Needed: Proactive Zionism

Needed: Proactive Zionism

By Gil Troy
The Jewish Week
November 17, 2005

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s despicable call to destroy Israel, and its hearty endorsement by the Palestinians’ Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, triggered a predictable and justifiable torrent of Jewish outrage. Those who consider anti-Semitism the worst sin in their books — and the community’s greatest motivator — are demanding world leaders repudiate these genocidal calls.

But we should challenge ourselves, too. The best response to Tehran’s dreaming about “a world without Zionism” is for Jews to dream about how to inject more Zionism into our own worlds.

Sadly, too many Jews have internalized the non-Jewish world’s disdain for the Z word. In North America, “Zionists” are caricatured as either fanatics or bureaucrats. In Israel, “post-Zionists” pathetically seek European approval by demonizing Zionism, while the Israeli street considers Zionists friers, “suckers.” We cannot demand the world respect our movement of Jewish national liberation if we do not even respect it ourselves.

This should be a moment of Zionist renewal, not only to defy our immoral enemies, but because in the last five years Zionism, and Israel, emerged triumphant. The Palestinians’ futile war forced us to relearn some essential Zionist lessons. We relearned the prime Zionist directive of ein breira, “we have no choice.” Just as hundreds of thousands of Jews from Europe, Arab countries, the Soviet Union and Ethiopia left their homes and came to live in the Jewish state because “ein breira”. Just as Israelis have had to fight, reluctantly, this wave of terrorism because they had no choice.

Future historians will compare Israelis, particularly Jerusalem’s citizens, to London’s citizens during the World War II blitz and Berlin’s citizens during the Cold War blockade, for demonstrating an extraordinarily courageous commitment to maintaining ordinary life that has fueled many democratic triumphs over evil.

Thanks to Yasir Arafat’s evil, we also rediscovered the central Zionist experience of unity in peoplehood. Even in this post-ethnic, hyper-individualistic age, the Jewish people’s nerve endings are intertwined. When one of us is cut, we all bleed. Too many Christians yawned as Christian aid workers were slaughtered in Pakistan, Christian children were enslaved in Sudan, Christian girls were raped in the Palestinian territories. But most Jews empathized with Israel’s terror victims, and many mobilized to help. Arafat offered negative proof that the Jewish people remain interconnected; we must rally around positive symbols, ideas, actions and initiatives, too.

Watching the Israeli center re-emerge, seeing how the separation fence buried the right’s maximalist territorial illusions and the left’s naive millennialist delusions, we also remembered the pragmatism and big tent centrism that traditionally characterized Zionism. The early Zionists were quarrelsome and fragmented. Still, for most, when faced with historic choices such as the painful 1947 partition plan, hardheaded, realistic problem-solving trumped ideological purity. Israel grew from the center, and it survived this round of violence by staying levelheaded, losing neither democracy nor dignity, balancing civil liberties and civil survival, seeking protection from Palestinian terror, not vengeance, and improvising as the situation demanded.

Hidden within these mostly reactive Zionist lessons, two more affirmative values can shape a positive Zionist renewal. Zionism at its best always sought particularism, meaning Jewish nationalism, as a path into universal values, not an escape from broader ideals. We can best advance humanistic values by concentrating communal energies in service of those ideals.

Tikkun olam is hot these days, but do-gooding should be more than merely Christian charity with a Jewish inflection. Zionism defined effectively can provide a Jewish national or communal framework for responding to modern challenges, be it the values crisis in our material world, the alienation and individuation of consumer society, or the worldwide epidemic of terror. Fighting poverty in Israel or alleviating misery in Darfur through an Israeli framework focuses and anchors actions that otherwise might dissipate as individual initiatives.

By having a “we” not a “me,” and a Jewish “us” at that, by taking responsibility for individual, communal and world problems together, you and I can change the world, as the Zionist hymn goes, or at least have a better shot at succeeding.

In doing that, we will also uphold the Zionist value of returning to history. In 1990s America there was much cheap talk about ending history until 9-11. We cannot escape history. We might as well be the best actors and activists we can be, broad in our vision, deep in our idealism, united in our purpose. Let us use our lucky accident of birth — membership in the Jewish people — as a way to enrich our lives, save our souls, work together, multiply our impact, build a country that we need and improve a world that needs us and our values.

Let this, then, become the year we all commit ourselves to developing Israel, not wiping it off the communal agenda because calm seems to be returning. And let this be the year we revitalize and redefine Zionism rather than just defend it when psychopaths attack. n

Gil Troy is professor of history at McGill University and the author of “Why I Am A Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today,” as well as “Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s.”