Israel Bartal

What’s Left of the Onion? A ‘Post-Modernist’ Tract against ‘Post-Zionism’

“[ . . . ] we ought not to create new distinctions between people; we ought not to raise fresh barriers, we should rather make the old disappear”.¹

I  , “Politics and Collective Memory,” published in the pro- ceedings of an academic conference held in November , Anita Shapira wrote as follows:

Israeli historiography of the last thirty years has striven to free itself from ideological approaches to history and analysis: academic historiography fl ourished along with the process of liberating itself from political perspec- tives. It sought to relieve young Zionist historiography of the burden of hagiography that had marked political literature of the s–s. > ere was, of course, general awareness that all historians are products of their time and place, burdened with the preconceptions inculcated in them by their education, society and personal biography. Nevertheless, the aspiration was that the historian should make a conscious eff ort to transcend human limitations and allow the source material to speak for itself. [ . . . ] Some of the ‘revisionists’ have sought to give renewed legitimacy to the politiciza- tion of research, justifying this move by means of vulgarized version of postmodernism: there is no reality but in the eyes of the beholder. > us, one cannot speak of objective facts, and even less so of historical truth. [ . . . ] > is view is meant to serve as the basis for return of ideology to historiography: every historian has a political agenda, whether overt or covert. > us, the ideological approach is legitimate when analyzing historical material. His- tory, according to this version, is a ‘narrative’, that is, a story invented by historians out of their own ideological needs. > e conclusion to be drawn

  •  ,  ,  

is that no story is more authentic than any other, each is meant to further the political or social ends of its author or the interest group he or she represents.²

> is acerbic criticism was written about the phenomenon known in Israel as “the new historians.” It was directed against the ahistorical character of the arguments advanced by the left wing of political writing about Zionism and history of the Yishuv. We have before us a political tract of a new sort, one that is precisely targeted by Shapira’s criticism, except that this time it is a political composition from the other political wing. Yoram Hazony’s  e Jewish State: the Struggle for Israel’s Soul is evidently the fullest and most developed manifestation of post-Zionist historical revisionism on the right.³ Central fi gures from the past, including Ahad Ha’am, Martin Buber, Gershom Sholem, Jacob Talmon and Joshua Prawer, as well as living intellectuals such as Eliezer Schweid, Asa Kasher, and Aharon Appelfeld are presented as supporters of “a post-Jewish state.”⁴ > ey are all indefatigable subversives, like secret Sabateans who present themselves as Zionists in public while committing their despicable deeds in the dark, uprooting Judaism from the State of Israel and working for the end of the state.⁵ I would not comment on  e Jewish State were it not for the fact that I know that some may be ensnared by such ideas, all the more so because they are ostensibly the result of broad research, overfl owing with references and replete with quoted passages. Hazony’s book presents itself as the fi rst major composition to deal with the annals of post-Zionism. > e book comprises four parts. > e fi rst deals with uncovering the infl uence of post-Zionism on the institutions of the State of Israel and describing how this infl uence threatens Israel’s survival as a Jewish state. > e author also surveys, inter alia, the curriculum of the Israeli educational system as a refl ection of the noxious and destructive infl uence of post- Zionism.⁶ > e second part of the book returns to the beginning of the Zionist movement and focuses on the idea of the Jewish state as crystallized by > eodor Herzl. > e third part describes the titanic struggle that was waged during the Mandate between the champions of the idea of the Jewish state, led by David Ben-Gurion, and a group of German-born Hebrew University professors. > e fourth and last part deals with the intellectuals’ victory over Ben-Gurion and how the spirit of the Hebrew University clique came to dominate present-day Israeli politics. > e author’s conclusion is unambiguous: a direct line runs from Ahad Ha’am’s opposition to Herzl’s political Zionism to the opponents of “the What’s Left of the Onion? •  idea of the Jewish state” in contemporary Israeli society. Buber and Judah Magnes, the University’s President, opposed it openly. > eir successors do so covertly, whether consciously or because they fail to understand where their harmful path is leading. Hazony makes this explicit:

> us, although the explicit term ‘binationalism’ may have been driven underground in the years after the birth of Israel, all the vast arsenal of ideas that had led to this political conclusion remained intact. In fact, by examining some of the major themes emphasized by professors in the humanities and social sciences at the Hebrew University, it is possible to see the ideological substructure upon which the subsequent trend towards ‘post-Zionism’—and the delegitimization of the idea of the Jewish state- among the students of the professors was based.⁷

What we have, then, is a general and all-embracing revision of the history of the Zionist movement. In order to get a feel for the scholarly value of this revision, the mode of argumentation it employs, and the validity of its conclusions, I will focus on one issue, the assertion that Judaic Studies in the State of Israel is a weapon aimed against the state.⁸ For this we should examine the chapter in which the author of  e Jewish State deals with the scholarly work of several of the greatest teachers in the annals of the Hebrew University, including Buber, Scholem, Prawer, and Talmon. For example, how did Scholem sin to the point that his scholarship threatens the integrity of the State? According to Hazony:

Without entering into the question of whether this interpretation of Hasidim [the ‘neutralization’ of Messianism -I. B.] is correct—recent research suggests that that it is not—one can readily appreciate why such an interpretation of Hasidism would be attractive to German-Jewish thinkers. After all, it in eff ect attributes to the Jewish mystical tradition, which is hundreds (if not thousands) years old, the very same ideas that were the cornerstone of nineteenth-century emancipationist Judaism: ‘Zion’ is essentially a meta- phor; that redemption can be brought about equally by every man, wherever he may be; and that there is consequently no longer any need to hope for a particular leader or movement (‘the Messiah’) to bring about historical- political Jewish restoration in Palestine [sic!], since this aim within Judaism has been ‘liquidated’.⁹

To Hazony, the political danger is unmistakable: Scholem’s teachings are liable to lead students to the conclusion that: “the Hasmonean kings,  •  ,  ,  

Masada, Bar-Kochba, ShabtaiTzvi, or even Herzl [ . . . ] were standing in the dark side of Jewish history.”¹⁰ > e presentation of the sins of Prawer, the historian of the Crusader Kingdom in Palestine, may trouble even those who accept our book’s interpretation of the dangers posed by Scholem’s work:

[ . . . ] Prawer pioneered the academic discipline of trying to understand the history of Palestine [sic!] from the point of view of the Arabs. ‘I tried to see the Crusades not from the European point of view’, explained Prawer, ‘but from the other way around’. And, indeed, his scholarly writing did not shrink from referring to the Christian settlers as ‘the destroyers’ [ . . . ] > is affi nity for the Arab historical perspective—which, it will be recalled, had been one of Magnes’s central ideological goals in establishing the Hebrew University—had a direct impact on the manner in which Prawer’s students viewed Zionism. A good example is the historian Meron Benvenisti, today a well-known journalist. [ . . . ] Not surprisingly, Meron Benvenist’s ability to see contemporary politics from the Arab perspective has left its marks on his own politics, and today he is one of the leading exponents of reconstituting Israel as a binational Arab-Jewish state.¹¹

According to our Hazony, Prawer, even though he himself was not an opponent of the Jewish state, “devoted his academic career to evoking emotional sympathy for an anti-Zionist historical narrative adopted from Arab political propaganda—in so doing transmitting the binationalism of his own mentor, Koebner, to a new generation of students”.¹² In a similar fashion, Shmuel Hugo Bergmann, Jacob Talmon, and Natan Rotenstreich are assigned the role of passing on the anti-Zionist torch from the founding generation of the Hebrew University to the post- Zionist Israeli intelligentsia of our own time. Critical readers can only wonder: is it possible to be a professionally respectable historian and have a loyal Zionist outlook? Is it possible for post-modern criticism to leave untouched even a modicum of hope for the existence of historical truths that do not depend on deconstructivist political exegesis? > is book provides an explicit answer: no! > ere is no mercy. Everything is relative, long live post-modernism, the greatest tyrant of our age! And when post- Zionist discourse teams up with radical politics in the one-dimensional and pitiless way in which it wreaks havoc with the discipline of history, where shall we all fi nd refuge? History and politics have always been interwoven. > e historians of national movements never concealed the link between their scholarly What’s Left of the Onion? •  work and their political views; so too with Zionist historiography. > e present book, however, is exceptional in three respects: dosage, line of argumentation, and conclusions. > e dosage is overdone: a focus on a particular detail in Prawer’s fi eld of research and the severing of this detail from the totality of his scholarly and public activities over so many years cannot serve a serious argument. Taking the signifi cance of the neutralization of the messianic idea in Scholem’s writings to its farthest extreme, without viewing the matter in the broader context of his wide-ranging Zionism, is not persua- sive. Basing Talmon’s post-Zionism on his political opposition to Ben- Gurion and consigning to oblivion this great historian’s conservative stand are aberrantly strange.¹³ Unfortunately, many of the conclusions drawn by  e Jewish State are based on this kind of excess. It is this overdose that blurs the distinction between nationalism and nationalistic fanaticism and between scholarly writing and ideological manifesto. > e book’s modes of argumentation also deviates from the accepted norms of academic writing in the Western world. > is is evident, for example, in the way in which the author links the subversive doctrines of the great professors with the subversives of the next generation. > e author Aharon Appelfeld wrote with great appreciation of his teachers at the Hebrew University: “I studied under Buber and Scholem at the Hebrew University . . . Buber and Scholem opened new gates for me. It was a new life.”¹⁴ > is statement automatically turns Appelfeld into the successor of the two professors’ ideological and political path and makes him one of the leading enemies of the state of the Jews.¹⁵ Evidently Hazony has no inkling that the human soul is complex and that is possible to admire some traits of a university lecturer while rejecting others. Hazony off ers other examples. > e historian Benny Morris (not exactly our author’s cup of tea) notes that he studied under Prawer, “who always talked about his great mentor Koebner,” and was deeply infl uenced by him.¹⁶ > is sentence suffi ces to link the two generations of subversives! > e historian Mordechai Bar-On (surely not another post-Zionist subversive!) “lists as his greatest infl uences Koebner, Ta lmon, Prawer, and the economist Dan Patinkin”.¹⁷ I will not weary readers with a full roster of the chain of the post-Zionist tradition. What we have here, though, is a fascinating type of cultural McCarthyism: Reuben says that he enjoyed conversing with Simon means that Reuben follows Simon’s ideological and political path. > e conclusions of the present work are quite extraordinary in the vast literature of Zionist historiography. A close reading of this tome reveals that  •  ,  ,   it actually deals with the internal enemy of Zionism, but that unfortunately the villain is Zionism itself! Here I am not writing about what the author describes as the enemies of the idea of “the Jewish state,” but precisely about those whom he describes as faithful to this idea. Herzl, who in this book has turned into the father of American-style neo-conservatism, envisioned a state that was as far from our author’s own vision as east from west. What can one do to overcome this internal enemy who was a champion of universalism and remote from any concept of insularity and xenophobia? One simply reinvents Herzl and the idea of Zionism. As is known, the prophet of the state wrote an enthusiastic Zionist utopia that was published in . > is utopian romance, Altneuland (Old-new land), describes a trip to Eretz Israel in . > e future Jewish state, as depicted by Herzl, is a universalist, open, and tolerant society. European culture dominates, and its Judaism is an extremely low-key aff air. In Hazony’s book, Herzl’s utopia is presented as irrelevant to his vision of a state. If that is the case, why did Herzl go to the trouble of producing so detailed a portrait of the future polity? To this the author replies:

“[ . . . ] when Herzl began to realize that his public was growing restless awaiting the results of his diplomacy, he began writing a mass-appeal utopia of his own, which, he hoped could buy him some faith, enthusiasm and patience with a public that could not really understand what their leader was doing.”¹⁸

In other words, in Altneuland Herzl was not revealing his true inten- tions, but only off ering the Jewish masses what he thought they wanted to read. In sum, Altneuland was a propaganda tract aimed at winning support and did not refl ect Herzl’s inner truth. > is is a very strange assertion, to put it mildly. Anyone familiar with the history of the composition of the Altneuland certainly remembers that Herzl fi rst had the idea to write the book when he was still debating about writing Der Judenstaat.¹⁹ He worked on it over a period of three years, from July  until April ; excerpts of which were published in the Zionist periodical Die Welt while he was still writing it.²⁰ > e claim that the book was written to serve as propaganda among the Jewish masses seems even more bizarre. A large portion of the description of the new country in Herzl’s novel presents a radically un-Jewish cultural environment. It is hard to believe that the strongly un-Jewish culture of the future state would have won Herzl any support whatsoever from the Jewish What’s Left of the Onion? •  masses. On the contrary, if Hazony believes that Herzl was pandering to the tastes of the traditionalist Jewish masses when he wrote Altneuland, he must explain why universalism and cultural openness strike him, today, as antithetical to the Jewishness of the state. We should compare the assessment of Altneuland in the present book with that by Jabotinsky in his letter to Ben-Gurion in :

Herzl never meant to write a utopia, that is, to paint a picture of the fulfi ll- ment of his civic dreams. > e purpose of Altneuland was quite diff erent: Herzl wanted to show the Judenstaat (state of the Jews)—that in favorable conditions it could be established in a very brief period, really almost ‘next year.’²¹

When one studies the few pages in the book devoted to Altneuland, the suspicion grows that the author did not have Herzl’s utopian romance in front of him while he was writing his book. According to him, it is the dream of a young lawyer from Vienna who: “falls asleep and dreams of a time twenty years hence when the Jews have returned to Palestine [sic!] > e dream is a contemporary reworking of Isaiah’s vision”²² As every reader of Herzl’s fascinating work knows, the young lawyer does not fall asleep and dream, but responds to an advertisement for a traveling companion on a journey outside Europe. > is is not a trivial detail, since the journey to the old-new land in  includes a plethora of information about the circumstances in which the hero had left Europe in . Are we to deduce from this that Hazony decided in advance that Altneuland is unimportant and consequently he didn’t have to bother reading it; or perhaps it was a case of an inner aversion to the possible revelation of a diff erent Herzl: universalist, open, innovative, democratic, and a fi erce antagonist of radical nationalism? To be fair, we shall refrain here from what is done in Hazony’s  e Jewish State to Talmon, Prawer, and Rotenstreich and not continue our exegesis of the signifi cance of the conversion of the journey into a dream. We shall only refer critical readers to two modern studies of Altneuland, that see it as a central text in Herzl’s Zionist thought.²³ Most instructive is a comparison of the presentation of two prominent Zionist leaders: Jabotinsky and Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion is undoubtedly a key protagonist of the book, but his character and thought are mobilized unequivocally in the national direction, while the universalist element in his ideas is dramatically minimized. Jabotinsky, on the other hand, is marginalized and always appears in the book as a supporting actor. Why  •  ,  ,   did the detailed doctrine of this man, for whom the idea of the state was so central to his thought and policy, disappear from this book? Jabotinsky, too, produced a written exposition of the future character of the state. Today there is no doubt that Jabotinsky was Herzl’s loyal successor. But he was a liberal, an atheist, and a great admirer of European culture. Evidently it was diffi cult for our author to deal with the fact that someone carried on Herzl’s vision in a direction other than that of reclusive nationalism. Here we have the invention of a new account of the history of Zionism. Herzl had to be reinvented, because he was the founder and must be included. On the other hand, the invented story can continue even without Jabotinsky, whose views, ideas, literary activity, and even attitude toward the Arab nationalist movement are the polar antithesis of the notion of the Jewish state presented in Hazony’s account. > is is the same Jabotinsky who wanted to write Hebrew in the Latin alphabet and wrote Samson, a Biblical novel with a pagan spirit. So it’s better for Hazony’s argument to gloss over Jabotinsky’s vital role in formulating the idea of a Jewish state. What, you must ask, after reading this book, is the ‘Jewishness’ of the Jewish state? Is it Jewish might, opposed by Buber, Scholem, and Appelfeld? Is its Jewishness manifested, according to the author, by the state’s existence as an organismic entity, something opposed by all advocates of the idea of the social contract? Is it a state of halakhah, which is not mentioned in this book at all? > e great strength of Hazony’s work lies in saying what the Jewish state is not. As with an onion, from which you peel layer after layer until you reach the nothingness at its core, so too the vision embodied in this book: you reach the last page and still have not read even one affi rmative statement about the “Jewishness” of the Jewish state. > e reason: what does a book that so resolutely rejects most elements of Zionism have left to off er? If Herzl himself is censored and improved, if Jabotinsky is abbreviated and gelded, and if Ben-Gurion is retailored in neo-conservative dress, what other novelty remains? If the rich cultural activity, the diverse settlement enterprise, and the complex social reality that emerged in the country by virtue of Zionism are not the point of departure for a discussion of the Jewish state, what is there left to talk discuss?  eJewish State is excellent political propaganda, fl uent and fascinat- ing. But as a study of the history of Zionism its value is chiefl y as a historical document in the annals of extremism. It is a document that should be taught in university seminars to illuminate the vast damage that post-modernism has wrought to Judaic Studies. What’s Left of the Onion? • 

N

. > eodor Herzl,  e Jewish State, . . A. Shapira, “Politics and Collective Memory”, History and Memory, vol. , no. , , –. I wrote something extremely similar about the change taking place in Israeli historical research in an article published back in : “Only in recent years has historical research about the Jewish Yishuv in Eretz Israel in the nineteenth century reached the stage of systematic historiography, despite the abundance of books and articles published in the fi eld over the decades. Entire domains of social and economic life have still not been described appropriately; but until recently, even what has been described was defi cient in a number of respects: it lacked a basis in archival sources or was truncated and conducted without a critical approach to the texts. Aspirations that derived from ideological and other motives shaped a perspective that one may disagree with today—and, in addition, the viewpoints and world picture of persons of the previous century were not always taken into account. > e Jews of Eretz Israel are sometimes treated in almost total isolation from the Eretz Israel and Middle East environment, on one hand, and from the political and international system, on the other. Obvious in this approach leaves its mark on the quality of the research” (Israel Bartal, Exile in the Land: the Settlement of Eretz Israel before Zionism, Essays and Studies, [Jerusalem, ] ) [Hebrew]. As we shall see below, the author of  e Jewish State, the book being reviewed here, considers this change in Israeli historiography to be an essential element in the plot by Israeli academics and a stage in the project to eliminate the Jewish and Zionist character of the State of Israel! In other words, it is the scholars of the mainstream of historical writing, and not the new historians, who constitute the threat. . Let me state at the outset that I am mentioned in the book, on page , on lines  and  from the top of the page, and again on lines  and . See also page , note . . Yoram Hazony,  e Jewish State: the Struggle for Israel’s Soul, . . Compare: “A systematic struggle is being conducted by Israeli scholars against the idea of the Jewish state, its historic narrative, institution and symbols.” Hazony, . . > e attack on the curricula of the State (secular) educational stream is a central element in the political campaign being waged by the book’s author. An expanded version of one chapter of the book under review was published in  e New Republic on April , , and produced no few reactions in the Israeli and American media. I published a detailed reply to that article, entitled, “Education and Lies: A Second Round of the Off ensive by the New Historians,” on the offi cial website of the Israel Ministry of Education (www.education.gov.il). For the convenience of readers I note that the version of  e New Republic article that appears on the website of the Shalem Center is not identical to the original text published in April. Readers must return to the published version to see the text in its full and uncorrected form.  •  ,  ,  

. Hazony, . . “Together with an inability to contribute positive substance to it, the rejec- tion of the purposes, values, history, heroes, and symbols that created Israel has brought the ideal of the Jewish state to the verge of dissolution at least among educated Israelis. And it should go without saying that the loss of this ideal will, sooner or later, bring about the end of the Jewish state itself.” Hazony, . . Hazony, ; Here the author refers us to A. Morgenstern, Mysticism and Messianism (Jerusalem, ) – [Hebrew]. . Hazony . Following this method, the conclusions of the scholar of kabbalah, Isaiah Tishby, about the role of messianism in hasidic thought, as well as recent studies by Emanuel Etkes, Moshe Idel, and Moshe Roseman about the history of the hasidic movement and hasidic thought, all seem to “imperil” the Jewish state. From the perspective of Judaic Studies, the implication is clear: if the results of your research will not serve a the desired political objective (in this case the objective of the author of  e Jewish State ), you should tie a muzzle on your mouth or falsify the results of your research in order to fi nd favor in the eye’s of the omniscient political censor. . Hazony, –. . Hazony, . . Hazony, –. . Hazony, . . On pages – readers will fi nd a fi erce indictment of Appelfeld because he believes that: “in complete opposition to the lesson that most Jews learned from the Holocaust [ . . . ] that what saved him was weakness: ‘I survived the war, not because I was strong or because I fought for my life’. Appelfeld’s ideological conclusion here and the author’s experiences during the days of his military service in the IDF seem to the author of the Jewish State to undermine the central axiom of Zionism! . Hazony, . Richard Koebner, one of the founders of the department of history at the Hebrew University, is another member of  eJewish State ’s blacklist of those who undermined the idea of the Jewish state; see pages , , . . Hazony, . . Hazony, . . Rachel Elboim-Dror, Yesterday’s Tomorrow (Jerusalem, ), vol. ,  [Hebrew]. . Ibid. . Letter of February ; Hazony, . . Hazony, . . S. Avineri, “Herzl’s Zionist Utopia: Dream and Reality” Cathedra  (Summer ), – [Hebrew]; Elboim-Dror, Yesterday’s Tomorrow.