- Israelseen is honored to present this new series by Tsvi Bisk from his book the “Optimistic Jew”.
the optimistic jew
* CHAPTER 1 *
The Triumph of Zionism
It seems to me self-evident that a serious reevaluation of Jewish life must begin with the extraordinary success of the Zionist project in the 20th century. Israel, for better or worse, has dominated the Jewish landscape for as long as any of us can remember. Its successes and failures have stood at the center of Jewish discourse for a century.
The aims of classical Zionism were to create a Jewish state, concentrate a majority of the Jewish People within that state, integrate peacefully into the Middle East, achieve relative economic independence and build a model society. Let’s review the record.
- We have established a state which, despite Arab hostility, has become part of the world community.
- Israel is now the largest Jewish community in the world and within 10-15 years will be larger than the entire Diaspora
- We have created a vital and highly developed economy despite what some researchers estimate as 44 billion dollars of economic harm caused by the Arab boycott since the establishment of Israel.
- Israel has been slowly integrating into the region over the past two and a half decades (despite intifadas and wars).
- The model society is still a distant vision to say the least.
Political Achievements
The last three decades have seen extraordinary political achievements that were but fantastic dreams during the first decades of Israel’s existence. I would make the case that Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem and the peace agreement with Egypt, the Madrid conference and the much maligned Oslo agreements with the Palestinians, as well as the subsequent peace agreement with Jordan represent Zionism’s greatest triumph since the creation of the State of Israel.
I say this because there has been an essential asymmetry between Arab and Zionist strategy following the creation of the State. Zionist strategy strove for Israel’s peaceful integration into the region while Arab strategy strove to drive the Jews out of the region. The peace process, as flawed as it is, is an unstated Arab admission that their strategy has failed and that Zionism’s has succeeded. This will remain the case no matter what the fate of the peace process following the second Intifada, the second Lebanese War or any other future crisis. What has been done cannot be undone, no matter how hard radical Islamists and Arab nationalists (and some Jews) try. They cannot deny that they sat with us in the same room, negotiated and signed peace treaties with us, conducted economic activity with us and made their own initiatives regarding a comprehensive settlement. Nor can they reverse other consequences of these developments, such as Israel’s improved relationship with the rising powers of China and India which had been hindered because of these countries identification with the Arab cause. Even something as extreme as Egypt and Jordan revoking their treaties with Israel would not and could not cause China and India to revert to a position of status quo ante regarding their relationship with Israel.
Economic Achievements: Becoming Silicon Wadi
These political developments have had direct positive consequences for Israel’s economic health. Israel is a small country and dependent on exports. From 1991 (the Madrid Conference) to 2000 (the outbreak of the second Intifada) 60% of the growth in Israel’s exports were to countries with which we did not have full diplomatic and economic relations before 1991 (such as China and India). This was a major factor in Israel’s overall economic growth which averaged 4-5% a year during this period. Israel’s economy grew by 40% in the 90’s and we became a world class high-tech center – Silicon Wadi. This enabled us to absorb over one million new immigrants (which along with natural increase grew the Jewish population of Israel by 25%). This is why the peace process, no matter how flawed, is a Zionist asset in and of itself.
As a consequence of these economic achievements Israel has ceased to be dependent on Jewish philanthropy and will soon achieve independence from American aid. This is an outstanding accomplishment given the challenges facing Israel. Many Diaspora Jews as well as non-Jews are under the mistaken impression that Israel would still not be able to survive without American aid or Diaspora contributions. The truth is that funds raised for Israel by all Jewish organizations represent about 1% of Israel’s GNP and 2% of Israel’s budget while American aid represents about 2% of Israel’s GNP and 4% of its budget.
In 2006 only 120 million dollars of American aid was for civilian purposes. It was the last year Israel received civilian aid. In contrast, before the election of Hamas the United States had been giving the Palestinian Authority 350 million dollars a year. All American aid to Israel is now military and totals a little over 2 billion dollars a year. This is much less than the 40-50 billion dollars a year the American military spent to defend Persian Gulf countries between the two Iraq wars. The military aid provided by the United States to the Moslem Gulf States totaled over a half a trillion dollars between the two Iraq wars. The military aid given to Israel during the same period was between 25-30 billion dollars. The difference is how both are itemized in the American budget. Israel’s is listed as foreign aid, while aid to the Gulf States’ is reflected in America’s military budget. This is also the case for America’s NATO contribution. It is not listed as foreign military aid to Europe, nor is the money that tens of thousands of American troops pour into the local economies of these countries listed as foreign aid.
What is not commonly known is that most of America’s military aid never comes to Israel and has no economic impact on the local economy (unlike the economic impact of the American troop presence in Europe and in the Persian Gulf). 75% of American military aid to Israel is deposited in American banks and used to buy American military supplies (generating jobs for an estimated 50,000 American families).
25% of the military aid is discretionary and comes directly to Israel. This is usually used to finance research and development of arms systems – such as the Arrow anti-missile missile – that Israel can do more efficiently than the United States (with subsequent savings to the American taxpayer). Israel is also a major provider of much of America’s human intelligence about the Middle East. The militarily relationship is much less one-sided than generally perceived and of minor importance to Israel’s economic wellbeing.
The threat to stop military aid as a means to pressure Israel into making decisions it would not otherwise make is simply wrongheaded. Fortunately this is recognized by most sophisticated policy makers in the United States and Europe. They know that Israel could now manage its security without such aid but also know that any arbitrary moves would make Israel more stubborn, not more flexible. They also know that a possible reaction might be to make its implicit nuclear capability explicit. This would almost certainly limit room for diplomatic maneuver and inflame the area even more.
Compared to the trillions of dollars of indirect military aid given to Europe and Japan during the Cold War (and even now) by way of the stationing of hundreds of thousands of American troops and powerful naval fleets, American aid to Israel is a bargain – especially as it is the only military aid America gives to any of its allies that does not entail the stationing of American troops.
The declining impact of the Arab boycott; the opening of formerly closed world markets; the legitimization of Israel as an object of international investment and the continued growth of the Israeli economy will more than make up for the end of Jewish and American aid. Ending the false sense of security American aid gives Israel might even compel organizational and administrative efficiencies that would be beneficial to the Israeli economy in the long run. The point is that Israel has succeeded in becoming an independent country, a triumph of human energy, will and perseverance.
The Success of the Zionist Analysis
Classical Zionism claimed that European civilization could not sustain vibrant Jewish communities in modern times. Anti-Semitism and the appeals of assimilation would eventually erode and destroy the possibility of Jewish existence in Europe. Naive faith in modern universalistic solutions to the Jewish problem such as liberalism or socialism was a delusion. The success of these ideologies would lead to increased assimilation, while their failure would lead to mass disappointment and social frustration. This would result in virulent anti-Semitism.
The above prediction unfortunately has been validated. Progressive ideologies alone have not been able to eliminate European anti-Semitism and its eventual expression in social and political behavior. One could be a liberal or socialist anti-Semite even as one spoke of universal brotherhood.
“Progressive” Europeans claimed that the Jews could achieve social and political liberation if they ceased to be Jews and became members of the general human community. Many Jews, anxious to please “enlightened” opinion, attempted to become the mythological “cosmopolitan” human being. That strange cultural mutation, the cosmopolitan Jew, with a pathological desire to be free of his Jewishness, was born. “Jew, Jew, Jew,” cried Portnoy in Phillip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. “Why can’t I just be a human being?”
On the other hand, 19th century European Liberal Nationalism claimed that there is no such thing as a general human community. There are rather a myriad of national, ethnic, and religious communities interacting with one another to their mutual benefit. The true progressive aim, therefore, should not be to deny our cultural differences but to create frameworks in which interactions between different human communities could be positive and creative. The great 19th century Italian liberal nationalist Mazzini was one of the clearest spokesmen of this view and he had a tremendous impact on Zionist thinking. Moses Hess’s seminal Rome and Jerusalem (1862) – demonstrating how ancient peoples like the Italians and the Jews could reconstruct themselves and make a universal contribution to the entire human race – was a reflection of Mazzini’s thinking. Jabotinsky’s national-social agenda replicated in many ways Mazzini’s thinking.
Today we might use the environmental paradigm to re-enforce Mazzini’s insights. Environmentalism recognizes that “mono-culturalism” (the cultivation of a single crop over extensive areas) endangers the health of the entire ecological system. Ecological systems that have an increasing variety of species and ever-increasing interactions between these species are healthy, vigorous, and robust. Ecological systems that have a diminishing variety of species and diminishing interaction between these species are sick and susceptible to collapse. Each species preserving its own identity and integrity in dynamic interaction with other species enhances the essential robustness of the entire ecological system. What is true of natural culture is also true of human culture.
A vigorous society would be characterized by an ever-increasing number of subcultures contributing their particular outlook and creativity. Nations and ethnic groups that strive to preserve their integrity and identity in respectful interaction with the rest of humanity enhance the essential robustness of all human civilization. A homogenization of human culture into a cosmopolitan monoculture would impoverish the human spirit to the point of endangering the very prospects of human survival. This view constitutes the ideological validation of Zionism as well as other liberal nationalisms in the 21st century.
Hess’s Rome and Jerusalem anticipated this ecological analogy by predicting the universal contributions a renascent Italian state and a renascent Jewish state would make to universal human civilization, not as their primary rationale, but as a natural consequence of performing the tasks necessary to reconstitute themselves.
Has Hess’s thesis stood the test of time? Have the necessary tasks of the Zionist enterprise contributed to universal human civilization? Examples are numerous. Following are only two:
- The Zionist success in reviving the Hebrew language (one of the greatest achievements of Zionism) has become a ‘light unto many nations’. The Welsh, Scots, Irish, Dutch and others are all using the Ulpan system to renew their languages or teach them to new immigrants.
- The Zionist success in creating a modern society in an arid ecology has also been a ‘light unto many nations’. Israeli foresters have been asked to oversee and advise massive arid zone reforestation projects in countries as diverse as Mexico and China. Israeli water engineers and agronomists advise developing and developed countries all over the world.
Such universal contributions have been a natural consequence of Israel fulfilling its national needs and not because of a desire to be universalistic humanitarians.
The Enlightenment call to the Jews to join the general human community was really a call for Jewish assimilation and the end of the Jews as a people. Particular collective Jewish existence was thus de-legitimized by the ideologies of modernism (see Hertzberg’s The French Enlightenment and the Jews, [Jewish Publication Society, 1968]). This was but a short step to de-legitimizing the very physical existence of the Jews. The Final Solution of the Nazis could be seen as a perverted stepchild of this simplistic universalistic impulse.
Anti-Semitism, Jewish Self-Hate and Zionism
The pathology of Jewish self-hate, whereby Jews themselves agreed to their own de-legitimization, was born out of this universalistic view. No one could be more contemptuous, sarcastic, and venomous against any expression of Jewishness (religious or Zionist) than the cosmopolitan Jew striving to be part of Gentile society.
Unfortunately for them, cosmopolitan Jews were also attacked by anti-Semites because they were cosmopolitan and so without authentic cultural roots. Rootless cosmopolitan became a synonym for Jew in Stalinist literature and was often a prelude to anti-Semitic activity.
The cosmopolitan Jews did not blame their “progressive” attackers who embraced universalistic ideologies of brotherhood—how could they be anti-Semitic? Instead they blamed the Jews. They blamed Eastern European Jews who refused to give up their particular Jewish behavior and mannerism. They would ask “how can the Gentiles be expected to accept us as part of their community if we remain separate?” They also blamed Zionism which generated questions of dual loyalty by embracing “reactionary” and “anachronistic” positions of nationalism. They would ask “how can we expect the Gentiles to accept us as loyal and patriotic citizens if we fight for a separate Jewish State and how can we expect progressives to accept us if we become reactionary nationalists?”
The Jews were attacked because they wanted to remain separate communities because they presumed to national sovereignty and because they dared assume they could assimilate and be true Germans or true Frenchmen. East European Jews were resented because they spoke poor German and French with a terrible accent, and cosmopolitan Jews were resented because they spoke perfect German and French, often better than “authentic” Germans and French. Today Russian Jews are resented either because they presume to be true Russians or because they choose to remain Jews. Germany could not tolerate the Jews, nor could Poland, Rumania, Hungary, or the Ukraine. Vast areas of Europe have or will soon become empty of Jews. The Zionist analysis has proven accurate for most of Europe.
Self-Emancipation
European cultures, unlike the mosaic of American culture, are normative. They have a national language, national customs, and national music and literature. For romantic nationalists, these are natural organic products of the internal developments of their particular people. Outsiders can imitate or pretend to be a part of these cultures, but they can never truly be part of them.
In the view of modern anti-Semitism, which is largely a perverted outgrowth of modern romantic nationalism, the very attempt to pretend to be part of the authentic nation by “inferior” ethnic groups infected the national culture and spiritual health of the nation. Accommodating this pretense was in their minds a disease that caused the authentic nation to be “sick”. It had to be expunged. The extreme expression of this sentiment led to the Nazis.
All of this was quite clear to early Zionist thinkers. In 1882 Leon Pinsker, a Russian Jewish supporter of the Enlightenment and assimilation, rethought his position after a pogrom and wrote his profound tract Auto-Emancipation.
Analyzing current events and anticipating some of the above dilemmas, he concluded that the only solution to the Jewish problem was to be found within the Jewish will to self-emancipation, that is, the Jews taking ultimate responsibility for their own future. He argued that putting one’s faith in universalistic ideologies to solve the Jewish problem is a self-deception and would result in even greater suffering.
He wrote that the Jews must take responsibility for their own fate and cease to base their future on the modernist fiction of human progress and the eventual perfection of humankind. As we have seen in the 20th century (the bloodiest in history) human progress is no guarantee for producing better human beings, it is only a guarantee for increasing human power.
The message of Zionism was that we cannot depend on liberals or socialists to emancipate us. We must arise and emancipate ourselves. If we wish to earn the goodwill of the Gentiles we must do so in the old-fashioned way — through power. We must become political and create power that would enable us to defend ourselves. In the era of nationalism and the nation-state, this meant Jewish nationalism and Jewish statehood as a means to Jewish self-emancipation.
Following Pinsker, Theodore Herzl, another assimilated Jew who had no knowledge of the Auto-Emancipation essay, came to the same conclusion. In response to the famous Dreyfus affair (1894) he wrote the Jewish State (1896). This work was less intellectual than Auto-Emancipation but was written in a more compelling and popular style that was more accessible to the Jewish masses and so had greater impact.
Although the Zionist analysis was preoccupied with European Jews most Zionists believed it was also relevant for Jews in the Moslem world. They believed that the inevitable rise of nationalism in the Moslem world, in response to European nationalism, would exacerbate the inherent precariousness of Jewish existence in the Islamic Diaspora, until viable Jewish communities could no longer sustain themselves in the Moslem world either.
America, on the other hand, was recognized as different from the outset. Leaders such as Ben Gurion and Jabotinsky realized that a different kind of Jewish community was being created. Yet in the final analysis most Zionists believed that sooner or later viable Jewish communities would also be difficult to sustain in America. The reasons might differ from those in Europe and the Islamic world, but in the end Jewish viability would also erode in America.
The conclusion was that Jewish survival in the modern era (the era of industrialism, liberalism, nationalism, socialism, and individualism) depended on creating and sustaining a modern, democratic Jewish State in the ancient Jewish homeland where, because of objective and subjective developments, the majority of Jews would eventually live.
Normality and Abnormality
The question of Jewish normality has been a preoccupation of Zionism since its inception. Early Zionists claimed that Jewish existence without Jewish sovereignty in a Jewish homeland was abnormal and dangerous. Since the Holocaust, the need for a Jewish State has become an almost universally accepted norm of world Jewry, with only a few exceptions. The only caveat being that most Jews (presumably including most Israelis) do not now believe that the entire Jewish people must settle in Israel.
Classical Zionists saw the dispersion not only as a physical exile from the Land of Israel, but also a spiritual exile from a Jew’s authentic self. Zionists viewed exile as the primary cause of a perceived distorted economic structure of Jewish society. Exile was also responsible for creating a peculiar kind of Jewish personality and mode of behavior: insecure, fearful, self-conscious, hyper-energetic, over-compensating.
Exilic Jews were thus characterized by a unique combination of self-loathing and self-love that exiled them from their genuine selves. Some Zionists even went so far as to claim that this collective socioeconomic abnormality combined with the behavioral abnormality of so many Jews made the Gentiles uncomfortable and contributed to anti-Semitism. For them, Zionism would not only cure the Jews of their abnormality, it would also cure the Gentiles of their anti-Semitism.
Exile and cure are recurring themes in Zionist literature. Exile was the disease; return to the homeland was the cure. Today, however, Israelis in contact with Diaspora Jewry would probably agree that Jews in the West are not living an abnormal existence in exile. Yet many reflective Zionists would still argue that while the classic Zionist analysis might leave a lot to be desired in its particulars, its basic ideological assumptions have stood the test of time.
The Success of the Zionist Analysis
What is the historical record of this Zionist analysis? In the Islamic world, millennia-old Jewish communities have all but disappeared. The only viable Jewish community in the Middle East is Israel. “Progressive” opinion would blame Zionism and Israel for this development. “Progressives” would claim that the Jews always lived well under Moslem rule; that Islam only appeared to become anti-Jewish because of the unjustified provocations of Zionism (unjustified because Jewish nationalism itself is unjustified). In truth, the Jews always lived under the sufferance of the Moslems. Jews were always a protected People of the Book as long as they agreed to their inferior position and, like the Blacks in the American South, ‘kept their place’. A good antidote to the politically correct romanticism of the wonderful relations between Jew and Arab during the golden age of Islam would be to remember that the great medieval Rabbi Maimonides (the Rambam) fled Spain not because of Christian persecution but because of the invasion of a fanatic Moslem sect.
The modern Islamic rejection of Zionism sprang from the Jewish pretension to equality. For Moslems it was intolerable that an inferior people presumed to assert their national and hence their human rights alongside of Islam and create a sovereign state within which even Moslems were bound by laws passed by a Jewish majority. Jews as individuals can be tolerated, but Judaism and Jewish aspirations cannot be treated as having equal value. Blaming Zionists for anti-Jewish violence in the Middle East and elsewhere is akin to blaming American Blacks for anti-Black violence because they dared to assert their rights and refused to accept the role designated for them by others.
The Zionist prediction about what would happen to the Jews of Europe was unfortunately vindicated in the 20th century. The Nazis almost physically exterminated European Jewry. The Communists almost spiritually exterminated Soviet Jewry. European Jewry’s population dropped from about 9 million before the war to about 3 million after the war, and to about 2 million at the fall of Communism. Hundreds of thousands have disappeared through assimilation in the Soviet Union. English Jewry has declined from a community of well over 400,000 in the 1960s to under 300,000 today, due mostly to assimilation and emigration. The 600,000-strong French community suffers from mass intermarriage.
Since the fall of Communism, well over a million Jews have emigrated from the Soviet Union. With less than 1 million Jews and fewer births than deaths and thousands emigrating every year, the future of Russian Jewry appears bleak.
As Zionism has predicted, physical and spiritual persecution has combined with tolerance-induced assimilation to spell the end of European Jewry. Within the next several decades — little more than a century since Herzl and Pinsker — fewer than one million Jews will live in Europe and fewer than one hundred thousand in the Moslem world, less than one-tenth the population of a century ago.
The Zionist claim that the exile cannot sustain viable Jewish communities in modern times appears vindicated. There is, however, a powerful argument for one major exception to the Zionist case: American Jewry.
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Tsvi Bisk is an American-Israeli futurist. He is the director of the Center for Strategic Futurist Thinking (www.futurist-thinking.co.il/) and contributing editor for strategic thinking for The Futurist magazine.
He is also the author of The Optimistic Jew: A Positive Vision for the Jewish People in the 21st Century. Tsvi is available as a lecturer or as a scholar in residence as well as for strategic consulting
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Tsvi Bisk
