The Flaw of Zionism

The only party to run openly and unequivocally on this issue received just 4 seats. Even when one factors in the votes cast for other parties by people of a generally right-wing persuasion, one comes up with only ten Knesseth seats which represent such a philosophy. The Jewish people seem to have given up on the idea of Eres Yisrael. This tragic state of affairs in which we are witness to the fact that a majority of our nation is simply disinterested and emotionally detached from its own land is not a new development; the demise of the Tehiya Party in the 1992 elections was a harbinger of things to come. However, for a truer appreciation of the matter, it is necessary to begin at the beginning: the history and essence of the Zionist movement.
The Zionist Movement founded by Theodore Herzl was from its inception a secular movement. Herzl himself was a very assimilated Jew, as were almost all its ‘Founding Fathers’. The necessity of having a country that Jews could call their own was entirely divorced from the traditional Jewish concept of Redemption. Zionism came to offer the Jews an escape route from persecution – the historical juxtaposition of the Dreyfuss case and the formulation of Herzl’s ideas is a well-known fact of history.
A somewhat less well-known, or at least rarely appreciated, point of history is the fact that the Zionist movement never clearly defined the borders of the future state. This was not a political stratagem. It was a function of the fact that the founders of Zionism had never seriously considered the issue. It was by no means understood by all that the future State would be constituted in the Jews’ historical homeland. Only in this light can one understand the outrageous fact that in 1903 the Zionist Congress voted on and accepted Herzl’s proposal that the Zionist State be established under British auspices in Uganda. A proposal that to us seems fantastic was, to many of the Zionist delegates – due to their self-imposed estrangement from the most fundamental and intuitive concepts and traditions of their forebears – not at all unthinkable.
The redress of this very major lacuna in Zionist ideology was left to Ze’ev Jabotinsky. His Revisionist version of Zionism aimed to define that: a) the explicit goal of Zionism was the establishment of a state this, too, was disputed by some!, and b) that Zionism laid claim to all of the Jewish homeland, which Revisionism defined as Mandatory Palestine. This position, however, was never endorsed by mainstream Zionism, with the result that an entire generation of pre-state Jewish Palestinians were brought up on the vague conception of a Jewish entity without border or definition. Their education (indoctrination is perhaps more accurate), very explicit on matters of socialism and the rejection by Zionism of Torah traditions and modalities, left the issue of Jewish territory untouched. The term Eres Yisrael was used, to be sure; it was just never given any substance. Inevitably these second-generation Zionists came to consider themselves citizens of an ethereal and unknowable country; the formation of any real bond to the land, to a specific geographical area, was rendered impossible. It was natural and normal (in such an abnormal environment) for the Jewish Palestinians of the day to feel a true connection only to those areas inhabited by their fellow Jews; after all, what else was there to go on?
This uncertainty and vagueness was a constant and characteristic aspect of Zionism till the War of Independence in 5708 (1948). The Jewish Palestinians suddenly found themselves citizens of the newly-formed State of Israel which had had its borders defined for it by the Partition Plan of the previous year on the one hand, and the realities and vagaries of war on the other. One can almost here the collective sigh of relief uttered by the new Israelis; the Answer to the Question they had been posing themselves, subconsciously albeit, for quite some time, was now at hand! The UN, the Arabs and the successes )and failures( of the Hagana had at last solved the riddle; they now knew where their country was! The maddeningly undefinable and elusive Eres Yisrael had metamorphosed into the well-defined and unambiguous Medinath Yisrael. The two were now synonymous.
For two generations the Zionist leadership had envisaged the ‘normalization’ of the Jewish people, i.e. a nation living on its land, in its sovereign state, within recognized borders, at peace with its neighbours. A nation like all others. To the average new Israeli, the vast expanses of the Jewish people’s heartland, the cradle of our nation, were now Hus La’ares as surely as Finland. No matter that these were ‘Auschwitz borders’ to quote Abba Eban, artificial and untenable. No-one was going to deny the Zionist-Israeli his dream by pointing out that as long as the Jews occupied only a small portion of their land, within plainly unrecognized borders, the dream remained unfulfilled, and the Jews remained ‘un-normalized’. In this tortuous and convoluted fashion, the Israel of 1948 became ‘Jewish land’, to the exclusion of all else.
It is not surprising therefore that in the wake of the Six-Day War, Israelis were for the most part unmoved by the liberation of their ancestral homeland. They had been conditioned to consider their native soil as foreign territory. Moshe Dayan gave expression to the prevailing Israeli viewpoint by announcing that all that remained to do was to await the imminent phone call from King Hussein seeking a peace treaty, in return for which Israel would gladly ‘return’ the recently acquired ‘occupied territories’. Not only did the Zionist-Israeli conceive of the ‘territories’ as ‘occupied’; they were viewed as the much sought-after bargaining chip in order to be able to obtain the missing piece of the Zionist puzzle: to coexist with the surrounding states in peace and within recognized borders. Here at last was the pottage of lentils with which to purchase the birthright of recognition and peace.
The dream of the weary Zionist-Israeli was, as we all know, not to be. The Arabs wouldn’t play ball. The Khartoum Conference of 1971 spelled it out: no peace, no recognition. With the additional blow of the surprise attack of Yom Kippur, the Zionist-formed Israeli mind set was at its wit’s end. Increasingly, the once content Israeli was becoming ever more aware that the hoped-for ‘normalization’ was more elusive than ever. Had he come all this way to be denied the trophy of recognition and peace?
Sadat shrewdly perceived the Israeli state-of-mind to be at breaking point. He moved in for the kill, packaged and presented to Menahem Begin as a ‘peace process’. The Israeli public swallowed hook, line and sinker.
The road from Camp David to Oslo is slippery and not that long. It was Begin who truly established the Palestinian state. Despite the well-established fact that the Palestinians do not abide by treaties, the Zionist-conditioned Israeli insists on completing his puzzle. After all, there are only a couple of pieces left, right? When the reality is viewed through such Zionist-issue spectacles, what else could we possibly expect?
It is Zionism that brought us to the current state of affairs, due to its rejection of the only ideology that can sustain the Jewish people in their quest for Redemption: Torah. The engine of Zionism is no more, and the train of our State is derailed. And only a political will defined, developed and nourished by Torah can ever put our train back on the tracks.