To the Editor:

Is Israel the Jewish state? There is probably no more crucial and, in a sense simple, question in Jewish life today. It is discouraging to find a man of Professor Shlomo Avineri’s caliber avoiding meaningful discussion of it, indeed even escaping from it, in the relentless progression of distortions and outright misrepresentations which characterized his review of my book, The Aryanization of the Jewish State [December 1967].

Avineri’s first substantive charge is that I failed to imply what I meant in referring to what I called the fundamental Zionist ambition of “Aryanizing” the Jewish people. Obviously I cannot repeat here all the points I made in the two chapters which I devoted to this matter, the first dealing primarily with the image of the East European Jew and his shtetl as projected in the novels of the Maskilim; the second with Herzl’s bizarre Utopia, Altneuland. It seems to me that the evidence contained in those chapters rather convincingly illustrates the contention that the Zionists acknowledged the validity of anti-Semitic stereotypes of the Jew and sought to build a new Jewish society which would aim at placating those stereotypes. Avineri however dismisses all this evidence as onesided and distorted. Yehezkel Kaufmann, the eminent Zionist publicist and distinguished Hebrew University biblical scholar whom I cited, was hardly of this opinion. “We have been suffering from the disease of Jewish anti-Semitism,” he wrote, “ever since the Haskalah. . . . The poison that flows from Jewish nationalist sources is perhaps the most dangerous of them all. . . . Zionism actually based [my emphasis] the national movement on a rationale of charges that it took over from the anti-Semites and endeavored to find a core of justice in the hatred of Jews.”

The only substantive point in this section of the discussion which Avineri attributes to me is the Zionist postulate of inverting the allegedly “lopsided” occupational pyramid of East European Jewry. A distinguished professor of political science should know better than to accept as axiomatic the postulates of a political movement with a highly sophisticated propaganda machine. The Russian census of 1897 (the first ever taken) revealed that 21 per cent of all factory workers in the Pale were Jews and that more Jews were employed in manufacturing than in commerce or agriculture. Yet even at that late date there were 190,000 Jews engaged in agriculture, for the most part the hardy remnants of the Jewish colonization of Siberia undertaken during the reign of Nicholas 1. Surely this data, discussed in my book, suggests that if the Jewish social structure in East Europe was neither “viable nor commendable” (Avineri’s words) then it was so because of the lack of a middle class rather than because of what the Zionists enjoyed calling Jewish middle-class “parasitism.”

Another point on which Avineri comes across as a propagandist rather than as the serious thinker which I know him to be: if, as he suggests, the massacre of six million Jews by the Nazis proved that Dubnow was “wrong” and the Zionists “right,” then how does he explain the fact that our ears have been ringing all this summer with strident, panicky reminders of the danger of a new genocide in the Middle East if Israel had been conquered?

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Most inconclusive is Avineri’s discourse on the Oriental problem in Israel. It strikes me as sheer dishonesty—prompted no doubt by an understandable impulse of guilt—that he should have written “the only concrete example cited by Selzer to prove his thesis of ‘cultural genocide’ is the Israeli law prohibiting polygamy.” I did in fact develop and demonstrate this thesis with a large number of examples on pages 62 to 78 of my book: one of the indications of this policy which I discussed most closely was the question of school curricula on which Avineri himself comments in his review. Was he not aware that the imposition of a Western curriculum (in such subjects as literature, history, and even geography) on a preponderantly Oriental student body could be regarded as an instance of “cultural genocide”? As a sophisticated . . . and eminent European Israeli, Professor Avineri should surely have acknowledged the distinction between “modernization” and “Westernization.” But perhaps not: while accusing me of “genteel paternalistic racism” for suggesting that it is possible to be both non-Western and “modern,” Avineri caustically asks if I propose that Israel should “cut out science and math in school? Turn the Weizmann Institute into an Academy for Mysticism? Dismantle industry, turn Israeli farmers into fellahin?” This racism is neither genteel nor paternalistic; . . . it confirms beautifully my point that social thinking in Israel is conditioned by an outdated, racist social Darwinism which assumes that non-Western cultures simply do not have it in them to master modern science and technology.

As for the Oriental Jew in Israeli politics, I thought that I had made the point clearly, but again Professor Avineri seems to have avoided it. In the highly centralized Israeli political party system the acknowledged capture of local centers of power (e.g., in the development towns) by no means necessarily points the way to eventual Oriental influence in the national centers. Incidentally—a correction of fact: I did not point out that Oriental lists were never successful in winning any Knesset seats. Avineri should have known that they were successful in the first three Knessets; he is, after all, an Israeli political scientist. It is scandalous of him to suggest that my understanding of this problem is limited by my ignorance of Hebrew as indicated by the alleged fact that I cite only from English-language publications. Among the Hebrew publications from which I cited are Divrei Haknesset, Bama’arachah, Davar, Ammot, and the reports of the “Emunah” circle. I repeat my contention however that the most valuable publications in this subject have, significantly enough, appeared in English—notably those of Shumsky, Weingrod, and Zenner. Israeli sociologists . . . have been fantastically backward in getting to grips with this problem. . . .

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In the light of all this, it must be asked whether Professor Avineri’s review really can be considered a serious and substantive discussion of my contention that Israel can in no meaningful way be considered the Jewish state. Israel had its origins in an ideology aimed explicitly at negating and rejecting the Jewish identity. The realities of Israeli society, of ethnic tensions in Israel, of a growingly dangerous and spiritually crippling Kulturkampf between secularists and clericalists; the violent intolerance shown toward the Arab world which parallels that shown by the Arabs toward Israel—all this gives little hope of demonstrating that Israel embodies, or has the potential of embodying, the normative ethical values of Judaism. At the outset of his review Professor Avineri observes, “an impressive mass of data and facts has been assembled; historical perspectives have been traced; all the right quotations adduced” in my book. He then . . . attempts to demonstrate the very reverse of this, accusing me of slogan-mongering, failing to substantiate assertions, etc. It would surely have been more appropriate for him to try to come to grips with what he himself called the “impressive mass of data and facts” I presented. My sole point in this book was really to present that data and then ask if it could possibly relate to a Jewish state—basically a very simple procedure. Unlike Professor Avineri, I cannot claim to be a sophisticate. That is why, as he correctly suggests, my earlier Zionism undoubtedly was “naive.” . . . It was “naive” because I assumed that the so-called Jewish state would really be a Jewish state in something more than merely the demographic sense. Equally, my anti-Zionism must now be considered, as he suggests, “naive.” I am an anti-Zionist because I do not see that Israel is in a normative or inspirational sense Jewish; nor do I see any reason for assuming that it ever will be. . . .

Michael Selzer
New York City

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Mr. Avineri writes:

Even one who agreed completely with Michael Selzer’s anti-Zionist premises would have wished for his attack on the social and cultural context of Zionism to be better informed. Equating Herzl with the shtetl mentality is absurd enough; reducing Herzl’s theory of Zionism to references to his literary Utopia Altneuland is as honest as trying to debunk socialism by pointing out that Cabet’s or Proudhon’s social Utopias contain a lot of nonsense. A real confrontation with Herzlean Zionism would have to deal with his political tracts, like Der Judenstaat, and a real confrontation with Zionist ideology would not be able to limit itself to Herzl. Immense as Herzl’s influence has been on Jewish public opinion in Europe, the real ideological underpinning of the social revolution in emerging Jewish society in Palestine (and Israel) draws far more on the writings of people like Leo Pinsker, Dov Borochov, Berl Katz-nelson, and others who may not be well known outside Israel, but whose writings are crucial to an understanding of the unique (and sometimes perhaps bizarre) nature of Israeli society. It is this understanding which is so lamentably missing from Selzer’s book.

Few people would disagree that the Haskala’s views on Jewish history were sometimes simpleminded and distorted. But Selzer seems to overlook the fact that the Haskala itself, as well as Zionism and mass-immigration to the West, were responses to the basically intolerable circumstances in which the Jews of Eastern Europe found themselves toward the end of the 19th century. Jewish misery and Eastern European anti-Semitism were locked in a vicious circle. The existence of a sizable Jewish population in the midst of growing Eastern European nationalism was basically unviable and impossible. Immigration to the West, as well as Zionism, were two answers, on different levels, to this particular plight. If fundamentalist Zionists view only the Zionist solution as legitimate, Selzer makes the opposite error of viewing only the non-Zionist solution as legitimate. On the grounds of his pluralistic premises, Selzer should at least view both of them as equally legitimate.

Selzer tries to explain his total disregard of the capture of local Israeli politics by the Oriental ethnic vote with a reference to what he calls the highly centralized party structure in Israel, which makes such local shifts inconsequential. This again shows his recurring inability to grasp social dynamics. What he calls the centralism of Israeli political parties has always been based on a coalition, within each party (and especially within Mapai) of the local machine bosses; the ensuing centralization was a consequence of the rather homogeneous composition of the Israeli political elite. However, with the entry of a socially different element into more and more arenas of local politics and power, strains have begun to be clearly visible at the center, and new coalitions are already being formed within each of the parties. In these coalitions, the power of the new local Oriental bosses is becoming more and more significant. The most casual examination of changes in the composition of the central party machines bears this out, yet Selzer never troubled himself to look into this issue. . . .

Selzer maintains that the crucial question is, “Is Israel the Jewish state?” But in this formulation the question is as meaningless as asking “Is America the Capitalist society?” or “Is the Soviet Union the Communist state?” Since Selzer agrees in the opening chapter of his book that the connotation of “Jewish” is multi-dimensional and hence pluralistic, there is no one meaning to his question and hence the number of possible explications of the term “Jewish.” In other words, the question is meaningless given Selzer’s own premises. But it raises another problem: some of us in Israel believe that no one Jewish community can legislate the “Jewishness” of another Jewish community. Just as few Israelis would agree today with the fundamentalist position once aired by old-time leaders—that one cannot be Jewish unless one lives in Israel—so would very few take seriously an attempt from the outside to tell Israel how to be “Jewish.” Just as the Jewishness of American Jews should be left, for better or for worse, to them, so should the Jewishness of Israel be left to the Israelis. The question is not “Is Israel the Jewish state?” but whether a person can consider himself Jewish in any meaningful sense without being concerned about Israel, whatever his criticism of or misgivings about Israel may be. It is here that Selzer’s answer is so disappointing—and so basically irresponsible to his own liberal and pluralistic premises.