Return to the Promised Land.. Jacek Surzyn
history of the world. In a way, Zionism has done something impossible, with so little competences and a strong internal resistance of the Jewish diaspore. Taking into account the moderate size of the global Jewish diaspora and its socio-economic potential, Zionism has created a strong democratic state that plays a decisive role in the Middle East, and – remembering the proportions – also in the world’s politics. The Zionist movement has always been understood in the Jewish milieu as a minority movement, so throughout its hundred years’ long history, it has failed to attract the majority of Jewish masses and has not transformed into a mass movement of the national liberation. Its founder Theodor Herzl and the first theorist Max Nordau dreamed about Zionism as a mass movement. Even the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897 had in its program the postulate of massification, and thus transformation into the only representative of the Jewry’s world.
It was the basis of credibility and effectiveness of Zionists’ actions toward the creation of a Jewish state. However, the massification of this movement never took place and Zionism since the beginning has been an elite movement, gathering a minority group of mainly assimilated and strongly secularized environments ←10 | 11→of the Jewish intelligentsia, a middle-class which came from major European capitals such as Vienna (the city of Herzl, though he was born in Budapest) and Paris (the city of Nordau), joined by the intelligentsia from tsarist Russia. The bourgeois spirit together with violent processes of social changes in the classical era of capitalism to a large extent shaped the Zionist movement. Zionist bourgeoisie were open to modern ideas – freedom, equality, individualism. While upholding the religion of their ancestors, Zionists favored a transformation of the traditional and the centuries-long concept of coming of the Messiah and return to Zion (the Promised Land) – so important for the whole Jewry – from a religious idea to its real version. In other words, Zionism transformed the religious idea of returning from exile and reconciliation with God, common for all Jews around the world, into the secular version of building the Jewish state on the territory of the Promised Land in Palestine.
The proposal to treat Zionism as a secular postulate, and thus to sever it from its religious dimension, had to meet with strong criticism of the traditional rabbinate, which had ruled the life of the Jewish diaspora for centuries. Traditional environments in the vast majority treated the Zionist movement in terms of the threat to the Jewish identity, which was ground on the religion and faith of the ancestors. For centuries, Jewish identity had been defined only in the area of religious identity, that is, belonging to the unique community of God’s chosen group (people, nation). Jewish history began with the appointment of Abraham (whose name means “Father of many nations/peoples”) and his journey to the Promised Land – Canaan. The covenant made between God and man determined the position of Jews as chosen people, which was confirmed and strengthened by the renewed covenant mediated by Moses. This sense of belonging to the religious community of the chosen people has formed Jewishness both in the intangible sense, within the community, and outside it, in the area of relations with the non-Jewish world. From that point of view, Zionism proposed by Herzl since the beginning has become a serious threat to the traditional vision of Jewishness, usurping the right to take over the idea of returning to Zion. According to orthodoxy, Zionists committed an unacceptable profanation of the holy idea, destroying the highest value of the Jewish faith and thus breaking the covenant with God. This understanding still determines strong opposition to Zionism – the opposition that exists in Israel itself, but also outside it in the world’s diaspora. This opposition primarily emphasizes the anti-religious character of the movement. Undoubtedly, Zionism in the nineteenth century managed to present the issue of Jewish identity as a problem by considering it in non-religious terms. Zionism was formed in response to the three motives that developed in the nineteenth century, characterizing the relationship between the ←11 | 12→Jewish community and the non-Jewish environment. These motives are the following: 1. The emergence of the modern anti-Semitism; 2. The process of Jewish emancipation and its consequences; 3. The problem of the mentioned above “Jewish Question” (Judenfrage). The creators of the Zionist movement, i.e. its founder Theodor Herzl and his first ideologist Max Nordau, like earlier protagonists of the movement (i.e. Moses Hess and Leo Pinsker), regarded anti-Semitism, emancipation, and the “Jewish Question” as fundamental problems faced by Jewry and assumed the Jewish future would depend on their solution. There is no doubt that the nineteenth century nationalism and its philosophical or ideological principles had a great influence on the perception of these problems and, consequently, the development of the Zionist movement.
According to Zionists, nationalism as the new philosophy was to become the remedy for all evil, that is, Zionists saw the nationalist perspective as a possibility of removing anti-Semitism, overcoming the failures of emancipation and solving the “Jewish Question.” In other words, in accordance with the intention of Zionism, the ubiquitous European nationalism propelling a new spiral of animosity and hatred toward Jews could only be neutralized by the Jewish nationalism: Jews were to become a law-conscious nation and fight for the possibility to create their own national state, since only then could they become equal to other nations. Theodor Herzl presented this idea most vividly and showed the plan of its implementation. According to him, the Jewish state was supposed to be (and it actually became once it was established) the quintessence of the Jewish nationalism: Jews became a nation, Israelis, and as a nation they won the right to have all political privileges that result from that fact. In this sense, since its beginning Zionism has followed the mainstream of national movements, which in the nineteenth and twentieth century shaped the socio-political history of Europe and the world. All this causes the lack of clear criteria for assessing the effectiveness of the movement from the perspective of more than a century of its history. As I mentioned above, on the one hand, we can point to the great success, that is, the creation of Israel as an independent, modern state, theoretically open to all Jews. On the other hand, however, it is difficult to overcome the reflection that the state of Israel was founded too late and Zionism itself was not able to save millions of Jews from genocide. In a way, it can be said that the “price” for the creation of Israel was six million victims. However, regardless of the evaluation of the Zionist movement, it remains a unique phenomenon. The belief in its uniqueness was also my motivation for working on this book.
In this book, I want to analyze the foundations of the Zionist ideology itself – the philosophical foundations in the deepest sense. I tried to maintain a neutral approach to this task, i.e. to refer to the thoughts of protagonists and ←12 | 13→philosophers of the movement rather than to judge them. Nevertheless, some choices must always be made, even from the perspective of methodological decisions regarding the selection of the analyzed content, sources, or literature. In my case, I attempted to describe the issue of foundations of the Zionist philosophy from the perspective of the researcher with a positive attitude to the subject of study, because I believe that, all in all, the Zionist movement has more positives than negatives.
The Zionist thought was not free from the weaknesses typical of any thought, but it made an effort to improve the grave Jewish fate; it was a reaction to the harassment and suffering that Jews had been facing for centuries and began to intensify at that time. What is important, the Zionist movement did not appear as an expansive movement threatening other peoples or nations. On the contrary, it was a Jewish way of self-defense against real threats. This fact should always be remembered in any attempt to evaluate the activities of Zionism. The Jews simply had (and still have) the right to take defensive actions against the threat to their identity or physical survival. The consciousness of this fact gives some indication for a positive assessment of the movement. The existence of the State of Israel is the confirmation of success of Zionist aspirations and dreams. However, the defense of the Israel’s existence cannot be the only reason for justifying the actions taken by this country that are often controversial and that often arouse legitimate opposition. Nevertheless, the rise of the Jewish state caused a permanent change both in the perception of the Jews in the world and of the Jewish diaspora itself. The formation of a Jewish nation postulated by Zionism – which brought positive effects: such a nation was born and has its own state – must also influence the evaluation of the Zionist movement. So there are presently Jews-Israelis, citizens of an independent state, forming a nation with all the attributes of a nation (I will not focus on the definition of a nation here, but in general, I use the term nation, which can be found in the works of Benedict Anderson or Ernst Gellner). There are also Jews who are not Israelis,