Zionism, religion and the modern State of Israel

BACK IN the UK I was a Zionist.  I supported the right of the Jewish people to a state of their own in their historic homeland.  Now I’m an Israeli, it seems I can’t define myself that way anymore without being thought of as either hopelessly anachronistic, or avowedly right-wing.

Sections of the Israeli right have made Zionism synonymous with support for the settlement movement, while sections of the left have acquiesced in this fiction by abdicating ownership of the term.  (It is worth noting that Zionism was originally a progressive liberation movement with its roots in enlightened 19^th century liberalism; closer in spirit to those supporting an end to the occupation of the Palestinians than to the West Bank settlers.  Even the father of what became the Israeli right, Vladimir Jabotinsky, was an avowed liberal who insisted on democratic rights for all the citizens of the putative Jewish state and who spoke resolutely against expelling Arabs from their homes).

Early secular Zionists forecast that Zionism would replace Jewish religion as the core identity of the Jewish people.  They imagined that the creation of a modern Jewish state would lead to the gradual marginalization of religious practice and its replacement by a proud secular nationalism that would unify the Jewish people.

Meanwhile the religious Zionists who followed Rav Kook saw Zionism as the next stage in God’s plan for the Jewish people.  For them, Zionism would persuade unbelievers by heralding the messianic age.

The secularists have been proved wrong by the polarization of Israeli society into religious Jews on the hand, and secularists who feel little kinship with the wider Jewish world on the other.

Meanwhile, the religious Zionists have, since 1967, obsessively prioritized the mitzvah of settling biblical Judea and Samaria – hardly a unifying issue in Israel. 

So can Zionism mean for 61 year-old Israel in the 21^st century?  It didn’t replace religion as the secularists predicted; neither can it be used to promote religion to the Jewish masses if it remains politically aligned with the advocates of ‘Greater Israel’ – or indeed if only a one-size-fits-all Orthodoxy is sanctioned by the state authorities.

I got a hint of an answer to this question on the Fast of Gedalia, a minor fast day in the Jewish calendar.  It marks the assassination of the Jewish Governor of Judea after the destruction of the First Temple. Gedalia was murdered by another Jew – a betrayal of the Jewish people regarded as so heinous by the Rabbis that a fast day was instituted.

A close friend of mine, with a strong Jewish and Zionist identity, but avowedly not religious, surprised me by informing me that she would be observing the fast.

“I’ve kept this fast since the Rabin assassination,” she explained.

An added twist to the tale is that far from being a supporter of the former prime minister, she was a fierce opponent of his policies who demonstrated against the Oslo Accords.  She was desperate to see him removed from office, but the way in which this eventually happened shocked her to her Zionist core.

For her, the Jewish tradition – which she less than scrupulously observes – provided a precedent of how to respond to the murder of a Jewish leader by another Jew.

I was struck by her decision.  She is not religious, but neither is she part of a secular community that has divorced itself from the Jewish world.  She is a Zionist, proud of being an Israeli, devoted to the country and deeply connected to Jewish tradition.  Her Judaism informs and strengthens her Zionism.

There are some excellent programs in Israel today, looking to promote Zionism as well as an understanding of, and identification with, Jewish tradition and culture, but Israel needs more of them, as well as government support for a new Zionist agenda which embraces Jewish tradition in a spirit of pluralism.  We also desperately need an entirely different relationship between the state and the Orthodox religious authorities, whose uncompromising monopoly on religious life in Israel has been one of the contributing factors to the alienation of most Israelis from religion.

I am not taking a stand against religious Zionists or indeed Orthodoxy; but there have to be religious role models in Israeli society preaching a Judaism that is not antithetical to the basic liberal democratic values of tolerance and freedom.  In the words of Michael Melchior, an Orthodox Rabbi and former Israeli government minister:

“Only a reconnection to the hyphenation that links Jewish and democratic values, Zionism and religion, the teachings of Judaism and the teachings of ethics, will offer a chance for the continued existence of the State of Israel as a state that fulfils the dreams imbued in it when it came into being. Only the reconnection of past heritage to present challenges will ensure future hopes.”

I REJECT the notion that Zionism is either dead or only meaningful to the settler movement and its supporters.  It has long been a cornerstone of contemporary Jewish identity outside Israel; within Israel it can be something that transcends politics and religious observance while connecting Jews to both their state and their heritage.

This was published as an op-ed in The Jewish Chronicle under the title: "A proud ethical Zionism for the 21st century", on 25/2/2010.