Humiliating as it may be for Jews to see themselves as the tool, the instrument, of other peoples’ politics, the predicament of the State of Israel cannot be understood without grasping its function in the politics of other nations. The Arab alliance with the Soviet bloc demonstrated how the old kind of opposition to the Jews as a resident minority (in Russia) could combine with the new kind of opposition to the Jewish state to forge a practical partnership that may have had other common objectives, but was cemented by common hostility to the Jews. The resolution equating Zionism with racism that prevailed during the years of this alliance came straight out of the arsenal of Soviet Communism, and proved of incalculable benefit to the Arabs by associating their language of rejectionism with the Left rather than with the Right. Although the fall of the Soviet Union shattered that alliance, the eventual revocation of the resolution did not erase the potency of its charge, which held Israel morally responsible for the aggression leveled against it, and undermined Israel’s credibility as a liberal cause. Anti-Jewishness has been a rallying point for Islamism, even beyond the borders of the Middle East, and it provides the link, whenever necessary, between religious militants and secular nationalists. Opposition to Jews is used by Islamic extremists to win converts among American blacks, tapping into the anti-Jewishness in Christianity, which is otherwise waning in America. In sum, anti-Zionism functions in Arab politics in the same way that anti-Semitism did in Europe, as an explanation for whatever frustrates the population. And, as in Europe, the usefulness of the Jewish presence as a political target dictates the ferocity of the war against it.

Having come to appreciate the Jews as a no-fail target, Israel’s enemies continue to treat the country as the Jews had been treated in the diaspora. This is not to deny that significant changes have taken place, and it is certainly not meant to encourage a sense of fatality. Israel has won recognition from most of the nations in the world. Its international status has steadily improved. The UN recently agreed to include Israel in the WEOG (Western Europe and Other Governments) group, removing the final barrier to its complete “legal equality.” The International Red Cross is on the point of extending recognition to the Magen David Adom. The signed peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan at least establish the possibility of political reciprocity, even if the goal of mutual respect is now honored by the Arabs mostly in the breach.

But over time, the protracted Arab siege led many of Israel’s leaders and thinkers to revert to the traditional Jewish politics of complementarity, and to attempt to use accommodationist politics under the conditions of sovereignty. The whole fantasy of “peace” is based on Israel’s judgment that the surrender of territory will pacify resolute aggressors, although political history yields no such evidence, and plenty of evidence to the contrary. The Oslo accords of 1993 made Israel the first sovereign nation in memory to arm its declared enemy with the expectation of gaining security. In the vision he set forth in The New Middle East, Shimon Peres declared that at the turn of the twenty-first century, “national political organizations can no longer fulfill the purpose for which they were established—that is, to furnish the fundamental needs of the nation.”³¹ Peres is dismissing the ideal of national self-reliance in favor of the internationalism that so many Jews cultivated before the birth of the state, and this in the face of Arab nationalism of which the Palestinian variety is merely the most proximate and vocal. Clearly, the familiar sensation of being overpowered is eliciting from Israelis the old strategies of self-adaptation, without thought that these strategies have been discredited beyond a doubt.

Because the politics of adaptation and accommodation are the cause of the unique kind of hostility that is leveled against the Jews, nothing is better guaranteed to stimulate that hostility than such a strategy of accommodation. The moral problem facing the Jews is thus exactly the opposite of what David Hartman claims in his rendering of the Jewish political tradition. The unique political experiment of the Jews has made them subject to an opposite set of temptations from the ones that confront their neighbors. Other nations may worry about the corruption of power; the Jews have to worry about the corruption of powerlessness. Other nations may suffer from the urge for political conquest. The Jews are defined by their hunger for acceptance. In order to fulfill the moral challenges of statehood without falling prey to the temptations of political dependency, Israel has to use Jewish power on behalf of national interests until her enemies learn to relate to her as a sovereign power. Israeli citizens and Jews around the world have to accept that political independence requires them to function as a competitive polity that has to hold on to the precious bounty of land and sovereignty against adversaries who may never cease wanting what they possess. Clearly, if peace is really the goal, Jews have to convince the world that they expect others to accommodate to them.

The Jews stand between two massive political failures—the destruction of their sovereignty at the hands of Rome, and of the diaspora experiment at the hands of the Germans. They cannot return to the politics of exile, but must somehow learn to hold on to their piece of soil. A people with so weak a political record must attend to its political behavior above all else, and learn to test its idea of morality first and foremost against the standard of political sanity. Zionism was the beginning, not the end of a process. The same people that launched the experiment of adaptation has the creative ability and energy to learn from its failures, and to craft a new politics of responsible autonomy that will insist on political reciprocity as its natural right. Even patterns of centuries are not impossible to change. The political revision that Zionism began is for the Jewish people to continue.

1.^­ Salo Wittmayer Baron, The Jewish Community: Its History and Structure to the American Revolution (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1948), vol. 1, p. 28.

2.^­ Hermann Cohen, “Graetz’s Philosophy of Jewish History,” in Alan L. Mittleman, The Scepter Shall Not Depart from Judah: Perspectives on the Persistence of the Political in Judaism (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2000), p. 35.

3.^­ Cohen, “Graetz’s Philosophy,” p. 38.

4.^­ Simon Dubnow, Nationalism and History: Essays on Old and New Judaism, ed. Koppel S. Pinson (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1958), p. 80.

5.^­ Dubnow, Nationalism and History, p. 99.

6.^­ Haim Hazaz, “The Sermon,” trans. Ben Halpern, in Robert Alter, ed., Modern Hebrew Literature (New York: Behrman, 1975), p. 274.

7.^­ Hazaz, “The Sermon,” p. 275.

8.^­ Daniel J. Elazar, “The Themes of the Jewish Political Studies Review,” in Jewish Political Studies Review 1:1-2, Spring 1989, p. 1. He dates the beginning of modern Jewish political studies from the appearance of the first bibliographical essay in the American Jewish Yearbook 1969.

9.^­ Ismar Schorsch, “On the History of the Political Judgment of the Jew,” in Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover: University of New England, 1994), p. 121.

10.^­ Schorsch, “Political Judgment of the Jew,” p. 122.

11.^­ Schorsch, “Political Judgment of the Jew,” p. 128.

12.^­ Schorsch, “Political Judgment of the Jew,” p. 129.

13.^­ Mendelsohn’s compressed handbook, On Modern Jewish Politics, provides a new terminology for discussion of that history. Ezra Mendelsohn, On Modern Jewish Politics (New York: Oxford, 1993). Eli Lederhendler’s work is especially valuable in the way it builds a conceptual model of Jewish political development, and integrates the study of internal institutions with Jewish “diplomatic and foreign relations.” Eli Lederhendler, The Road to Modern Jewish Politics: Political Tradition and Political Reconstruction in the Jewish Community of Tsarist Russia (New York: Oxford, 1989). See also Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus Affair: ‘Ritual Murder,’ Politics and the Jews in 1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1997).

14.^­ David Hartman, “Foreword,” in The Jewish Political Tradition, vol. 1: Authority, eds. Michael Walzer et al. (New Haven: Yale, 2000), p. xiv.

15.^­ Hartman, “Foreword,” p. xiv.

16.^­ Werner Sombart gave an ingenious, or disingenuous, explanation of the Jewish racial character when he wrote that “the Jew’s inherent ‘Nomadism’ or ‘Saharism’ (if I may coin the words) was always kept alive through selection or adaptation. Throughout the centuries… Israel has remained a desert and nomadic people.” Werner Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism, trans. Mordechai Epstein (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1982), p. 328.

17.^­ Jane S. Gerber, The Jews of Spain: A History of the Sephardi Experience (New York: Free Press, 1992), p. 39.

18.^­ Sholom Ash, Kiddush Ha-Shem: An Epic of 1648, trans. Rufus Learsi (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1926), p. 64.

20.^­ The linguistic record of modern Jews may be represented by the ten percent of Nobel Prize winners for Literature in this century who were born Jews. Only two wrote in Jewish languages, S.Y. Agnon (1966) in Hebrew and Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978) in Yiddish. Of the others, Paul Heyse (1910), Nelly Sachs (1966) and Elias Canetti (1981) wrote in German; Henri Bergson (1927) in French; Boris Pasternak (1958) and Joseph Brodsky (1987) in Russian; Saul Bellow (1976) and Nadine Gordimer (1991) in English.

21.^­ Lederhendler, The Road to Modern Jewish Politics, pp. 33-34.

22.^­ Shlomo Dov Goitein, “Political Conflict and the Use of Power in the World of the Geniza,” in Daniel J. Elazar, ed., Kinship and Consent: The Jewish Political Tradition and Its Contemporary Uses (Washington: University Press of America, 1983), p. 177.

23.^­ Gerson D. Cohen, “Changing Perspectives of Jewish Historiography,” in Gerson D. Cohen, Jewish History and Jewish Destiny (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1997), p. 172. The talk in which these paragraphs figure was delivered in 1971. Some years later, I heard Gerson Cohen deliver a much fuller lecture on these ideas in Montreal, but to the best of my knowledge, it was never published.

24.^­ Genesis 49:10.

25.^­ Hyam Maccoby, ed. and trans., Judaism on Trial: Jewish-Christian Disputations in the Middle Ages (East Brunswick: Associated University Presses, 1982), p. 149. Maccoby’s translation from the Latin is based on the Christian account of the Barcelona disputation as edited and translated by Y. Baer, Tarbitz: A Quarterly Review of the Humanities 2:1, October 1930, pp. 187-172. [Hebrew]

26.^­ See David G. Roskies, The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989).

27.^­ H. Leivick, Complete Works by H. Leivick (New York: Shoulson, 1940), pp. 93-94. [Yiddish]

28.­ See George K. Anderson, The Legend of the Wandering Jew (Hanover: Brown University, 1991).

29.^­ See Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in Karl Marx, Early Writings (New York: Vintage, 1975), pp. 211-242; Julius Carlebach, Karl Marx and the Radical Critique of Judaism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), especially ch. viii, pp. 148-184.

30.^­ Ben-Zion Dinur, Israel and the Diaspora, trans. Merton B. Dagut (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1969), pp. 141, 145.

31.^­ Shimon Peres with Arye Na’or, The New Middle East (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), p. 80.