Zionism’s Illusions Become Clear: Israel Has Failed as a Sanctuary for Jews

By Allan C. Brownfeld

As a prophet, Theodor Herzl, Zionism’s primary architect and founding father, seems to have failed in his understanding of the future and where his philosophy would lead. Far better prophets were the founding fathers of American Reform Judaism, who rejected Jewish nationalism and looked forward to living as equal citizens in a diverse and open society.

In Der Judenstaat (“The Jewish State”), published in l896, Herzl proposed to solve “the Jewish Question,” by which he meant the question of anti-Semitism. Convinced that anti-Semitism was a consequence of the Diaspora, he was certain that gathering Jews in a new homeland in Palestine would remove this source of trouble.

“The Jews, once settled in their own State, would probably have no more enemies,” Herzl wrote. “We shall live at last as men on our own soil, and die peacefully in our own homes.”

In fact, rather than being an integral part of Jewish tradition, the Zionist enterprise really was a rejection of it. As Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg wrote in The Fate of Zionism, “Modern Zionism did not arise to carry out an imperative of the Jewish faith that God had designated the Holy Land as the ultimate home of the Jews. The Jewish religious imperative had always been defined as forbidding the Jews to take direct action themselves to re-create their kingdom; their return had to wait for God’s miraculous intervention. Indeed, from the very beginning to this day, the majority of Orthodox Jews of the world have not accepted Zionist ideology...The movement that Herzl launched side-stepped the inherited Jewish faith to propose that not faith in God but rallying against anti-Semitism was the tie that bound Jews together...they...were overwhelmingly secular; they wanted to redo Judaism and make of it a national culture in Hebrew.”

The original Zionist slogan, “A people without land for a land without people,” ignored completely the indigenous Arab population of Palestine. Robert S. Wistrich of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, one of the world’s leading experts on anti-Semitism, points to Herzl’s total failure to consider Zionism as a fresh incitement to anti-Semitism, what he sees as “perhaps even a fatal flaw of Zionism.”

Rather than speaking out of the Jewish tradition, Herzl was deeply influenced by the nationalist movements sweeping Europe in the late l9th century. According to historian Norman Davies, writing in Europe: A History, “Political Zionism differed from other manifestations of European nationalism mainly in the fact that its sacred national soil lay outside Europe. Otherwise, it possessed all the characteristics of the other national movements of the day.”

“Was Zionism a _monumental mistake—for the Jews, that is?”

In an important article, “Re-Thinking Zionism,” in the April 24, 2004 National Journal, Paul Starobin asks: “Was Zionism a monumental mistake—for the Jews, that is? I wonder. One core aim of Zionism—to restore the lost self-respect of the European ghetto Jew—was achieved with the successful establishment of the modern state of Israel in l948 and the nation’s rise as the reigning military power in one of the toughest blocks in the world—the Arab Middle East...But the other core purpose—to provide a sanctuary and refuge for Jewish people in the shadow of the Holocaust—looks like a tragic and, to a certain degree, self-inflicted failure. For Israel has turned out to be one of the least safe and most stressful of all places for a Jew to be...Jews are fleeing Israel in a growing reverse exodus. One destination, somewhat improbably, is Russia, to which an estimated 50,000 Jewish émigrés to Israel have returned; another, not so surprisingly, is America, which already houses an Israeli Diaspora numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Meanwhile, the Jewish Diaspora in the United States and elsewhere is helping to keep Israel afloat with its philanthropy: Israel annually receives some $l billion in private donations from outside sources. The general idea of Zionism was that Israel would support the Diaspora, not the other way around.”

In Starobin’s view, “Considering this ripe basket of grim ironies, it seems fair to say that the present state of affairs—a Jewish people in Palestine living under siege and forced to be a supplicant to a more secure Jewish community living among the goyim—is nearly the opposite of what Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, promised before his death a century ago...America tends to miss how overwhelmingly tribal life is for Jews in Israel—perhaps because Americans have been sold a propaganda poster, smartly designed for their particular sensibilities...America and Israel have very different underlying rationales. Whereas America is a kind of nation of nations, a state for people of diverse ethnic and religious character, Israel is by definition a state for Jews. That’s the whole point...Of course, other countries, too, are home to a particular type of people. What makes the Israel case more complex is that the Jews have also believed that God ordained them to be ‘a light unto the nations.’ Jewish experience has over the millennia swung between these poles—between the outward-focusing spiritual mission and the inward, self-protective dictate of the tribal ethos.”

“A New Ghetto”

Israel, at the present time, is busy constructing a fence which would both annex Jewish settlements in the West Bank and effectively seal Israel off from the outside. One critic, the Jerusalem-based writer Danny Gavron, says that the product “creates a new ghetto” and therefore “is the ultimate irony in Jewish history.”

It is time, argues Paul Starobin, to review the U.S. policy of underwriting Israel’s escalating battles with its foes. Since l949, Israel has received more than any other recipient during that period, a total of $94 billion in U.S. aid. Of the nearly $4 billion currently awarded to Israel annually, some $3 billion goes to Israel’s military, including money for Israel’s purchase of weaponry for use in the occupied territories.

Starobin himself is a disillusioned Zionist. “I’ve traveled my own ‘lost illusions’ odyssey,” he explains, “which spurred me to write this essay. I grew up steeped in the Zionist story...Back in the summer of l98l, at the age of 23, I was a volunteer on an Israeli kibbutz just over the Mount Carmel ridge, near Haifa...I pondered settling in Israel...I was attracted, you might say, to the tribal thing. And yet, as far back as the early l980s, I was arguing over the telephone with the rabbi at my hometown temple in central Massachusetts over his call for the congregation to rally behind Israel in its invasion of Lebanon—an invasion that culminated in a massacre of Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatila camps...An independent Israeli commission found government and military leaders, including Sharon, then defense minister, indirectly responsible for the atrocities, and it likened the role of Israeli rulers to that of Russia’s when bloody pogroms were waged against ghetto Jews in Eastern Europe. These days, tribal polemics such as The Case for Israel, a recent book by Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, exasperate me—must Jews exempt the telling of their own story from the classic Jewish commitment to open-ended and rigorous inquiry. Although the story of modern Zionism is complicated, as is every nation’s formative tale, the main facts are not in dispute. They just tend to get twisted or selectively deployed to serve partisan points. It’s time for some untwisting.”

Opponents of Jewish Nationalism

Far better prophets—and proponents of a more hopeful future—were the American Reform Jewish opponents of Jewish nationalism. The l885 Pittsburgh Platform of Reform Judaism rejected the idea that Jews were a “nation,” and declared themselves a religious group dedicated to universal values. In the book American Reform Judaism: An Introduction, Dana Evan Kaplan writes that, “The platform emphasized the prophetic mandate to work tirelessly for the rights of the downtrodden, and the term ‘prophetic Judaism’ described the Reform vision of following the dictates of the prophets to create a just society on earth. Coupled with the emphasis on its interpretation of prophetic Judaism, the Reformers in particular spoke frequently about the mission of Israel, which presented the idea that the prophets of the Bible served as advocates of ethical monotheism...The mission of Israel was to stand as an example of the highest standards of ethics and morals and to help bring the world to an awareness of and commitment to ethical monotheism...”

The concept of the “mission of Israel” rejected any notion of a return by Jews to Palestine. Notes Kaplan, “The Reformers...vehemently opposed any suggestion that they should hold political loyalties other than the loyalty to the land of their birth and citizenship...early Reform theologians used language from the prophets to declare that the Jews had a special mission to be a light unto the world and thus needed to be dispersed: God had deliberately scattered the Jews among the nations to bring the ethical monotheistic message of Israel’s God to all people.”

As early as l869, at a Philadelphia conference, a gathering of early Reform rabbis argued that Israel’s messianic aim was not the restoration of the ancient Jewish state, but rather the union of all of God’s children in the confession of his unity. Thus, the destruction of the second Jewish commonwealth by the Romans in 70 C.E. was not a divine punishment, since the dispersion of the Jews throughout the world was necessary for them to fulfill “their high priestly mission, to lead the nations to the true knowledge and worship of God.”

A typical Reform view was expressed in the comments of Gustavus Poznanski when he participated in the dedication of a new building for Congregation Beth Elohim in Charleston, South Carolina in 1841: “This synagogue is our temple, this city our Jerusalem, this happy land our Palestine, and as our fathers defended with their lives that temple, that city, and that land, so will their sons defend this temple, this city and this land.”

Max Lilienthal, a prominent rabbi in Cincinnati in the latter part of the l9th century, echoed this view: “We Israelites of the present age do not dream any longer about the restoration of Palestine and the Messiah crowned with a diadem of earthly power and glory. America is our Palestine; here is our Zion and Jerusalem. Washington and the signers of the glorious Declaration of Independence—of universal human right, liberty and happiness—are our deliverers, and the time when their doctrines will be recognized and carried into effect is the time so hopefully foretold by our prophets. When men will live together united in brotherly love, peace, justice and mutual benevolence, then the Messiah has come indeed, and the spirit of the Lord will have been revealed to all his creatures.”

“America is our Palestine; here is our Zion and Jerusalem.”

Paul Starobin contrasts the vision of the early American Jewish reformers and that of Zionism: “There were…adamant Jewish opponents of Zionism—including the founder of American Reform Judaism, Isaac Mayer Wise. He viewed Jewish nationalism as a mistaken avenue that, by fostering the separateness of the Jews as a people, would undermine Judaism’s unique spiritual mission as ‘a light unto the nations.’ His view was actually a modern recasting of the perspective of the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah, who even as he foretold the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in the sixth century B.C. proclaimed that Judaism could flower in the Diaspora under a new covenant with God.”

While modern Israel is “the story of a heroic and courageous nationalist movement that has survived against all odds and helped renew Jewish culture, including its language,” Starobin believes that “the more distinctive achievement belongs to the United States—and for that matter, also its northern neighbor, Canada—both of which have fashioned liberal pluralist societies that, whatever their faults, have transcended tribalism...The standard Zionist position, embraced these days even by Reform rabbis in America, is that a Jew living outside of Israel—a person such as myself—is in exile, in galut, and thus presumably at some risk...But America has been a relative paradise for Jews since their first settlement in New Amsterdam 350 years ago…It turns out that the story of the Jewish community in America is not only one of safety and prosperity. It is also, in its own way, a story of the development of a ‘New Jew’—not the Warrior Jew that Israel by environmental necessity developed, but nevertheless a self-confident Jew bearing little trace of the stereotypical Meek Jew of the European shtetl.…Several centuries of experience have yet to show Isaac Mayer Wise to be misplaced in his faith in America as a blessed place for Jews. Amid the savageries that have attended modern Israel’s determination to carve out a spot for itself in the Middle East, Wise’s argument that Jewish nationalism could taint the soul of Judaism is not looking so bad, either. My wife and I…are raising our young children in the Reform Jewish tradition, and I expect that one of these days, I am going to talk to a local rabbi about elevating Isaac Wise to his deserved place in the pantheon of Jewish prophets.”

Competing Visions

American Jews must ask themselves which vision they wish to embrace—Theodor Herzl’s goal of gathering the Jews of the world into a tribal enclave in the Middle East, or Isaac Mayer Wise’s vision of Judaism as a light unto the nations and Jews as equal citizens in free, open, multi-religious societies. Many, it seems, wish to have it both ways. They wish to live as free Americans, and use that freedom to promote the tribal interests of an Israeli state which openly proclaims that they are in “exile” in America and that the highest goal of Jews should be emigration to Israel.

For those for whom America is not enough, emigration to Israel is indeed a legitimate option. It is wrong, however, to use religious institutions in the United States to alienate young people from their own country and to insist that their genuine “homeland” is elsewhere. The original Jewish reformers wanted to live as free and equal citizens in a society to which they gave their allegiance—not only their political allegiance, but their emotional allegiance as well. They were genuinely “at home,” as many contemporary Jewish spokesmen seem not to be. As the organized Jewish community celebrates the 350th anniversary of permanent Jewish settlement in America it should ponder the title the Library of Congress has given to its forthcoming exhibition: “From Haven To Home: Three Hundred and Fifty Years of Jewish History in America.”

Considering Theodor Herzl’s vision in contrast to that of Isaac Mayer Wise and the early reformers would be a worthy enterprise for those in the contemporary Jewish community. Such a consideration is long overdue.

Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.