(Continued from p.5)
examples is former Education Minister Amnon Rubinstein, who has been so angered by the rise of post- Zionism among Israeli academics that his new book, From Herzl to Rabin and Beyond, devotes no fewer than eighty pages to rebutting their arguments. And yet at the same time, Rubinstein has himself publicly advocated the dissolution of Jewish sovereignty in Israel through the immurement of the state in the European Union, and the subjugation of all of Israel's laws to the decisions of the European High Court. Similarly telling is the recent attempt by Eliezer Schweid of Hebrew University--widely held to be one of Israel's most important Zionist thinkers--to devise a new Zionism suited to contemporary Israel. This effort leads him to propose a "universal Zionism" which would add to the Israeli flag "a symbol that will represent the participation of the Arab minority"-a crescent moon, perhaps?--and which would compose a new national anthem "that will express the Zionist purpose on a universal level: Loyalty to the Land of Israel, to Jerusalem and to the State of Israel as symbols which express the hope of redemption, brotherhood and peace for all who are called by the name 'Israel' and among all peoples. Such an anthem could unite all the citizens of the state, even though each one of them would use it to express his own national or religious identity." And Rubinstein and Schweid are the defenders of the idea of the Jewish state. As I say, this idea is in such a state of dissolution in the minds of its adherents that when they try to apply it--to simple questions such as "Should Germany, France and Britain have the authority to strike down Israeli legislation?" or "Should the flag of Israel have a crescent moon added to it?"--half the time they end up shooting at their own forces.This same conceptual decadence cannot, unfortunately, be said to characterize the camp of the post-Zionists. They have a clearly defined agenda which has proved comprehensible to virtually everyone: The renunciation of the concept of the Jewish state, and the reconstruction of Israel as a Kantian "state of its citizens" without any particularistic national or religious attributes; without any formal or informal interest in the well-being of the Jewish people; and without constitutional legitimacy for political, military, or cultural policies taken on behalf of the Jewish people as a whole-up to and including the repeal of the Law of Return and the relegation of diaspora Jews to the status of "foreigners" in the Land of Israel. As Yaron London, one of Israel's most distinguished commentators in the print and broadcast media has written of the Law of Return: "This law is a symbol, the last redoubt of the outdated ideas [of Zionism]. Symbols live on even after that which they represent has itself passed away. Such is the Law of Return. Our citizenship laws need to serve us, the Israelis--religious and secular, Arabs and Jews--and not the Jews of the diaspora."
As in every case in which a clear, cogent idea is locked in combat with an idea so decayed that it continues to exist in name only, the idea of the Jewish state has been in virtually unbroken retreat now for decades. It is important that we not mislead ourselves as to where we are headed. The decayed idea of the Jewish state will be restored in the coming years--that is, it will be critiqued, rebuilt, and refined by its advocates, until it is a clear, cogent idea that can be grasped and defended and transformed into a living tradition of government; or else the Jewish state will, as Franz Rosenzweig predicted, simply disappear, leaving in its place yet another irrelevant Bulgaria or Montenegro on the shores of the Mediterranean. The time has come for a change in the direction of Jewish public discussion, both in Israel and in the diaspora. We must admit that the arguments which have absorbed our attention these last thirty years have been overtaken by events; indeed, in comparison to the looming dissolution of the Jewish state at the hands of its own intellectual and political leadership, they are irrelevant. For what possible difference does it make whether or not the Israeli bureaucracy recognizes Reform Jewish converts as Jews for the purposes of citizenship under the Law of Return--if a few years from now there isn't going to be a Law of Return? (Hanoch Marmari, editor-in-chief of Ha'aretz, Israel's most prestigious daily, has launched a crusade to name 2023 as the year of its repeal.) And what possible difference does it make whether it is the sovereignty of one state or another that ultimately holds sway in places of great Jewish significance such as Hebron or the Old City of Jerusalem--if a few years from now there isn't going to be a Jewish state, whose mission is to protect the interests and dreams of the Jewish people, in such places or anywhere else?
If we reason to the root of the issues which preoccupy our political agenda, we will discover that all of them are relevant to us only because there exists a Jewish state, whose authority and power can be wielded in ways that are more to our liking, or less so. But if the Jewish state is to be dismantled, then all of the great "issues" on which we have spent our time for a generation will evaporate as though they (and we) had never been. Let us return our attention to fundamentals: Today the material basis of the Jewish state--its armed forces, its economy--is probably more solid than at any time since the founding of the Zionist movement a cen-
(Continued on p.7)
Outpost - 6 - February 1999