Our CONTENTIONS colleague David Hazony has a piece in the new issue of The New Republic on the question of whether Israel is a normal country, or should even want to be. David writes that

from its inception, Zionism embodied two conflicting moods: the need for normalcy and the longing for uniqueness. The Jews who went to Palestine sought both. But, perhaps because the dream of normalizing was so grand and the work required so consuming, no one really noticed the inner tension between normalcy and uniqueness, or at least the need to figure out what, exactly, needed to be normal, and what special.

Israeli normalcy is tightly intertwined with the Israeli obsession with legitimacy, the longing for the Jewish state to be accepted in the same way that other nations are accepted. In this, I take a slightly different tack than does David, who argues that Israelis should try to step away from the question of normalcy, and thereby add a touch of normalcy to their existence. After all, how many other peoples dwell so insistently on the question of their nation’s legitimacy, as do Israelis? Yet I think the prevalence of such existential questions has much less to do with the Israeli state of mind than with the refusal of so many to allow the Jewish state to take its place among the other nations.

One of the goals of Zionism was to take the diseased and often brutal relationship between gentile and Jew and elevate it to a new plane, so that Jews could interact with the gentile world in the realm of nation-states. By assuming the responsibilities of sovereignty, Jews would re-enter history on what was hoped to be an equal footing with those who in exile had been their tormentors. That project has been a dreamscape of success, insofar as Israel today is an economic, political, and military powerhouse. But it has been a failure insofar as the same diseased and brutal relationship that once existed between Jews and gentiles in the Diaspora has, in important ways, simply been replicated in the international discourse between Israel and other nations. There is probably no solution to this; Israel will never be permitted to be normal.

It strikes me as not a coincidence that the nation which has embraced its Jews more than any other in history — America — happens to be the same nation which today stands as Israel’s closest friend.