One does not have to be a committed Zionist to recognize that the establishment of the State of Israel has been the most remarkable and most constructive achievement of the Jewish people as a corporate entity for the last two thousand years, and one of the great feats of universal history. Since this essay is written in anything but a mood of self-congratulation, it is only fair to begin by highlighting the outstanding features, familiar though they be, of this vast and inspiring panorama.

In no time at all, relatively speaking, the Zionist movement succeeded in focusing the interest, the emotions, the passions, and the will of members of widely dispersed and very heterogeneous Jewish communities throughout the world upon what had for very long been nothing more than a mere vision. It was able to set up on a completely voluntary basis a whole network of institutions—a government, a national assembly, an administrative apparatus, and an army—long before Jews had even settled in the territory over which they would ultimately achieve political sovereignty. The movement won the Platonic and sometimes even ardent sympathy of wide sections of Gentile public opinion in many countries, and then, through a masterly exploitation of propitious circumstances in a fluid historical situation, obtained formal pledges of assistance from great powers and recognition of its claims by the highest international bodies. It undertook and triumphantly accomplished the task of building, without resort to force, a national-territorial community out of immigrants who came from different climates, cultural traditions, and economic conditions; it established self-governing towns and villages, agriculture and industry, and local organs of self-defense—all this in the teeth of obstruction of all kinds, culminating in determined British chicanery and armed resistance by the indigenous Arab population. It laid the foundations for a new civilization, based on an artificially revived ancient language, and on an endeavor to throw a bridge across the centuries into the remotest past while also trying out social experiments requiring the most strenuous idealism and avant-garde daring.

Faced at last with the ineluctable necessity of marshaling all the moral and material resources for a national liberation struggle, the Zionist movement was able to organize civil disobedience, underground activity, terrorist and guerrilla operations, while simultaneously conducting an intensive diplomatic campaign on the world stage. It was then called upon to go through the supreme test of fighting the invading armies of half a dozen states. Notwithstanding the permanent armed siege under which the new state has since had to live for all the twenty years of its existence, Israel has remained a genuine and effective democracy, the only one within a radius of thousands of miles, and strong enough to sustain itself in spite of deep internal divisions. Its record in education and culture, without being spectacular, has been quite respectable, and its success in transforming a motley of what could almost be called races into a coherent modern nation has been highly impressive. Finally, there is the incredible feat of arms—the famous victory of June 1967 over four combined Arab armies.

_____________

The historian looks to other movements of national liberation for terms of reference and points of comparison. The national aspiration of a normal people struggling for independence turns on a relatively simple issue, aggravated and complicated as it may be by practical circumstances: the expulsion of foreign rulers. In such instances the moral case is so self-evident as to need no proof or elaboration. Not so Zionism. I am not only referring to the obvious fact that the Jews had neither territory nor nationhood in the conventional sense when they embarked on the Zionist venture. I have in mind the moral dilemmas which the very Jewishness of the Zionists could not but make extremely acute. Believers themselves in the right of national self-determination, they could pursue it only at the cost of conflict with Arabs claiming the same simple right. In analogous fashion, though fundamentally anti-imperialist and passionately democratic, the Zionists had no choice but to look for help to imperial powers. Many a Jewish youth stood bewildered in the cross-fires of those days—between the demands of the religious conscience and those of secular power politics; between messianic nationalism on the one side, and messianic revolutionary universalism on the other.

The failures or sins of which Zionism has been guilty in this respect call—I wish to submit—not for censure alone, but also for compassion as unavoidable tragedies. This sustained, strenuous effort—awe-inspiring in its single-mindedness, astonishing in its global strategies, and often heartrending in the moral dilemmas it was called upon to confront—was carried out in the midst of the greatest calamity that has ever befallen a people, and brought to fruition on the morrow of the most horrible blood-letting that any group has ever experienced. Dull must be the man, Jew or Gentile, who would fail to respond with a thrill to this most powerful assertion of the will to live in the shadows and the agonies of death; to this triumph of the human spirit over the deepest degradation and wretchedness.

On the strength of a long and close familiarity with the history of national movements, admittedly restricted to Europe, I would venture to claim that Zionism was the richest of them all. In Zionism we find all the salient features of each rolled into one: the aura of ancient myth and the vision of renovation which constituted the unique appeal of the Greek war of independence; the theoretical, not to say metaphysical, elaboration of national ideology in 19th-century Germany; the misssionary idealism of the Italian Risorgimento, coupled with consummate diplomatic skill and finesse; the dogged romantic desperation of the Irish and the Poles; the cultural and literary renaissance of the Slav peoples; the social radicalism of many a national liberation movement in Asia and Africa. The wonderful gallery of great and colorful personalities thrown up by Zionism will stand comparison with any of the finest and ablest national leaders among the nations: Herzl with Mazzini, Weizmann with Cavour or Masaryk, Ben-Gurion with Bismarck or Pilsudski, Jabotinsky with Nehru, Buber with Fichte, Bialik with Mickiewicz and Petofi, Aharon David Gordon with Gandhi. Israel has also exploded many of the most rooted and widely held fallacies about Jews. The great Theodor Mommsen was sure that the Jew lacked all talent for politics, just as Ernest Renan had little hesitation in lending his immense authority as a Semitic scholar to the idea that Jews possessed no aptitude for philosophy, science, and the arts. Which Gentile only half a century ago had any doubt that the Jews could not fight, were all cowards, and knew nothing of military honor? Israel has changed all that to the point where a French shopkeeper last June could express his surprise that Poland could have been so quickly and so completely beaten by the Germans in 1939, “when there were so many Jews in Poland in those days.”

_____________

Israel has been seen as the fulfillment and ultimate denouement of Jewish history, but it has also been seen as the greatest deviation from the course of that history. It may be altogether too metaphysical a pursuit for the scholarly historian to try to define the “true essence,” the “authentic spirit,” or the “preordained direction” of a millennial history spun over such diverse epochs, civilizations, and regions and to describe developments which do not conform to that “authentic core” as deviations, false starts, perversions, heresies, or culs de sac. We all know that these speculations are so often the fuel of political ideologies. All of us are by now also sufficiently dialectical in our thinking to view revolution as both the coming to a climax of the old, and the transmutation of that longstanding reality into an opposite state of affairs.

There is nothing absurd or illegitimate in the view that the establishment of a political and warrior state in some way constitutes a repudiation of a long Jewish tradition. According to this philosophy, pre-exilic Jewish statehood was a tribal phase to be outgrown, and outgrown it was, with the result that the Jews came into their own for the next two thousand years as a strictly religious confraternity, an entirely apolitical civilization. Continuing this trend of thought, one would conclude that Zionism was an assimilationist movement par excellence. Its inspiration was the envious desire to emulate the example of “all the nations,” to be like them, and the modes of action to which it resorted were alien to a tradition of nearly two thousand years.

But while it is true that to some extent Jews ended by imitating the Gentiles, it seems no less true that the Gentiles followed in the footsteps of the Jews. It was under Judaic inspiration that the peoples of Europe turned into confraternities of believers in the Middle Ages. They made their way to nationhood in modern times also by largely following the teachings of Judaism. Modern European nationalism was born when educated Europeans began to be ashamed of the title of subject, and came to aspire to the dignity of citizen; at the same time they began to identify themselves first and foremost as members of a nation, and only in the second place as sons of a Church. But before nationalism became conscious of its secular and to a certain degree anti-religious character, there was a period during which militant religious evangelism was spilling over into nationalist pride.

The Jewish example was of considerable importance in that process. The image of the people of God fighting God's battles, of the Maccabees defending the true faith, of Elijah smiting the idolatrous heathen and backsliding Israelites—all this inspired the Hussites of Bohemia and Moravia; the Spaniards waging a war against heresy and carrying the cross over the ocean; the Puritans, Cromwell, and John Milton. The idea of having been chosen by God for a special universal mission was taken over from the Jews. Even the essentially secular ingredients of the nationalism of a later day were of Jewish provenance: the myth of past glories, the trauma of failure and defeat, and the dream of a marvelous restoration of ancient greatness through some revolutionary breakthrough, combined, in the case of nationalities oppressed by peoples of a more powerful culture, with anguished loyalty to an indigenous spiritual heritage.

These sentiments became potent and propelling political forces when they were fused into one by the overarching idea of sovereign statehood as the sole guarantee of their effective integration and assertion. In the wake of triumphant nationalist movements all across Europe, this non-Jewish synthesis of Judaic ingredients was thrown back to, and seized upon by, the Jews. Thus the politicization of national Jewish messianism was a consequence of foreign influences—as is clearly shown by the fact that every one of the historic statements of Zionist philosophy came in the form of a response to the victory of some national movement. Rabbi Judah Alkalay wrote his tract advocating Jewish colonization of Palestine under the impact of the Greek war of independence and the emergence of Serbian nationalism. Moses Hess's astonishing little book, Rome and Jerusalem, was composed in the heat of general enthusiasm engendered by the unification of Italy. Leo Pinsker's Autoemancipation was stimulated not only by the pogroms of 1881, but also by the establishment of the state of Bulgaria. It appeared so logical, indeed so inevitable—first the glory that was Athens is resuscitated, then Rome begins rising from the dead, and now Jerusalem's turn to be redeemed has come.

_____________

There was another and more concrete way in which Zionism was tied to European nationalism. The position of the Jews was made difficult by the latter and, in the countries of greatest Jewish concentration and strongest internal cohesion, untenable. It may be anachronistic to speak of pluralism in pre-19th-century Europe. Still, class differentiation, cultural diversity, regional peculiarities, and religious splits made for some kind of pluralism, and it was away from this that modern nationalism, as an all-embracing creed, was bound to lead. The Jews became a test case of the ambiguity besetting the modern nation-state. There was the conception of the state as the outcome of a social contract among men—atoms emerging from the state of nature and resolving to live together under laws of their own devising, reserving to themselves all the natural liberties and rights, and ceding to the state only what was necessary for the administration of the commonweal and the defense of those very rights. At a very early stage this conception was counterbalanced by the idea of the state as an irreducible organic entity growing out of blood, dispositions, and folkways, myth and destiny, memories and urges, which were supposedly prior to and more decisive than the conscious resolve of abstract individuals to band together for a limited number of purposes. The separate Jewish tradition and communal cohesion, taken for granted in the Ständestaat, a society composed of communities, were now challenged by the philosophy which frowned upon group loyalties of any kind as a danger to the individualistic social order.

On the other side, those Jews who out of genuine conviction or out of a readiness to pay the price required for emancipation, gave their enthusiastic adherence to this liberal order, were decried by the upholders of organic nationhood as solvents and germs of disintegration, out to undermine the instinctive certainties passed on in the blood and in the perennial traditions. Liberal individualism, cosmopolitan finance capitalism, laissez-faire economics, socialist doctrine, indeed rationalism as such came to be seen as agents of Jewish decomposition, representing the abstract and the universal, rather than the concrete and the place-bound. Yet the same Jews who were such eager upholders of universalism either could not or were not allowed to give up their group identity, and the universalist values and modes of being they propagated were condemned as instruments of a conspiracy to dominate the world.

For decades Jewish liberals were able to dismiss such teachings with a shrug of the shoulders. They would not stoop to defend themselves against that last residue of medieval superstition and prejudice, the rear-guard action of forces upon which history had already pronounced its verdict of doom. By 1880, however, these ideas were suddenly and simultaneously being espoused by mass movements in a number of countries, sometimes finding highly sophisticated expression in metaphysical theories, but more often in virulent agitation and outbreaks of riot and violence. Many Jewish liberals were shaken to the core. It was not only that they felt menaced personally. Their pride was deeply wounded, and their faith in the rationality of man and the inevitability of progress suffered a terrible blow. Thus Herzl, overwhelmed by the orgy of irrational anti-Semitism occasioned by the Dreyfus Affair in France, argued that Jews must no longer wait for their salvation upon the eventual triumph of right. Indeed, since the Jews had been cast into the role of an irritant, they would be rendering a great service to the cause of general progress if they evacuated themselves, especially from Eastern Europe. That was even more emphatically the view of Borochov. Both Herzl and Borochov visualized the future Jewish state as having precisely the kind of regime to which the Jewish irritant was proving an obstacle in Europe—to Herzl liberal-social democracy, to Borochov a Marxist Utopia emerging out of the healthy class struggle from which the Jewish problem in Europe acted as a distraction. Despair, wounded pride, the wish to assert human dignity—such were, once more, the motives which propelled these men whose personal situation was reasonably comfortable and who had never undergone the Jewish experience as a living and natural one. Their Jewish nationalism was thus re-active, and not a spontaneous reality achieving self-awareness. But the seed sown by these alienated outsiders fell upon the fertile ground of the unbroken Jewish experience in Central and Eastern Europe, which, in the domain of the spiritual, was at that very moment evolving from religious into secular and national self-awareness, and in the political and socioeconomic domains was being subjected to strains and stresses of growing intensity.

The historian is fascinated by the interplay of the inevitable and the contingent in human affairs. It is not true that there are no alternatives in history. Yet when he views long chains of events and long periods of time retrospectively from the vantage point of an ultimate denouement, the historian is weighed down by the fatalistic feeling that after all what finally happened had to happen that way and no other. Infinitely painful will the conclusion seem that Jewish history in Eastern Europe, when surveyed from the heights of the second part of the 20th century, appears to have been leading for generations ineluctably to catastrophe. But of course the catastrophe did not have to be Auschwitz; no one in his worst nightmares could ever have envisaged Auschwitz. Yet clear-sighted men like Herzl and Jabotinsky, and in guarded terms Weizmann himself, understood the danger, and when they spoke of an “evacuation” they were bitterly attacked by fellow Jews for implying that there was no room for Jews in countries where they had lived for centuries, sometimes—for instance in Hungary—longer than the “host” nation itself. In fact, the burden of the Bund's implacable opposition to Zionism was the charge that Zionism accepted the arguments of the anti-Semites.

_____________

As a consequence of the great expulsions in the late Middle Ages from England, France, Spain, Portugal, Southern Italy, and parts of Germany, the bulk of the Jewish people found themselves in the dawn of the modern era concentrated in the territories between the Oder and the Dnieper. Of course significant things continued to happen to Jews and they continued to pursue important activities outside the Pale as well—in Northern Italy, Holland, Palestine, Turkey. In Germany, especially, Jewish tradition, developing from generation to generation, became the matrix of great battles of ideas from the days of the Enlightenment until well into the 20th century: one need mention only the struggle for emancipation, the grand dialogue between Reform and Tradition, the sustained effort of self-identification through internal and external polemic, and last but not least the great intellectual endeavor, Wissenschaft des Judentums. Nevertheless, it is no exaggeration to say that in the main the history of the Jewish nation in modern times—before the emergence of a self-sufficient American Jewish community and of the Palestinian Yishuv—was the history of the Pale.

For centuries the territories of the Pale constituted the underdeveloped part of Europe. Primarily agricultural, and feudal for a considerably longer period than Western Europe, the countries of the area had no real middle class. A large and often impoverished, but extremely self-conscious and exclusive gentry faced millions of horribly poor, illiterate, oppressed, and downtrodden serfs. In the middle were the Jews. Even if they had wished to give up their Jewish identity, there was really no one to whom they could assimilate: the nobility was too high, the peasantry too low. So they remained a civilization apart. The three or four empires—the Russian, Austrian, Turkish, and, to a much lesser extent, the German—on the Western fringe of the Pale were all multiracial states. The various tribes were kept apart by social and religious barriers, while the dominant group in each case lacked the cultural force (or, if one prefers, a sufficiently strong bourgeoisie and an adequate urban life) to attract and assimilate the politically weaker nationalities. The various peoples of the area were thus swept up by nationalist passion before they had had the time and the opportunity to develop a middle class. To an even greater degreee than in Germany, nationalism here was deformed by the absence of those virtues, values, and institutions which a flourishing, dominant, and self-assured bourgeoisie has bequeathed to the West: the rule of law, the ethics of reciprocity, respect for the human personality, civilized intercourse—all embodied in municipal self-government, the parliamentary system, and the freedoms of the individual citizen.

Threatened by the higher cultures of the dominant groups, very unsure of themselves and of their own national-cultural heritages, these peoples drew their inspiration not from the social-contract and natural-law philosophies of the West, but from the German ideas of organic Volkstum and racial uniqueness. The Jews, whose culture was higher and more ancient, and who in the nature of things were also more attracted by the cultures of the dominant groups and the greater opportunities afforded by those cultures, were bound to appear to the weaker peoples as allies and instruments of their oppressors.

With the decline of feudalism, and the emancipation of the serfs in the Austrian and Russian Empires, the sons of an impoverished gentry together with masses of superfluous peasants flocked from the countryside into the towns. There they found the Jews. Economic rivalry was aggravated by nationalist passion. The newcomers, eager to build a national society with a balanced social structure, saw the Jew as the chief obstacle: an alien, a rival, a threat to national integrity.

Grave as these strains and stresses were before World War I, they assumed the dimensions of acute and unabated crisis between the two Wars. Russian Jewry had in Tsarist times been subjected to discriminatory legislation, administrative chicanery, and waves of government-sponsored pogroms designed to divert the attention of the masses from real social evils. Nevertheless, multiracial empires—not even excluding so entirely chauvinist a one as Tsarist Russia—usually have a dampening effect on nationalist militancy. With the breakup of the old empires in 1918, a succession of nation-states emerged from the ruins. Some had never enjoyed political independence before; some had lost it centuries earlier; others, like Rumania and Hungary, were so enlarged or so diminished as in fact to be reshaped beyond recognition. These new nations were driven by fierce nationalism, the more fanatical, the less self-assured and externally secure they were. Their hereditary foe and traditional oppressor, Russia, had changed from an old-fashioned despot into the standard-bearer of world revolution—a stance calculated to attract not a few of the citizens of the new young states, and to offer Russia a good reason to expand, seemingly not in order to subjugate, but in order to liberate and redeem. Hence the bitter anti-Communism of these states, a sentiment that needed no particular incitement from Western capitalism.

_____________

Socially and economically weak, feeling threatened by external danger, and lacking any democratic experience, the new states were driven to make the oppression of minorities into a basic policy. Although the Jews of Poland and Rumania—unlike the Ukrainians, Hungarians, and Germans—had no separatist ambitions, they nonetheless came to bear the brunt and to feel the fury of the neurotic nationalisms of Eastern Europe more than any other minority group. Other minorities lived in certain border areas; the Jews, because they lived almost exclusively in the towns, where they often formed a majority, were ubiquitous. As the commercial class, and “aliens” to boot, they were subjected to punitive taxation. They were considered usurpers, if not parasites, and an impediment to national consolidation: a foreign body when cultivating their own identity; a menace to the purity and integrity of the national creative genius when attempting to participate in the spiritual life of the nation. They were above all regarded as actual or potential Communists, and therefore enemies of the state. In those early days Communism triumphant in the Soviet Union appeared to be carried by the visionary qualities and zeal, the organizing talent and technical expertise of the Jews. That message which fifty years later was to become the gravest menace to Judaism seemed to many at the time—in a development disquietingly reminiscent of the evolution of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity—to be a Jewish message.

And indeed, knowing themselves to be undesirables, conscious of the determination of the government and majority population to make conditions so unbearable to them that they would be forced to emigrate, with economic opportunities constantly shrinking, with no access to government posts, public works, and services, no wonder the Jewish youth of those countries felt that their existence was unreal, transitional, a kind of preparation for some future reality—redemption through Zion or through the coming World Revolution. All this explains why Nazism and Fascism elicited so ready a response in Eastern Europe and how Hitler could find accomplices in that part of the world when he embarked upon his genocidal program against the Jews. In the darkest days of Auschwitz one could read in the underground press of the Polish resistance movement expressions of thanks to “Providence for solving for us a problem in a way which we could never have contemplated.”

It was the intensification of the Jewish plight together with the convergent growth of Jewish national consciousness that gave an irresistible impetus to Zionism. Neither of these two factors would have been effective without the other. Plight without ideology would have reduced the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe to a mob of wretched refugees, whereas ideology gave them the dignity of a hard-pressed nation on the march. Yet aspiration alone, without the propulsion of necessity, would hardly have been sufficient. The tragedy lies in this: that when the combined force of the two factors grew into the power that moves mountains, and move them it did, the bearers of that force were no longer there to claim the sunny uplands. They were dead. The State of Israel arose out of the holocaust, too late for the dead—and perhaps not only for them.

Historic inevitability and historic contingency: catastrophe and statehood were both inevitable and preordained, while the physical annihilation of millions of potential citizens of the Jewish state was an awful contingency, which in turn—as we shall see—became the source of another type of inevitability.

_____________

The Jewish movement of national liberation derived from a thoroughly liberal-humanitarian impulse. It was at the same time driven on by intensely anti-liberal forces. The climate in which it was destined to realize its aspiration was nothing short of apocalyptic. Above all, it was condemned to come into conflict with another national aspiration, which clash—let us have the courage to face the brutal truth—was incapable of resolution in any spirit of democratic liberalism.

It was the misfortune of Zionism to have arrived late, and to have achieved its aim in the nick of time, if not, indeed, again too late. The very close early association with the Russian revolutionary ideology imbued Zionism, especially its left wing, with Mazzinian notions of a united front of all oppressed nationalities struggling for liberation against a common oppressor. Yet by the time Zionism arrived, nationalism everywhere in Europe had developed into a cult of sacred egoism. Zionism expressed and represented a yearning for a home for the oppressed and for those who wished to be themselves—has there ever been a nobler aspiration? Yet the planet had by then been divided, and there were no longer any empty spaces. The home to which Zionism naturally aspired was inhabited by another people, the Arabs, and ruled by a third nation, the Turks. All of mankind's history has been a history of invasion, conquest of nation by nation, deportation of populations or their absorption by others, not to speak of extermination. At the turn of the century such things had become both objectively and subjectively impossible, most of all to Jews. They were destined to become possible and horribly inevitable again half a century later. Herzl saw the Jewish problem as an international problem, as a matter of general concern to all nations. What he would have liked best was an international agreement and international machinery, with money provided by Jews and if possible also by European governments, for the resettlement of Jewish immigrants. There was no escape in practice from an association with some Great Power, which might have been, in this sinful world of ours, suspected of being more mindful of imperial interests than of humanitarian challenges. When Herzl began his rounds in quest for a powerful ally, finding access to Wilhelm II, Joseph Chamberlain, Abdul Hamid and others, imperialism seemed at its zenith. The rule of the white man over all the colored races had seemed a preordained and blessed fulfillment—the more so for the fact that such imperial powers as Great Britain and France represented advanced political regimes and progressive social systems. But white hegemony and European self-assurance received a strong jolt in the form of the resounding victory of Japan over imperial Russia in 1904 (which was also the year of Herzl's death). For the first time in modern history, a colored race had succeeded in defeating one of the great white powers. In retrospect we can see that event as the beginning of the end of Western imperialism. The Japanese victory triggered a series of momentous explosions in Asia and Africa: the Young Turk revolution, the revolution in Persia, a little later the Chinese revolution, the setting up of the Congress Party in India, and the first rumblings of Arab nationalism in the Levant.

Nothing was calculated to please the Zionists more than the spreading of the League of Nations umbrella over the Balfour Declaration and British rule in Palestine. Representing, as it did, an international decision to help the homeless Jews, it seemed to do away with the specter of Jews having to fight, and ultimately to displace, Arabs. Palestine was put under a League of Nations mandate after World War I, and it was in response to the growth of Arab nationalism that Iraq and Syria and the Lebanon found themselves in the same status. The Zionists would say that the latter mandates were established to prepare the local Arabs for independence and the Palestine Mandate to facilitate the up building of the Jewish National Home as promised in the Balfour Declaration: could a fairer and more just procedure be imagined? The Arabs, however, interpreted matters differently: if Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon were entitled to independence, so too were the Palestinian Arabs.

The State of Israel came into being some twenty years later at a time when the process of decolonization was already in full swing (in fact, the withdrawal of the British from Palestine in 1948 was modeled on their withdrawal from India a year earlier). It is more than doubtful whether a few years later the majority necessary for the UN resolution on the partition of Palestine could have been obtained at all. Few, if any, of the new Asian and African states, which were due to be admitted to the UN soon after, and which now maintain friendly relations with Israel, would have been prepared to vote for the establishment of a Jewish State before having had an opportunity to see Israel at work not as a society of colonial planters, but as a society of workers and producers, and to derive benefit from its services and example.

The exit of the white man from Asia and Africa and the arrival of the Jews into that nodal point where the two continents touch is a coincidence with tremendous symbolic overtones. Its significance for Israel is further deepened by the fact that the reemergence of vast ancient civilizations like China, Japan, and India, and the rise of a large number of new nations, are bound to make for a relative decline in the weight of the Jewish ingredient in the sum total of human civilization. The races of Asia and Africa were not brought up on the Bible. They cannot be expected to respond to the magic names of Zion and Jerusalem in the way Bible readers do. They have never been preoccupied or obsessed with the Jewish phenomenon: they have never admired, feared, or persecuted the Jews. Their record is clean of anti-Semitism, but it is also empty of Jews. Hence their proneness to equate Israeli Jews with white intruders.

_____________

The Zionist-British relationship bears the mark of “too little and too late,” and of an ambiguity which burdened the Jews with guilt without at the same time granting them the sweets of sin. It is no mean irony that while the Balfour Declaration may have looked like a deal between imperial Britain and the Jews, disguised on Britain's part by high-sounding idealistic formulae, the entire history of the Anglo-Zionist partnership was the history of a sustained effort on England's part to escape the obligations and the logic of that solemn pledge. There has never been agreement on what that pledge really contained. Nor, for that matter, do we really know, in spite of all the innumerable reasons given by or attributed to the British government, why the Balfour Declaration was even issued—as Christopher Sykes, the son of Sir Mark Sykes, one of the architects of British policies in the Middle East during World War I, points out in his highly perceptive Crossroads to Israel. The late British Empire was acquired, it is said, in a fit of absent-mindedness; so, too, the Balfour Declaration seems to have been issued by a group of men who did not know what they were doing.

The statesmen of 1917 may have been confused, inattentive, muddled, idealistic, or shrewd; they may have been moved by humanitarian sentiment, by strategic considerations, by the wish to gain the sympathy of American Jewry for the Allied war effort, or to wean the Russian Jews away from Bolshevism, by the desire, finally, to cut the French out of Palestine. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to know. But certainly no one gave precise thought to the ways in which the Balfour Declaration should be implemented. And in any case, contrary to popular belief, surprisingly little attention seems to have been paid to the idea of turning Palestine into a bastion for Suez.

Very soon after 1917 and throughout the thirty years of British administration that followed, there was little disagreement among the British, least of all among the men called upon to implement the Mandate in Whitehall and in Palestine, that the association with Zionism was at best a terrible embarrassment and liability. Few, even among those who supported Zionism—or, more accurately, among those who from time to time could be alerted by the Zionists to prevent another attempt at whittling away the provisions of the Balfour Declaration—did so out of a sense of conviction or a disposition to give a helping hand to something good and desirable. Instead they acted out of a sense of obligation to a pledged word, in a resigned attempt to make the best of a bad job. Lloyd George seems to have been speaking for most of his colleagues when, in 1919, he tried to still objections to Zionism with the confident assertion that Britain's age-long experience of empire would enable her to take on all parties concerned—Jews, Arabs, Christians, the Pope, and the Caliph—and (he did not use the expression, though he implied it) muddle through somehow. Why should the Arabs, who were about to get so much, when for centuries under the Turks they had had nothing, “begrudge the Jews that little notch?” And, indeed, who were the Arabs? Before 1914, they had hardly impinged upon the consciousness of Europe, except perhaps as another native population with colorful nomadic Bedouins, etc., etc.

One man saw the dilemma clearly, and that was Balfour himself:

The contradiction between the letter of the Covenant and the policy of the Allies is even more flagrant in the case of the independent nation of Palestine than in that of the independent nation of Syria. For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country. . . . The four great powers are committed to Zionism, and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder importance than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land. . . .

With all this, Balfour was most reluctant for Britain to assume the mandate, and very anxious to hand it over to the United States. England was tired and disillusioned in the wake of the bloodiest of wars the world had seen till then; the imperial urge and the sense of mission were by then too enfeebled for her to take up the kind of challenge Balfour may have had in mind: to plan and execute with the cooperation of Jews and various international agencies a scheme of colonization and settlement within a fixed number of years. It may well be that had such an approach been seriously attempted, the Arabs, dazed and weak as they still were, would have been placed before a fait accompli without any injury to their economic interests. They might then have accepted the accomplished fact, and the long drawn-out agony would have been avoided. But all this is plausible only within the theoretical sphere. As a matter of historical fact, such Keynesian methods as Five Year programs, Marshall plans, Four Point proposals, etc., were still beyond the ken of most people in the West. The British administration in Palestine had not been intended and was not equipped for such undertakings. Its greatest ambition was to keep the peace somehow and to get the essential services running, harassed as it was by the opposing claims of the Jews—impatient, arrogant, intent on forging ahead—and the Arabs—sulky, riotous, and aggrieved.

_____________

Was the Arab-Jewish conflict inevitable? Can one put one's finger on sins of commission or omission, on points of no return, and say that had this or that happened or not happened, been done or not done, things would have taken a radically different course? The more I ponder these questions, the more confirmed I become in the grim conclusion that although in detail, in style and tone, the Jews might have acted more wisely or more tactfully, it would not have made much difference in the final analysis. The same cannot be said about the Arabs. On very many occasions they could, by making concessions, have arrested or very significantly slowed down the growth of the Jewish National Home so as to prevent its transformation into a Jewish State. By adopting an attitude of absolute and total intransigence, they reduced the Yishuv's alternatives either to giving up Zionism or to carrying out its program to the full extent in the teeth of Arab opposition. Since no give and take was possible, since even such modest forms of Zionism as a measure of immigration and settlement encountered maximum resistance, there seemed no choice but to aim at maximum strength. God had hardened the heart of Pharaoh.

The Arab policy of total and uncompromising denial of any Jewish right to a National Home was punctuated by outbreaks of violence and riot, like those in 1920, 1921, 1929, and 1936. Consistent, proud, and heroic as action of this kind may have appeared to them, it was disastrous to their best political interests. So too was their refusal to participate in the Legislative Council which the British planned to set up in the early 20's, and which might have given the Arabs leverage they did not otherwise possess. If, similarly, the Arabs had been ready to discuss the partition plan proposed by the Peel Commission in 1938 after the Jews had accepted it, they might have succeeded in bringing about its failure (because it was not really workable); they would then have been in a position to claim a political and moral victory. Finally, had they agreed to let the 100,000 Jewish refugees into the country in 1945-46, the Jewish State might never have come into being. In the words of Abba Eban, the Jewish case would have lost its urgency. Had the Arabs not resisted the setting up of Israel in armed combat, there would have been no Arab refugee problem and the territory of the Jewish state would have been much smaller, perhaps too small and with too many Arabs living in it to make it viable.

The stage was thus set for an apocalyptic tragedy, both in the diaspora and in Palestine. Yet few people saw it coming, and fewer still were ready for it when it came. With the hindsight knowledge of what was to follow, the Zionist believer is visited not merely by a feeling of anguish, but also by a sense of embarrassment and shame that up to the days of Hitler those millions of Jews who were soon to perish, and who no doubt had in their majority been seized by the Zionist mystique, should have done so little to settle and build up their National Home for the first fifteen years of the Mandate. There were years in the late 20's when the number of emigrants leaving Palestine was larger than the number of arrivals. What kept the Jews of Poland, of Rumania, of Hungary from boarding every ship and raft in one huge exodus to the Promised Land? I cannot resist the temptation to quote a passage from Friedrich Engels, although I have already done so on another occasion: “History is about the most cruel of all goddesses, and she leads her triumphal car over heaps of corpses, not only in war, but also in ‘peaceful’ economic development. And we men and women are unfortunately so stupid that we never pluck up the courage for real progress unless urged to it by sufferings that seem almost out of proportion.”

In the absence of a sense of irresistible urgency, deeply ingrained liberal modes of thought held the Jews back from facing up squarely to the implacable fact of irreconcilable conflict. Progressives are always unwilling and frequently even unable to understand that some conflicts can be resolved only by force. Thus it was that many Labor Zionists and others on the Zionist Left could deny any real conflict of interest between Jews and Arabs, and could put all the blame on feudal effendis or religious fanaticism. The Arabs, according to this view, had nothing to fear and much to gain from Jewish settlement. Some in the Zionist movement had visions of a bi-national state. The more starry-eyed even dreamed of acting as the midwife of socialist transformation to the stagnant semi-feudal, ritualistic societies of the Middle East—not through conquest, but by good precept. The Jews were completely sincere when they claimed that they had no intention of unsettling a single Arab. They had not come to take the place of the Arabs, but to create new opportunities, reclaim the desert and the marshes, and settle alongside the Arabs.

After seven years of relative peace, the turn of the decade witnessed the dreadful massacres of 1929, caused ostensibly by an absurd dispute over rights to the Wailing Wall, but in fact by the specter of a worldwide Jewish plot—the setting up of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, in which large non-Zionist bodies and very eminent non-Zionist Jews were to join the Zionists. The pogroms were followed by committees of investigation whose reports recommended the virtual abandonment of the Jewish National Home policy. This recommendation was embraced with alacrity by the Colonial Secretary in the Labour Government, Lord Passfield, better known as the famous Fabian theoretician Sidney Webb, and his wife, the still better known Beatrice Webb, both prophets of socialism and progressivism, enjoying immense prestige as unrivaled experts in the social sciences. That they should have adopted an attitude of contemptuous hostility to Zionism was particularly galling to the liberal and left-wing elements of the Zionist movement: Not even the letter Ramsay MacDonald subsequently sent to Weizmann, rescinding in effect all steps taken by Passfield, could really heal the wound.

_____________

In Europe, too, the Jews continued to think and behave as though they were still living in the liberal age, which is why the events set into motion by Hitler's assumption of power on January 31, 1933 came as so great a shock. Jews were used to pogroms, to discriminatory legislation, to insults and physical violence, to anti-Semitic theories and slander. But it was utterly unthinkable to them that the government of a great country, and one of the most civilized nations in the world, would—150 years after the Declaration of the Rights of Man—abolish Jewish equality by a stroke of the pen, and do it with an air of defiance and victory. The theory of catastrophic Zionism suddenly seemed vindicated and was soon to be confirmed in a way which even the gloomiest prophets could never have imagined. The whole of Jewish history began to appear as one long preparation for doom in the diaspora and redemption in the Land of Israel. The messianic movements of the past were no longer seen as marginal episodes, but as the highlights of Jewish history, the great spasms, premature revolutionary outbreaks leading to the Great Revolution. Emigration to Palestine was growing in momentum, raising hopes that the Jews might become a majority within a generation. Embarrassing questions which had earlier been dodged as idly theoretical now began to press for answer. What would or should happen at the moment when the Jews came in sight of their goal, needing only one final push? Would the Arabs and the British look on, or would they make a supreme effort to call a halt, and if so what should the Jews do in response?

The Arabs did indeed make a supreme effort to call a halt. April 1936 saw the beginning of riots and a general strike, which were to swell into a prolonged armed uprising. So strong were the liberal and pacific instincts of the Yishuv that even at that late date the leadership was able to proclaim and for a long time maintain a policy of no retaliation. But the Arab revolt drove home to the Zionists the depth and intensity of the clash, and the difficulties, perhaps the impossibility, of winning through the slow organic growth envisaged by Weizmann—one more cow, one more goat, one more acre. This is why so many, probably the majority, seized upon the solution proposed by the Royal Commission on Palestine presided over by Lord Peel—partition of the Holy Land into Jewish and Arab states. Some saw partition as the only way out of the deadlock; others had vague ulterior motives: let us consolidate what we can, bring in as many immigrants as possible, and then let us see what further opportunities history may occasion.

In any case, the Peel Commission lent a new respectability to the idea of a sovereign Jewish state in the eyes of the Jews themselves—and this at a moment when they were being given increasingly stronger reasons to think themselves persecuted by one half of the world and abandoned by the other. For the world was now divided into countries which wanted to get rid of the Jews, and countries which did not want to let them in. Contrary to the expectations of many, the Nazi regime did not relent after driving the Jews out of all public positions. It continued to persecute the Jews with a brutality that culminated in the November 1938 pogroms. Hitler imposed anti-Jewish legislation upon Italy, the rump of Czechoslovakia, and other countries under his tutelage or influence. Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda was also making inroads in the West where there was no country without a growing Fascist movement. The Western democracies seemed paralyzed in the face of Nazism, unable to resist.

Wooed at one time as a community of vast influence and accepted then as an ally of incalculable promise, the Jews had shrunk to the status of hunted animals and unwanted refugees—a circumstance to which the fiasco of the international conference on refugees at Evian bore gruesome testimony. And as their needs grew more desperate, thepower of the Jewscontinued to decline. This decline was both a cause and a result of the rise of Arab nationalism and the formal abandonment by the British of the Jewish National Home policy in the famous White Paper of 1939-40, with the virtual stoppage of Jewish immigration and land purchase in Palestine.

Humiliated, betrayed, forsaken, the Jews were left almost entirely defenseless before Hitler's genocidal campaign. The world had never before witnessed anything like this campaign. It was not a wave of pogroms by an inflamed mob, not excesses committed by drunken soldiers, not the horrors of revolution or civil war. A whole people was surrendered to assassins with the sole stipulation that every member of it, every man, woman, and child, healthy or sick, normal or paralyzed, should be put to death, individually or collectively, by the bullet of a thug or in especially built human abattoirs, after being starved, tortured, flushed out from every hiding place and brought to the factories of death from the remotest corner of Hitler's empire. The Allies were far away, and claimed to have only one obligation—to hasten the day of general victory. There was no judge to appeal to for redress, no government to turn to for protection, no neighbor to ask for succor, no God to pray to for mercy.

Despair to the point of madness gripped the Yishuv. The gates of the Jewish National Home remained shut and sealed, while desperate fugitives drowned at its very shores. By degrees the resolve hardened and thickened that there must be one place in the world where Jews could be masters of their own fate, where they would not have to rely on others from whom in any case they could expect neither help nor justice, and where if they had to perish they would go down fighting to the last man and not like sheep led to the slaughterhouse. The State of Israel assumed the dimensions of the great reparation for an untold wrong, the only way of asserting the Jewish right and the Jewish will to live, and as the only instrument and guarantee of corporate survival.

_____________

The story of the final breakthrough to Jewish statehood was a great epic. Against the background and under the impact of an apocalyptic catastrophe, in the shadows of a veritably Dantean hell, the despair of the Yishuv transformed itself into the kind of divine and creative madness which not only stills all fear and hesitation, but also makes for clarity of vision in a landscape bathed in a lurid, distorting light. The climate changed visibly. Situations and actions considered only yesterday unthinkable, impossible, crazy, began to appear possible, logical, natural, desirable, imperative: fantastic risks, violence, sabotage, terror, war. Only a short while before, a community cherishing law and order, the decencies of life, civilized intercourse, had recoiled from Jabotinsky's teachings of blood and mud as the setting for the struggle for national independence, and had felt horrified by the slogan of his more extreme followers: “In blood and fire Judea fell, out of blood and fire she will arise.” Of course, only a minority became terrorists. But the vast majority no longer had the conviction or the heart to oppose them.

It is idle to argue which factor was more decisive to the final outcome. The terror brought urgency, drama, and myth. But of course it would have been unavailing if not for the towns and villages, the economy and the institutions which slow and arduous toil had patiently and lovingly built up. In that respect both Weizmann and Jabotinsky stand vindicated. Yet even these two factors together do not tell the whole story of the breakthrough. There was the irresistible pressure of the survivors in the former concentration camps in Germany and Austria, their numbers swelling daily with the arrival of fugitives from Eastern Europe; there were the ships carrying illegal immigrants and intercepted by the British on approaching the shores of Palestine; there was the half horrified and half guilty sympathy of world opinion, finding expression in active assistance from official quarters; there was the diplomatic offensive in the capitals of the world, especially in the United States, where the Jewish community was propelled by the feeling that but for the grace of God they too might have ended in Auschwitz, and the passionate conviction that the memory of the dead martyrs and their own power imposed upon them a historic responsibility which they dared not shirk.

The methods had changed radically; the focal point of the struggle had shifted from London to Palestine; and inevitably, indeed one might say symbolically, the rudder was taken over from the hands of Weizmann by Ben-Gurion. The Jewish people have never had a more impressive and persuasive apostle unto the Gentiles than Weizmann. In the gravity and charm of his bearing and deeply furrowed countenance, he epitomized both the sufferings and the majesty of an ancient and unique people. Few men of the Gentile elite could resist the magic of that peculiar mixture of prophetic idealism and ironic skepticism, profound moral seriousness and addiction to facts, felicity of phrase and metaphor and contempt for rhetoric and pose, intense sensitivity to others and the self-sufficiency of a powerful and idiosyncratic personality. But Weizmann belonged to the pre-1914 age. He could appeal to the reason and enlightened self-interest of cultivated persons; he could tap buried sentiments of compassion and love; he could stir visions. But he could not electrify or intoxicate crowds. He abhorred the tricks of the rabble-rousers, and the world of the irrational was entirely beyond his ken. Lawlessness, violence, terror were to him not only morally reprehensible and utterly at odds with the Jewish spirit, they were squalid and repulsive as well.

But if the subhuman was alien to him, so were the superhuman resources of heroic madness and despair. Subject to fits of depression and paralyzing lethargy, he longed to get away from the thick of things into the quiet of laboratory and study. He loved his people with unequaled depth and tenderness, yet how harsh and biting he could be toward his fellow Jews. Wholly identified with the cause, he would nonetheless never give up his private world.

Weizmann's political orientation was entirely Britain-centered. It derived from his great faith in, and admiration for, British character and institutions, and rested upon his proven ability to influence upper-class British statesmen of a romantic cast of mind. Once the British had made up their minds that the association with Zionism must be terminated, Weizmann's usefulness was at an end. He simply had no alternative policy: neither another great power to lean on (for America would not assume direct and complete responsibility) nor a different strategy for dealing with Britain. When a British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, warned the survivors of Auschwitz not to push themselves to the head of the queue, and sneeringly attributed American support for Zionist demands to an unwillingness to take in more Jews, Weizmann could find no words to answer him.

Weizmann was, to borrow Isaiah Berlin's epithet, the great exilarch who led his people back to the Promised Land, and he will always be remembered as the architect of the Jewish National Home. But it is Ben-Gurion's name that will forever remain associated with the final breakthrough to statehood. In speaking of Ben-Gurion, I can only repeat an evaluation I ventured some eight years ago that he will take his place among the half-dozen most decisive figures in Jewish history. So completely identified has Ben-Gurion been with the Yishuv from the moment he landed as a youth of eighteen at Jaffa from the small Polish town of Plonsk, that every facet and period in his life is indistinguishable from some aspect or phase in the history of the Yishuv itself: agricultural laborer; Socialist-Zionist publicist; trade-union organizer; soldier in the Haganah and the Jewish Legion during World War I; Mapai leader and General Secretary of the Histadrut; member of the Zionist Executive and Chairman of the Jewish Agency; Prime Minister; and, finally, retired elder statesman who would not retire and would refuse the self-chosen role of a Cincinnatus in the desert, the virulent head of an opposition party, the lonely old man left behind by momentous events and even by his own party, the pathetic stillborn child of his declining years.

_____________

Ben-Gurion has no loyalties other than Zion. A supremely political being who has shown himself to possess uncanny intuition in most concrete situations, he is also a great visionary whose vision transcends the here and now, expanding into past and future. To be sure he is a “grand et terrible simplificateur,” for whom two thousand years of diaspora history might just as well be erased from the record, and who denies the title of Zionist to anyone who does not settle in Israel. But in that crucial moment when men no less good than he grew hesitant and lost their nerve, his unclouded clarity of vision, his unerring instinct, his ability to make decisions made the providential difference. Having identified himself so wholly with the cause, he was able to fight for it with relentless ferocity and a ruthless disregard of those who took another view or wavered and vacillated. His faith was infectious, his resolve inspired confidence, his passionate words swept crowds: statehood as the goal, a national uprising as the method. It was now or never, for no such situation as the one created on the cessation of hostilities in 1945 would ever return, and in the desperate tug of war between Jew and Arab, with the British ranged behind the latter, any faltering meant for the Jews being hurled into the abyss.

Ben-Gurion as national leader was the architect of this policy, holding in his hands the reins and the levers of power, and if not initiating all actions, at least sufficiently in control to prevent actions like those of the Irgun and the Stern group from undoing his own efforts; yet it was still given to Weizmann to play his own inimitable role even after all the bridges with Britain had been blown up. It is enough to recall the appearance of the great old diplomat before the United Nations Commission on Palestine and his contacts with Truman which issued in the assigning of the Negev to Israel and the immediate recognition of the new state by Washington. These services were performed in the now-or-never spirit of Ben-Gurion's own absolute resolve that there must be no retreat into Trusteeship schemes as suggested by the Americans, and no weakening before Arab threats and neutral pressures.

The State of Israel came into being within the borders of 1949 as a result of an armed uprising, an international enactment, and a victorious war. When we look more closely, we discover here the very pattern followed by many national liberation movements in history. Except during the postwar period in black Africa, no new nation has even been formed nor has any old enslaved people ever won independence without undergoing an ordeal of fire—in the first phase, rebellion, and in the last, war. It would seem that only through struggle, suffering, and violence is a people held to have proved that it deserves to be recognized as a nation, and even then, after it has compelled recognition, the rising nation almost invariably has to continue its fight for safer frontiers, as was shown most strikingly in the 1820's by the Greeks, the first oppressed nation to win independence in modern times, and by the Italians a few decades later. The international concert steps in after the facts have already been established by the rebel nation, very often in an attempt to stem the tide and, by acknowledging accomplished facts, to prevent further facts from being established. Almost invariably the rising nation has to continue its fight for real security. A ruling power is no more prepared to yield and efface itself without a struggle than is a ruling class. The Greeks, the Italians, the Germans, the Poles have all gone on fixing the borders of their country with the sword, in disregard of formulae and definitions laid down by international agreements.

But the war between the Yishuv and the invading Arab armies that broke out upon the establishment of the State of Israel can also be seen as a part of a more immediate pattern—as the belated spasm of the tremendous convulsion which had racked the world for the preceding six years and more. The flight of the Arab refugees thus appears as an episode in the Enormous migration of populations, with millions driven and driving others across Europe and the vast expanses of Asia and Africa—the largest such migration for many centuries, and of which the Jews were the most helpless victims. So airily detached a view of millions of cases of individual tragedy and personal suffering may sound inhumanly harsh. But the historian has no answer to the question of why, in the great conflicts of nations and classes, innocent people suffer and uninvolved persons are wronged.

_____________

“Qu'elle etait belle la République sous l'Empire”—was the saying in the early days of the Third Republic in France. “Beautiful was the Revolution under the Tsars,” must have come the echo a century later in Soviet Russia. Might we with equal justice say how wonderful the Jewish state was under the Mandate?

The dream and the reality, the myth and the facts: the Revolution, liberation, independence, victory are the myths which lift men out of and above themselves, upon which they focus all their passions and energies. The vision must be made supernaturally glorious, for otherwise men would be unable to summon the necessary resources to suffer, struggle, and die. Since reality cannot possibly come up to these expectations, disenchantment is inevitable. Once the single-minded concentration on the all-embracing goal is relaxed, men return to their selfish petty concerns, and all the problems and difficulties which had been brushed aside or forgotten in the great emergency reassert themselves with a vengeance. Poverty, endemic civil war, bitter social strife, assassination, backwardness in every sphere were the answer to the dreams of Greeks and enthusiastic philhellenes about a renaissance of the most gifted, eternally youthful, and miraculously creative nation. The visions and transports of the Italian Risorgimento, actually badly bruised by repeated humiliating failures on the field of battle, were followed by the dispiriting pettiness and meanness of political life, against the background of the huge Southern cesspool. A blanket of obscurantism and provincialism descended upon the Ireland of the great rebels and the meteoric writers. Poland between the two wars was a sad comment upon the fate of the messianic nationalism of its poets and prophets. Bismarck's Reich was the most powerful nation in the world, but it was drunk with the arrogance of power and squeezed dry of that idealism and those flights of the spirit which in earlier days won the admiration of the world. And what a swampy place present-day India appears to be. But a much more disquieting reflection forces itself upon the contemplative historian. Is it an accident that those countries in which missionary universalist idealism found its loftiest expressions at an earlier age—Italy, Germany, and Russia—eventually became the seats of the most perverse regimes—Fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism?

To these examples, Israel represents a heartening contrast, an illustration if not of complete fulfillment, then certainly not of irretrievable failure. If Israel has by no means escaped an erosion of vision and promise, it has at least so far been saved from perversion.

I spoke earlier of nationalism as marking the primacy of national consciousness over religious self-identification. But nationalism, like revolutionary socialism, is also a secular religion. Independence and statehood were not conceived by the aspiring as a utilitarian instrument for satisfying mundane needs or gratifying the urge for power and the ambition for a spectacular place in the sun. Nationalism generally involved a sense of mission, which postulated dedicated service to a universal ideal—of liberty, of the spirit, of ethical rebirth. The hankering after lost glories, coupled with tribal self-idealization, made the believers feel that they were about to recover their true being, the pure, authentic self which bondage, disunity, and evil influences had buried and caked with filth. The restoration of independence was to be the preordained hour for a totally new start: the redeemed nation would turn its back upon the mistakes, errors, and routine selfishness of the older nations, and would guide itself entirely by the light of reason and justice. At the same time it would maintain the brotherhood steeled in battle, and bring into their own the pristine qualities of the race.

The more so, as usual, the Jews. Simple gratification of individual needs and group desires could never become the declared aim of a Jewish state. Imbued from the beginning of their history as a people with the idea that they must accept a particularly heavy yoke of responsibility because they were charged with the mission of serving as a light unto the nations, the Jews were incapable of finding meaning in a life strictly devoted to the here and now and lacking any transcendental significance. For so long aliens to the normal rivalry for political power, moreover, the Jews had entirely lost any understanding of the urge itself. Hence the distrust and indeed contempt for coercion, militarism, and even the virtues of the warrior.

They fed upon each other, the hatred for the squalor and degradation of the ghetto, and the dream of restoring the rustic simplicities and heroic glory of Biblical times. The air of late 19th-century Russia was thick with populist notions and scorn for the overripe rotten West, and in Germany enthusiastic youth was abandoning itself to the revitalizing magic of nature. Not a few Jewish intellectuals became quite hypnotized by openly or obliquely anti-Semitic theories which depicted the Jew as the representative and germ carrier of cosmopolitan rootlessness, modern alienation, the type of analytical sophistication which kills spontaneity and authenticity of instinct and feeling, and of course as the only begetter of oppressive capitalism, sordid money-making, hypocritical cunning, and urban degeneration. To all this the Zionist ideal of a communal return to the soil constituted an answer. As for those young Russian Zionists who responded with fervor to the socialist challenge, they had to answer the charge of fellow revolutionaries that by trying to take themselves out of Russia and going to Palestine, they were deserting the World Revolution. The deeper, then, became the resolve of the Socialist Zionists to build a model society in their national home.

Political needs thus seemed to coincide with utopian demands. After all, settlement in Palestine was never a commercial proposition. Not only was there precious little profit in it for the individual. The reclamation of the land, the creation of a society of toilers, and the collectivist methods were all necessary to achieve independent nationhood and a balanced social structure, and obviate the danger of becoming a planters' economy in a country with plentiful cheap labor.

_____________

This idealistic social endeavor is sure to remain the most distinctive, most original, and most precious aspect of the Zionist effort in Palestine. Other nations have won signal victories on the battlefield; heroism and martyrdom have been the marks of many a national movement of liberation. But that ferment of social ideas, that intensity of feeling, that sustained dedication to a chosen way of life, that wealth of experiments (the Kibbutz, the Moshav, the Histadrut) in the field of social organization—all this is probably without precedent, especially when we consider the exiguous number of men and the paucity of assets with which everything had to work itself out.

An egalitarian puritanical society emerged, combining in a fine blend the virtues of individual self-reliance and an enthusiastic readiness to join in cooperative endeavor. This has been the main secret of every success scored by the Yishuv—in agriculture, in the struggle for survival and growth, and finally in armed combat. Indeed, nothing has contributed more to the repeated victories over the Arabs, who, owing to Oriental traditions and the heavy hand of Turkish despotism, have lacked both sets of qualities.

Such, then, was the religion of the young Zionists in Eastern and Central Europe. The ideals, the achievements, the myth of Labor Zionism were all of their making. It may be doubted whether these ideals could have been maintained in a modern technological state for any length of time. What is quite certain is that the holocaust destroyed the cadres of potential immigrants required for their continued realization. Hitler lost the war, and no doubt Hitler hastened the establishment of the State of Israel. But Hitler also won a far-reaching victory in depriving Israel of the most precious reservoir of manpower and moral strength to be found in the Jewish world.

For decades before the emergence of the state, arguments had been raging in the Zionist camp on the issue of selective vs. indiscriminate immigration. Those who dreamed of a utopian society naturally favored the former, while those who were weighed down by the predicament of the diaspora and were in haste to achieve statehood clamored for the latter. But the holocaust robbed the debate of all meaning, turning Israel from a country of choice primarily into a place of refuge.

First to be brought in were the survivors of the Nazi massacres in the DP camps and in Eastern Europe; then came the Oriental Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, partly under duress as refugees, partly in response to an inner urge and Zionist inducement. Neither of the two types of new immigrant had much training, aptitude, or taste for the utopian collectivist endeavor. Having led a hunted existence in the years of the war, or having experienced Communist regimentation, the survivors of the Hitler period wanted above all to enjoy the blessings of privacy and security. As for the Oriental Jews, they had not for the most part gone through the mill of socialist teaching. Besides, the family and clan of the patriarchal tradition were still a living reality to those who came from tribal societies and bronze-age civilizations. Romantic, Rousseauist-Tolstoyan slogans of “back to the land,” the philosophy which glorified the university graduate who exchanged his pen or scalpel for a spade or a hammer, became irrelevant when the country was suddenly swamped with hundreds of thousands of newcomers who could handle nothing else but a spade, and when rapid industrialization and modern organization put a premium on high technical training and university education. An extremely egalitarian society, based on voluntary teamwork, changed almost overnight into a managerial society, split into those who manage and those who are managed. And the split was along social, cultural, almost racial lines: Westerners versus Asio-Africans.

The Oriental Jews represent an ancient civilization with a dignity and loyalties of its own, invisible as those may sometimes be to the superficial and impatient outsider. But these are not the values of a modern technological society. Responsible Israelis, anxiously aware of the problem, have made intensive efforts, especially in the field of education, to narrow the gap between Westerner and Oriental. But facts of life are very stubborn, and even the best intentioned and best thought-out programs take a long time to bear fruit, whereas in the modern world, and especially in Israel, time is in very short supply.

Confronted with all these difficulties, Israel has in at least two vital matters been blessed with good fortune. There has been no serious, certainly no effective, attempt on the part of the Oriental Jews to organize themselves into a separate political party. Any such attempt would have been fraught with grave dangers from demagogues and rabble-rousers. As it is, incidents of riot in the course of twenty years can be counted on the fingers of one hand, in spite of housing and unemployment problems. It must also be added that the existing political powers, preponderantly of European origin, have displayed an admirable sense of responsibility. (This includes the opposition party Herut, which finds itself in the anomalous situation of having a Polish leadership and a largely Oriental, particularly Yemenite, following.) The second stroke of good fortune has been the fact that there is no religious militancy among the Oriental Jews, for an alliance between the militant Orthodox of West and East would have imposed an unbearable strain on Israeli society. Traditional and observant though they tend to be, the Oriental Jews are not motivated by any proselytizing urge, and when left free to practice their own brand of Judaism, they do not care what others do. Nor do those of their young who, under the impact of detribalization, drop out, feel any need to fight the faith they have abandoned.

_____________

The inevitable transformation of the pioneers of yesterday into the managers of today has brought into sharp relief the antinomies which arise when a great faith, heroic memories, and a beautiful myth are carried over into the context of a changed reality. The more sincere and firm the idealism of the past, the greater the danger of hypocrisy and even reactionary attitudes in the present. There is the natural unwillingness to see that what was service yesterday is today power, that what was then sacrifice has now become privilege, that what was voluntary confraternity has become coercive hierarchy.

The political parties in Israel are a good example of how this corrosive process works. The parties have every right to look back with pride upon their past. They came into being long before the establishment of the state, not as loose congeries of men becoming active on the eve of an election in order to line up voters behind a given candidate, but as tightly knit confraternities pledged to a strenuous way of life: some were virtually monastic orders. Zionism encouraged a multiplicity of such confraternities in the belief that the Jewish National Home stood to gain from ardent competition among them. Thus the Zionist parties (not, incidentally, unlike the Socialist parties in Germany and Eastern Europe), each embodying a Weltanschauung and a system of ethics of its own, evolved whole networks of cultural, social, economic, and educational institutions—in short, they assumed the character of self-sufficient societies. Upon the establishment of statehood, the Israeli political parties were not only fully organized and well provided for, but fully armed. Mapai controlled the Hagana, Ahdut Avoda had very close links with the Palmach, the Irgun was the army of Herut, and Mizrahi could always summon the hosts of the Lord. The parties thus took over the state to such an extent that it became possible to say with a good deal of truth that Israel was a country where the parties owned the voters rather than the other way around.

In the days of the mandate, immigration certificates were distributed according to the so-called party key—that is, in proportion to the numbers of enrolled members. The party key continues to be consulted today in the division of spoils and jobs. Proportional representation is the inevitable accompaniment, cause, and result of such a philosophy and such a practice. This in turn makes coalition government an unavoidable necessity. Together, proportional representation and the coalition system work to encourage the parties not to bury but to emphasize and even invent political differences. Coalitions are precarious, majorities are weak, and the power of blackmail possessed by small splinter groups considerable. No wonder that Ben-Gurion, who had experienced a full measure of political bazaar haggling, became a bitter enemy of proportional representation and a preacher—to no avail—of the virtues of the majoritarian-regional system.

This state of affairs is calculated to enhance the power of the party machines, to favor the higher age groups, to discourage nonconformism. It is not surprising that the Knesset should have probably the highest age average of any parliament in the world, especially in the left-wing parties, and that a politician who has passed fifty should count himself and be counted by others as among the young revolutionaries. The same state of affairs also explains the dearth of original political thinking in present-day Israel when compared with the daring and originality displayed in the great debates of old.

Following the Six-Day War, the three socialist parties—Mapai, Ahdut Avoda, and Rafi fused into a United Labor Party. On the face of it, this is a promising development. On the other hand, it raises the specter of the perpetuation of this governing party in power, since it threatens to rule out for a long time the emergence of an effective alternative in the form of a middle-class party. Rafi came into existence as a force pledged to fight the corruption that comes from holding power for too long, to replace outworn clichés with critical thinking, and nostalgia with modern empirical methods. It remains to be seen whether the Rafi component will prove able to revitalize the united party or will lose its combative urge in the comfortable embrace of the mother.

_____________

The erosion of aspiring idealism as it comes into possession of power is most strikingly illustrated by the kibbutz. This most original and most impressive achievement of Zionism has exhibited very little creative energy in the last twenty years, while maintaing a very strong hold on the life of the country. Although the kibbutz movement comprises only about 4 per cent of the population of Israel, roughly half the Ministers, probably a third of the Knesset, and a very large number of generals, ambassadors, directors of government departments and public agencies are at least nominal members of a kibbutz. One hastens to add that a quarter of the soldiers, and especially officers, who fell in the last war were sons of the kibbutz. If ever there was a ruling elite, and moreover one not based upon wealth, this is it. It was only natural for the state to tap the finest human material in the country for the most responsible and exacting tasks, but in doing so the state skimmed off the cream of the kibbutz population, leaving the less dynamic elements to carry on.

The state has diminished the functions and status of the kibbutz in many other ways as well. The kibbutz movement made an incalculable contribution to the struggle for independence, but as though to confirm Hegelian dialectics, it was thrown thereafter if not onto the rubbish heap of history, certainly onto the margin of events. Unequipped for the task, and for ideological reasons reluctant to open its gates to all and sundry, it played no part in the great effort of the ingathering of exiles. Besides, the post-1948 immigrants showed little eagerness to knock at its doors, and the few new recruits from among Israeli youth could hardly compensate for the exodus of so many old members into the society at large. The glamor of the kibbutz was being stolen by other institutions—army, state, civil service, science and technology, all of which were crying out for highly trained personnel and claiming the ablest and best.

No longer in the center of the stage, almost forgotten and rendered irrelevant, in spite and partly because of the success of its leading cadres, the kibbutz sank into a malaise. Many began to wonder whether after all the kibbutz was not a transitional phenomenon rather than a form of life with a permanent role to play, apart from serving as a home and refuge for those whom it suited.

_____________

On a broader canvas the problem of the kibbutz in the State of Israel epitomizes the problem of the State of Israel within contemporary world Jewry. The exhaustion of the sources of aliyah in the countries from which the Jews needed and wished to get away on the one hand, and on the other, the lack of any appreciable immigration from the countries where the Jews have a choice, constitute Israel's gravest and in every way most decisive problem. Although little was said openly at the time, nothing shook the Yishuv more than the fact that when a classical Herzlian situation arose in Algeria, with a whole community moving out of a land inhabited by Jews for two millennia and more, most of the Jews preferred to settle in France instead of joining their anxiously waiting brethren in the Jewish state. Zionist philosophy had depicted the creation of the state and the ingathering of exiles as the climax of Jewish history, the great watershed, the great fulfillment. As it became clear that Western Jews had no intention of moving, Zionism began to appear in the eyes of many as only an episode, an aspect of modern Jewish history, not its final vindication—in the last analysis, the solution to a temporary problem of a part of the Jewish people overtaken by an extraordinarily horrible calamity. Israel, then, was a refuge but not the Jewish National Home, heir to the Jewish civilization of the Pale but not the medium for the energies and peculiarities of the millions of Jews all over the world. Zionism on its face had called for the “normalization” of the Jew, but it could never bring that about. An abnormal people, the Jews are driven. Strive they must, justify themselves in their own eyes and in the eyes of others they must. They are unable to take reality as it is for granted. They are hypnotized, now as always, by the idea of ultimate meaning, final denouement.

When the fact that no more Jews were to be expected began to sink in, the feeling of having reached an impasse, of facing a cul de sac, took hold of the Yishuv. Relations with the Arab states were at an unbreakable deadlock. The economic situation was grave. The number of emigrants leaving the country was growing, among them young men born and bred in Israel. Most Israelis were seized by panic at the reports of the fast advancing assimilation of American Jewry. One could hear voices predicting that in two generations no Jews would be left outside Israel, not even in Russia.

No longer the vanguard of the Jewish people and its spearhead, the Yishuv was now experiencing the cold winds of isolation: a ghetto hemmed in by implacable enemies, pledged to drown it in streams of blood. What was it all worth? For whom were they toiling? The self-questioning mood was giving rise to a general crisis of identity. Was there any such thing as a distinctive Jewish culture worth preserving? And would Israel ever be able to create anything in that sphere that would have so strong an appeal as to wean highly sophisticated Jews in the advanced countries away from assimilation?

Young Israelis would react with impatient scorn to the old Zionist slogans, treating them as cant and humbug. At one end of the spectrum, the Canaanites preached dissociation from diaspora Jewry and its traditions, a loving communion with the facts and values growing out of the soil and landscape, a return to pre-Judaic realities, and an attempt to fuse with the non-Jewish inhabitants of the area into a single old-new race. At the other end, there were calls for a repudiation of secularism and a return to an observant mode of Jewish life as the only way of staving off complete assimilation and eventual apostasy.

This spreading malaise joined with traumatic memories of Munich and Auschwitz to make the diplomatic crisis triggered by Nasser's closing of the Straits of Tiran in the spring of 1967 look like proof of a paralyzing loss of nerve. The government was fumbling and stumbling. Israeli emmissaries were knocking at the doors of the chancelleries of the Great Powers for help which would clearly never come. The enemy seemed to hold the initiative and to be defiantly and systematically tightening the rope around the neck of Israel.

_____________

The fantastic victory that came so unexpectedly in June violently propelled the Yishuv into a diametrically opposite mood. All at once Zionism became immensely meaningful again. The Six-Day War was a display of incredible vitality, fighting spirit, and sheer talent, and it activated a new sense of destiny in the Israeli soul. The achievement of “natural frontiers” and the reincorporation of ancient places surrounded by the halo of piety and glory were felt by many to represent an inevitable historic fulfillment. So too the utterly unanticipated magnitude of the wave of solidarity which swept world Jewry in those days awakened hopes that the dry bones of Jewish life in the diaspora were putting on flesh and moving toward the East. Many were also sure that a resurgence of halutzic idealism was about to be witnessed in the country—that Israel, like Athens after the Persian Wars, was on the point of a golden age which would astonish and redeem mankind.

In the full tide of this mood, there were shrill voices to extol the position of Israel as the greatest power in the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean, and to identify power with manifest destiny. There were romantics and mystics who saw the hand of God in this great deliverance, and who condemned any thought of withdrawal or territorial concession as an act of treachery toward the Jewish past and toward the countless generations to come. Such voices contended that any denial of Israel's right to sovereignty over the whole of Palestine would be tantamount to an admission that Zionism had always been wrong. The Balfour Declaration and the Mandate had recognized the rights of the Palestinian Arabs as individuals, but not as a sovereign national entity. Sovereignty over the Holy Land was reserved to the Jews alone. Those Palestinian Arabs who, in spite of the Israeli resolve to guarantee their human and civil rights and to grant them equality, preferred to live in an Arab state, were welcome to emigrate.

Would such a policy not constitute an insurmountable obstacle to peace with the Arab countries? To this objection the new militants replied that the Arabs would only agree to peace if they became convinced that they had no hope of breaking the resolve of Israel; since any sign of weakness only encouraged them in their intransigence, Israel was bound not to yield an inch. And if there was to be no peace, surely the absolute imperative was to stick for strategic reasons to the new frontiers. Some extremists have gone even further than this, asserting that peace might not be desirable for Israel at all, and pointing in support of their view to the bracing effect wars have had on the nation, its pride, and its sense of unity.

The basic and primary assumption behind this line of thought is the expectation of a new large-scale immigration. Failing such an immigration, the proportion of Arabs in the population of “Greater Israel” is sure to grow to the point where it will jeopardize the very Jewishness of Israel and perhaps even the majority status of the Jews. Thus one of the oldest of the new militants exclaims in prophetic ecstasy: Two million new immigrants in two years! And a poet of the same persuasion, but doubtful of the possibility of enticing so many Jews to immigrate, launches a delirious “appeal to the Gentiles”—Norwegians, Dutchmen, Danes, Mexicans, Frenchmen, and Italians: “Let us tell them: come and partake of the wonderful adventure of building Eretz Israel. . . . We will share everything with them. We will give them our pretty daughters for wives and their dark or light skinned women will find men here worthy of the name. We will make it easy for them to convert to Judaism, and those who will not wish to convert can live here as a sympathetic minority of Christians and atheists, tied to us in heart and soul, as citizens.”

It is skepticism as to the possibility of a new large-scale immigration that lies behind the moderate attitudes current in Israel. How, in the first place, does one evaluate the upsurge of pro-Israel anxiety and sympathy among the Jews in the diaspora in the spring of 1967? Did it mark a turning point, or was it no more than the sign of a resolve not to allow a second holocaust in the 20th century, a threat which the Arabs did their best to make appear imminent, acting in this way as Israel's most effective public relations officers?

The dialogue between Israelis and American Jews is bedeviled by a fundamental misunderstanding. The older generation of East-European Zionists in Israel appears to see no difference between the situation of the Jews in America and that of the Jews in pre-war Poland and Rumania where they did in fact constitute a separate civilization and indeed nation, and were considered aliens by the great majority of the Gentile population. These older Zionists do not understand that American Jewry, like its counterpart communities in other Western countries, has been moving into a position resembling that of the descendants of the French Huguenots expelled from France by Louis XIV—a people who maintain certain distinct traditions and proud memories, but who in all other respects have become indistinguishable from their fellows in a national partnership based on a pluralistic social system. Such a people is hardly likely to experience the yearning for the untrammeled Jewish existence that an older generation of East European Jews went to Palestine to seek.

Turning now from the hawks to the doves, we find them making the following case. The Jewish right to Palestine, say the doves, was based not only upon history and sentiment, but derived its strength and urgency from the desperate needs of homeless Jews. It was these needs that gained the Zionist cause recognition and support and also gave primacy to the Jewish right in its clash with the right of the Arabs. Even so, the Jews agreed to partition as a way out of a clash between the two rights.

And the doves continue: Should it prove impossible to settle the conquered areas with new Jewish immigrants—and it is almost certain to prove impossible, given the extreme unlikelihood of an aliyah from either America or Russia, at least in the foreseeable future—those lands would in fact be territory held by troops and police, even if Israel could manage to set up a few isolated kibbutzim in strategic spots. However noble may be the sentiment of attachment to ancient and hallowed places associated with the history of Judaism, territory densely populated by Arabs, say the doves, is no asset, only a liability. No casuistry will do away with the fact that just as the Jews once refused to be treated as a crowd without national identity, so do the Arabs of the West Bank now. And it does not become the Jews who fought so hard for national recognition to deny it to others.

_____________

The mystics and romantics, like the simple hawks, dismiss the elementary fact of the rising Arab birthrate with all kinds of facetious arguments and hopes: Jews will begin to multiply like rabbits while Arab women will learn to use the pill. I can well remember from my own experience in Poland with what anger, ill will, and fear the arrival of a new Jewish child was greeted by most of the local Gentiles. Speaking now for myself, I would not wish to see the Jews of Israel wracking their brains over how to stem the natural increase of Arabs, as the ancient Egyptians did in regard to the Israelites in their midst: “lest they multiply.”

Without voicing such sentiments openly, some hawkish mystics are almost on the lookout for anti-Semitism, on the assumption that “the worse the better”—if egged on by fear of persecution, diaspora Jews will emigrate to Israel. The doves point to the lessons of 20th-century anti-Semitism, to its seemingly preordained tendency to run out its full murderous course on a global scale, and to the lessons of the twenty years of Israel's existence, which show that a strong diaspora is the only safe ally of Israel, while a proud Israel is the greatest source of inspiration to the diaspora.

The grand debate which is going on now in Israel reminds one of the furious controversy which convulsed the socialist movement at the turn of the century, between the revisionists led by Eduard Bernstein and the radical messianic believers. Obsessed with the vision of the preordained Revolution at the end of an apocalyptic crisis, the latter would refuse to pay attention to facts, to consider figures, or to listen to arguments. Many of those who claimed that “the worse the better” (for the Revolution) ended up in the Third International, and quite a few—a fact not usually remembered—in the Fascist leadership.

Horrible, maddening, exasperating is Arab terror, sabotage, arson, mine-laying, sniping, murder in the dark of the night. The Israeli government cannot escape or evade its duty to extend protection to life, limb, and property. All the same, guerrilla terrorism is a fact of life in occupied countries—and much as Israelis abhor and reject the title of occupying power, that is what they are to the Arabs. The Israeli armed forces are as humane as any soldiery could be, and they conducted the last war in as civilized and chivalrous a spirit as any in history (witness the beautiful speech of General Rabin upon receiving his honorary doctorate from the Hebrew University and the recently published symposium of veterans of the war). Nevertheless, it will be impossible for the Israeli soldier and for the Yishuv in general to escape the corroding effects of the atmosphere of fear and emergency which has already been generated by Arab terrorism. The argument of all hawks in all times and countries has always been that the resolute and determined deployment of overwhelming force is the shortest and safest way to peace, since it convinces the adversary that he has no chance. But hawks tend to forget that the enemy is likely to be persuaded of the same argument, and if he is too weak for a face-to-face confrontation of regular armies, he will resort to more and more intensive guerrilla operations, provoking his antagonist into more and more violent responses. And we know with what ease even humane men slide into inhumanity when thrown off balance by such provocation or through the removal of natural restraints.

But there is a less obvious and more insidious danger. The history of national ideologies, and indeed also of religious and social movements, is full of examples of the way in which a messianic creed of mission and service can change into an arrogant claim of dominion once it has gained power. From the desire to serve as a light unto others, it evolves into the conviction of its destiny to expand, conquer, and rule.

“A great victory,” wrote Nietzsche in the after-math of the Prussian defeat of France in 1870, “is a great danger. Human nature sustains it with greater difficulty than a defeat. Indeed, it seems easier to win such a victory than to sustain it in a way that no great defeat comes from it . . . the defeat, rather the extinction of the German spirit before the German Reich.”

_____________

I have too much faith in the fundamental humanity and sanity of the Jews to expect them to undergo a degeneration of this kind. But I am not enough of a chauvinist to believe that the Jews are exempt from the snares and perversions which lie in wait for all mankind. Should Israel be overtaken by the nemesis which has so often befallen other idealistically aspiring nations, the June war would indeed prove a momentous turning point, but in a direction that would make for one of the great ironies of history. For an Israel which lost its old bearings—Jewish, liberal, and idealistic—would become repulsively similar to the arch persecutors of the Jews. It would alienate the diaspora Jews—whose interests, instincts, and convictions propel them into a quite opposite direction—and it would forfeit the sympathetic attention and anxious good will of that part of world public opinion which has been a source of strength to the state. While it is the height of unrealism for Israel to expect other nations to fight its wars for it and to hasten to its help in times of trouble, it is no less silly and dangerous to fall into the opposite mood of writing off world public opinion altogether. Greater powers than Israel have found that opinion supremely important.

It may, of course, turn out that Israel will have no real choices at all, because inexorable circumstances may prevent it from being placed in a situation to make any. The Arabs—it is plausibly claimed—are unlikely to budge from their sulky obstinacy on the matter of a negotiated settlement. For decades they had been obsessed by memories of past glories and prophecies of future greatness, and at the same time confronted with the injury and shame of having had an alien race injected by imperialism into the nerve center of their promised empire. The effect was to make them almost incapable of setting their minds to anything else, or of seeing anything on its own merits and as unrelated to the central grievance. Everything had, as it were, to be suspended until that wrong could be redressed. Since the June war was to be the great day of reckoning, it is easy to imagine what a shock the defeat has been to the Arab world. Instead of the pan-Arab unity and the social revolution which were to be achieved in one stroke by a victorious national upsurge, which was not only to bring about political unification, but also to enable the Arab nation to come into its inheritance by seizing the immense oil wells from the hands of feudal sheikhs and tribal chiefs, there came utter humiliation, loss of large territories, and internal dissension. Hostages of their own rhetoric and the passions it has aroused, the Arab leaders are unable to take any step which cool reason may whisper into their ears in more sober moments. All this makes it highly unlikely that they will agree to negotiations: Nasser because he believes Egypt can live without maintaining any relations with Israel, and hopes that the Powers will force Israel to remove its troops from the canal, Hussein because he dare not start negotiations alone and because he is not master in his own house.

Since hardly anyone in Israel would countenance a withdrawal from the occupied territories without some negotiated settlement, the chances are that conditions will be left hanging for an indefinite period. Il n'y a que le provisoire qui dure. In such a permanently provisional state, Israel might not be able to work up the necessary determination to go all out in one direction or the other: integrate or not integrate the new territories, with all the cost, effort, and trouble that would be entailed by either course; embark upon unilateral schemes for resettling the refugees—a task indeed beyond our means or strengths—or wait for some international action and funds, and keep the sore festering. And so we come back to the problems and dangers involved in Israel's remaining an occupying power. I do not share the optimistic view that time works for Israel and the longer we stay in the new territories without any settlement, interfering as little as possible with the internal affairs of the Arabs on the West Bank or with trade with the East bank, the better for Israel. Possession and power establish facts and facts are sure to obtain recognition as rights. While questioning this assumption on practical grounds, which have already been adduced, I would also make an emphatic distinction between what we may be compelled to do and what we should work for and aspire to.

It is sometimes suggested that the implicit refusal to allow power and all that comes with it to the Jews derives from the semi-anti-Semitic or masochistic presupposition that Jews are by definition supposed to be weak and persecuted. Is it not time for everyone, including the Jews themselves, to stop discriminating against Jews even in that field, and recognize them as normal?

The Great Power vision now being fostered by some Israelis is extremely parochial in its assumptions. Israelis have proved themselves strong against the Arabs in face-to-face combat. In the context of the wider world of immense power alignments, however, the battles between the Israelis and the Arabs, profoundly significant as the things at stake in them most assuredly are, assume the dimensions of a minor little game.

Here, then, we must broaden our canvas.

_____________

The State of Israel came into being in 1948 through Soviet-American agreement; the Suez crisis was resolved in 1956-57 because the two superpowers wanted it to be.

It is said that in the early days of Israel Ben-Gurion would instruct a diplomat going abroad to “do everything possible to please the Americans and nothing to displease the Russians.” That balance could not be maintained for long.

Soviet support for partition in 1947-48 was an isolated episode. Although it was greeted with jubilation by Zionist left-wingers, to whom consistent Soviet hostility had been a source of deep chagrin, the motive of the Russians, as soon became unmistakably clear, had been to get Britain out of Palestine; there had been no change of heart in regard to Zionism. Nor can any such change be expected so long as the U.S. and the USSR are locked in rivalry.

It is impossible under any circumstances for Israel to adopt an anti-American attitude or even to defy American wishes for any length of time in a vital matter. The reasons are too obvious to need elaboration. This is well known to the Russians, and from it they draw extreme conclusions. Russia is surrounded by American bases, and it is very important for her to have allies and friends and bases behind the American bases—in other words, in Syria, Egypt, Iraq. The Russians think in quantities, and thus conclude that even if Israel could be weaned away from America, the strategic value of the large Arab territories, not to mention the oil they contain, makes the Arab world a much more worthwhile ally. The Soviets ask themselves also the simple question: who pays for it? He who pays has the say. Since totalitarian regimes would never allow, in fact could not even conceive, that a group of citizens could have a kind of foreign policy of their own which differs from or is not dictated by the government, they are bound to conclude that through the intermediary of American Jewry, Israel is of course an American puppet and agent.

There are other considerations behind Russian policy as well. Insofar as it has been stirring up Jewish sentiment among the Russian Jews, making this “undigestible” group still more difficult to digest, Israel is resented by the Soviet government as a nuisance and an irritant. The social achievements of the Israeli Labor movement, far from impressing the Bolsheviks, evoke contemptuous hostility: how dare a tiny country like Israel presume to build socialism better than Russia itself! Similarly the demand to permit emigration from Russia to Israel must appear as an anti-Soviet device, implying as it does a vote of no confidence in the achievements and nature of the regime.

Thus, while not motivated by conventionally anti-Semitic convictions and aims, the Soviet Union is almost objectively, to use its own language, led to adopt policies which, given the murderous hostility of the Arabs and the role of Israel in the post-holocaust period of Jewish history, amount to a definite threat to the survival of the Jewish people. Particularly horrifying is the Soviet-Arab sponsorship of an updated version of the Protocols of Zion: the Zionist-American-Imperialist world plot, operating not only against Arabs, Asians, and Africans, but also against all the socialist regimes, causing economic difficulties, student unrest, Catholic intransigence.

We have traveled a long way from the revolutionary universalism of Marx which recognized neither Jew nor Greek nor Gentile, but only workers and capitalists.

And yet, there is a glimmer of hope that the inexorable compulsions of modern technology and warfare may still work to bring about a Russo-American agreement to resolve the Arab-Israel conflict, once the Vietnam imbroglio is out of the way. As a very great power, Russia finds it extremely difficult to do nothing for the Arabs beyond replacing the arms they have lost, and to take Israeli defiance lying down. At the same time, there can be no doubt, the Soviet Union will never risk a nuclear war over the Middle East, any more than the United States will. This may induce the two super-powers to search for a face-saving formula for a Middle Eastern settlement; and prayer within hope: a solution that would give Israel, if not all the large tracts of territory craved by the maximalists, at least Jerusalem, reasonable frontiers, free passage through the Straits, and a greater measure of security. The fear of being sold down the river as a result of a U.S.-USSR agreement which torments many Israelis derives from traumatic experiences like Munich.

Absolute security is unattainable in this world. “Thou hadst grasped too much, thou hast grasped nothing,” is the ancient Hebrew saying. And there is Hegel's dictum on “the impotence of victory” that leads to no repose, but only to new complications, and finally to exhaustion and death. Just as Israel insists that the Arabs must recognize its right to exist as the first premise of any settlement, so must Israel be willing to base its thinking on that principle of reciprocity without which there can be no give and take and no real morality. Jews have been able to exist and prosper only where reciprocity has obtained; where an exclusive claim based on superior power or supposedly higher right has prevailed, Jews have always been the first victims. Of course any discussion of reciprocity must take into account the fact that while the aim of the Israelis, even of the annexationist minority, is security, the Arabs have indicated all too frequently their determination to wipe Israel off the map.

_____________

The time may have come for the Israeli government to put its cards on the table. It is no secret that the real reason for its reticence up until now has been indecision brought about by internal dissension as well as by infirmity of purpose. As a consequence, the practice of waiting for something to turn up has become official Israeli policy, as if what turns up will necessarily be to Israel's benefit (in fact, given certain circumstances, what can turn up might conceivably be a Soviet blitz attack on Israel—an attack accomplished too quickly and too thoroughly for the West to declare war on Russia—or even a sudden leap into the arena by China). Statements by official Israeli leaders have been masterpieces of equivocation, unlikely to win the respect of the world. Even General Dayan, who has not only shown himself to be a most liberal administrator, but has displayed a refreshingly chivalrous understanding of the national susceptibilities of the Arabs, has been known to use such Delphic language as this: “Their [the Arabs'] political self-expression may assert itself in the parliament of Jordan or in the Knesset”—no small difference! One wonders whether, in his most recent statement, David Ben-Gurion has not again been the first to voice what others have not yet gained sufficient maturity to say: “If the alternatives were the old borders and peace, or the entirety of Eretz Israel without peace—I would choose little Israel and peace.”

The Jewish people is not made to live by the sword. It is a token of small faith to fear that peace will make Israel sluggish and careless. Why should it not become a stimulant for spiritual creativeness and social endeavor? Jewish history is a story of unlimited impossibilities. There is no telling what effect the shock of peace may have on a nation which has known so much turmoil and torment.