I. 9.
The Theory of Zionism – Different Models
The third issue is that of the different visions developed by
the competing ideological streams in Zionism, following the description of
some of the tensions that developed within the Zionist movement. It is important
to emphasise that Zionism was never a monolithic movement with a general nationalist
vision. It was a movement which, for many Zionists, went far beyond the idea
of the attainment of a society or state for the Jewish People, even though
that was its central plank and its common denominator.
That stated, there were two significant streams within Zionism
that were essentially political rather than societal in their orientation,
placing the attainment of the state as their major aim, rather than concentrating
on the sort of society that should develop after independence. These were
the Herzlian movement of Political Zionism and Jabotinsky’s Revisionist
movement both of which were were political movements. They were characterised,
more than in any other way, by the emphasis they placed on the tactics needed
to gain statehood.
- Herzl, as mentioned earlier, put the emphasis on diplomatic activity aimed
at the acquisition of a Charter for Palestine from the Ottoman Turks.
- Jabotinsky, during the period of the British Mandate, placed enormous emphasis
on measures necessary to gain the Jewish state from the British.
They both regarded the question of the type of society that would
develop as secondary to their primary purpose of gaining a state: Herzl talked
about a liberal western republic, and so in certain ways did Jabotinsky, fired
as he was by a strong opposition to the socialist vision entertained by the
leaders of the Yishuv at this time.
Neither of these streams of Zionism put their major efforts into
the question of the type of society that should develop in Palestine.
But there were those who did: Zionism, through several different
streams, developed a number of visions regarding the form of society that
should be established in the future state.
It was not just a question of the future state that was at stake
for these different streams in Zionism. All of their proponents were united
in the idea that their vision must be reflected in the immediate pre-state
world of the New Yishuv in Eretz Yisrael. The future state, if and when it
came about, would be a continuation of the present day Yishuv with the security
of sovereignty and national borders to safeguard that way of life.
Thus the struggle that developed between the different streams
of Zionism was both bitter and, from their own point of view, absolutely justified.
There were three major streams whose ideology was of a comprehensive nature,
Socialist Zionism, Cultural Zionism and Religious Zionism.
A. The Vision of Left-Wing Zionism
By the First World War, Labour Zionism had become the leading
activist movement in the Zionist world and in Palestine. A host of settlements
had been set up on a communal basis and thousands of workers were tilling
the land and building an urban infrastructure.
The most significant departure in the activity of these workers,
from our point of view, is that they consciously took upon themselves the
transformation of the Jewish people. Despite the seeming contradiction, these
Jewish secularists believed that their work had almost cosmic implications.
They consciously perceived themselves as revolutionaries: They had not come
to the Land of Israel just to change the situation of the land, but to change
themselves - and in so doing they aimed at a revolution in the character of
the entire Jewish people.
, We have come to
the land to build and to be built was one of their slogans.
The Labour movement had a vision of a New Jew, a polar opposite
to the old ghetto Jew, downtrodden, stooped and weak as a result of millenia
in the Galut (Exile).
This new Jew would be a type witnessed only in the period of
Antiquity: strong rather than weak: brave rather than cowardly: active rather
than passive: rooted in nature rather than alienated from it. Moreover, the
New Jew would not be a slave to the Halachah, to the rabbis and rabbincal
Judaism. The New Jew would be free, relying only on her or his own abilities
and strengths.
By their own strength and work, they will bring their own salvation.
The concept is utopian, but it is a utopia which will be created
by the efforts of the people themselves. They adopted the activist tradition
in messianic thought – that concept that believed that Jewish actions
themselves could hasten the coming of the Messiah - and secularised it. They
were responsible for creating a better world for themselves, for the Jewish
people and even perhaps for the wider world; they were their own Messiah.
Perhaps the greatest of all the Labour thinkers of the time was
A.D. Gordon. He rejected the label “Socialist”
because it smacked too much of the cold, “scientific” socialism
of Marx, who had believed that the world was moving in the direction of socialism
because of capitalism’s inevitable class tensions.
Gordon rejected this, but his ideas put him right at the centre
of the Labour Zionist camp: the new society, the new world, could only be
built up by the efforts of the people within it. He envisaged the basis of
the great society of the future in the relationships and the way of life created
by the workers. In their labouring to build up their society, they would create
the foundations of the new way of life.
Gordon was a moralist and believed that all people were endowed
with potential for good: in the service of the nation, in their work on the
land, this potential would be realised. The power of the land would work on
the soul of the individual Jew and a moral society would come into being.
Many of the pioneers perceived the communities that they created
as the seeds from which would grow the better future that they envisaged.
The new society of equality and morality would spread out from the settlements
and would ultimately encompass the whole of the country.
There were those who dreamed of turning the country into one big
communal enterprise, one whole kibbutz. Indeed, when it became clear to many
in the late 1920’s that this would not happen, there were those - albeit
a very small minority - who left the country and returned to Stalin’s
Russia believing that this would prove a more viable road to Utopia. But for
the majority of Labour Zionists the plan was to create a Hebrew workers society
not by class struggle and revolution but rather by piecmeal, gradualist efforts
popularly known as Constructivist Socialism.
The building blocks of this co-operative effort were not only
the kibbutz but primarily the Histadrut, with its dominant role in the economic,
welfare, educational and cultural sectors of the society. The leaders of this
school of thought were men like David Ben-Gurion, Berl Katznelson and Yitzhak
Tabenkin.
B. The Vision of Cultural Zionism
The second group were the Cultural Zionists, traditionally associated
with their great intellectual leader,
Ahad Ha’am (the pen name for Asher Ginsberg).
Ahad Ha’am is a fascinating figure, a deeply learned Jew
from a Chassidic family, he left the world of Torah-intensive Judaism and
struggled to find a synthesis between the free thinking of the western world
with his understanding of Judaism’s core system of ethics and values,
in order to create a normative, secular Judaism.
He used religious language and injected it with secular content.
He believed that the Jews had developed a unique system of values and beliefs
that had evolved throughout the course of Jewish history. For the religious,
these values were, of course, transcendent - the source of the values was
G-d. It was hard for Ahad Ha’am, without a concept of an external transcendental
source of values (G-d) to explain where these values had come from, how they
had actually arisen, but he was convinced of their existence.
When Ahad Ha’am thought about the autonomous society that
he hoped would be built in Eretz Yisrael, he was thinking, first and foremost,
of a moral society. The state as a political framework had no value for him
- a state was a neutral organism; if it had value, it was in its ability to
safeguard the culture and the way of life of a nation. What was important
to him was the way of life lived within the framework of the society or state.
Here, for him, there could be no compromise: if the new Jewish society in
Eretz Yisrael had any purpose, any raison d’etre, it could only come
from the morality of the life that would be lived within that social framework.
It was from the Prophets, those moral geniuses with their extraordinary
sensitivity to the human condition, that he derived his moral system for Jewish
society - his aim was no less than an ideal society based on the teaching
of the Prophets. The aim of Zionism – the only conceivable aim of Zionism
for him – was the creation of a society of total righteousness, that
would act as beacon to the world. Political power was not a value: he looked
to the past, to the time that the Jews had political power and he saw the
corruption, the power politics, the internal strife, the blind hatred that
had been like a disease on the body politic of the nation.
This was not what the nation needed. Only a restoration of values
at the heart of a reborn culture could possibly deal with the contemporary
sickness of the Jewish people. He believed, moreover, that any Herzlian hope
of bringing the majority of the world’s Jews to the new Jewish centre
was unrealistic, and that the country would only attract – could only
attract – a minority of Jews. He called, instead ,for a small group
to come to the new society and dedicate themselves to a mission – the
building of a Jewish culture based on the prophetic ideas of justice and righteousness.
He believed that the new society, having built up its base in its own soil,
could then start to radiate its message and experience to the Jewish communities
of the world thereby reinforcing Judaism in the Diaspora - this, he felt,
was realistic.
The concept of a society based on justice and righteousness was
indeed a secularised version of the Prophetic idea. Heaven on earth –
without the theological framework of traditional messianic thought –
was the aim here. Once again, as in the case of the socialist-Zionists, the
work of creating the messianic society would be taken on by the Jews themselves,
or to be more precise, by a small elite within the Jewish people. Again, the
Jews would be their own Messiah.
C. The Vision of Religious Zionism
The third group was the religious-Zionists, who we shall represent
through their greatest thinker, HaRav Abraham Isaac Kook. Rav Kook was unquestionably
one of the most challenging and profound of all Zionist thinkers. Indeed,
to call him a Zionist thinker is to do him a certain discredit, for in truth
he was far more than that. Nevertheless, for our purposes here, we will regard
him as such.
Unlike Ahad Ha’am, or the Labour-Zionists, his world view
was deeply rooted in the transcendental, in the covenantal relationship with
G-d.
Rav Kook was a messianist and held a very clear notion of the
Redemption of the Jewish People in the Land of Israel, a redemption that was
part of the Divine plan - not just for the Jews but for the whole world. Indeed,
he believed that ultimately there could be no redemption for the Jewish people
without redemption for the entire world. The converse was also true: world
redemption depended on the redemption of the Jews.
It was clear to Rav Kook that such a redemption could only be
carried out within the framework of a Jewish state so the Jewish people therefore
needed a state of their own. Only in a state could they return to the Divine
and national way of life that G-d had commanded them. The true glory of G-d’s
name could not be expressed when it was confined to the study houses and synagogues
of the Diaspora and limited to the world of the spirit - it needed to expand
to the full dimensions of national life.
Moreover, Judaism itself needed to reflect every area of that
national life. Rav Kook’s Judaism was not limited to prayer and study;
it was a full, three-dimensional way of life that would penetrate the physical
and the spiritual together, as one. He placed emphasis on the need for religious
youth to develop their bodies physically: it was a perversion of Judaism to
limit Judaism to the world of study. Judaism should be unlimited in the world
of life- and this could only happen within a Jewish state, he argued.
However, he saw dangers inherent in the life of the Jewish state:
political life leads when unharnessed to all the abuses that come from using
power. The Jewish people was not immune from this descent into the world of
political dirt and corruption: the two previous attempts by the Jews to live
a full political life within their own state had ended in failure.
In both cases different abuses had crept into the life of the
people causing a perversion of the healthy national life demanded by the Torah.
The second Jewish state had fallen because the Jews had not learnt how to
use power responsibly without its corrupting effect. That, according to Rav
Kook, was why the Exile had lasted so long; the Jews needed to be purified
from the influence of the abuses of power, to be cured of their lust for power.
Only when they had once again become an ethical people had the national impulse
arisen in the people: for Rav Kook, this was tantamount to a sign from G-d.
The need for the exile was over; the time for the beginning of
redemption was at hand; now was the time for Jews to leave the lands of exile,
as quickly as possible. These lands were by their very nature unclean, unholy:
it was time for Jews to take themselves to the only land that was intrinsically
holy, the land in which they could build once again their sacred national
life. Here they would be free of the limitations and of the uncleanliness
of life in exile and would be free of the need for power for power’s
sake, which had characterised them in their previous life as a state in Eretz
Yisrael.
In their state they had the opportunity once again to rebuild
their pure life as a nation.
What was the holy national life that they were called upon to
lead in their own state?
We have already stressed that it must be a full three-dimensional
life. We have mentioned, too, that it was to be a life where all aspects of
Torah in the widest sense were to be given expression. Now we must emphasise
the implications of this idea.
Just as for Ahad Ha’am, the life to be lived was a life
of total morality. The same obligations that bound the individual in her or
his relations with the world around – both people and things –
also obligated the national state. A nation must in other words live up to
the highest standards of morality: other nations and states did not; the Jewish
state must.
This was a source of great concern to Rav Kook. He knew well that
it would be impossible for a Jewish state to behave in a substantially different
way from other states in a real world. Thus he linked the fate of the Jewish
state with the fate of the other countries of the world.
The Jewish state could only exist in the way that G-d demanded
from it if it was part of a world which G-d was redeeming. The Jewish redemption,
a redemption that could only occur in the framework of a Jewish state, was
part of a universal redemption - the two could not be separated, for they
were both part of G-d’s plan. G-d had given the Jews the task of redeeming
the world, of guiding the rest of the world towards righteousness and the
acceptance of G-d; it was this that would lead to their redemption by G-d.
However, unlike, for example, the Reform movement that also stressed
the mission of the Jews in the world, Rav Kook was certain that the Jews needed
to separate themselves from the other nations in order to fulfill this obligation
- they must turn themselves and their state into a stage for G-d’s glory
and for G-d’s rule on earth, which was the path that would ultimately
lead to the redemption of the world.
In this version of messianism, the Jews themselves had a vital
role: they had to show the will, the resolve and the ability to rebuild their
national life. This was part of G-d’s plan, for which G-d waited: G-d
would bring the redemption, but it was up to the Jews to supply the pre-conditions.