The State of Israel vs. the Jews

Published by: Other Press, New York, 2021, 352pp. ISBN: 9781635420975.

The discord between Judaism and Zionism, it appears, is far too pernicious to be assuaged by quips like “when a man cannot be a Jew, he becomes a Zionist.” The original project of European Zionists, who sought to save Jews not only from persecutions and pogroms but also from the clutches of a faith which in their eyes was the root cause of their misery, has run aground, sabotaged and wrecked from within. The cunning of history has wrought havoc on the secular Utopia and the Empire of faith has returned with a vengeance. No doubt, the state of Israel survives, stronger than ever, but of the original Zionist ethos, nourished by Enlightenment’s dream of the “emancipation of Man” and its own hopes of being “a light unto the world”, there is hardly a trace in the Israeli society today. Even if the rift between the champions of Jewish homeland and Diaspora existed prior to the foundation of the Zionist state, the erstwhile ideological ssure now appears as a moral chasm, a choice between “the state of Israel and the Jews” as the title of this extremely agonising and painful work makes it abundantly clear.

Earlier, the contending visions of Jewish historical mission allowed themselves to be mediated, as, for instance, in the manner of George Steiner, who dutifully conceded that “the State of Israel is an endeavour – wholly understandable, in many respects historically admirable, perhaps inevitable – to normalise the condition, the meaning Judaism,” but nevertheless insisted that “the virtues of Israel are those of the beleaguered Sparta” ... and that by trading its “homeland in the text” for a piece of real-estate, the new state has rendered “Judaism homeless to itself”. On the other side of the spectrum and in total opposition to the Zionist solution, redemption/emancipation through political sovereignty in a homeland, Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin make bold their claim that “only the diaspora and not the state represents genuine Jewish values”. The Zionist solution for them represents “the substitution of a European, Western cultural-political formulation for a traditional Jewish one.” Hence, according to their vision of the Jewish calling, “Diaspora, and not monotheism, may be the most important contribution that Judaism has to make to the world.” (A convenient and lucid summary of this debate is found in: Michael Brenner: In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea. Princeton University Press, 2018.)