‘The Jewish State’ at 100

By Yoram Hazony

Does anyone remember the ideas that founded the Jewish state?

But Israel is not “fundamentally indestructible.” No nation is. The Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Canada—all these at one time looked “fundamentally indestructible” as well, if one were to judge by the material and military assets accumulated in their names. What rendered the survival of these states a question was not the want of factories and fighter planes, but the lack of a compelling national idea among the people. In each of these cases, it eventually transpired that the “state” in question was an abstraction to which its people were neither attracted nor loyal, and that little could be done to move them to action on its behalf.

And when one considers what Herzl believed would be required to render the Jewish state a compelling national idea and a home for the aspirations of the Jews, it becomes apparent that, beyond its material assets, Israel is not powerful at all. Of the three “centers” which Herzl considered indispensable for constructing the idea of the Jewish state, not one was ever the subject of concerted development by the Labor Zionism which built the material Jewish settlement. And the Post-Zionism and yeshiva nationalism which have sought to bring the idea of the State of Israel to maturity, each in its own way, have done only slightly better, each of the two movements watering tiny patches of the conceptual wilderness, while at the same time seeking to trample any aspect of the national idea that might be under cultivation by the other.

The entrepreneurial center. Each of Herzl’s assets of mind aimed to attract a different part of the Jewish soul, providing it with a sense of belonging and “home” in the Jewish state. Of these, it was the idea of the Jewish state as an entrepreneurial center with which he intended to attract that element which strives for individual success, and those individuals in whom this motive is dominant. It was for this reason that Herzl envisioned the Jewish state as a land of initiative and experiment, in which the individual Jew would have the freedom to assume personal risk in the pursuit of his private dreams. Only in this way would such individuals find fulfillment for themselves in Israel and create a better life for the Jewish people as a whole through the success of their efforts.

But Israeli society has since the 1930s been organized in accordance with the opposite idea: The belief that the good of the individual and his contributions to society should not be determined by means of personal initiative, but must be regulated by some central institution which is always presumed to know better—whether it be the Labor Federation, the army, the kibbutz or some other coercive collective. The result is a Jewish state which to this day enforces hundreds of “business constraints”—whose principal achievement is to prevent the individual from conducting his business affairs as he chooses; which controls the capital markets so that the private entrepreneur cannot secure financial backing unless he is properly “connected”; and which punishes the entrepreneur for his successes through devastating rates of taxation. The suffocating nature of Israel’s market is reflected in statistics as well: In economic freedom, the economy of the Jewish state rates lower than those of Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.²⁷

No wonder, then, that Herzl’s dream of a state capable of attracting Jewish business talent to immigrate from the industrialized nations has never been realized: The authority of the Jewish state has been consistently aimed at preventing the enterprising individual from competing freely, so that he can never feel that in Israel he has found a welcoming home for his activities.

Nor is the state’s intolerance of creative entrepreneurship limited to business ideas. Opposition to private initiative and the insistence on subservience to a coercive center pervades every sphere of public endeavor. Both the electronic media and the university system—to name two other particularly important areas of national life—are the special preserve of tiny, government-enforced cartels which ensure that only certain ideas may be developed and promulgated. In dictatorial states, such mind-control is used to ensure that all available ideas are consonant with the continued existence of the regime. But in Israel, even this rationale does not exist: Both cartels grow more vicious in their assaults on the Jewish state with each passing year, and yet the government continues mindlessly preventing any intellectual competition from challenging them—for reasons no one in the country seems capable of articulating.

Virtually alone on the Israeli political landscape, Post-Zionists and others on the New Left have made conscientious, if often mistaken, efforts to make Israel a country in which the needs of the individual can find satisfaction—while cultural apolitical figures identified with Jewish nationalism have consistently opposed these efforts, believing that it is the introduction of “American” norms which has caused the destruction of the collective Jewish-national identity.²⁸ But the nationalists have tragically misunderstood the revolution they are witnessing: Post-Zionism is not a consequence of increasing individual freedom; it is a reaction to decades of intentional suffocation of the individual by state socialism. That is, Post-Zionism is caused not by freedom, but by bondage. It is the abuse of the individual by the Labor Zionist state which has brought about the disgust for the Jewish national idea, just as it was the abuse of the individual by the Soviet state which brought disgust for the Communist idea, and the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The only way for the Jewish state to earn the love of that part of each Jewish soul which strives for individuality is by honoring it with freedom. It is the United States which has understood enough to grant real freedom to its citizens since its founding, and for this reason it is the United States—and not the centrally planned champion of collective values, the Soviet Union—which has retained the love of its people and has survived. Until the Jewish state becomes a place in which the individual Jew can, as Herzl demanded, strive in freedom to develop, implement and popularize his own ideas and reap his just rewards, the most talented and capable Jews will never be able to feel that Israel is truly their “home”—and they will continue to find their place elsewhere.

The religious center. Herzl intended that religious centers cultivate that part of the Jewish soul which seeks its place in the Jewish people’s unity and continuity, from the reaches of the farthest past and into the mists of the farthest future. Of Herzl’s three assets of mind, the idea of the Jewish state as a homeland of motivating religious sites is the only one that was ever the subject of systematic emphasis among Zionists of any stream; and it is the only area in which today’s Jewish nationalists have not completely ignored Herzl’s vision of true nation-building.

Beginning in 1967, the Jews have had the opportunity to transform the tels and tombs and battlefields that dot their ancient homeland from meaningless heaps of rubble into a system of religious, national and historic sites—places of prayer, places of memorial, places of learning—which could draw the heart of the nation. Some of the onerous work of restoration has in fact been done, primarily in Old Jerusalem, and on a more limited scale in certain other sites such as Hebron. In return for these limited investments in “creating” national religious centers, the Jewish state has been lavishly rewarded with renewed strength: In the form of the heightened hold of the state on the imagination of its citizens; in the form of the many Jews who have been inspired to immigrate to their homeland as a result; and in terms of an increasing admiration and affinity for the Jewish state among Christians, for whom these places are slowly but inexorably gaining in importance as well.

But we should not exaggerate what has been achieved. In the United States, which still suffers from the lack of history associated with a young nation, every house in which the American revolutionaries conspired, every church from which they flashed their signal lamps, every tree under which one of their officers died, is registered as a historic site, given over to the hands of a local curator and transformed into a place of pilgrimage and meaning, no matter how small. One can drive from Boston to San Francisco, collecting the booklets of the local historical societies, explaining the meaning and the power of these places within the quiltwork of America’s young identity. Compare this with the emptiness of Judea and Samaria, where the thousands of events of the Bible, the Apocrypha, and much of the Talmud, the most meaning-stained events of human history, actually took place. Here, most of the excavations have not been seriously begun; most of the holy places remain unreconstructed and unvisited. A site such as the tel of Shiloh—which for nearly four centuries served as the capital of Israel during the period of the Judges—lies in ruins, virtually untouched, except by the children who play there as on any other dirt heap. Who knows what untold stories of our fathers may be learned from this sleeping hill; who knows what Jewish hearts it might touch, and what faith it might bring? But we have left Shiloh as it has been for two thousand years; and it has left us as we have been for two thousand years—in exile from it.

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