It has been 27 years since Baldini & Castoldi published a book in Italy that is still important today — both for its content, which is disconcertingly timely, and for the stature of its author. The book is The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State. Its author, who died on June 21, 2020, is Zeev Sternhell, one of the greatest historians Israel can rightly claim as its own.
Among the myths that Professor Sternhell — who taught at the Hebrew University of Tel Aviv and at the Sorbonne in Paris — dismantles is that of “good” Zionism, understood in the sense of a progressive ideology with socialist traits that was given political form by the founding fathers of the State of Israel. The myth of pioneering Zionism. That myth took hold in Israel and beyond. For decades it oriented the Jewish diaspora, in Europe and in the United States, providing a value system that aligned perfectly with the principles of Western liberal democracy, with a leftward tilt steeped in kibbutz socialism, in an economy partly founded on collectivism and inclusion.
Zeev Sternhell was always active on the Israeli left. But he never mythologized it. Furthermore, for our purposes here, he never lent support to the narrative of “good” Zionism — secular, vaguely socialist — as the opposite of “bad” Zionism, the kind articulated by Zeev Jabotinsky, the ideologist of the Israeli right.
Sternhell never endorsed this Manichean reading, which is still dusted off today by those who, in perfectly good faith, take a stand against the genocide in Gaza, against apartheid in the West Bank, against the messianic drift of the Israeli right — all while insisting on their Zionist identity.
There is something deeply existential in this approach. There is an inner, personal anguish that deserves the same respect owed to anyone who has embraced an ideology without ulterior motives and is then called upon to reckon with its failure. This applies to communism, and to Zionism too.
Here Sternhell comes to our aid. On page 453 and following of his substantial text, he writes:
Until recent years, all the tendencies of Zionism were guided, more or less, by the same principles. The difference between religious and secular Zionism, between left-wing and right-wing Zionism, was formal rather than essential. Their adherents unanimously regarded Zionism as a project of Jewish liberation, which envisaged the mass transfer of Jews to Palestine, and subsequently to the State of Israel. All recognized that it was Zionism’s task to lead a cultural revolution the likes of which Jews had not known since the conquest of Canaan. And all, finally, regarded the Bible as the title deed to the land — the entire land of their ancestors.
Identity cohesion is structural.
Sternhell further underscores:
It was on this foundation that the alliance between secular and religious Zionists rested — an alliance that owed nothing to political factors tied to contingent circumstances.
This is where the demythologizing of “good” Zionism comes into play.
Sternhell writes:
In left-wing Zionism, secularism was only an appearance. It had a ritual significance, like a prayer repeated automatically. The true emotional core lay elsewhere — in identity. Chief Rabbi Kook (1865–1935), a leading figure of religious Zionism, considered the labor movement’s reconquest of the ancestral homeland to be sacred. A great admirer of the pioneers, he encouraged religious Jews to found kibbutzim. At that time, his spiritual and intellectual closeness to the labor elite forestalled the rise of the obscurantism that, by the mid-1970s, had found its spiritual mentors among certain rabbis of the occupied territories. In the era of the Yishuv, there was obviously no need for a religious authority to pronounce a death sentence against a political leader deemed guilty of having sold off a single meter of land granted by God to the Jewish people. In those days, the question of returning even the smallest portion of already-conquered territory to the Arabs did not arise.
It did not arise for reasons of political expediency — important, certainly, but having nothing to do with a nonexistent rift between a supposedly secular Zionism and the malevolent revisionism of religious Zionism.
This salvation narrative for progressive consciences collides with historical reality, which Sternhell — universally recognized as a great historian — sets out as follows:
The spiritual legacy of the founders — whether Gordon, Katznelson, and Tabenkin, or even Ben Gurion, Eshkol, and Golda Meir — was in general indistinguishable from that of the leaders of religious Zionism. Even Dayan and Allon, born in Palestine and symbolic figures of the “new Jew,” had essentially no other frame of reference than their “secular” predecessors, who had found fertile ground for elaborating their ideas in the small Jewish towns of Poland and Russia, clustered around their rabbinical schools. It was within the context of this cultural unity, and in the course of a common struggle for independence, that the de facto alliance of all Zionist movements was forged. The religious movement and the three currents of secular Zionism — general, revisionist, and labor — displayed the same determination in their struggle against assimilation and against the loss of traditional Jewish identity.
This vision of identity holds even through the political storms that shake Israel in the years that follow. There is division over many things, but then a rediscovered unity in voting — all Jewish and Zionist parties together — for the Nation-State Law (July 2018), which institutionalizes and codifies a hierarchy among citizens of the same state based on ethnic and religious belonging.
The transition from democracy to ethnocracy is complete. And those who vote together include Labor members and Likud members, secular centrists and parliamentarians of the religious parties (with Meretz and, naturally, the Arab-Israeli parties opposed).
The far right of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich did not yet hold the power it holds today. And even less so in the period to which Sternhell was referring.
Sternhell explains:
At that time all the tendencies wanted a country with the broadest possible territorial extent and differed only in their views on how to achieve this goal. In their eyes, Zionism was defined in terms of culture, history, religion, and even mysticism. The Jewish people were regarded as a tribe — a tribe that had to unite and fall in behind the pioneers who had led the enterprise of reconquering and re-colonizing the land.
And further:
Like all nationalist movements formed at roughly the same period, Zionism — with the exception of a few numerically insignificant groups — rejected from the outset the universalist aspects of socialism and liberalism. Zionism, like all nationalisms, never considered defending the rights of man or establishing equality among nations to be its vocation. It could not have done otherwise, given its mission: to liberate a people threatened with extinction — both cultural and physical.
It was a mission that, for the founding fathers of Israel — the pioneers of secular and nationalist Zionism — justified everything, including recourse to religious and messianic mythology.
Sternhell correctly emphasizes that
nationalism can exist and develop on the basis of rationalism, individualism, and genuine secularism, just as it can on the basis of history, culture, religion, and mysticism. The self-proclaimed radical secular nationalism claims Hebron not in the name of the liberation of the Jewish people or the individual Jew, but in order to renew a bond with one of the most potent symbols of Jewish mythic history. In Israel, this historical-religious continuum determines the common ground between the religious nationalist and the radical secular nationalist, underscores their shared desire to see a Jewish Hebron, and constitutes the foundation of their claim to that symbolic city — and in practice to all of Judea and Samaria.
This thesis recurs in the work of another of the great Israeli historians: Benny Morris, who, in one of his most important books, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001 (Rizzoli), notes that
Zionist ideology and practice were necessarily and instinctively expansionist […] Zionism was politically expansionist in the sense that from the outset it aimed to incorporate all of Palestine (and, in the movement’s maps prior to 1921, also Transjordan and Lebanon south of the Litani River). Palestine was considered too small to serve as a homeland for the entire Jewish people, and it was thought that in the end it would be the settlements that would mark the borders of the future state. And furthermore: the realization of the Zionist project necessarily entailed the dispossession and marginalization of the Arabs of Palestine, in a political and even material sense.
That “material sense” to which Morris refers implicates a policy that did not originate with the Netanyahu–Ben-Gvir government: the policy of “transfer” — voluntary or forced — of the Palestinian population. Transfer, or more accurately, deportation. Morris recalls in his book that Ben Gurion
declared once again in 1944: “I do not reject [the idea of] transfer either on moral grounds… or on political grounds.” However, he repeatedly advised against discussing the matter in public, so as not to alarm the Arabs and provoke criticism from British and international public opinion.
Thus it was a matter of expediency, not of resolve. On the other hand, Morris recalls, Ben Gurion and the other leaders of the movement gave public expression to their views on a single occasion, “the only occasion in the history of Zionism on which they more or less publicly approved the idea of transfer”. “I am for compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it,” Ben Gurion had declared in 1938 at a meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive.
One can debate the relative weight of the religious element versus the secular-nationalist one, but Zionism, in all its articulations, visions, and readings, has never separated these two elements. It has not done so because otherwise the entire edifice would have collapsed. For this reason, and because of it, there is no such thing — except as an opportunistic convenience — as à la carte Zionism that takes this, and discards that. That would be too easy, too comfortable. Moreover, the issue cannot be resolved by observing that the very existence of Israel, 78 years on, is the demonstrable proof of Zionism’s success. Whoever accepts this objectification of Zionism must, as a logical consequence, accept all its implications. Because everything is contained in that realization: Israel as the nation of start-ups, and Israel of the pogromist settlers presented as the new Zionist pioneers.
The only category to be rejected is that of “betrayal.” Zionism has not been “betrayed.” It has been realized across the different phases of Israel’s history through its principal political actors of the moment, historical events, and the emphases that best suited the spirit of the times. What is certain is that there is no Zionism without Eretz Israel — the appeal to the sacredness of the Promised Land granted by the God of the Old Testament to his chosen people, and its possession. An absolute possession that denies not only the claims but the very existence of the other. It was not Benjamin Netanyahu who first declared that “Palestine is a land without a people for a people without a land.” It was stated by Golda Meir, “mother of the nation,” a secular Zionist.
Today’s history poses a question that updates an issue running through all 78 years of Israel’s history since its founding as a “Jewish national home.” A question that Avishai Margalit, professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and one of Israel’s most authoritative political thinkers, has summed up in a chapter of his book The Faces of Israel (Carocci): “Zionism: Failure or Tragedy?”.
The book, in its first Italian edition, dates from March 2000. Twenty-six years later, the conclusion of that chapter reads as prophetic. Margalit writes:
In my view, the tragedy of Zionism is its thus-far irreconcilable clash with the Palestinians, which casts a long dark shadow over the moral aspirations of Zionism. It is a tragic conflict because it is easy for all people of goodwill to recognize the moral force of the claims of both sides. And yet there is no moral equivalence. The burden of moral proof rests with Israel — that is, with the embodiment of Zionism. The reason for this is not that Jews are held to higher moral standards because they stand on higher moral ground, but, on the contrary, because there exists an asymmetry between the power held by Israelis and that held by Palestinians. Having so much more power places an additional moral obligation on Israel.
An obligation that remains unfulfilled.
Cover image: The parade in Haifa on Independence Day, 1953, in the presence of Prime Minister David Ben Gurion (Photo: Hans Pinn/GPO)
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