In the summer of 1937, the Yishuv − the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine − was in uproar over the Peel Commission’s publication of its conclusions concerning the Arab-Jewish dispute in the country. For several decades the Zionist movement’s political vision remained vague, with the very revival of Jewish nationalism still in doubt. However, in the 1930s, Jews fleeing Europe’s darkening skies reached Palestine in increasing numbers and the Yishuv stepped up its land purchases.
It was in response to these developments (with the growth of the Arab population in the background) that the Arab Revolt broke out in 1936. Abruptly, all the parties were obliged to make clear their intentions, in contradistinction to their dreams. After a few months of hearing testimonies, touring the country and holding discussions, members of the commission – formally known as the Palestine Royal Commission – arrived at the conclusion that two cohesive national movements existed in Palestine, each espousing mutually conflicting aspirations. In the light of this finding, the commission stated: “Neither of the two national ideals permits of combination in the service of a single State.” For the first time, the report recommended the idea of partition to the British government.
Effectively, the commission recognized that, as distinct from other national conflicts, in which it is sometimes possible to balance national tension with other elements of identity shared by the two sides, this was not the case in Palestine: Jews and Arabs differed in their religion, language, cultural resources, family structure, history and more (North African Jewry would partially alter this picture, but they were not yet in the country). Elsewhere, it might have been possible to consider one state shared by different national groups (Switzerland) or a binational state (Belgium). However, in Palestine the disparities in the various aspects of existence of the two peoples in question required (in the commission’s view) a sharp political differentiation; in short, two states.
In retrospect, one could argue that this solution was somewhat simplistic − consideration should have been given to the creation of joint institutions for the two states, if only for the sake of stability − but the commission’s analysis of the situation was fundamentally sound.
The state that was proposed for the Yishuv consisted of less than 20 percent of the territory of Mandatory Palestine west of the Jordan River and was unreasonable in terms of its borders and demographic composition. More than a third of the population would be Arabs, whereas the proposed Arab state would contain almost no Jews. Nevertheless, in August 1937, with the support of Chaim Weizmann, Moshe Sharett and David Ben-Gurion, the World Zionist Congress accepted the principle of partition, albeit rejecting the specific blueprint put forward by the commission.
This was the first time the Zionist movement was forced to cope with the following question: Is this a national movement whose primary goal is to transform the new Jew into a citizen who is responsible for his or her collective fate and to create a political community united around institutions, principles, ideals and certain texts (with the Land of Israel being the essential base for this community’s existence but not the purpose of sovereign life)? Or, is Zionism a deep yearning for a home, for settlement and for land, for the redemption of the Land of Israel from its ruins and for an identity bound umbilically to this place, with the state being no more than a possible means to achieve that goal? At this time, three generations ago, the majority of the Zionist leadership chose the first option, contrary to the viewpoint of religious and Revisionist Zionists.
There was never an agreement in the Zionist movement concerning the principles and values on which the political community should be founded, if the Land of Israel is indeed the basis of the movement but not its ultimate purpose. Here are a few well-known examples: The liberal-Herzlian school placed the emphasis on civic equality, broad individual freedoms, respect for the other, tolerance, a minimal common identity and an ethos of progress and rationality. However, the cultural Zionism espoused by Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginsberg) sought to secularize tradition and extract from it what it saw as the central trait of Judaism: a high moral spirit free of national egoism, uncompromising (to the point of being moralistic) over what is just and meritorious, and refusing to resort to violence in solving human conflicts (hence its suspiciousness regarding the idea of the state).
For socialist Zionism, the core of Zionism lay in freedom – in two inseparable senses: national liberation of the Jews from surging anti-Semitism and from being subject to the mercies of states in which they remained strangers; and also liberation from the exploitative capitalist order, from the scarcity which was the lot of the majority of Jews in Eastern Europe, and from life in an alienated economic system based on interests of individuals and on class status, not on solidarity and mutual commitment.
However, the attempt to forge a community which relies mainly on a shared language and political philosophy − and not on place − seems to have gone awry in Zionism. Each of the schools mentioned above failed in its own way. The liberalism of rights was perceived as an alien Western implant, and as belonging to an individualist tradition which was incompatible with organic nationalism. The attempt to continue the spirit of Jewish diasporic morality was viewed as emasculating and as irrelevant in conditions of a violent national struggle. And social democracy was seen as a tainted, obsolete system advocating an antiquated concept of labor and representing an almost extinct class. (Labor is now trying to revive a moderate version of this approach, but mainly in the name of the middle classes and without commitment to the idea of the right of oppressed peoples to freedom and sovereignty – an idea that was central to the socialist movement in the Yishuv at its outset.)
More generally, the more Israelis faltered in the attempt to define their identity as a pluralistic community but with a dominant political language, or with a number of languages which shared elements in common − in fact, as the ideas which the Jewish people’s state was supposed to realize increasingly disappeared as an important horizon for discussion and the dialogue about them faded into silence − the more the Israelis were captivated by the allure of the place and by the concreteness of the territory. They adopted the Zionism of “numbers” instead of the Zionism of “letters,” in Bialik’s formulation.
Vehement opposition to the Peel Commission’s conclusions was voiced by the Revisionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky. At present, after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s 2009 speech at Bar-Ilan University, even Jabotinsky’s heirs in Likud are officially committed to the two-state idea. Declarations should not be scoffed at, and Netanyahu also tried at first to connect words and deeds when he froze construction in the settlements. However, while the Israeli head tilts leftward, the body tilts to the right.
In his book “A Journey in Israel Autumn 1982” (published in English as “In the Land of Israel”), Amos Oz quotes Pinchas Wallerstein, who at the time was head of the Mateh Binyamin Regional Council in the West Bank: “One hundred thousand [Jews] − that’s not the 8,000 you had in Yamit [in northern Sinai], that’s a number [which will] be impossible for any government to uproot. Just give us five more years of peace and quiet, and the question of the Land of Israel will be sewn up. For good.”
Thirty years later, with 320,000 settlers in the West Bank (not counting East Jerusalem), with Jewish communities scattered across the length and breadth of the West Bank, often adjacent to Palestinian population centers, with a ramified road and infrastructure network, and, most pointedly, with a generation or two of settlers who take for granted their home in the occupied territories − the partition idea is increasingly slipping away from us.
The Palestinian society never viewed the idea of a sovereign state as a supreme wish. Its collective identity is based (perhaps unavoidably) principally on the Nakba, and what it sees as the “catastrophe” of the creation of a Jewish state − on a yearning for a lost home and on righting a historic and moral wrong.
Israeli society is gradually undergoing a similar process. It is losing its confidence in its identity and in its purpose as a political community, and finding it difficult to posit an alternative to those among its members for whom ancient soil, protective territory and productive real estate constitute the highest priorities. It has backtracked from the Zionist stance which gave precedence to the establishment of a sovereign state of the Jewish people, even if only in part of the Land of Israel; a state driven (in addition to its promise of life itself or a haven) by a political-moral idea of some kind: liberal, secularized-traditionalist, socialist or even national-liberal of the Jabotinsky school (he advocated absolute civic equality and broad cultural autonomy for minorities).
Political communities frequently fail to realize their ideals, but the true threat is the loss of the aspiration to achieve them, because the rationale for life together is undermined. Zionism was a revolution that tried to transform individuals who had been (for the most part) politically excluded for 2,000 years into citizens; that is, to allow the Jewish individual to give public expression to his historical experience, his heritage and his particular identity, and to make him responsible for his fate and for the consequences of his actions (without him replicating his experience and excluding the minority living with him).
A citizen is not defined solely by his ability to realize rights and fulfill obligations (that can also be done in the diaspora), but as someone who sees the public space and the state’s institutions as his and as expressing his identity, and also has the will and the ability to join the dialogue and the activity that preserve and renew this public existence.
The collapse of the State of Israel and the establishment of a binational or a-national state will not only force life together on two nations which at this stage have mainly the conflict in common; or will disintegrate the remnants of communal-national solidarity, which is a necessary condition for the emergence of social justice of some kind; or will strengthen religious fervor in the wake of the neutralization of the political sphere and the dissolution of its symbolic importance. More than all of this, the collapse of the State of Israel will reflect principally the failure of Zionism in the sense of forging a political world by and for the new Jew.
Despite this, all the major parties today − Likud, Kadima, Labor − are burying their heads in the sand, whether willingly or in helplessness. They are promoting the strengthening of the settlement project and the occupation, or protesting against them halfheartedly. They are bringing about the end of Zionism, even as they purport to carry its banner.
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