3. ZIONISM
Zionism should not be identified with Messianism. Jewish Messianism is an expression of Judaism; it is the general faith that, notwithstanding the failures and backslidings of Jews as well as of the rest of mankind, the Kingdom of God will yet be a reality in this world. Zionism, on the other hand, is composed of particular forces, needs, and longings in Jewish life.
Let us attempt to indicate the components of modern Zionism. The most obvious element seems to be the practical need of the Jewish people. Whatever the higher aspirations of Judaism, and whatever the functions and destiny of Jewry in world history, Jews are people: they are human beings. Like other people they do not enjoy being pushed about, persecuted, and chased from country to country. They have been homeless for nineteen centuries, and all the time they were longing for the home that had been theirs but had been taken from them. One does not commit a crime, nor does one embrace the idolatry of nationalism, merely by seeking protection against the inhumanity of “penalization.” Perhaps the majority of the Jews who now live in the Jewish state were driven to Erets Israel by Christian as well as Arab nations.
In addition, there has been the moral need. A people is not a mere aggregate of individuals. It possesses not only a biological but also a psychological and spiritual coherence. A people has distinctiveness, an identity of its own. Like everything else that is alive, it wants to live on. A people needs a home for itself. There is no reason why the Jewish people should not have felt this need—should not have the right, like all other peoples, to satisfy it. For the solution of the present serious crisis of the Western world, Mr. Toynbee suggests not the dissolution of nationalities—the disappearance of the English, French, Germans, Russians, and so on—but “a middle way between two mutually antithetical deadly extremes: a devastating strife between irreconcilable parochial states and a desolating ecumenical peace imposed through the delivery of a knock-out blow.” Or, as he calls it, “the saving harmony of multiplicity-in-unity and unity-in-multiplicity.”30IX/346. It is a goal to which Zionism can sincerely subscribe. But what is right for the nations of the West and the East cannot be wrong only because it is claimed on behalf of the Jewish people. If the idolatry of nationalism is correctly defined “as a spirit which makes people feel and act and think about a part of any given society as though it were the whole of that society,”31See I/9. This is how Toynbee defines “the spirit of Nationality.” But nationality is neither a policy nor an ideology; it is a fact of life and history. Nations do exist. The spirit of nationality is a form of national self-awareness, which in itself is as little evil as is the self-awareness of the individual. To be oneself and to wish to remain oneself is not a form of egoism or even of egotism, but a healthy and natural manifestation of Life itself. What Toynbee actually defines would better be called the spirit of nationalism. Nationalism is a consciously conceived ideology of a nation’s will to power, unimpeded by considerations of an ethical code of behavior towards others. then to deny the Jewish people the chance to preserve its identity, to continue to live and to express itself by way of its selfhood, is “to feel and act and think about a part of a given society” as if it were dead—or at least ought to be dead.
Apart from the material need of the Jews and the moral need of the Jewish people, there have also been in Zionism rich veins of noblest idealism. One of the finest types that have appeared on the stage of modern history has been that of the Haluts, the Zionist pioneer. Young men and women by the thousand left the cities and ghettos of Europe to devote their lives to the redemption of a land ravaged by centuries of neglect, in order to redeem a people crushed to the ground by centuries of human hatred. The people was their people and the land was the land of their fathers. The Haluts went to Palestine not in order to fight with other human beings, but ready to give his life—as he actually did—in an aweinspiring struggle with the swamps and the deserts and the malaria of a devastated country. Moved by idealism, he went there with the determination to build a better, a juster, and a more humane society than the one he had left behind in Europe. No doubt the Haluts often went to Palestine feeling a rich measure of Toynbean disillusionment with the “West.” Having repeatedly experienced the impact of Western barbarity on his own body, his soul was longing for a creative life of self-sacrifice which alone could cleanse him of the contaminating burden of abominable memories. One of the early Halutsim wrote in a letter after a pogrom in the Pale, the Toynbean “homeland” of the Jews: “… if we do not find something to redeem us from this horror we shall go mad.”32See Me’asef l’Tnuat he’Haluts, Warsaw, 1930.
CHAPTER VII And he went to Palestine. Very likely he perished of hunger and malaria, as so many of the early Halutsim did; but not before he had redeemed his soul from the demoralizing stranglehold of the horror that he had seen.
Besides such secular idealism and longing for “secular salvation,” one of the motivating forces within Zionism is Jewry’s longing for Messianic salvation. From its inception, outstanding religious leaders and broad sections of religious Jewry have identified themselves with the Zionist movement. They did not substitute Zionism for Messianism, but they recognized in Zionism a movement that subserved the aspirations of Messianic Judaism. There was indeed a great deal of secularism in the Zionist movement, which religious Jews rejected and against which they fought. But they could not overlook the purity of the motivation of so many of their “secularist” brothers and sisters. The secularism in Zionism emphasized for them the nature of their responsibility, which was, as it has always been, to strive for the sanctification of the secular, not by preaching and finding fault with others, but by transforming this world into the Kingdom, first of all in one’s own corner. Especially for the religious Zionist, Jewry’s exile was also the spiritual tragedy of the stultification of Judaism; the “flakes” had been broken away from the core of the flint. The return to Zion alone promised the gradual reintegration of the body social, within which the task of “interpenetration” could be taken up anew. Religious Zionism recognized that the upbuilding of Palestine was the opportunity, as well as the inescapable challenge, to work through the redemption of the people for the redemption of Judaism itself.
There is, however, one important element in the debacle of the West which one does not find in Zionism—a Master Race ideology. No doubt modern nationalism had great influence on the Zionist movement, but not every form of nationalism is Fascism or Nazism. Nor would it have been possible for Zionism to accomplish so much if it had been a mere imitation of a Western blunder. Zionism translated the needs and the sorrow of the Jewish people as well as the faith and the longings of the Jewish soul into a creative response to the challenge of the exile. The technique of political action and propaganda it might have learned from modern nationalism; the international recognition of the rights of oppressed national minorities encouraged Zionists to believe that what had been granted to others could not readily be denied to Jews. The need and the sorrow, the faith and the longing, were nineteen centuries old; it was they that through the ages had sustained Israel’s hope for its eventual return to Erets Israel. In spite of exile, the link between the people and its land had never been severed. The continuity of Jewish history and the consistency in Jewry’s aspirations were the foundation on which Zionism built; they were also the source of the idealism, of the moral energies of perseverance and self-sacrifice, ingenuity and heroism, without which the state of Israel could never have been established.
Unfortunately, there is no history, as there is no life, without some measure of guilt; and thus there is guilt associated with Zionism. However, it is guilt broadly distributed. First, there is the infamous guilt of sixteen centuries of Western barbarity against the Jews; and, while it is perhaps true that the Moslem world has been less guilty than the West, there is also the Moslem guilt of thirteen centuries of anti-Jewish discrimination and “penalization,” of having reduced the Jew in most Arab countries to the status of the pariah. Without the impetus provided by the persecutors Zionism might never have succeeded. Then, there is the guilt of Great Britain: not for allowing Jews to settle in Palestine in conformity with the decision of the League of Nations, which—even though not the guardian angel of an “otherworldly” Kingdom of God—was at the time the highest international authority on earth; but for the cynically calculating imperialistic policy of divida et impera, the crime of the mandatory administration which for most of the thirty-odd years of its authority did everything in its power to widen the breach between Jew and Arab. There is the Jewish guilt for not having been able to reach an amicable settlement with the Arabs—as there is also the guilt of a barren Arab nationalism that did not permit any such understanding.
There is also the tragedy of the Arab-Jewish war, and in a war no one is innocent. But, apart from the Arab-Jewish guilt in the war, born of mutual fear and mutual distrust, there is the share in this guilt of those who had to fear nothing except the loss of some power and influence and who, for the sake of political considerations, did nothing to prevent the war. There is again the guilt of Great Britain, which having submitted the Palestine question to arbitration by the United Nations, refused to co-operate in the implementation of the U.N. decision and withdrew from Palestine, leaving behind planned chaos and confusion, hoping to be called back again to restore order and peace. There is also the shameful guilt of those forces that out of enmity for a state of Israel were urging on the Arabs to resist the authority of the United Nations, by force of arms.
And thus the responsibility for the plight of the Arab refugees is shared by many. It is part of the guilt of the war and of everything else that preceded it from the day that Jewry went into exile; but it has been aggravated a thousandfold by those who, having with shameless calculation turned human suffering into a pawn in the game of international power politics, prevent any constructive solution of this tragic problem.
Nothing is easier than to blame the Jews; nor is there anything cheaper than that. Today, as in the past, it is a sign of moral bankruptcy.