 50 years after Israel's birth, to vie with each other in dismantling the state?

Hazony contends that it was Buber's influence that would prove decisive in the academy, above all at the Hebrew University where he and his cadre of disciples dominated its intellectual life and were thus in a position to shape the thinking of generations of students who would become Israel's cultural elite. In short, it would be Buber's disciples who would shape the cultural course of the Jewish state.

The problem, as Hazony sees it, was not only what Buber did, but what Labor Zionism failed to do. Preoccupied with building up the state one brick at a time, one factory or agricultural settlement after the other, its leaders became so preoccupied with material achievements that they lost sight of the need to transmit a Zionist vision; Labor Zionism allowed a spiritual vacuum to develop that the Buberites rushed in to fill. It is worth quoting Hazony's eloquent summation: "The story of Martin Buber's lifelong struggle against the idea of the Jewish state is indeed a tragedy: the tragedy of the People of the Book, which chose to abandon its life in the realm of ideas in order to pursue heroic, virtuous, and saving deeds in the realm of the material--only to discover that it is ideas that make material facts into heroic, virtuous, and saving deeds; and that just as easily smash them again, calling them myths and villainy. It is the tragedy of a people that, having given up on ideas to pursue deeds, was soon enough without ideas, and without deeds as well."

The difficulty with Hazony's analysis is that it omits another set of roots that go far to explain Zionism's decline. Hazony treats Ben-Gurion, and by extension Labor Zionism (which Ben-Gurion dominated for decades), as the Zionist lodestone carrying forward Herzl's vision. In fact it was Jabotinsky, of whom Hazony speaks little, who most closely carried forward Herzl's vision. Surprisingly, unlike the group surrounding Brit Shalom whose ideology he explores in depth, Hazony skips over Labor Zionism: if he only relied on this book, the untutored reader might think it lacked any ideology at all, simply putting brick on brick in the vain belief that material progress would guarantee the state's future.

But in fact Labor Zionism was permeated with ideology that in its own way was as threatening to Israel's future as the blatant anti-Zionism of the professors and in some ways more so, for it was transmitted to the next generation in the home, making the ground fallow for the professors' message to take subsequent root. Hazony does observe that Herzl expected the Jewish state to be modeled politically and economically on the Western democratic states of Europe and that the Labor Zionists were socialists, but does not explore the consequences of that divergence.

For combining socialist goals with Zionism imposed immense strains. It meant the state-founding elites viewed their mission as implementing goals that were not exclusively religious or national. The achievement of the transcendental goal of a "just society" (in political terms, socialism) implied the need for participation in a universal anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist struggle as well. Extraordinarily complex theoretical systems were constructed showing, for example, how the socialist Jew- ish enterprise in Palestine was the appropriate way for Jews to implement the Marxist revolution. And success had to be measured not simply by how well Zionism met Jewish goals and needs but by how well it advanced universalist socialist criteria of a "just society"--and was

Outpost               - 4 -               May 2000