In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Menachem Fisch about his article “The Tragic Paradox of Political Zionism,” from Telos 192 (Fall 2020). An excerpt of the article appears below. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Purchase a print copy of Telos 192 in our online store.
The Tragic Paradox of Political Zionism
Menachem Fisch
Michael Walzer’s Paradox of Liberation argues convincingly that the very success of national liberation is often the cause of its radical undoing. He compares three cases of successful struggles for liberation—Israel and India in 1948 and Algeria in 1962—all by secular liberation movements committed to Western values. And yet,
in the states that they created a politics rooted in what we can loosely call fundamentalist religion is today very powerful. In three different countries, with three different religions, the timetable was remarkably similar: roughly twenty to thirty years after independence, the secular state was challenged by a militant religious movement.[1]
What the liberators failed to properly appreciate, he argues, is the difference between liberating their people from external rule and achieving independence, on one hand, and rendering them fellow democrats, on the other. Paradoxically, the very success of their efforts—the liberation of all three was enormously successful—blinded them to the need to liberate their people from an ingrained mindset of authoritarianism, submission, accommodation, and false consciousness. I accept the basic schema of Walzer’s argument but insist that what political Zionism found itself up against after 1967 had less to do with “fatalistic resignation” bred of centuries of exilic oppression than with the Pandora’s box of traditional Jewish eschatological yearning for Zion that it inadvertently opened. This, I shall argue, constitutes the most pressing problem of state and religion faced by Israel today—one that has little to do with questions of halakha and democracy, which normally go by the name, as with the separation of state and religion that is often deemed its remedy. It is a problem that goes to the very heart of political Zionism’s two main and seldom discussed undertakings, nation-building and statecraft: forging and cultivating the state’s national collective and forging and cultivating its relations with its sister states—in Hebrew, אומתיות ומדינתיות.
Nation-Building
There is a world of difference between yearning for statehood, planning and fighting for it, and achieving independence, on one hand, and actually establishing a state, on the other. Beyond the important issues of legally regularizing membership in the body politic, drawing its boundaries, and creating procedures for entry and exit, properly establishing a state requires transforming its citizenry into a faithful and identified national collective: creating an Israeli nation from the different peoples and ethnic groups that make up its population.
Israel’s citizenry is discussed as such only in relation to two main issues: the unfounded question of to whom the state “belongs”; and the even murkier question of the level of “loyalty to the state” (not to the law but to its “official” definition and narrative) that Israel should demand of its non-Jewish citizens (the question is never raised with respect to its Jewish citizens[2]). But the question of Israel’s nation-building responsibilities toward its citizens, or rather its total failure in recent years to even acknowledge them, is not even raised.
Nation-building is a sensitive and long-term social and political undertaking, aimed at welding the country’s different homeland communities, to use Chaim Ganz’s term,[3] Jewish and non-Jewish, native and foreign, into a single national collective—the Israeli nation, if you wish—a united population of proud and identified Israelis, who see Israel as their national home, without, and this is important, having to renounce any other component of their personal identity. Forging its citizenry into a thick and stable national collective is of vital interest to any country, certainly to one as young and aspiring as ours.
Suitable legislation is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for creating the kind of welcoming national cohesion of which I speak. Heedless to their feelings, states can painfully alienate and discriminate against communities in areas unregulated by law. Israel’s insistence that “Ha-Tikva” remain its national anthem is a good example of how a significant segment of the population can be collectively excluded by granting another segment the right to define the nation’s deepest aspirations from its exclusivist perspective, while sanctimoniously rolling their eyes each time a non-Jewish Israeli national footballer does not feel moved to mouth the anthem along with his Jewish teammates.
National solidarity requires more than a robust democracy.[4] Here is an even more worrying example, exactly because it lacks any of the chauvinistic presumption of ownership that underlies the “Ha-Tikva” dispute. During the period of the Oslo process, extended Israeli and Palestinian teams engaged in a complex network of committees and subcommittees to hammer out the details of coexistence in the areas of banking, water, transport, communications, taxation, tourism, agriculture, aviation, defense, and more. However, to the best of my knowledge, not one Israeli Arab was included in any of the Israeli teams. It seems to have been instinctively assumed that since Jews set the Zionist revolution in motion, and Jews established the state in 1948, therefore, forty-five or so years later, it was again up to Jews, and Jews alone, to envisage and fashion its future.
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1. Michael Walzer, The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2015), p. xii.
2. Which is doubly worrying in light of the fact that (a) in reality only Jewish immigrants to Israel are ever granted citizenship (with the exception of the odd basketball star who applies for naturalization), and (b) it is granted to them automatically, wholly devoid of any civic content or obligation, on the mere basis of their proven (part-)Jewishness. Jews become citizens without even being required to symbolically pledge allegiance to Israeli law!
3. Namely, as Gans puts it, communities “that have a historical justification for considering a country to be the place where they acquired their distinctness as an [ethno-]cultural group. Such groups would of course include indigenous communities, native populations, original nations, aborigines, but also groups such as African-Americans in the U.S., Jews in Israel/Palestine, and settlers’ nations in the new world countries.” See Chaim Gans, “Citizenship and Nationhood,” in The Oxford Handbook of Citizenship, ed. Ayelet Shachar, Rainer Bauböck, Irene Bloemraad, and Maarten Vink (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2017), p. 119n33.
4. For a pointed discussion of the problem and its possible remedies, see Martha C. Nussbaum, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2013).
