The declaration of the State of Israel in 1948 dealt a death blow to what had once been the chief goal of mainstream Zionism: a Jewish autonomous homeland in Palestine. This statement will puzzle readers for three reasons. First, they may assume that the goal of mainstream Zionism was always the establishment of a Jewish ethnic state of the sort established in 1948. Next, they may think that those who argued against statist Zionism consisted only of a handful of inconsequential central European Zionists, who were later proven wrong by history. Finally, they may conclude that the 1948 state, even if not fully predicted by the Zionist ideologues and policy-makers, nonetheless fulfilled the goal of providing for Jewish autonomy in Palestine.
All these assumptions are due to the history of Zionism being written by the victors, the statist Zionists, who all offer roughly the following historical narrative: Herzl founded modern political Zionism with his publication of The Jewish State, his efforts to obtain charters for land, and his convening of the first Zionist congress in 1897. Political Zionism proceeded apace through a combination of diplomacy and colonialisation; in the meantime, another strand of Zionism, cultural non-statist Zionism, emphasised the importance of the revival of Hebrew culture. In the end, Herzl’s vision of political Zionism, greatly modified by Ben Gurion, vanquished the cultural Zionist opposition, which was led by men like Hans Kohn, Martin Buber and Judah Magnes. Kohn ceased to be a Zionist in 1929; Magnes died shortly after the establishment of the State; Buber accepted the Jewish state and adopted the stance of the moral critic from within.
Yet as Israeli historian Dimitry Shumsky has pointed out recently, this historiography tends “to observe pre-1948 Zionist history through the retrospective lens of the establishment of the State of Israel”.1 Shumsky argues that throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Zionist ideology was not statist but autonomist, and the various mainstream Zionist proposals for Jewish autonomy allowed for Palestinian Arab autonomy as well. The political regime established in Palestine in 1948 was one model for a Jewish homeland, but different models had been advanced earlier by many of the central figures of Zionism, from Herzl to Ben Gurion. Once again, these different models have been dismissed in Zionist historiography as utopian, or born of political weakness or expedience, but they have rarely been viewed as principled. Few non-historians are aware that statehood became an explicit goal of the Zionist movement only in 1942, six years before the establishment of Israel.
While the statist Zionism that found its expression in the 1948 state is, in my view, anachronistic and inherently discriminatory, cultural Zionism is not. Indeed, I wish to argue that the latter should have a place in a future Israeli Jewish / Palestinian Arab political arrangement, one that will look quite different from the present one. The Zionist ethnic state, founded hastily in 1948 and which sixty-three years later still lacks a constitution, much less a bill of rights, has not served the inhabitants of Israel/Palestine and their transnational constituencies well. In the case of the Arabs this is obviously true; in the case of the Jews, it is less obvious, but true none the less (I leave this latter claim to be argued another day). And yet the failure of the State of Israel to deliver on many of the promises of Zionism, in both its political and cultural forms, does not imply a refutation of all forms of Zionism. If we pause here to set the record straight, it is not merely for the sake of historical accuracy, but in order to see what can be salvaged from alternative visions of a Jewish state, once the defects of the ethnic-exclusivist state vision have been revealed.
Just how mainstream was the rejection of ethnic-exclusivist statism? Consider this statement by Berl Katznelson, one of the chief architects of Labour Zionist ideology:
I have no part in concepts of those [....] who regard the realisation of Zionism in the form of a new state of Poland, with the difference being that the Arabs will be in the position of the Jews, and the Jews in the position of the Poles [ ... The foundations of the National Home should be]: municipal democracy, national autonomy, and the participation of the country’s population in influencing the administration of its affairs – participation that will steadily increase – on the basis of parity between the two national divisions.2
Far from constituting the bi-national state Katznelson wished for, on principled grounds, in 1931, the state of Israel founded in 1948 was precisely the sort of state he had rejected earlier. Moreover, the Israeli Law of Return of 1950 and the Citizenship Law of 1951 not only denaturalised the majority of the natives of Palestine, they created a state that excluded native citizens from the nation represented by the state – and included members who had never lived in the state, as well as those who had become part of the nation through religious conversion. It was as if the Zionist founders of the State wished to replicate Poland in Palestine; without the political recognition, albeit limited, accorded to ethnic minorities in Poland, including Jews, in the interwar period.
Yosef Gorny has written an entire book about the federative and confederative plans proposed by mainstream Zionists in the 1920s and 1930s, plans that looked quite different from the particular political framework adopted by the state of Israel.3 None other than Vladimir Jabotinsky offered variations on such plans; even when he called for a Jewish state, he insisted on preserving the political rights of the Palestinian Arabs as an ethnic minority. As late as 1940 he wrote:
In every Cabinet where the prime minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered as an Arab, and vice-versa. [...] The Jewish and the Arab ethnic communities shall be recognised as an autonomous public bodies of equal status before the law [...] Each ethno-community shall elect its National Diet with the right to issue ordinances and levy taxes within the limit of its autonomy and to appoint a national executive responsible before the Diet.4
Jabotinsky did not believe that the Palestinian Arabs had the same national rights to Palestine as did the Jewish people. He, like most mainstream Zionists, insisted on the goal of a Jewish majority and unrestricted immigration. But Jabotinsky was true to his Russian multinationalism throughout his life and on principled ground championed the national rights of minorities, whether the Jewish national minority in Russia or the Arab national minority in Palestine.
What happened, then, to the mainstream Zionist vision of bi-nationalism? This is a matter best left to historians, but it seems that several factors transformed Zionism’s desire in the late 1930s and the early 1940s for a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine into the desire for a Jewish ethnic state replacing Palestine. Historical circumstances such the British White Paper restricting Jewish immigration, the fate of European Jewry during World War II, and the absence of any strong Palestinian leadership following the 1936 revolt seemed to make the time ripe for the statists to push. And the Zionist leader who more than any other left his imprint on the formation of the state of Israel, David Ben Gurion, became an enthusiastic convert to statism. The transfer of ethnic populations following World War II appeared to facilitate the moral justification of the involuntary transfer of the native Palestinians and the appropriation of their possessions, to be divided among the Jewish settlers and later immigrants.
Yet what emerged was not an imperfectly liberal “ethnic-nationalist” democracy, but rather an ethnocracy5 with certain liberal adornments, such as the promise of “full and equal citizenship” for Arab Israelis in the Declaration of Independence. I do not want to minimise statements of this sort: the American Declaration of Independence proclaimed that all men are created equal with certain “unalienable rights”; and yet it was debated for decades whether this was relevant to the question of black men, and later whether “all men” included women as well. Still, such formulations could be used, and in the enfranchisement of blacks were used, to justify the transformation of American society at the appropriate time. But whatever was written in the Israeli Declaration of Independence, it is fair to say that Ben Gurion and the Israeli Knesset, dominated by his Mapai party, proceeded to create institutions that ensured permanent infringement of the rights of the non-Jewish citizens, in many cases severely so. These inequities are not merely de facto, as claimed by many supporters, or even de jure, as recognised by the more acute of them, but foundational to the state of Israel in ways that the inequities described above were not foundational to the United States.
Consider briefly only some of the inequities. The Palestinian Arabs who remained in the newly established state were controlled by a military government until 1966. Their education was handed over to the Zionists, who carefully controlled what they learned and who taught them. The lands of the refugees (including some who were internal refugees) were transferred to state agencies as “absentee property”; and, of course, the refugees were barred from returning to their homes. When Jewish kibbutzim or settlements needed land for growth, the government often sought out ways to transfer Arab land to them. In this way, between 65–75 percent of the land of Arab citizens was allocated for Jewish development. Few if any Jewish lands were allocated for Arab development.6
Most important, the political system foundationally discriminated against the Arab citizens of Israel. True, they were courted by Zionist parties for their votes, and their village chieftains could benefit from a certain amount of patronage. But in the parliamentary system of the new state, where political parties are able to provide services for their sectors only if they are members of the government coalition, the Arab sector inevitably lost out. This has become a permanent exclusionary feature of the Israeli political system, one that thwarts the efforts of even the best intentioned Israeli Jews to close the gap between the Arab and Jewish sectors.7 The gap between the Arab and Jewish sections is sometimes attributed to the hostile relations between Arabs and Jews, but that is putting the cart before the horse – what led to the hostile relations between the two groups was the Zionist demand to establish hegemony in Palestine. They did so through creating an ethnic-exclusivist state that inevitably curtailed the rights of the bulk of the Arab minority.
The hasty establishment of the state of Israel against the will of the majority of Palestine’s inhabitants, and the subsequent legislation imposed on them by the nascent state, was both a betrayal of previous Zionist promises to those inhabitants and to the world, and a gross violation of the Balfour Declaration’s stipulation that the proposed Jewish homeland would not prejudice “the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. But it was also a betrayal of what had been morally defensible about Zionism – not only to strongly bi-national cultural Zionists like Martin Buber and Judah Magnes, but also to mainstream political Zionists like Ben Gurion and Katznelson before their transformation, and even Jabotinsky. This is not to minimise the differences between the two groups, or to suggest that the non-statist Zionism of Buber and Magnes would ultimately have been amenable to Arab nationalists, who were against any power-sharing scheme with the Zionist settlers. Rather it is to point out the often ignored fact that much of Israel’s current problems should not be attributed to Zionist ideology per se, but to a certain kind of ethnic-exclusivist Zionism ideology that emerged in the 1940s and was crystallised in the 1948 regime, a Zionism that has been drummed into the heads of Israelis and their supporters for over sixty years as mainstream Zionism. For those who find much to admire about Zionism, and I am one of them, the question is not “Where is Israel headed after Zionism?” (the post-Zionism question), but: “Where should Zionism be headed? And what role, if any, should Jewish nationalism play in a future Israel/Palestine that emerges from the current imbroglio?”
Once the goal of statist Zionism was achieved, one would have thought that over time it would cease to be a factor in the psyche of the Jewish state. And to some extent this has been the case:
The terms “Israelis” and “supporters of Israel” have replaced “Zionist” as the primary ideological label. But while the label “Zionist” has faded to some extent, some of the ideological premises of statist Zionism remain, e.g., the belief that Israel is the state of the Jewish people, almost half of whom live outside Israel, rather than the state of its citizens; the desire for the return of the Jews to Zion through “ascent” (aliya), the need to restrict the growth and power of the Palestinian Arab minority (the so-called “demographic question”), and the necessity for discriminatory legislation and policies, albeit motivated more by preferential treatment for the Jews than by antagonism towards Arabs. The influx of hundreds of thousands of Jews in the early years of the State had a direct detrimental impact on the native Palestinians – no longer considered either “Palestinian Arab” or “native”, but now a minority called “Israeli Arabs” or just “minorities”.8
And waves of immigration have also had a disastrous effect, as new groups of immigrants (except Ethiopian Jews) take their place at the government coalition table.
As for the Arab natives of Palestine who had become refugees, the conventional Israeli historiography was that they had voluntarily left before and during the War of Independence, and that they should be resettled among their own brethren in surrounding Arab countries. In any event, those very countries had forced thousands of Jews from North Africa and the Middle East to leave, and so things were more or less balanced. But in those years of state and institution building, few people outside Israel paid attention to the Arabs inside Israel. They simply had no positive role to play in the formation of the nationalist ethos.
The Arabs outside Israel, of course, did. Statist Zionism led almost inevitably to armed conflict with the Arabs – first the Palestinians, who were routed, and then the Arab states, whose armies were outnumbered, poorly motivated, and insufficiently armed.9 I say “inevitably”, for what people would not resist by force the attempts of settlers to establish a state, against the will of the majority, in their land? Much of the Israeli national ethos was built on the notion of militarism, self-defence and bereavement on the one hand, and the yearning for peace with Arab neighbours on the other. That the Arabs of Palestine and the Arab states had resisted what they viewed to be a colonialist settler-state seemed incomprehensible to those who had internalised the fundamental principles of Zionism. After all, had they not offered to share the land to which they had recently immigrated? Zionists reasoned that certainly after the state was established, recognised by other states, and admitted to the United Nations, there was no reason for the Arabs not to accept the legitimacy of Israel’s existence as a Jewish state, that is, to accept the claims of statist Zionism. The fact that the Arab states did not accept Israel (and when Egypt and Jordan did, it was at government level and not in accordance with popular sentiment) was perceived by Israelis as indicative of an irrational, deep-seated prejudice against the Jewish state. Israelis inferred that it was necessary to maintain a military and strategic advantage, to erect an “Iron Wall” until the Arabs eventually accepted them.
This narrative does not by any means capture all or even most of the national ethos of Israel in the 1950s and the 1960s; it certainly does not capture the growth and development of the Jewish state, its immigration policies, the socialist political framework led by the Mapai and then the Labour party, cultural achievements, and a host of other developments. My purpose is to remark on the continuity between the statist Zionist ideology of the 1940s during and after the Holocaust, and the nationalist ethos in the early years of the state; an ethos that was little challenged by mainstream Israelis. As we shall see, with the notable exception of the first two years after the Oslo agreement was signed, this ethos has remained in the national psyche until the present.
There seems to be an assumption among western liberals that the period between 1948 and 1967 was a golden age for Israel, an age when its legitimacy in the world was unquestioned, its politics pragmatic, and its decisions, more or less, untrammelled by Zionist ideology. Israel’s fall from grace, according to this view, came as a result of the 1967 war, which, although justified as a defensive war, led to the revival of the Greater Israel ideology and the settlements. This narrative forgets many things: the treatment of the Arab Israelis and their lands under the post-1948 military occupation; the attacks on those Arab refugees wishing to return to their homes; the land policy and ideology of settlement that continued unabated from the pre-state years; and the irredentist goals of some players that involved the security control of the West Bank.
As for the Israeli claim that the 1967 war was a defensive one, it is sufficient to recall that on the whole, the border with Jordan had remained quiet from 1956–67 and that Jordan, unlike Egypt and Syria, had not been considered a serious military threat by the Israelis. If the 1967 push to control Jerusalem and the West Bank was at all motivated by security considerations, the reaction was disproportionate to the threat; indeed, much of the West Bank was occupied after it was known that the Jordanian forces had been ordered to withdraw.10 The differences of opinion among the Labour and Herut parties in the 1970s and 1980s was not whether to return all of the West Bank, but rather how much of it should be put under direct Palestinian control, given the presence of so many Palestinian Arabs, and how much under the joint control of Israel and Jordan. On Jerusalem there was no disagreement. To this day, no Israeli government and no Zionist political party, Left or Right, has accepted in principle the withdrawal from the West Bank to the 1949 armistice lines. The same applies to acceptance of the right of the Palestinians to a sovereign state, responsible for its own security.
The short-lived period in Israel’s history where there seemed to be a shift in the national ethos began with the Madrid Conference (and the revocation of the UN “Zionism is Racism” resolution) and went into high gear with the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993. That stage began to crumble with the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin in 1995 and ended completely with the second intifada. To be sure, the statist Zionist ethos had already begun to be questioned as a result of the 1980–1 Lebanon War; the work of the “New Historians” like Morris, Pappe and Segev; and the rise of post-Zionism in academic discourse. But the Oslo process for the first time presented to the Israelis the Palestinians as partners, even as aggrieved parties. Palestinians who until recently had been imprisoned as terrorists in Israeli prisons were now appearing on television with their former captors.
Many Israelis were exhilarated, but a large part of the population viewed this normalisation as nothing less than a betrayal of Zionist, even Jewish, principles (similar views existed on the Palestinian side). The idea that Israel could be an accepted member of the Middle East, that there could be normalised relations between Arabs and Jews, was for many too radical a paradigm shift in the national ethos. Opponents of the Oslo process were more than willing to seize upon any counter-evidence (especially terrorism) to suggest that the Palestinian recognition of Israel was an elaborate ruse to weaken and destroy the Jewish state. As an observer of Israeli society during this period, I can report that the prospect of peace was invigorating to many, but nerve-wracking to others, and not just because of territorial concessions or security concerns. Relations with some Arab countries thawed; the Israeli economy boomed; and Palestinians entered the Israeli public sphere. With the breakdown of the Oslo process after the 1996 elections, and finally, with the failure of Camp David II and the horrors of the second intifada, the experience of the early Oslo period was erased and wiped from the collective memory, except, of course the experience of terror, which only reinforced the view that the paradigm should never have shifted.
Indeed, as world criticism of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) military force against civilians in last decade mounted, there was a return to the pre-Oslo period ethos of “All the world is against us”. Hamas assumed the role of bugbear once played by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO); Ahmadinejad and Nasrallah replaced Arafat; the UN was considered no different from the UN of the 1970s. The quiet negotiations that took place between Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas in 2008 were totally unlike negotiations during the Oslo period and represented a slight deviation from classic Zionist/Israeli unilateralism. More typical was the disengagement from Gaza in 2005 which, according to Prime Minister Sharon’s principal advisor, far from “giving peace a chance”, allowed Israeli troops to be redeployed in order to control Gaza better, to relieve pressure on Israel for concessions on the West Bank, and to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.11
When one combines the feelings of Jewish victimhood inherent in the Zionist national ethos with the most powerful military in the Middle East, it is clear why Israel has become dangerous to anything that it perceives to be a threat. This ethos of victimhood has not weakened its grip on the national psyche, even with its unyielding control of the territories, the end of suicide bombing, the near total exclusion of Palestinians from the Israeli public space, and the enormous asymmetry of power between Israelis and the Palestinians. The general unwillingness today to move past the nationalist pieties and clichés of the founders is striking. Israel’s situation may now be very different, but its self-perception has changed but little. The late Tony Judt summed it quite well in 2006 when he characterised Israel as the country that wouldn’t grow up, but preferred to remain stuck in its adolescent mindset.
Seen from the outside, Israel still comports itself like an adolescent: consumed by a brittle confidence in its own uniqueness; certain that no one “understands” it and everyone is “against” it; full of wounded self-esteem, quick to take offence and quick to give it. Like many adolescents, Israel is convinced – and makes a point of aggressively and repeatedly asserting – that it can do as it wishes, that its actions carry no consequences and that it is immortal.12
Immortal, yet at the same time fearful of its existence.
Although Israel has grown to be a regional superpower, it seems almost Peter Pan-like in its refusal to shed the Zionist statist ethos of its founding years, especially in its relations with the Palestinians. It is willing to seek peace with the Palestinians under occupation, but only if the Palestinians content themselves with something less than a state, a non-militarised entity that will be economically dependent upon Israel, politically toothless, and whose natural resources are shared with Israel – and even this has been rejected out of hand by the Right-wing parties. As for the “Geneva Accord”, which has been rejected by the Israeli government and much of the Israeli public as overly accommodating, the Palestinian “state’s” security is guaranteed not by its own military but by a multi-national force.13
What prevents Israel from normalising its relations with its neighbours and coming to grips with its treatment of the Palestinians is not its security situation, which has never been better, nor its lack of a Palestinian “partner”, which it indeed has. It is rather the fact of its being mired in an ethnic-exclusivist nationalist ethos that views its settlement in Palestine as a “return”, denies the Palestinian Arabs historical and national rights, and relegates Palestinian natives to an inferior status – those within Israel individually as second- and third-class citizens, and those without Israel collectively, as a “state minus”, to use the characterisation favoured by current Prime Minister Netanyahu.
For there to be any significant change, the national ethos must change, at least among a broad segment of the population and its supporters outside its borders. The prospect of that happening is indeed remote at the present, but may become less remote as more people despair of existing solutions, and as the price for maintaining the status quo grows. Abandoning the ethnic-exclusivist vision of statist Zionism will be a bitter pill for many to swallow. But it may be perhaps a little less bitter if one can convince Israelis and their supporters that essential elements of classical Zionism, that is, the preservation and fostering of Hebrew culture, the view of Israel/Palestine as a Jewish homeland, a place which offers some form of self-determination for the Israeli Jewish people (and needless to say, the Palestinian Arab people) – will come about if Israel abandons the 1948 statist ethos.
Statist Zionism decisively rejected and marginalised those Zionist voices that demanded that any political arrangement for a Jewish homeland, indeed even Jewish immigration, be part of a broader political agreement with the native Palestinian Arabs. For statist Zionists, the cultural Zionist “road not taken” was, as one Israeli professor recently put it, “the road to nowhere”.14 Now that Israeli– Palestinian relations have reached a dead end, with one side controlling the lives, liberties and resources of the other for over four decades and counting, some Israeli intellectuals are beginning to examine where Zionism went wrong and how it can get on a road leading to somewhere better. Of course, alternatives to the Israeli state have been proposed by non-Zionists, post-Zionists and anti-Zionists since 1948; one need only point to the “Canaanite” movement of the 1950s, the PLO’s “secular democratic state” of the late 1960s, and the various post-Zionist alternatives of the 1980s. What is different about these new proposals is that they reject the ethnic-exclusivist character of Israel without rejecting the possibility, indeed the desirability, of preserving its Jewish character, redefined primarily in cultural rather than in ethnic-exclusivist terms.
In the past few years, Israelis have advanced several proposals that reject the ethnic-exclusivist ethos of statist Zionism and replace it with something more in tune with liberal democracies in the twenty-first century. They are contained in books like Bernard Avishai’s The Hebrew Republic (New York 2008), Chaim Gans’s A Just Zionism (Oxford 2008), Moshe Berent’s A Nation like All Nations: Towards the Establishment of an Israeli Republic (Hebrew; Jerusalem, 2009) and, earlier, Joseph Agassi’s Liberal Nationalism for Israel: Towards an Israeli National Identity (Jerusalem 1999). These authors may not regard themselves as “cultural Zionists”, but they are willing to allow Jewish cultural, heritage, history, calendar and language pride of place in a state that is not a vehicle for Jewish ethnic-exclusivist hegemony.
Of course, there are other authors who reject Zionism altogether, as well as those who deny that Jewish culture and heritage have any place in a future secular, democratic state in Palestine, but they are not my subject here. I merely wish to point out that these four books attest to a growing intellectual willingness on the part of Israeli intellectuals to replace statist Zionism with cultural versions that avoid some of its drawbacks. And this, in itself, is significant.15 That some of the best political thinkers in Israel have offered proposals to change fundamentally the structure of the Jewish nation-state – and others are compelled to defend that structure – suggests that the Jewish state founded in 1948 is increasingly viewed as problematic among liberal nationalists within Israel. This would be the case even had the state of Israel been founded on some empty expanse in the Arctic. That it was founded by thwarting the self-determination of the Palestinian people through expulsion and expropriation of their lands, and that Israel still thinks that it holds the key to the fulfilment of that self-determination, exacerbate the question of its legitimacy as a modern “ethnic democracy”, if indeed it is one.16
Cultural Zionism moves the notion of a Jewish state away from the ethnic hegemony of the Jews to the cultural centrality of Israeli Jewish culture. In other words, a Jewish state is one in which Israeli Jewish culture plays a central role in the national ethos. In terms of the outmoded, if convenient, distinction between civic nationalism and ethnic nationalism, the Jewish state I envision would foster a moderate civic nationalism in all its citizens but would accord pride of place, though not exclusively so, to Jewish tradition in the broadest sense and not in its narrowly religious sense. Varieties of religious Judaism will obviously be important in the lives of groups of the Jewish citizenry, and even the non-Jewish citizenry, when there are common concerns. Of course, there will be questions as to how much of a role Jewish culture would play, and some of these could be settled constitutionally. My own view is that Hebrew language and calendar are essential; beyond that, the fostering of Jewish culture, as a function of what is important in the large segment of the citizenry, is an important priority of a state I understand as Jewish.
The justification for Jewish cultural centrality is simple: there are over five and a half million Jews in Israel/Palestine, and Jewish culture, again in the broadest sense, including the Hebrew language, is central to their identity and well-being. From the standpoint of liberal nationalism (and I am clearly adopting that standpoint), the state does not have to adopt a strictly neutral stance with regard to what are central components in the identities of its citizens, or to shy away from them in the public sphere. Again, the degree of state support would have to be negotiated with the various elements of society. There is a large traditional religious population in Israel/Palestine, and while I am personally in favour of the separation of church and state, the role of religion would also have to be negotiated. It is critical to remove the religious affiliation of the citizens from the question of their nationality. The most illiberal element of the state of Israel today is its identification of the nation with a certain religion, or, more accurately, its definition of the Jewish nation in sufficiently religious terms so as to exclude Israelis who have other religions from being Jewish.
Jewish cultural centrality can be feature of a state whose population is overwhelmingly Israeli Jewish, but it can also be a feature of one “Abrahamic” state from the Jordan to the Mediterranean. Clearly in the latter state, Palestinian Arab culture would also play an equally central role. I would still call that bi-national state a Jewish state, indeed, the Jewish state, though not the exclusively Jewish state, because of the centrality of Jewish culture. Yet whatever the configuration of the Jewish state, a civic national cultural identity of all its citizens would also be fostered. Once again, one’s ethnicity or religion would not be an integral notion of the state’s nationalism. It is not likely, for example, that Palestinian Arab Muslims will feel comfortable with adopting a Jewish national identity, because of the religious dissonance, but there is no reasons why they cannot adopt an Israeli or “Abrahamic” nationalism. And, indeed, despite the absence of official Israeli recognition of an Israeli national identity, it very much exists today among the 600,000 Palestinian Arab Israelis.
Statist Zionists often argue that a Jewish state is necessary not only to foster Jewish culture and enrich the identity of many of its Jewish citizens, but to ensure the physical survival of Jews. After two thousand years of precarious existence, only a Jewish ethnic state can do that. Moreover, as a nation, Jews should have the right to determine their own destiny, and this can only be done through ethnic hegemony. If a Jewish state is not a haven for persecuted Jews, it has lost an important raison d’être.
My own opinion is that these views had a certain purchase in the aftermath of World War II, although even then their validity was questionable, but now they are much less convincing. For one thing, the most dangerous place for Jews to live qua Jews over the past sixty-plus years has been the state of Israel, where thousands of Jews have died as a result of Israel’s wars. If one is to believe the alarmists, the existence of the five and a half million Jews in Israel is perpetually in danger. I know many Jews who believe that Iranian President Ahmadinejad is planning to annihilate the Jewish state, and that even if he doesn’t succeed, thousands or hundreds of thousands may die. Moreover, anti-Semitic attacks against Jews outside of Israel have a direct correlation to Israel’s actions, even if those actions are defensible. So while some Jews may feel more secure within Israel than outside it (and during periods of increased Israel-related anti-Semitism, they may be right) that seems more the result of their Zionist indoctrination.
For another, the self-determination of a people does not have to be achieved through the vehicle of an ethnic-exclusivist nation-state; in fact for most of the world, it is not. Again, as long as Jewish nationalism has an irreducible religious element to it that excludes people of other religious faiths from being part of the Jewish nation, there is good reason not to view the self-determination of the Jewish people along those lines. What is needed now for there to be a Jewish state that is not a post-Zionist Israel, but rather a post-Israel Zionism. Maybe that sort of Zionism can find expression in a liberal nationalism that is both “Jewish and democratic”.