Israel is Gone, Zionism Remains

The vote of the Knesset curbing the power of the Supreme Court to review legislation marks the end of Israel. This may be difficult to understand for some people, but its reasons are quite simple. Israel was only ever sustainable within certain parameters. Those parameters have been violated, and so Israel is lost.

It is a common misconception that Israel grew out of a religious movement. This is understandable, since so much of the iconography that identifies Israel internationally (the Star of David on the national flag, the name "Israel" itself, drawn from the Hebrew Bible) is religious. But the founders of Israel were secular humanists- by and large socialists and atheists. David Ben Gurion, Israel's first (and until recently longest-serving) Prime Minister, took much more inspiration from Vladimir Lenin than he did from Moses Maimonides. 

There were lots of different conceptual models for the "Jewish homeland" among early Zionists, but the one that prevailed was that of Theodor Herzl. Herzl's ideal won out because it best comported with the emergent norms of 20th century international politics. Like other Zionists, Herzl proposed that, because of the threat of antisemitism, Jews needed a homeland. He was distinctive (though not alone) among Zionists in asserting that this homeland should not only have a Jewish majority, but be sovereign and militarized- a true nation-state. 

But Herzl's Jewish state served secular and liberal ends: the nation existed only to safeguard the rights and freedoms that antisemites sought to deny Jews, not to achieve religious goals. Herzl's second Zionist writing, the novel Altneuland (The Old-New Land) underscored this point. The villain of that novel is a wicked rabbi who tries to turn the Jewish state into a theocracy.

The secular liberal character of Herzl's vision was essential to the success of Israel's founding. Only by guaranteeing that all citizens would be free to choose the level of religious observance they desired was it possible to bring a critical mass of Jews together to face the challenges of establishing an emigre community in Palestine. Only by promising to respect the civil rights of non-Jews living in the new state was Israel able to garner international recognition in 1948.

The liberal safeguards that Herzl cherished were only ever imperfectly realized in the actual operation of the Israeli state, especially for Israel's Arab citizens and the Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories. But the existence of those safeguards, which largely rested on the power of the Israeli judiciary to limit the power of the Knesset and the Prime Minister, has been undermined. Every Israeli's freedom of speech and freedom of conscience is now threatened by the state. Every Palestinian living in the Occupied Territories is now subject to even more arbitrary exercises of state power, and the situation promises to deteriorate further as the current ruling coalition presses forward with its plans to amend Israel's Basic Laws. In the absence of even imperfect protections of civil rights, Israel is unsustainable.

Some might object that I am being unreasonably pessimistic, but such an objection is tendentious. It does not take exceptional political wisdom to know that it is mad to pass a law that sends hundreds of thousands of enraged citizens into the street in a country whose very survival depends on the collective willingness of its people to regularly and routinely risk their lives in its defense. Israeli leaders do not have the luxury of insulting and alienating their fellow citizens to the degree that has become common here in the United States. The body politic cannot survive such strife.

It is likewise mad to move away from democracy in a country whose survival depends on the support of allies that cherish democratic values (even if that cherishing is often rhetorical). The course that the current government is on will diminish the rights of women, and LGBTQ citizens, and of anyone who is not Jewish or who is Jewish but not religiously observant to the standards of orthodoxy. As discrimination and violence towards women, non-Jewish Arabs, and LGBTQ Israelis increases, support for Israel in Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, and Brussels will inevitably recede. 

The hope for Israel is fading, but the hope for Zionism need not. The citizens of Israel who cherish Herzl's secular liberal vision are being outvoted because the demographics of Israel are changing. The answer to this demographic problem is and has always been very simple.Twenty percent of Israel's citizens are non-Jewish Arabs. That is an ENORMOUS community in a country that is as closely polarized as Israel has become. 

Despite being one-fifth of the country, Israel's non-Jewish Arab community has only ever held ONE SEAT in any governing cabinet (the prior government of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett). That is a ridiculous figure. Imagine if, in the years since 1948, there had only been one African-American member of any US president's cabinet. 

There are, of course, mitigating circumstances. Hostility between Jews and non-Jewish Arabs has been intense and frequently violent. Many Israeli Arab citizens have refused to participate in the electoral process for political reasons. But supporters of secular democracy among Israel's Jewish population need allies, and the only community in which they will find those allies in sufficient numbers is the non-Jewish Arab community.

Forging a secular, democratic alliance between Jews and non-Jews will require profound compromise. Israel's non-Jewish Arab citizens will demand that the rights of Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem be respected, even to the point of those territories being united with pre-1967 Israel and all inhabitants being given full rights of citizenship. That new nation would most likely have a new name and a new flag.

That would not spell the end of Zionism, however. A democratic nation in which Jews constituted almost 50% of all citizens would still be one in which Jews were better represented than in any other nation on earth. Though such a united state does not comport with Herzl's vision, his was never the sole or defining voice of the Zionist project. Prominent Zionists such as Martin Buber, Henrietta Szold, and Albert Einstein envisioned a homeland that would be shared on the basis of equality and mutual respect between Jews and non-Jews. Now that the caretakers of Herzl's vision have failed, the ideals of Buber and Szold provide the best path for an ethical Zionism to continue.

Here in the US, it is commonly imagined that Israel was founded to revere Jewish tradition or to fulfill ancient Jewish aspirations. That is simply not true. Israel was founded to protect the rights of Jews to live in dignity and as human beings. That Zionist goal was and remains a noble cause, but it is one for which DEMOCRACY is indispensable. For Zionism to survive, democracy must be preserved, even if it requires that Israel evolve into something new.