VII

In addition to its obvious social and economic benefits, the vision of a knowledge-nation also stands to advance Israel’s rather languid foreign policy. The obliging cooperation and diplomatic finesse traditionally evinced by the Jews of the diaspora in their dealings with the outside world have been successfully incorporated into Israel’s business and academic transactions; KNI would encourage their adoption by the country’s political echelons as well. If Israel is to become a cultural center, it must forge open and constructive ties with the international community.

Yet perhaps one of the greatest advantages of KNI is its potential to improve the Jewish state’s flagging relations, not only with the world, but also with its brethren in the diaspora. Zionism, having unconsciously borrowed many of its central tenets from the antisemitic discourse of its time, came to reject diasporic existence and everything associated with it. While attempting to create a new identity, it diminished the old one; after all, two-thirds of Jewish history and the majority of its achievements occurred when there was no sovereign national entity.

Identity, whether individual or collective, is always left severely impaired by the rejection of the history upon which it is based. As I have tried to show elsewhere, the myth of the “new Jew,” born of the eradication of the “old Jew,” has played a highly destructive role in Israel’s short history.³³ The old Jew, depicted by Apollonian Zionism as weak, effeminate, and helpless, has continued to haunt Israel’s psyche throughout the country’s desperate struggle for survival.

More than sixty years after its founding, Israel no longer ought to feel it necessary to disparage the diaspora.³⁴ The claim that Jewish communities abroad suffer from a diminished sense of national identity is unfair and unfounded—as is the claim that their existence is in some way unhealthy or neurotic.³⁵ Admittedly, the history of world Jewry is rife with persecution and suffering. Yet in presenting it as a dark tale of shame and humiliation, the Zionist narrative considerably narrows the horizons of Jewish consciousness.

It is imperative that the Jewish state adopt a more balanced view of the history of its people. The diaspora, after all, harbored most of the elements that have turned Israel into the vital, successful society it is: a love of learning, entrepreneurial drive, and keen creative instincts. Israel has long outgrown the ideology that distinguishes “old Jew” and “new Jew.” As its own experience has proven, the mind is not the enemy of the body, nor is learning the antithesis of self-defense. Such perceptions have no place in Israel’s renewed ethos as a knowledge society.

With its emphasis on knowledge, learning, and culture, KNI can begin to rectify the Israeli misapprehension of the diaspora. The charged relationship between Israel and world Jewry has been widely described and diagnosed.³⁶ For many years this relationship relied too heavily on bad conscience, on the guilt felt by those who had not participated in the creation and defense of the state. Yet shame and remorse cannot be the building blocks of a prosperous national society, one that will appeal to young Jews who do not care to carry the psychological burden of past generations.

KNI, in this sense, not only serves as a unifying vision for the country’s citizens, but might also create new opportunities for Israelis and diaspora Jews to come together. The ideal of a knowledge-nation has the potential to become a new joint venture for Jews worldwide, one based not on guilt, but on a common passion and shared hopes.

Of course, the concept of KNI leaves many questions unanswered: For example, what kind of knowledge should be cultivated by the Israeli enterprise? What sort of balance ought to be achieved between the religious canon of rabbinical literature and the secular disciplines of the humanities and sciences? How will KNI, and the market-state on which it is based, determine questions of citizenship and civil rights? And to what extent should KNI be reflected in the country’s legal and political systems?

Many of these questions have long been contentious, and KNI does not propose to resolve them all immediately. They will have to be debated and ultimately determined by public discussion. Yet while KNI is not the deus ex machina that will make all the conflicts disappear, there is good reason to hope that it will equip us with a strong sense of purpose so lacking today—all, to quote Ahad Ha’am, “for the sake and for the glory of the great idea.”

Carlo Strenger chairs the clinical graduate program in the department of psychology at Tel Aviv University.

Notes

1. Ahad Ha’am, “The Wrong Way,” in Hans Kohn, ed., Nationalism and the Jewish Ethic: Basic Writings of Ahad Ha’am, trans. Leon Simon (New York: Schocken, 1962), p. 36.

2. For an in-depth analysis of this process, see Shmuel Eisenstadt, The Transformation of Israeli Society: An Essay in Interpretation (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1985).

3. The precise aspects of classical Zionism to which I am referring will be delineated in the course of the essay. For an excellent summary of the fundamentals of Zionist ideology, see Shlomo Avineri, Varieties of Zionist Thought (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1980) [Hebrew].

4. This idea of the “belated” arrival of a nation-state on the historical scene is discussed in Helmut Plessner, The Belated Nation, second ed. (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1959) [German].

5. See, for example, Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell, 1983); Liah Greenfeld, The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth (Cambridge: Harvard, 2001); Carlton J.H. Hayes, A Political and Social History of Europe (New York: Macmillan, 1926); E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1990); and Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism (London: NLB, 1977).

6. For an interesting study of how ethnic groups were welded into a completely new entity, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, revised ed. (London: Verso, 2003).

7. Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton, 2004), p. 24.

8. Slezkine, Jewish Century, p. 7.

9. Slezkine, Jewish Century, pp. 40-104.

10. Leon Poliakov, A History of Anti-Semitism, vol. 4, Suicidal Europe 1870-1933, trans. George Klin (New York: Vanguard, 1985).

11. Anita Shapira, New Jews, Old Jews (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1997), pp. 175-191 [Hebrew].

12. See, in this context, Sander Gilman, Jewish Self Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1986).

13. Personal communication with Avishai Margalit, August 2009.

14. For a comprehensive analysis of this revolution, see Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); Peter Sloterdijk, In the Weltinnenraum of the Capital (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2005) [German]; Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History (New York: Anchor, 2003); and Philip Bobbitt, Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Knopf, 2008). A more popular account may be found in Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1999).

15. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class (New York: Basic, 2002).

16. After completing his study in the United States, Florida was commissioned by the European Union to conduct another study that, ultimately, replicated his U.S. findings. See Richard Florida and Irene Tinagli, Europe in the Creative Age (London: Demos, 2004). On the failure of Arab countries to cultivate creative economies, see the Arab Human Development Report, United Nations Development Programme (New York: United Nations Development Programme, 2002).

17. Bobbitt, Shield of Achilles.

18. Former U.S. labor secretary Robert Reich refers to these groups as a new class of “international symbolic analysts,” in contrast to the national symbolic analysts, who are bound by the local language of the nation-state. See Robert Reich, “The New Rich-Rich Gap,” American Prospect, December 12, 2005, www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_new_richrich_gap.

19. See Bobbitt, Terror and Consent, pp. 23-124.

20. Dan Senor and Saul Singer, Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle (New York: Twelve, 2009), pp. 11-12.

21. Dan Ben-David, “Brain Drained,” Centre for Economic Policy Research, March 22, 2008, p. 3.

22. It must be noted, though, that Israel’s flourishing agricultural sector remains an important part of the country’s economy.

23. Steve Levy, “The Hot New High-Tech Cities,” Newsweek, November 9, 1998.

24. Nathan Drazin, History of Jewish Education from 515 B.C.E. to 220 C.E. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1940). For a description of post-Enlightenment Jewish education, see Jay R. Berkovitz, The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century France (Detroit: Wayne State, 1989).

25. Amos Funkenstein and Adin Steinsaltz, Sociology of Ignorance (Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defense, 1987) [Hebrew].

26. See Immanuel Etkes, ed., Yeshivot and Batei Midrash (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar, 2006) [Hebrew]. For post-Enlightenment developments, see Berkovitz, Shaping of Jewish Identity.

27. Over 85 percent of American Jewish high-school graduates pursue a college education. See Steven Bayme, Jewish Arguments and Counterarguments: Essays and Addresses (Hoboken, N.J.: Ktav, 2002), p. 83.

28. See, in this context, Joel Rebibo, “The Road Back from Utopia,” Azure 11 (Summer 2001), pp. 131-167.

29. “Annual Report 31/32 for 2003-4 and 2004-5,” published by The Council for Higher Education in Israel (Jerusalem, 2006), pp. 89-136 [Hebrew].

30. See Shaul Katz, “Berlin Roots—Zionist Incarnation: The Ethos of Pure Mathematics and the Beginnings of the Einstein Institute of Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem,” Science in Context 17:1-2 (Spring-Summer 2004), pp. 199-234.

31. Ben-David, “Brain Drained,” p. 3. Ben-David makes a convincing case for the economic benefits of investing in higher education. His extensive work on the subject may be found at www.tau.ac.il/~danib/index.html.

32. Ben-David, “Brain Drained,” p. 15.

33. Carlo Strenger, The Designed Self (Hillsdale, N.J.: Analytic, 2004), pp. 99-126.

34. The term “diaspora,” incidentally, is not only preferable to the derogatory “exile;” it is also more historically accurate. The notion that Jews were exiled during the Roman period evolved in the high Middle Ages. It has a peculiarly strong hold on the Jewish imagination, in spite of compelling evidence to the contrary. See Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations (London: Allen Lane, 2007).

35. In this respect I strongly disagree with A.B. Yehoshua’s statements about Jewish existence in the diaspora. Not only were they highly undiplomatic, they were also unfaithful to reality. For an English translation of Yehoshua’s controversial essay, see A.B. Yehoshua, “An Attempt to Identify the Root Cause of Antisemitism,” Azure 32 (Spring 2008), pp. 48-79.

36. See, for example, Samuel G. Freedman, Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), pp. 162-172.