The Jewish State

(Continued from p.4)

Yet since the end of Ben-Gurion's leadership of Israel in 1963, the concept of the Jewish state has gradually receded into the background, and the Jewish world has moved on to other matters, which have seemed more pressing: Israeli Jews have come to think of their personal political identity almost exclusively in terms of their views regarding Israel's physical, territorial dimension. American Jews have similarly tended to define themselves in terms of their own particular obsession: The political feud between Orthodoxy and Reform, almost comically transformed into an "Israeli" issue through a remote-control political struggle over whether the Israeli bureaucracy will or will not endorse the validity of Reform Jewish conversions.

The obvious reason for this "moving on" to other issues was the widespread sense that the Jewish state had gained a concrete, positive and final existence in the immediate years after independence, or at least after the victory of the Six Day War in 1967. Yet this premature sense of closure has been disastrous for the idea of the Jewish state. Israel was at birth led by individuals who, heroic though they were, lacked any tradition of the operation of a state-much less a Jewish state-which could serve to anchor and deepen the concept of the state in their minds. The Labor Zionism which brought the state into being was particularly removed from political philosophy, constitutional thought and other traditions of ideas which might have assisted in defining the Jewish state and stabilizing it. And in the five decades since independence, the concept of the Jewish state has received almost no further elaboration and development: In Israeli universities, the tone has been set by Kantian political and moral theories which leave no room for the national or religious particularism of a Jewish state; virtually nothing has been done to systematically develop the idea of a Jewish constitution, with the result that Israel's legal system has lurched ever closer to the idea of a "neutral" post-Jewish regime; and many leading Jewish cultural figures have thrown their weight into the unceasing struggle to delegitimize-rather than to deepen-the concept of the Jewish state itself in the public mind. (Israel's most prominent novelist, Amos Oz: "A state cannot be Jewish, just as a chair or a bus cannot be Jewish. The state is no more than a tool. The concept of a 'Jewish state' is nothing other than a snare.")

More than thirty years of obsessive Jewish entanglement in arguments over the West Bank, the PLO and "Who is a Jew"--combined with the almost total disinterest in the problem of developing a conception and a tradition of Jewish national sovereignty--have thus brought the idea of the Jewish state to the verge of complete decadence. This situation has expressed itself in the "post-Zionist" project of deconstructing the historical, political and religious beliefs that have held the idea of the Jewish state together--a project in which hundreds of Israeli academics, writers, artists and politicians have lent a hand, and which has now spread to Jewish academics in the diaspora as well.

But the surest sign of the decadence of the concept of the Jewish state is the fact that even some of the most outspoken critics of post-Zionism have themselves joined the ranks of those working to undermine the idea of Jewish national sovereignty. One of the more striking

(Continued on p.6)

February 1999               - 5 -               Outpost