The greatest influence of the Zionist movement on everyday life in Israel today lies in its fusion of the religious with the secular. The original return to Zion was all religious, yet the modern one was chiefly secular. For, the former was a renewal of a religious community and the latter was that of political independence, though, obviously, with religious tinge that is hard to pinpoint, especially since many of its participants were rebels against traditional Judaism. Prior to Israel’s independence, members of the Jewish settlement in Palestine used to consider themselves lucky as they were free of the problem of identity that plagued the non-practicing Jews of the Diaspora. Not so. It is the Israeli non-practicing Jews rather than the ones in the Diaspora who endure in a unique manner the problem of the very possibility of life as a non-practicing Jew.
The primary expression of the uniqueness of the problem of identity non-practicing Jews in Israel is the attitude of the Israeli law to religion. It is very odd. For, the law expresses the demand for the imposition of religious practices. The majority of a democratic society who are non-practicing Jews demand this form its practicing Jewish minority. Moreover, they regularly complain about this imposition. They demand it nonetheless, as they take it for granted that Israel has to maintain her Jewish character, and that to that end Israeli Jews must maintain their Jewish identity, and that to that end they must adhere to an unusual official system of courts of law that are allegedly Rabbinical (since it is manned by government officials who are practicing Jews appointed undemocratically by the religious leadership of the Orthodox Jewish community to officiate in this unique capacity)..
Nationalism and national movements are hard to depict, especially Jewish nationalism and the Jewish national movement. If one item about it is clear, it is that it was secular intellectually and religious emotionally. Diverse thinkers in Eastern and in Western Europe (such as Lilienblum and Herzl) took it for granted that the Jews should strive for political independence, that their state should be secular and their nation Jewish in character. In Western liberal democratic nation-states the state is secular and the nation is usually religious: it lives in strong religious communities. In Israel it is the other way. Israel is the most theocratic state on earth, as it speaks in the name of all Jews, of the whole of the Jewish people, and its nation is least religious, since most of its members do not belong to religious communities and ignore religious practices and a significant part of them are openly hostile to religion. This situation is dangerous as it threatens the nation with a schism, especially since the hard core of the orthodox community in Israel are exempt form national military service as they do no recognize the state. The root of this is confusion about emancipation – common in a few national movements, but especially in the Jewish one.
National movements grew out of local populations in efforts to ignore them and their unique characteristic, since the inspiration behind this growth was the idea of the liberation of the individual, the idea of emancipation, of equal political rights the citizens that belong to different religious communities. This secularization of citizenship is the distinction between community and nation. It altered the Jewish community – even for those who remained faithful, and even for those who lived in Eastern European countries that disregarded the idea of emancipation. For, it raised awareness of the diversity of the different dimensions of Judaism, such as faith, community, society, ethics, tradition, and culture. Some observant Jews joined local national movements, and even were active in then (both in nineteenth-century Italy and in twentieth-century Iraq). Some of them demanded Jewish cultural autonomy. This demand in the early nineteenth-century Prussia the orthodox Leopold Zunz shared with the anti-religious Peretz Smolenskin in late nineteenth-century Russia.
The clearest attitude to the return to Zion was that of the conservative Jewish communities. Most of them were hostile to the Zionist movement, both as a political movement and as one that distinguished between faith and culture. Their reaction to the foundation of the Zionist movement was their foundation of the anti-Zionist movement, whose agenda consisted of nothing but the abolition of Zionism. A minority of observant Jews founded the orthodox Zionist movement that stressed the secular nature of Zionism. Nonetheless, they found a need to justify their Zionism – by the claim that times were particularly hard. They generally took for granted that the Zionist movement was secular -- both before and after the declaration of Israel’s independence. It is no accident that Judah Leib Pinsker, author of the justly celebrated pamphlet “Auto-Emancipation”, arrived at the question of the location of the Jewish state only on the last page of that remarkable pamphlet. He said there, since Jews are traditionally longing for the return to the holy land, the new movement should go there. Herzl said similar things in his The Jewish state: the subtitle of the book is “A new solution to the Jewish problem” yet the opening says, “The solution offered here is ancient, as it appears in the Jewish prayer-book.” What makes the old idea a new solution is the new problem. What was it? And why was there so much disappointment when Herzl showed readiness to settle elsewhere (in Uganda)?
There is no one single Jewish problem. And, indeed, the Zionist movement split to factions or parties from the very start, because the problem was different in the West than in the East. The hostility to emancipation was reactionary. It was hostile to the Jews, of course – be they traditional or radicals or even converts to other religions. Richard Wagner, one of the leading reactionaries in the German lands, spread a new accusation against the Jews: that they had poor taste in music. (Admittedly, this accusation is present already in Plato’s works. He directed it against slaves. Wagner was unaware of this. He directed his hatred against Felix Mendelssohn, who was a Christian of Jewish descent.) Thus, there are tow kinds of national movements, one advocating emancipation, and one opposing it, one liberal and one reactionary. And indeed, the growth of the Reaction in the liberal West found its expression in the betrayal of the idea of emancipation. And this betrayal found its symbolic expression in the Dreyfus trial hat brought Jews (including Herzl) to Jewish nationalism with no reference to religion and with no reference to liberalism. In the East the hatred of Jews was more traditional: the Reaction did not discuss the question of the fate of the Jews who had left the Jewish Ghettoes. The Russian reactionary eldership simply staged old-fashioned pogroms. And these accelerated the rise of pre-Zionist Jewish nationalism.
Israel is very sensitive to anti-Semitism. This sensitivity expresses itself in the demand to recognize the equal rights of all Jews everywhere as well as in the opinion, widespread in Israel, that this demand will never work, since anti-Semitism is nothing but the traditional hatred of Jews that has deep roots in Western culture. This is a mix of distrust in Western democracy with Israel’s current highly exaggerated assessment of her ability to stand against every possible enemy. The traditional Zionist opinion was that the Jewish state should be a refuge for any Jew who wishes to join it. The opinion currently popular in Israel is that there will be no peace for the Jews in the Diaspora unless they settle in Israel, and that therefore there will be no peace for Israeli Jews either, unless the Diaspora will disappear (more or less). The opinion wins increasing support that this is a process that is presently reaching its completion, both because emancipation spells (religious) assimilation and because disregard for it encourages the anti-Semitism that will encourage Jews to migrate to Israel. And so, most Israelis assume, some of the Diaspora Jews ill forget their Jewish origins and others will join the Israeli nation.
The claim that the Jewish Diaspora will vanish soon stand facing the new phenomenon of the rise of an Israeli Diaspora. Israel shows disregard for it and an official contempt for its members, on the ground that it will disappear when the Jewish Diaspora will. This strengthens a the basic alteration in Zionist ideology. Although Zionism developed without a clear attitude to liberalism, it was a liberal movement. Thus, soon after Israel declared its independence, the head of the national religious party there, Rabbi Meir Bar-Ilan (Berlin) discussed the question, could Israel follow traditional Jewish Law. The option, current today, that this law will prevail through imposition on the population, never occurred to him. The new opinion, that the Jewish Diaspora has no future rests on the basis of the idea that anti-Semitism is strengthening everywhere. This is an expression of distrust in Western liberalism that comes in Israel with the slogan (of David Ben-Gurion) that Zionism will have concluded its task only after the extinction of the Jewish Diaspora. This renders current Israel a temporary, provisional system. The provisional character of the state receives its strongest expression in the current public debate over question, how is a democratic Jewish state possible? Sensitivity to this ideological change regarding essentials will help the reader understand the Jewish nationalist literature before and after the founding of Israel and the changes that it underwent.