Guest Blog: Israel and the growing failure of Zionism

The Kulturkampf, so long feared, has stealthily come and gone, coalition politics increasingly hostage to a radical haredi fringe pursuing their own selfish anti-Zionist agenda.

One hundred fifty years ago, in the wake of Napoleonic conquest, western Jewry was emancipated from centuries of serfdom, promised freedom and equality throughout the newly-proclaimed secular states of the West. In less than 100 years the Holocaust proved to all and forever that not only had secularization failed to end discrimination against Jews, but that the secular inheritor states of Christendom's 'Jewish Problem' had morphed from religion-inspired random acts of terror into annihilative antisemitism.

Zionism, the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, was the Diaspora's response to its growing awareness that Jews would always be strangers, will forever face danger in the Christian west. Israel, it was hoped, would fulfill Zionism's agenda of a state for the stateless, refuge for a threatened Diaspora. Sixty years of wars fought and won, peace sought and partially achieved; an ancient language, like our Jewish people, reborn. A national transformation, a social and cultural revolution more complete and successful than anything the world had ever seen, or likely would again!

Fast-forward to 2009. Haredi-secular conflict in the streets of Jerusalem; conversion court insurrectionists disenfranchise thousands of Jews legally converted under that same conversion court; the Knesset Constitution and Law Committee, in celebration of Israel's 60th Independence Day, proposed a constitution with a watered down Law of Return, its enacting Grandparent Clause eliminated; annual efforts in the Knesset by the orthodox Shas party to impose on Israel its own definition of Who is a Jew which, if enacted, would disenfranchise the majority of Jews in Israel and the Diaspora, limiting legitimacy to a minority even within the Orthodox community. Is this what the Jewish people aspired to in defining Zionism, in creating a state for the Jews? Who but the haredi fringe is benefited by such actions as described above? 

Anti-Zionism is not new to Israel. As a young Zionist living in Israel in 1960 I was aware that sabras my age considered Zionism passé, an ideology of the Galut [Diaspora]. Of course that same generation of Jews in the United States similarly considered themselves Americans first, Jews second. This was the "post-greenhorn" generation. But what is happening today in Israel goes well beyond adolescent self-definition.

The polity of Israel is being increasingly corrupted by an anti-Zionist minority, an extremist haredi dominance of institutions of state governance. Even the National Religious Party, orthodox and historically Zionist, fear and defer to the intolerant and aggressive anti-Zionists. The Kulturkampf [culture struggles], so long feared, has stealthily come and gone, coalition politics increasingly hostage to a radical haredi fringe pursuing their own selfish anti-Zionist agenda.

PHOTO:AP

Israel is at a crossroads of identity and responsibility: to continue to capitulate to extremist minority sects determined to return Jewry to ghetto life, to bring down the state not resulting from messianic intervention; or to be the state of the Jews, of all Jews, tolerant, secular and democratic where even that most radical anti-Zionist sect, the Neturei Karta, are accepted as Jews and citizens under the Law of Return; where the Neturei Karta are free even to travel to Iran on Yom HaShoah [Holocaust Memorial Day] to endorse Ahmadinejad's call for the destruction of Israel, or to Gaza to encourage Hamas' in its dream to bring to end Jewish sovereignty!

Zionism was born of the recognition that Jews are unsafe in the Christian west. But not even the most prescient early Zionist could have foreseen the politicization of Christendom's 2,000 year-long Jewish Problem, the transformation of traditional religious anti-Judaism into secular annihilative antisemitism. No sane and rational person, Zionist or other, could have foreseen that the instruments of technological progress of the 20th century, that IBM computers would be used to identify Jews back to a single Jewish grandparent, to pinpoint their location for roundup and transport to the death camps; that Ford's streamlining of the factory, the assembly line, would be used to economically and efficiently reduce six million Jews to ash.

Israel has transformed a segment of our people beyond even Herzl's dream, a cultural and social miracle of Jewish national rebirth. Continuing along her present course Israel is increasingly failing her Zionist responsibility as refuge for Jews when need arises. Not just the few defined as such by a narrow definition of Who is a Jew, but of ALL Jews. Even those non-practicing.

If the most democratic electoral system in the world proves the obstacle to fulfilling that responsibility because of coalition politics, if an abundance of single-issue parties draws votes from the major parties, forcing dependence on the anti-Zionist fringe in order to even form a government, then the time is long overdue to surrender a measure of democratic choice in service of a less anarchic and chaotic electoral system.  If a two- or three-party system is needed to eliminate a haredi influence well out of proportion to their actual numbers, to return Israel to her Zionist responsibilities as protector of our Diaspora then the small cost involved far outweighs the benefits.

The identity of the state and the security of our future are at risk. Israel today stands at the historical crossroads of her reason for existing.