(In the May issue of Outpost, we reviewed Yoram Hazony's The Jewish State, published by Basic Books. Because of the importance of the book, we publish another article focusing on it.)
The thesis of Yoram Hazony's The Jewish State is that "a state is not a material object [but, rather] first and foremost, a matter of culture," or ideas and ideals, aspirations, memories, songs and banners (334-40). Accordingly, "a state need not be defeated militarily to be defeated utterly. The entire job may be done on the battlefield of ideas." In charting the growth of the suicidal ideology of Israel's cultural Bolsheviks to dominance, Hazony does fine work. However, by almost totally neglecting what many believe to be Zionism's greatest advocate and thinker, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, Hazony winds up presenting a misleading history, ignoring roots of Zionist decline apparent long before Ben-Gurion's downfall.
"How could it be," Hazony asks, that Herzl and Ben Gurion "produced such exhilaration over the idea of the Jewish State during their lifetimes, only for this idea to begin a precipitous decline the moment they left the arena?" An unabashed partisan of Ben-Gurion's brand of Zionism, Hazony ignores the fact that Ben-Gurion's brand of Zionism contributed to the problem. Hazony locates the enzyme of collapse in the anti-Zionist ideology of Martin Buber, which, by dominating Israel's universities (and subsequently, its media and arts), came to dominate its politics and enormous bureaucracy. He charts the insidious effects of Buber's teaching that Israel's "true mission" was to eschew political power and find saintliness through identifying with "the other," principally the Arabs. Through recovery of its "Oriental heritage," Israel would "re-unite with the Arab world" that it would recompense for the "original sin" of re-establishing Israel in the first place.
These ideas now dominate a State whose institutions have been turned against its own people. They are a grotesque parody of Chasidic saintliness that cherished at its core faith in the redemption of the Land and nation of Israel and the practice of the commandments that are to be "performed in the Land" (Deuteronomy 4:14, passim). Israel was created and maintained by mighty acts and practices of separation, but facts like these don't deter modern ideologues like Buber or his descendants. They are writ large in the lunatic project of Shimon Peres, a Ben-Gurion protege, that Israel should join the Arab League. They blare from the literature, judicial decisions and op eds of a cultural elite ("enlightened opinion," they smugly term themselves) whose purpose is to make Israelis view themselves through the eyes of their Arab enemies.
But anyone who truly wants to understand the descent toward the abyss of a third exile must look at other events of the 1920s and '30s. It was then that Chaim Weizmann and Ben-Gurion assumed control of efforts to re-establish Israel and undermined, suppressed and often slandered those who sought a more forthright emphasis on ingathering the exiles and settling the entire land of the Mandate. Hazony averts his eyes from many crucial chapters of modern history and as a result, delimits response to his own question. It was in the debates and episodes of character assassination between the world wars, not in 1963, that a massive hole opened in the heart of the not yet established Jewish State. It was then that Ben-Gurion and his supporters undermined those Zionists who would later have invigorated the state with Jewish purpose and faith and whose first goal was to save the imperiled Jews of Europe.
In practical terms, it was in 1922 that the British Cabinet signaled its betrayal of its Mandate from the League of Nations to establish a National Home for the Jewish people in Palestine by detaching more than 75% of that land. The British created a puppet administration in Trans-Jordan, an area henceforth off limits to Jews. At first, Weizmann protested vigorously. "The soil of Trans-Jordania is rich. Irrigation would be easy. There Jewish settlement [the ostensible purpose of the Mandate, and justification for British administration] could proceed on a large scale without friction" because it was largely uninhabited. These plains, the historical Gilead, "form the natural granary of all Palestine. Scarcely inhabited and long derelict," Weizmann noted, "they hardly would satisfy Arab nationalism, which centers on Damascus and Baghdad, but would frustrate His Majesty's entire policy regarding the Jewish National Home" (quoted in Samuel Katz, Lone Wolf, 830-1). These words were a diplomatic appeal to the British sense of fair play and justice. The severing of the lands east of the Jordan from the Jewish National Home indicated that His Majesty's government already had decided to betray the Mandate and the aspirations of the Jewish people.
After this watershed event in 20th century Middle Eastern history, Weizmann became an apologist for British policy. He undermined those like Ze'ev Jabotinsky who lobbied in person and through the press for the fulfillment of the pledge, for Jewish Independence, for the right of Jews to own and bear arms and for a massive ingathering to Israel of the Jews of Europe. It is a sad fact that Weizmann, Ben-Gurion and others at the Jewish Agency had, at best, mixed feelings about wholesale
[(Continued on p.7)]
Outpost - 6 - October 2000