THE PAST IS ANOTHER COUNTRY: My friend Mike sent me a good packet with essays on different aspects of the founding of Israel. The packet didn’t say all that much that I found totally new and surprising (with two exceptions: lots of awful anecdotes about the treatment of Jews by Muslims and Christians during the long centuries in the Holy Land, unsurprising but saddening; and I definitely had no idea how many European countries have laws similar to the Law of Return), but it was nonetheless helpful. I won’t say it clarified my thinking, since I don’t think my position is clear even now, but it did give me more to work with, at least. And my friend was right that it gave me more sympathy for the founding of Israel, though I already had some pretty serious sympathy for it. So here follows a rambling post about the relevance and irrelevance of the founding of Israel for Israel today.

Two facts were hammered on by the packet, in the essays, Shlomo Avineri’s “Zionism as a National Liberation Movement” and David Landes’s “Palestine Before the Zionists”: 1) Zionism began much more as a 19th-century nationalist movement than as a Jewish religious movement; and 2) There has been, basically continuously since Biblical times, a religious Jewish presence in Israel. Other pertinent facts: Many Palestinians currently living in Israel or the Occupied Territories moved there after Israel’s founding; and many Arabs fled Israel without/before getting their land taken by Jewish settlers. (The essays, perhaps unsurprisingly, didn’t really clear up whether the Arabs fled in anticipation of getting their land stolen, or simply because they didn’t want to live in a Jewish state, or what. If people have reading recommendations on that I’d be interested.) Thus the population of Arabs in Israel and the Occupied Territories now is very different from what it was in 1947.

So I don’t actually have a huge amount to say about this stuff. Only two things, really. The first is that if the Israel/Arab clash, today, is mostly the clash of 19th-century nationalism with post-1970s pan-Arab radical Islam, well, the latter force seems like a much stronger motivator right now. Brink Lindsey is almost certainly right that dictatorial Islam is doomed to failure as a basis for society. But does that mean that half-Islamist projects like the intifada are equally doomed? I think radical Islam, for all its obvious drawbacks as a basis for a sustainable society, does just dandy at keeping a bloody terrorist insurrection going ad infinitum.

I may well be wrong about that, in the long run. In the short run, in the foreseeable future, grandmothers are getting murdered at bar mitzvahs, Arafat and his cronies have invested everything in the continuing war against Israel (meaning that they’ve invested everything in the continuing existence of Israel, everyone’s most useful enemy), and I certainly have no solution for any of this. But the nature of the founding of Israel, the nature of Zionism, makes me more skeptical of its ability to cease to be a US client state and be instead a self-reliant and healthy society, than I would be if Zionism had not been a product of a now-dissipating style of nationalism. However, having said that, I should emphasize that a) this is extremely speculative on my part, and b) I do think Israel can re-understood itself as primarily a liberal democracy a la the United States rather than primarily a secular Jewish national homeland a la France or Italy, and that is likely to be a stronger self-understanding than the nationalist one.

The second thing is that “Zionism as a National Liberation Movement” gives strong cause to believe that Father Richard Neuhaus’s reasons for supporting Israel, as laid out in this month’s “Public Square” (not online yet), are inaccurate. Father Neuhaus rightly says, “However inarticulate they may be about it, American Christians intuit that there is a divinely ordered entanglement between Christians and Jews that is not there with any other people.” But then he argues that this entanglement requires the support of Israel, and that, therefore, Israel’s Jews should reconsider desires for secularism, since secularism would undermine Israel’s whole claim to support from the US (or from other Jews, as far as I can tell from his essay).

I wonder what he makes of the long Jewish centuries, pre-nationalism, in which Israel was seen as a spiritual though not a physical homeland. Does he have to argue that the Jews who chose to immigrate to the US, or Canada, or South America, instead of Israel, thus sustaining the exilic and spiritual understanding of the Jewish relationship to Israel, were wrong? Or making a less-good or less-Jewish choice than the Zionists? Does it matter that the relationship he supports of the Jewish people to the geographic territory of Israel was not developed as a primarily religious understanding, but rather as a secular nationalist one?

If Father Neuhaus supports Israel because it is the closest thing in the area to a liberal democracy, or because it is a US ally in a hostile region, that’s different. I’ve laid out my take on that in my previous big post about Israel, and so far I haven’t changed my mind or resolved my confusion about those justifications. But if he supports Israel because as a Christian he believes he must support an authentically Jewish relationship to Israel, then I don’t know if he’s accurately assessing either Judaism or Zionism.