There Is No Jewish State
5. 2. 2024 / Joseph Grim Feinberg
čas čtení
26 minut
(Českou verzi tohoto článku jsme vydali ZDE
A Czech version of this article is HERE)
In the Czech media I often hear about something called “the Jewish
State.” But I know of no such state deserving of that name.
Yes, I am aware
that the Israeli
Declaration of Independence announces “the establishment of a
Jewish State,” and I know that since 1985 Israel’s Basic
Law defines that state as “Jewish and democratic.” I also
know that a new Basic
Law from 2018 defines Israel as a “nation state of the Jewish
people.” None of that makes “Jewish State” into an innocent
synonym for “Israel,” a simple substitution to avoid repetition
and spice up journalistic prose. The fact that Israel calls itself a
Jewish state does not give it authority to fix the meaning of
“Jewish,” or the relationship of Jewishness to states.
The Israeli
Declaration of Independence speaks of a “natural right of the
Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations
[sic!], in their own sovereign State.” The document then
declared its state’s national affiliation, announcing that it was a
state for the members of a single, predefined nation. By doing so, it
closed off the possibility of founding a state that could have been
Jewish in a different sense—by expressing the historically
developed principles of Jewishness and deciding how best to bring
these principles into a new age.
Israel and the
Jewish World
There’s a lot
in the Israeli Declaration of Independence about where the Jewish
people lived long ago and where they dream of returning. There’s
nothing in it about what these people, during their long wandering
from their point of origin to their destination, have been. In the
rhetoric of Israel’s founding document, Jewishness is about Israel,
but Israel is not about Jewishness. The Jewish people are
characterized solely by their relationship to the land they came from
and head toward. The state born on this land is not characterized in
relation to the people who for thousands of years lived elsewhere.
And thanks to this programmatic overlooking of Jewish existence
outside Israel, Israel has failed in its attempt to become a state
for the worldwide population of Jews.
Yes, several
million Jews eventually moved to the new state, and many others
maintain strong personal connections with Israeli society. But about
half the world’s Jews maintain still stronger connections to
other states. Over 75 years after the founding of the allegedly
Jewish state, about half the world’s Jewish life—half the
activity cultivating Jewish traditions and developing Jewish
history—still takes place in the Diaspora.
This does not
have to be a problem for Israel. The Land of Israel could continue to
be a symbolic center of Jewish thought, just as it has always been,
without needing to become the geographical home of all Jews. The
Jewish community in Israel could be one community among many, with
political structures that support Jewish communities in the Diaspora,
without needing to perpetually suggest their inferiority. Israeli
society could be a refuge for Jews fleeing persecution, without the
Israeli state apparatus claiming the right to speak for global Jewry.
And in fact these
ideas for the Jewish community in Israel were historically
well represented in Zionism. Take Ber
Borochov, for example, a central figure of labor Zionism, the
leading tendency among the founders of modern Israel—he not only
promoted the renewal of Hebrew as a language of Jewish unity, but
also promoted Yiddish as a language of Diaspora, with a great legacy
as a language of labor organizing that could continue in a new state
(where, he imagined, the national question could be resolved, making
national unity no longer necessary). Another Zionist tendency, known
as territorialism,
emphasized the practical need for a safe haven for Jewish refugees,
wherever land for them might be found, and territorialists did not
insist that Diaspora Jews living in safe conditions should feel
morally obliged to emigrate to an eventual Jewish state.
Or take the
so-called cultural
Zionists, who measured the success of their project not by the
numbers of Jews who might emigrate, but by the cultural
accomplishments of the new community that could inspire Jews around
the world facing the pressures of assimilation. For Ahad
Ha’am, the leading figure of cultural Zionissm, the idea
of the “Jewish State” meant not a complete “ingathering of
the exiles,” which could be promised only by the “miraculous
redemption of religion,” but “the settlement of a small part of
our people in Palestine.” He wrote:
Truth is bitter, but with all its bitterness it is better than illusion. We must confess to ourselves that the “ingathering of the exiles” is unattainable by natural means. We may, by natural means, establish a Jewish State one day, and the Jews may increase and multiply in it until the country will hold no more: but even then the greater part of the people will remain scattered in strange lands.
When, at last,
the “small part of our people in Palestine” succeeds in raising
the level of “our national culture” and spreading “the spirit
of Judaism,” then “we may be confident that it will produce men
in the country who will be able, on a favourable opportunity, to
establish a State…” And then this state can be “a
Jewish State, and not merely a State of Jews.”
Here lies the
whole problem, in the difference between a “Jewish State” and a
“State of Jews.” In Ha’am’s view, the state should be founded
only on the condition that it contributes to the main goal, which was
the cultivation of Jewish culture and society. And in those days,
even Zionists of the more dominant tendencies imagined that their
project would result in something more than some ordinary state that
just happened to belong to Jews instead of another nation. Yet again
and again the leading Zionists sacrificed this vision in the interest
of establishing and maintaining the power of a state.
And for this very
reason the state they created could not be a state for all Jews. They
devalued Israel as a symbolic center of Judaism; they insulted and
alienated large segments of the Jewish population outside Israel; and
in the end they compromised the possibility of establishing Israel as
a safe place for Jews in need. What they created was not a state with
which all Jews could identify, but a tendentious state for some
Jews, a state for Israeli Jews, who directly participate in its
functioning, and a state for that segment of non-Israeli Jews who
accept Israel’s specific understanding of Jewishness, that is, for
those who accept Jewishness as a national identity that hurries to
its own state in its own land and regards tarrying in the Diaspora,
among the other nations of the world, as a defect.
Israel grew
satisfied with its self-definition as the state of all Jews, and with
the idea that all Jews should defend Israel—not because it might be
a good state, but because it is a state of Jews, not because it
showed what a Jewish state could be, but because it was supposed to
be a priori Jewish. And by trying to be a State of Jews, it
set out on a path that would soon take it away from the most
important thing that could have justified its claim to preeminence in
the Jewish world: cultivating Jewish life by continuing,
rather than leaping over, Jewish history.
While many
earlier Zionists measured the success of their project by the
cultural and social strength of the community forming in Palestine,
the builders of the Israeli state began to measure their success by
the numbers of Jews they could attract to the territory. This Zionism
no longer saw itself as a source of strength to be added to global
Jewish communities, but as competition with them. The Israeli
community grew by subtracting from other Jewish communities, and
while it decried the dangers of assimilation in the Diaspora, it
placed enormous emphasis on assimilating immigrants into a new,
specifically Israeli culture that sharply contrasted with the Jewish
cultures of the Diaspora. Social pressures and institutional
arrangements (schooling, immigrant immersion programs, population
dispersion within the country, cases of children taken
from their parents, a partial ban
on the Yiddish language) combined to disrupt the cultural life of
Sephardic, Mizrahi, Ashkenazi, Yemenite, Ethiopian, Iranian, and so
many other kinds of Jews, to ensure that they all lived as Israelis.
The State of
Israel can’t bear the chief blame for the conditions that pressured
many Jews to emigrate to Israeli (however much one might see
post-1948 antisemitism in Arab countries as a response to Israeli
practices), but it is clear that Israel did not become a place where
Jewish refugees were given the means to preserve and develop the
traditions they had chosen or been compelled to leave behind.
Israel’s success became the Diaspora’s loss. Yiddish, Ladino,
Judeo-Arabic, and the literatures and oral cultures that came with
them—it is as if they were invited to Israel only to be thrown to
the winds upon arrival.
And within the
territory of Israel and Palestine, the politics of counting Jews
became still more fraught. Because the state measured its Jewishness
in numbers rather than content, Israel not only took from Diaspora
communities, but felt the need to subtract from the non-Jewish
communities in the land it claimed, to make room for immigrants and
ensure their majority in the state. To accomplish the goal, Israel
built an imposing army, a legendary spy outfit, and a frightening
security apparatus; it won wars and increased its territory while
being careful not to expand its offers of non-Jewish citizenship as
quickly as it expanded its control over land.
And the more
powerful Israel grew as a state, the further it departed from the
idea that progressive interpreters had given to Jewishness: the idea
that Jewish life would develop by participating in global projects of
all-human emancipation. As the Israeli state grew more inhumane
toward the non-Jewish inhabitants of Israel and Palestine, Israeli
leaders grew still more impatient toward those high-minded Jews in
the Diaspora who still believed Israel should adhere to universal
moral standards—or at least to the moral standards developed by
Jewish tradition itself. For the new generations of Israeli leaders,
such moral hand-wringing was ignorant and pitiable, and only Israelis
themselves could really understand that the brutal necessities of
Israeli life required them to contradict every grand humanistic
ideal. And the more Israel turned the presumed necessity of violence
into a virtue, the less it could be a state of those Jews who reject
this necessity.
The State of
Jewishness Is Diaspora
What if Israel
tried to be not the state of a single, narrowly defined nation, but a
state of all people who choose to participate in a certain history,
developing principles drawn from a certain experience and a certain
tradition of thought? What if Israel acknowledged not only the right
of Jews to live in one land, but also the right of all people to live
where they are and to return to the lands they consider to be their
home?
The Israeli
Declaration of Independence writes that the Land of Israel “was the
birthplace of the Jewish people,” but this is only half true. In
the ancient kingdom whose capital was Jerusalem, there lived Judeans.
It was only their descendants who became Jews after the Judean
kingdom was conquered and its people scattered from the land. The
Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Diaspora, and it was only
the Diaspora that gave birth to Jews.
When Israel
claims that it is a state belonging exclusively to the Jewish nation,
this very claim contradicts a key principle of Jewish tradition as it
developed in the millennia of life among other, larger nations: the
contestation of the exclusivity of nations on the territories
to which they lay claim. A Jewish state that develops this
principle would not be a state only for a Jews. Its founding
principle would be respect for people who live without their own
state, which is to say: respect for all people whose supposed states
are not really fully theirs. Respect for everyone who lacks full
protection of state machinery, for all who are exiled or excluded or
exploited and only falsely integrated into the states and societies
where they live.
A state that
fulfils the Diasporic meaning of being Jewish would, properly
speaking, no longer be a state, at least not insofar as it is Jewish.
The principle of Jewishness in the Diaspora is the principle of
building life outside the state.
Judean worship
was a state religion. It was organized around a central Temple and
run by high priests under the power and protection of kings. The
specifically Jewish practice of worship emerged when the old Judean
rituals became independent after their erstwhile state and Temple
were destroyed. Judean politics had been monarchistic. Jewish
politics emerged when the formerly Judean society reconstituted
itself in exile and without its own kings, treating other kings as
accidental rulers, secondary in authority to the voices of God and
His prophets and, more importantly, to the local community scholars,
who came to be known as rabbis, who interpreted those voices. Instead
of dying out when removed from its land, the
community grew as the emerging worldview was dispersed over land
and sea, increasingly emphasizing the universality of the condition
of exile and the search for paths of return.
In the Babylonian
and Assyrian Exiles (ca. 720–520 BCE), which ended the Judean
kingdom and its northern Israelite sister kingdom, the people who
were becoming Jews began to edit a collection of texts that we know
today as the Bible, celebrating above all the pre-monarchistic period
of Israelite history, from the times before the Judean kings, with a
narrative centered around a double exile: first from Eden, an exile
that will not end before the end of time, and second from Egypt, an
exile and ambivalent return that would provide the structure for
thinking Jewish history in repeated waves thereafter. When the kings
at last come into the Biblical story, they come as secondary figures,
legitimate only when they follow the advice of prophets, whose
authority outweighs theirs, and who sometimes decry
the very institution of kingship. After the kings are swept away,
the whole story is told from the perspective of exile, and even
though parts of the book reflect the attitude of a later period, when
the kingdom was reconstituted and the Temple was rebuilt, the book in
its final form would be read with full knowledge that this moment of
return was temporary, because the Temple was destroyed again (in 70
CE) and, like Eden, it remains out of reach to this day.
After the Second
Temple was destroyed, the community reevaluated its earlier
practices. It gave up on the rituals connected to the Temple and the
king, and its system of worship came to resemble the decentralized
forms of worship that were denounced in the monarchist sections of
the book (like the book of Kings): ritual life was spread far
and wide among thousands of proxy temples, run by their own
congregants instead of priests and kings.
Jerusalem stopped
being the political center Judeanism, becoming the symbolic center of
Judaism. The dispersion of Jews around the world not only refer to
one people’s geographical exile, but took on the existential
significance that we are nowhere entirely at home, because the whole
world has taken on the character of Exile. The destruction of one
particular Temple became a symbol of universal destruction; it could
be confronted not by erecting a new building at a single location,
but by the right kind of activity anywhere in the world. And the fact
that the Temple remained destroyed, despite great spiritual and
material effort, was a reminder that the Messiah has not yet come,
because in the post-Biblical period only the Messiah would be capable
of adequately repairing all the worldly destruction that the Temple
now symbolized. And the Messiah would not build a Temple for Jews
alone. He would end the exile of all nations—and only then would
the Jews truly come home.
The Jerusalem
hill known as Zion became a symbol of the desire for return,
but return no longer meant primarily physical displacement to the
territory of Israel, which was by now (since the times of Roman
domination) better known to the world as Palestine. The idea of a
physical return became a metaphor for a turn away from the conditions
of existential hardship, a redemption of all people from all forms of
debt and servitude that were entailed by life under foreign rule
(that is, by life under all illegitimate rulers). Jews were expected
to desire this return, but not to return prematurely. They were to
remain wary of false Messiahs, who promise to save everyone, but who
in practice save only a few. Life in Diaspora was meant to remind us
not to be become too comfortable as long as we haven’t all returned
home and the world remains unredeemed.
Jewish life in
the Diaspora was a product of this tension: the desire for return,
and caution against premature returns. How to understand this in the
secular society toward which most currents of Jewish life in recent
centuries have been moving? Perhaps like this: We should struggle
against oppression, but not declare victory before it has truly come.
We should support the right of people to return to their homes, but
we should not think that we ourselves are home before we have all
arrived. We can dream of a society where we will all live in harmony,
but we should remember that in our actual societies perfect harmony
is illusory, because we are not all equally at home. Some of us are
where we don’t want to be, while others are in places where
societies-hoping-for-harmony don’t want us. And we just might
choose to stay where we don’t belong.
Those are
principles of Diasporic Jewish thought that Zionism could have
developed. Zionists could have asked at every stage whether their own
goals were compatible with the goals of all-human emancipation. They
could have fought for the ingathering of Jews on the condition that
they guard against prematurely feeling completely at home. They could
have sought ways to link the safety of Jews in Palestine to the
safety of all people who live there. But as long as Zionism failed to
do this, it could not form a Jewish state, no matter what the state’s
declarations and laws announced and no matter how it identified the
people who became its citizens.
Zionism diverged
from the principle of Diasporic Jewishness the moment it chose—as
Zionists often said—to make Jews into a “normal nation” that
would behave—as the Declaration of Independence says—“like all
other nations, in their own sovereign State.” Jews in the Diaspora
have experienced the result of this behavior
of normal nations, which have the right to oppress other nations
within their borders, and which have a tendency to look on the people
of other nations as elements dangerous to their own state. The
primary contribution of Jewish thought to the understanding of
nations and states consists in its grappling with a
national-cultural-political experience that not fit conveniently into
the modern model of a nation seeking perfect accord with itself in
its own state. Its legacy is not normal. It stands as a
warning against what modernity has made too normal. It
is a legacy of impropriety in the face of unbearable normality.
This warning
against normality does not make Diasporic Jewish thought unusual. It
is unique only insofar as every tradition of thought is abnormal in
its own way and deserves the chance to work through its own
particular abnormalities in the search for something universal.
This principle of
Jewishness can join the many voices that remind us of an alternative
path to modernity, one closed off by the “normal nations” of the
world—which is to say, by the idea of normal nationhood, to
which so few nations properly conform. That alternative is a path
toward the forming of states that do not belong to one nation, and to
the forming of nations that do not lay claim to the domination of any
states. A state that reflected this principle of Jewishness
would shatter unitary national identity, helping all people return to
their lands by working to make all lands the potential home of all
people. But Zionism abandoned this principle of Jewishness, in order
to found a “normal” nation-state.
A Jewish State
or an Israeli State?
Is it too much,
on my part, to ask Israel to be better than normal nation-states? At
this point, I would be glad if Israel were at least normal. I
just wish it wouldn’t confuse its nations. It would not be a Jewish
state, but it could at least be consistently Israeli.
States typically
declare themselves to belong to entire, long-existing nations, when
in practice they are above all specific, newly emerging
projects—concrete organizational structures that gather together
the groups of people who participate in them. It is a
misunderstanding, sometimes harmless and sometimes tragic, when this
concrete group of participants is confused with an abstract nation
born centuries or millennia before. Israel could be a state of the
abstract Jewish nation, but only if its state project were the
development of the manifold tendencies that come out of Jewish
history. Or it could be a normal state of Israelis—of the
concrete participants in its project—if only it stopped insisting
that it is the state of the abstract nation of all Jews.
Israel should
continue to be open to all Jews who choose to participate in its
project—and to all non-Jews who choose to join them. It should try
to create and preserve a space where Jews can be safe—which,
practically speaking, would mean forming positive, non-violent
relations between Jews and non-Jews. And so much the better if it
also, finally, becomes a place where Jewish history can unfold as a
project mediating between an abstract, generalized conception of
exile and concrete attempts at redemption from exile. But to the
extent that it is the state of a nation, that nation will not be
Jewish. It will be Israeli.
Many Israelis
have indeed worked to continue the Jewish history that was begun in
the Diaspora, but Zionism as a whole has been more interested in
overcoming this history than in continuing it. Early Zionists spoke
of “negating
the diaspora,” in order to create a society entirely different
from the existing, Diasporic societies of Jews. I understand. Life in
Diaspora can be too easy and too hard. It can oppress and exterminate
some Jews while offering others the cheap pleasures of assimilation
and material plenty. I respect the attempt to seek something
different. Let us only be aware that what results from such a project
will not be Jewish, not in the sense given to Jewishness by Jewish
history; it will be something new. Let’s call it Israeli.
This new category
does not need to be limited to Jews, or even to Jewish Israelis. It
could be open to all people who choose to be a part of Israeli
society, whether as enthusiastic supporters of it in its current
form, or as its harsh critics. The Israeli Declaration of
Independence calls on “Jewish people throughout the Diaspora” to
immigrate to the new state and participate in its “upbuilding.”
Many of them answered the call. The Declaration also calls on “the
Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and
participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and
equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and
permanent institutions.” Considering the fact that the same
Declaration declared the state to be Jewish and, therefore, not
theirs, and the fact that after its founding the state revised its
offer and significantly limited the equality of its Arab citizens,
while denying citizenship to many other Arabs under its eventual
rule, it’s remarkable that not a few non-Jewish citizens of Israel
also found various ways to answer this call. If only Israel admitted
that it is an Israeli sate, and not a Jewish state, these citizens
could feel that they are fully Israeli and not strangers in a strange
land, even when it is land on which their ancestors lived long
before.
By bringing
non-Jewish people into its community as full participants in its
project, Israel would become more, not less Jewish. Jews, a nation
born in Diaspora, are Jews only in heterogeneous societies, only
where they can preserve consciousness of the fact that people still
live in exile. Jews in Israel can remain Jews only as long as Israel
remains a part of the Diaspora, which is to say, as long as the
people of Israel continue to address the problems of exile, whether
it be their own alienation from a society that is supposed to be
theirs, or the expulsion of other people from lands on which they
once lived and the exclusion of other people from lands on which they
still live, but which are occupied or besieged by the State of
Israel.
Such a state
could offer space where Jews and non-Jews, referring to their various
pasts and various visions, could debate their shared future, without
merging into a monolithic whole. Such a struggle among competing
memories, tendencies, and hopes would be a negative dialectic,
without a Messiah and without final resolution.
Whether this
state will have borders around all of Palestine, and will be
compelled to bring in Palestinian history and experience—the
Palestinian idea of Diaspora—as an equal part of its
self-understanding, or whether it will exist alongside an independent
Palestine, which finds its own path forward, I don’t know. Whether
it will be called “Israel” or “Palestine” or
“Palestine-Israel” or something completely different, I don’t
know that either. I only know that without a political project of
this type, there is little hope that this state, which has become
stuck in a trap of self-negation through the negation of supposed
foreigners, can ever move forward.
Jewishness
beyond the State
Fortunately,
Israel has not resolved all the questions of exile; it has not fully
negated the Diaspora or overcome Jewish history in its millennia-long
Diasporic sense. Thanks to this, Jews still exist as Jews, and not
only as Jews transformed into Israelis. There are even Jews in the
State of Israel, precisely because they have not become identical to
the Israeli state, which is to say, because Israel is not a Jewish
state, thanks be to the Lord. Since Jews can only be Jews where they
do not merge with their states, Israeli society can be Jewish to the
extent that it contradicts the homogenizing principle of the Israeli
state, and Jewish history can continue even in Israeli, to the extent
that people in Israel create something independent of the Israeli
state. It is up to society, beyond the state, to move forward that
history that the state was unable to end.
Diasporic
Jewishness finds its home only at the end of history, which probably
(and perhaps hopefully) will never end. This does not mean that
Jewish tradition ignores the principle of home. It means that it
recognizes home not only for Jews. What happens to others who lose
their homes happens also to us. The longings of other people for
return our also our longings. This view of the world venerates homes,
not borders, because it honors places that are open for return. And
because existing states, founded on the principle of predefined
state-making nations, do not offer homes to all people, this concept
of Jewishness maintains a distance from all existing states—including
that state that calls itself Jewish.
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