11. Where will a balanced Voice of a possible future for Israel be heard?

One must look into Israel itself, to find the authentic authors who are willing to look squarely at the possibilities.

At one time I said that all societies are based on myth and all myths have a toxic corner that has the potential to re-infect the whole. I was writing about the politics of proxy Hate. We know of many researchers who are finding all the impossibilities in ancient Hebrew writings (scriptures), and claiming these are the causes of anti-Semitism, and the causes of current atrocities as a reaction.

PERHAPS THEY DISCOVER A LOT OF TRUTH?

But my premise in writing is to say there are other reasons that explain today's conditions, and that they may also conceive of tomorrow's solutions. They will not be found in the frozen precepts of a moribund theology. They will not be found in the external Diaspora's lock-step behind Israel.

Here I will publish an excerpt from “Jewish State or Israeli Nation”, by Boas Evron

Israel and the Jewish People, (the Diaspora)  6,500 words See what you think.

Jewish impotence created the illusion that the essential attribute of independent national existence is military might. It also fostered the view of Zionism and the state of Israel as a historical revenge rather than as a means of becoming integrated as equals in both history and the family of nations.

Self-confident nations (and individuals) are not in a hurry to display force. They weigh their force and interests coolly, calculate what they wish to achieve and what they are willing to pay in order to achieve it, and behave accordingly. There is no doubt that in any accounting of the attributes of an independent nation, military-economic power IS a major element. That does not mean that a nation that makes such an accounting is in a state of war with other nations. What it means is that it functions among them as an equal, in symbiotic relations that only rarely deteriorate into war. The relations between members of the European Community, for example, are those of close cooperation, in spite of elements of competition. Member nations wish the prosperity of the entire community; if any nation is unsuccessful, it could become a liability and impoverish the common organization. The United States desires the strength and wealth of Western Europe and Japan, despite their economic rivalry; their weakness would threaten the system as a whole. It has recently become clear that for the same reason the United States desires the prosperity of Eastern Europe. The assumption (typical of the age of mercantilism) that the success of one comes at the expense of another (a zero-sum game) is partially true only in war and is wholly true only under conditions of total warfare. Even so, during World War II the United States, for instance, did not seek the total destruction of Germany; in planning for the future the U.S. already considered Germany a vital component in the postwar global confrontation with the Soviet Union. In short, the system of sovereign states in the world is not anarchic; it is based on mutual balances and adjustments, with rivalries usually confined to the framework of {games with recognized rules} and with the requisite that all player-states have certain traits in common.

The thinking of the messianic Right in Israel fails to grasp the nature of international relations and is incapable of understanding the nature of an independent nation in the international arena. It imagines Israel's existence not in the world as it is, but only in the Jewish world. The Jewish world (diaspora) is supposed to provide a sort of a protective envelope around the state (in an ironic reversal of the Zionist aim of providing protection for the Jewish people). But even if the Jewish world were interested in providing such a shield, it is too small and weak to permit such a flight from the facts of international life. The state must function as a state in order to exist at all. And it follows that the acceptance of the responsibilities of political existence also implies the acceptance of the rules of international behavior.

It is necessary therefore to change the basis of the Israeli national definition and found it on the conventional territorial principle—equality before the law of all citizens living within Israeli territory, irrespective of ethnic origins, race, community, religion, or sex. A national definition on the level of these-differences will sooner or later lead to the fragmentation of the state. For example, the definition of the state as Jewish, leads to a situation in which more than a third, and eventually a half, of the population within the Israeli political system, being non-Jewish, will not accept it and as a result will be in a state of open or suppressed revolt. This revolt will break out into the open as soon as it is felt that the dominant ethnic group is losing its grip.

Furthermore, Israel is located in an area that has been heterogeneous since the dawn of history. The ethnic homogeneity of areas such as Northern Europe, with their roughly uniform cultures and ethnic origins, cannot be duplicated in the Middle East. It cannot be duplicated even within the Jewish population of Israel. Since the region has always been a complex mosaic of ethnic and religious groups and since Israel is a mosaic itself, any attempt to impose a uniform way of life and identity on Israel or on the region as a whole is doomed to failure. In the entire Middle East there exists only one state with a unified, homogeneous national substance—Egypt. But even Egypt contains a large Copt minority. Israel, in order to survive, must not only create supraethnic and suprareligious frameworks; it also must accept in advance that it contains a broad variety of particularistic cultures and compensate for this by cultivating loyalty to the common state framework. To some extent the beginnings of such a situation already exist, with Moroccans, Yemenites, Russians, Poles, Americans, Germans, Ethiopians, and Latin Americans rubbing shoulders, vaguely unified by "Jewishness." What is needed now is to add to the mix the growing numbers of Muslim and Christian citizens, most of whom are much closer to Hebrew culture and language than the new immigrants, to say nothing of their intense connection to their ancestral land.

The shift of the national definition from ethnicity or religious allegiance to territoriality will entail a change in the nature of the connection between Israeli Jews and the Jewish world. This connection will then cease to be a state-political one and move more to the cultural and economic spheres, although it should be assumed that certain principles of political preference of the Jews will be kept, such as the readiness to grant asylum to any Jews who are persecuted for their Jewishness (just as the sister Palestinian state that one hopes will be established at Israel's side will undoubtedly extend similar refuge to any Palestinians living abroad). This asylum will not be accompanied by automatic citizenship. To gain that, the refugee would have to face ordinary tests of citizenship, which would be indifferent in respect of religion and nationality.

The elimination of the fear of Zionist expansion, which is one of the main reasons for Arab hostility toward Israel and the reluctance of a large part of the Arab world to make peace with it, will remove a major obstacle to a regional and later perhaps a federal collaboration of Israel with the Arabic-speaking countries. In this way the visions of Weizmann and BenGurion in the twenties and of Lehi in the forties, of a regional federation with a Jewish state as an integral part of it, may yet become a reality. (I omit to mention the Canaanites in this connection, since they envisaged the "Hebraization" of the region by conquest—an impossible eventuality, as I showed earlier.)

I do not pretend to know or be able to prescribe how such a federal or confederal arrangement could be achieved. But it would appear that the only alternative to such integration in and becoming a fully legitimate member of the Middle Eastern system is the continuation of the current situation in which armed confrontation between Israel and its Arab neighbors erupts every few years. This alternative will, in turn, lead to the inevitable decline of Israel's military superiority vis-เ-vis the Arab countries. History shows that such superiority is a transient affair. Such an evaluation is particularly apt when a small force, even a highly efficient one, confronts a large, long-winded force endowed with a great capacity for absorbing punishment. (Israel could never have withstood the attrition undergone by Iraq in its eight-year war with Iran followed by its capacity during the Gulf War to absorb frightful aerial punishment.) Under such conditions, the small force is compelled to strain all its resources and to act with maximum efficiency. But, though such an effort is a spur to continual alertness and advancement, the continual confrontation also obliges the opposing side to improve and increase its force in anticipation of the next round.

One way by which a small force can permanently overcome a large one is by becoming a large force itself, and it does this by assimilating and digesting its conquests, turning conquered populations into organic parts of its system and into full partners in its interests. Because of the exclusivist, self-segregating nature of the Jewish state of Israel, it is incapable of absorbing non-Jewish populations. Many Israeli Arabs and Druze have expressed the desire to become integrated as full patriotic partners in the state, but they have been rebuffed by the state's discriminatory policies. On the other hand, the Jews of Israel, and Jewish people throughout the world, Jewish State or Israeli Nation? have no demographic reserves that could even remotely match the immense Arab numerical superiority.

I believe that the gradual decline of Israel's military superiority is not only the result of the steadily growing Arab numerical superiority but also a consequence of the processes of urbanization, industrialization, and the development of all branches of technological and scientific education taking place in Arab countries. Shlomo Gazit, former president of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, writes that in 1970, of a total Israeli population of 3.5 million Jews, 36,000 were enrolled as students in Israeli institutions of higher learning. In the same year, of a total Middle East Arab population of 100 million, 440,000 were enrolled in institutions of higher learning, a ratio of 1 to 12. Ten years later, in 1980, Israel had 55,000 students enrolled, compared to 1.5 million in the Arab countries, a ratio of 1 to 28. Moreover, in 1970.13.000 Israeli students (35 percent of the total Israeli student population) studied in scientific and technological faculties, in comparison to only 15.000 students working in these fields in all the Arab countries put together, a ratio of almost 1 to 1. But in 1980, the ratio between Israelis and Arabs studying in such institutes had already become 1 to 7.5. Figures from later years show that this process has accelerated.

In a broader historical perspective, Israel is an ideal catalyzer for the development of the region. Once the distant European empires, Britain and France, decided that the area was not worth keeping, they retired, and their invigorating influence departed with it. A mighty local empire would have such a power preponderance over the region that no local power could challenge it (which was the case for centuries with the Ottoman Empire). Israel, as has been demonstrated, mainly in the Lebanon War, is incapable of conquering the region and keeping it. Again and again, it defeats Arab armies, but the damage inflicted on them and on the Arab nations is limited, and, as a result of lessons learned in the most recent round, within a surprisingly short time their armies are restored to an even higher level of professionalism and sophistication.

These confrontations serve as tests, showing the Arabs that they have not yet achieved a level that will enable them to defeat Israel, and this goads them to advance, to improve, never to rest. That is to say, Israeli might is in exactly the right dosage to spur the Arab-Islamic world to enter the modem age and shake off its somnolent traditions, while, all told, paying relatively low historical tuition fees. I noted in an earlier chapter that at the beginning of this century no Palestinian nation yet existed and that the Arabic-speaking population of Palestine was one of most backward, most ignorant, and poorest in the Ottoman Empire. In the whole of Palestine there was not at the time a single Arab institution of higher learning. Today the Palestinians are a group with a fierce national identity. They are also the best-educated and most dynamic of the Arabicspeaking Middle East peoples. None of this would have taken place had it not been for the conflict with the Yishuv and the state, the opportunity to learn from Israel and the rise of a modem, sophisticated, and bitterly determined leadership of this new Palestinian nation. It may even be conjectured that in the long view, the exile of a part of this nation, the subjugation of another part, and the constant pressure applied on it by Israel are not an exaggerated historical price to pay for such an advancement. (?? doubtful). To a lesser extent, this is Israel's effect on all of the "confrontation" states, first and foremost Syria and Jordan. Orthodox Hegelians would perhaps view this as a manifestation of the "cunning of reason," which elected the Jewish national movement as the main catalyzer for the return of the Arab world and of the World of Islam to the center of the historical stage.

It is unlikely that the erosion of Israel's military advantage will make it more amenable to a settlement with the Palestinians or its other Arab neighbors. On the contrary, if this erosion reduces the willingness of the Arab countries to compromise with Israel, assuming that they are bound to win anyway, the feelings of anxiety and xenophobia already prevalent in Israel may intensify and increase the danger to its relatively democratic institutions. Those who call for peace and openness will be branded traitors, the power of the rightist-religious reaction will increase further, exclusivity and hostility to the outside world will become dominant. This is the usual reaction to decline, for only self-confidence leads to openness. The persecution of the inner opposition, if such a scenario materializes, will undoubtedly be accompanied by expulsions and worse inflicted on the country's non-Jewish population. Such atrocities will become ever more aggravated because the subjugated population, sensing the weakening of the state, will become more rebellious.

Still, the assumption of a Holocaust-like ending, in the form of conquest of Israel and annihilation or deportation of its Jewish population, is highly unlikely. If it is ever faced with such a possibility, the nonconventional arsenal in Israel's possession will always enable it to threaten the entire region with mass devastation. But no armaments can prevent a social and economic decline or political disintegration, as has been amply demonstrated in the collapse of the Soviet Union. In addition, the Arab countries, in future wars against Israel, could state limited objectives in advance. In such a case Israel would be unable to use total weapons, since similar ones could be placed in the hands of its opponents, or their opponents could already be in possession of such armaments. Such a balance of terror would necessarily limit the wars to conventional means. But a war of attrition with conventional weapons would exact a heavy toll on Israel's human and economic resources. Its efficacy is shown by the fact that even toward the end of the eighties the country had not completely recovered from the economic blow it sustained in the 1973 Yom Kippur War (although in more recent years the Israeli economy has begun to grow again at an impressive rate). That war also undermined the smug confidence Israelis had in their perpetual military ascendancy. And the Lebanon War, which began in 1982 and lasted until 1985, dealt a mortal blow to the delusion that all problems can be solved by the use of force.

Israel's weakening will undoubtedly be accompanied by a brain drain to countries where economic and professional opportunities seem more attractive. And if the country does not change its definition, character, and structure in the directions here indicated, it is reasonable to assume that it will eventually become one of the ethnoreligious minorities in the region, like the Druze or the Maronites. It will lose its conquests one by one and will be slowly pushed back, perhaps to the coastal strip from which the Hebrew Yishuv began to expand.

Only a strong Israel can join a regional federation. And only within such a federal structure will it be possible to overcome the self-segregating, communal, and proto-fascist tendencies gathering strength in Israeli society. In contrast to the Canaanite conception, which predicted that conquest would encourage integrative attitudes and promote the assimilation of the occupied population as an equal in the structure of the state, experience has shown that the conquest only intensified secretive, xenophobic tendencies in Israel. We face here a vicious circle: an Israeli state that preserves its power ascendancy will probably be loath to relinquish its conquests, and such a refusal will forestall any integration in a regional federal system. On the other hand, it is reasonable to assume that the Arab world will not be inclined to reach a compromise with a deteriorating country and will be avid to press it to extinction. A possible escape from such a vicious circle could be an imposition of a regional settlement by an external power or powers, but such a development depends on an array of factors, the discussion of which is beyond the scope of this book.

Just as I have written of the growth of Zionism and the state of Israel from their start in the crisis of traditional Judaism and have made conjectures (for the above are nothing but conjectures, and no other predictions could be more than conjectures) about the probable future of Israel, I cannot avoid concluding this work with some guesses about the future of the Jewish people in the Diaspora.

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Apart from the future of the Jews as a community, a caste, a people or a nation, what will be the future of Judaism as a religion, as a self-justifying way of life, as a form of group reaction to the world and a view of it? What will happen to Judaism as a result of the Israeli experience, the effect, that is, of the existence of the state on Judaism, particularly if the state deteriorates as envisaged here? What does and what will the state do to Judaism? ??

One thing can be predicted with a considerable measure of certainty: ultra-orthodoxy, which has never reconciled itself to the existence of Israel, will see the state's decline, if it occurs, as a confirmation and reinforcement of its stand about the sinful nature of forcing the "end of days." Even if the state does not decline, it will undoubtedly undergo major changes, an inescapable consequence of its unstable position in an unstable region. Most of such changes will be interpreted by Orthodox Jews as a decline and as a divine punishment. (Were the country to follow the course recommended in this book, which would sever it from its intimate relationship with the Jewish people and Zionism, this might be acceptable to the Orthodox, who would then be able to accept Israel as another gentile state and to adjust to it and accept its authority.)

Orthodoxy will continue to maintain enclaves anywhere in the world willing to accept it, as it has been doing for more than two thousand years. Israel's existence or nonexistence would be of little consequence. Orthodoxy deliberately shut itself in for good about 250 years ago, at the time of the Vilna Gaon, and ever since then it has existed spiritually and socially divorced from the outside world. There is no reason to suppose that it will NOT continue to do so in the foreseeable future, as long as there are Jews prepared to accept its strictures. Its inner survival and satisfaction systems and the emotional and mental peace which its adamantine ritual frame provides, creating a whole inner universe within the confines of the Halacha community, are so elaborate that the Orthodox community will undoubtedly persist in any host society. On the other hand, it may be conjectured that despite the extremely high birthrate in the ultra-Orthodox communities, the continuous process of secularization taking place among them (a process that has been at work since the beginning of the emancipation and continues to work in any society that does not force the Jews back into the ghetto, and there are none such today) will cause the Orthodox communities to revert to what they were for centuries in the West: small, enclosed groups, exotic and strange in the eyes of the outside world (including most Jews) but endowed with remarkable powers of flexibility and adjustment in their contacts with the outside. Their members will always know how to maneuver in the fields of commerce, finance, special occupations such as diamond polishing, and other traditional "Jewish occupations." To this day, nothing has influenced these Jews to change their view of the world or to think critically about the foundations of their faith, not even the destruction of their main stronghold in Eastern Europe. The very fact that the extermination of European Jewry caused no religious crisis, aroused no misgivings about the way that the world is conducted by the Almighty, is proof that the secret of the community's stability is not in any central faith but in the protective, comfortable, and eternally firm framework of daily custom and ritual.

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There is no need to do much speculating about the future of non-Orthodox Jews. Their courses of development are quite familiar. Various forms of Reform Judaism—through to the ultimate blurring of religious and communal identity within the Unitarian Church, which comprises Jews and Christians without distinction—have existed since the first half of the nineteenth century in Germany, France, Britain, and the United States. There exist the various forms of assimilation, with or without religious conversion. There also exist the various forms of nationalism, from Zionism to territorialism and autonomism (although, with the destruction of their population base in Eastern Europe, the latter two versions have become almost extinct). Almost certainly this is the full range of forms which Judaism could assume within the foreseeable future. Except for orthodoxy, all of these forms are various forms of compromise with and adjustment to modem civilization, which separates church from state. They are not the development of an independent spiritual-cultural approach. This reveals the spiritual barrenness of contemporary Judaism. Orthodoxy remains petrified within its strictures and obscurantist world view, unable to offer any spiritual sustenance or answer to the problems of modem man, except "penitence" (Teshuva, the Jewish equivalent of born-again Christianity), which is nothing but intellectual suicide, a frightened sheltering behind dead ritual formulas, not a creative encounter with the human-historical situation.

The willful ossification of Judaism, then, has resulted in its having no answer to the existential problems of modem man, not even to the limited extent that we find in Christianity. Orthodox Judaism, despite its pretension to a loftier morality than that of any other religion, has never displayed a universal social consciousness. Ultra-Orthodox rabbis and other religious worthies have never campaigned for general human causes beyond the limits of the Orthodox Jewish community. One never sees them in demonstrations against racial oppression, against war, against class rule. The mores of their host societies are not of the slightest interest to them. Their only concern is that Jews be allowed to live and prosper within these societies and to conduct their internal community affairs without outside interference. To the extent that rabbis do participate in social action campaigns (such as the campaigns waged in the United States for civil rights and against the Vietnam War), they have always been non-Orthodox. In Israel itself, where there is hardly any Reform Judaism, most of the Orthodox religious establishment is associated with the worst racist and chauvinistic positions. Most of the notorious names among fascist, anti-Arab agitators are those of Orthodox rabbis such as the late Meir Kahane and Moshe Levinger, neither of whom ever was denounced by the rabbinical establishment. On the contrary, one of Israel's two chief rabbis eulogized Kahane at the latter's funeral.

In the absence of a positive spiritual significance in contemporary Judaism, it may be assumed that the assimilation and fading away of the Jews into the surrounding populations will continue, until only the small, closed Orthodox communities are left. True, there still exist Conservative and Reform congregations numbering in the millions, mainly in the United States, but in pre-Hitler Germany and in France these did not avert the complete blurring away of Jewishness. This process has been accelerated by urbanization, the growing mobility of populations, and social atomization. In villages and small towns, with their stable populations, everyone knows everyone else, and no one can escape his origins. But in huge, anonymous societies with mobile individuals lacking any stable traditions, attracting people from all parts of the world and growing ever more cosmopolitan, ethnic and religious traits and their external manifestations hide fast. Anti-Semitic tremors will certainly recur from time to time, and individuals within modem societies will occasionally try to "establish a connection with their roots," to counterbalance the general fluidity and erosion of identity. But such foibles have little influence on the general trend. Even the Nazi tempest, which drove many Jews to Zionism or to religion, hardly changed the process. It still continues among the Jews who survived in the countries occupied by the Nazis, even among the Jews living in Germany itself.

Paradoxically, what may be termed the Israeli experience is one of the accelerating factors of the process. I dwelled in a previous chapter on the exteriorized nature of the Jewish identity formed by "identification with Israel" and pointed out that an identity that is expressed not in the course of day-to-day living but on formal occasions only, is in the final analysis a means of evading a commitment to a definite identity. But the Israeli experience has more aspects in the life of world Jewry. I have described how the Diaspora is manipulated by the Israeli power establishment to further its own ends. This manipulation facilitates the establishment's control of Israeli society by means of the financial resources which the Diaspora puts at its disposal. To this end, the establishment has also done its best to suppress the growth of an independent national consciousness in the Israeli population, which might have led to an estrangement from the Diaspora and the establishment's power sources there. Another powerful instrument in the hands of the establishment to foster its control of both Israelis and Jews abroad has been the systematic exploitation of the greatest Jewish trauma in modem times—the Holocaust.

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Before I touch on the methods used in this exploitation, I would like to describe its destructive meaning. For many Jews, the Holocaust is now the only meaning and content of Judaism and the very basis of their identity as Jews. Theirs is not a positive identity but derives from their experience of the common horror of being Jewish. This is a paranoid basis that can only breed hatred and desire for vengeance against the rest of the world. It leads to a doctrine of a difference in kind between Jews and the rest of humanity—which is basically the photographic negative of Nazi doctrines. It is the continuation of Jewish seclusion from the rest of humanity, though in a separate state, instead of the return to history that is the basis of political Zionism. And it was Ben-Gurion's socialist Zionism that led the way to this betrayal of the legacy and mission of Zionism.

The supreme example of this approach is the Eichmann trial. From the outset, Ben-Gurion viewed the trial as a substitute for a nonexistent national bond, an educational tool to instill in Israeli youth and immigrants from Islamic countries who knew little of the Holocaust a consciousness of the common Jewish fate that found in the Holocaust its supreme and awful expression, along with an awareness of the importance of Israel as the only alternative to protect the Jewish people from another Holocaust. In the absence of a positive national bond, Ben-Gurion deliberately sought to base the national consciousness on the negative foundation of terror and nightmare, with the attendant obsession with military force and an unbounded increase of this force to avert a new Holocaust, the two aspects of the Zionist will to power.

No matter how strong Israel can hope to become, it will, obviously, never be strong enough to avert a Nazi-style new Holocaust. After all, Nazi Germany was a superpower. If the United States, for example, ever decided to exterminate its Jews, Israel would not be able to prevent this any more than the Jewish Yishuv in 1939 was able to prevent Nazi Germany from doing so.

But the aim of the Israeli establishment was not to investigate the past but to use it to create an ideology and a myth that would help the establishment to control both the Diaspora and the Israeli people. The Holocaust was eminently suitable for that purpose, and the establishment used it in two unrelated contexts, though each is traumatic in itself, and fused them together to create a sense of trauma for both the Jews abroad and the Israelis. The one, as noted, is the Holocaust. The other is the Arab siege of Israel. Although it is not my purpose here to discuss the contexts and historical causes of the Holocaust, in one respect Zionism was correct in claiming that the peculiar situation of the Jews in European society in general and in the German particular was one of the main causes of the Holocaust—although the latter may not have taken place had it not been for the Nazi goal of creating a German living space (Lebensraum) in Eastern Europe, which involved the enslavement and gradual extermination of the Slav peoples. The conclusion which classical Zionism drew from this grim chapter of history was that if the Jews were assembled in a state of their own, their social and political conditions would change accordingly and so would the attitude of the surrounding world. This, in addition to their acquiring a military-political might of their own, would prevent another Holocaust. But such a conclusion implies an admission of the separate character and course of the emerging Israeli nation, thus undermining the thesis that all Jews constitute a single nation.

Therefore, the Zionist leadership developed a parallel argument—that the Arab siege of Israel is actually traditional anti-Semitism, but in a different form. The Palestinians' desire to rid themselves of what they see as the Zionist invader, clearly a military-political struggle of two peoples fighting for the same land, and the support extended them by sister Arab nations have been conceived, whether from deliberate misrepresentation or because of the dominance of ossified patterns of thinking, as a continuation of the traditional hatred of the Jews, not as a normal manifestation of the violent struggle. This distortion of the Arab resistance to Israel—a rational enough resistance, far removed from the irrational hatred of traditional anti-Semitism—enabled the Israeli leadership and the intelligentsia that serves it to develop the notion about the Jewish fate "common to and uniting all of us." Because the aim of the Arabs is to "inflict a second Holocaust" on the Jews of Israel, the Arabs are the "pupils of the Nazis." The danger of a second Holocaust serves the Israeli leadership as a powerful instrument for mobilizing Jewish support and for silencing critical voices both in the Diaspora and among non-Jews.

The main inner contradiction of this position is that it conflicts with the basic tenets of Zionism, hence with the logic of the establishment of Israel. If the establishment of the state has not been able to solve the problems of anti-Semitism and the persecution of even those Jews living within the state, people who are now outcasts not as individuals but as a political whole, and who are now in danger of a collective (state) Holocaust; if Jew hatred is a kind of a metaphysical datum, plaguing the Jews from time immemorial like a mark of Cain (as argued by the early church and maintained until quite recent times)—then their ingathering in a state of their own does not solve the problem of Jewish survival but only puts it in a new form, and in a way even aggravates it. All of Israel's military prowess could not sustain the state against a world bent on its destruction, for the world will always be stronger. In addition, the assumption of a metaphysical anti-Semitism negates in advance any possibility that a Jewish state could ever survive among other states and function in a real world based on the essential equality of all sovereign bodies operating within it. Were such an assumption true, it would be more desirable for Jewish survival that the Jews continue to be dispersed, thus enabling any threatened Jewish community to emigrate to more inviting climes, as Jews have always done.

In such a case, the difference between Israelis and other Jews shrinks to the fact that the former have an army and the latter don't. The fathers of Zionism never thought in such terms. They sought to change the character and structure and essence of the Jewish people, to create a different human quality, not to establish an armed ghetto. Although armaments are necessary for a country's defense, they, of themselves, do not create a different human quality. If that is the sum total of the difference, only individuals suffering from constant persecution and humiliation, or whose lives are in danger, or are haunted by feelings of inferiority and seek compensation by humiliating others, would choose to live in Israel. In short, all possible motivations for Jewish emigration to Israel are of a negative nature. The Jews coming to Israel are not offered a safer, freer, more pleasant, or more civilized life. But if that is so, there would be few Jews in free countries who would want to come to Israel. As a rule, their motivation in immigrating is religious. For them, the country is the Holy Land, and in most cases, rather than becoming integrated in Israel's true national life they continue to live a separate caste existence, within the secluded religious enclaves.

I might add that the Holocaust motif as a central point of Jewish existence necessarily leads to a negative result from both the Jewish and the Zionist perspective. If it is true that the only element unifying Jews as Jews is the permanent danger of annihilation that hovers over them, it is reasonable to assume that all sane persons would try to divest themselves, through assimilation or conversion, of this identity. If they find this possible, they would undoubtedly and rightly choose this course. No healthy identity can be based on purely negative, paranoiac sentiments.

Although most Jews in the world have no intention of emigrating to Israel, many of them have developed an intense affinity to it, supporting it unconditionally, whatever its policy. The organization of Jewish communities and the Israeli and Zionist influence network, mainly in the United States, have created a situation in which there is hardly anyone in the Jewish community who dares criticize Israel in public. One needs much civic courage to give public utterance abroad to even a fraction of the criticism leveled at the Israeli government and its policy even by center groups in Israel, to say nothing of the opposition. Thus, has it come to pass that the very Jewish public that in the past was supposed to keep faith with a religious or a moral scale of values today is loyal to Israeli power politics, which are by definition amoral, and defends them by inventing excuses and apologies of a moral nature.

The result is similar to what happened over the years to the Moscow leaning Communist parties, with their apologetics for such crimes as the annihilation of the kulaks, the repression of freedom of thought and expression, the great purges, the persecution of the Cosmopolitans, the labor camps where millions died, the repression of rebellions in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia. The constant effort needed to invent excuses and to adapt to the party line totally corrupted the thinking of party members, sapped their idealism and turned them into cynical hacks. We have now witnessed the final result of this situation—the collapse of the system under its own weight.

The unconditional, unquestioning identification with Israel, the fabrication of excuses for Israeli action so that it corresponds with lofty moral principles (even when Israeli policy is represented by ominous figures such as Ariel Sharon), has set in motion a de-ethicization process of the Jewish people in the Diaspora. The contradiction between obvious, universal moral principles and Israeli realpolitik and the suppression of the criticism generated by this conflict—which, when it comes from non-Jews, is immediately branded as anti-Semitic, and when it comes from Jews, as self-hating—are bound in the end to cause cynicism and nihilism among the best elements of the Jewish Diaspora and a feeling that the Jews have lost any claim to a loftier morality.

The Jews themselves may then reach the conclusion that the cult of the Jewish state has seduced them to whore after strange gods, that the moral identification with power politics is tantamount to idolatry. That may cause a collapse of the moral pretension which the Jews adopted after the decline of religious faith and as a substitute for it, and subsequently have a disastrous effect on the feelings of Jewish continuity, with the collapse of that element in which the Jews considered themselves as superior to others and therefore justifying the continuation of their identity as Jews. The realization that they are no better than others but that, unlike others, who arrived at a critical, reserved attitude toward the morality of any political system, they of all people were fooled and led astray by such a system established by their own brethren—thus becoming inferior in this respect to those who have not foregone this skeptical attitude—this may become the most upsetting factor imaginable for the Jewish feeling of meaning, continuity, and solidarity.

It is quite conceivable that the sobering up of masses of Jews from this civil religion of theirs will parallel results in the Diaspora after the collapse of the false messianism of Sabbetai Zvi in the seventeenth century—a mass distancing from both Israel and Judaism. Perhaps it will even lead to an explicitly anti-Israeli formulation of Jewish identity. If Judaism is to continue to exist, and if it is to remain sane, the myth of "one people" will also have to be abolished. Israel could well inflict the true death blow to Judaism—and then the Orthodox, who instinctively fear just such a disaster, will be found to be justified.

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