The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State [Paperback ed.] 0691009678, 9780691009674

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The FOUNDING f of ISRAEL Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State

Zeev Sternhell Translated by David Maisel The well-known historian and political scientist Zeev Sternhell here advances a radically new interpretation of the founding of modern Israel. The founders claimed that they intended to create both a landed state for the Jewish people and a socialist society. However, according to Sternhell, socialism served the leaders of the influential labor movement more as a rhetorical resource for the legitimation of the national project of establishing a Jewish state than as a blueprint for a just society. In this thought-provoking book, Sternhell demonstrates how socialist principles were consistently subverted in practice by the nationalist goals to which socialist Zionism was committed. Sternhell explains how the avowedly socialist leaders of the dominant labor party, Mapai, especially David Ben-Gurion and Berl Katznelson, never really believed in the prospects of realizing the “dream” of a new society, even though many of their working-class supporters were selfidentified socialists. The founders of the state understood, from the very beginning, that not only socialism but also other universalistic ideologies like liberalism were incompatible with cultural, historical, and territorial nationalism. Because nationalism took precedence over universal values, argues Sternhell, Israel has not evolved a constitution or a Bill of Rights, has not moved to separate state and religion, has failed to develop a liberal concept of (continued on back flap)

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THE FOUNDING MYTHS OF ISRAEL

Introduction Nationalism, Socialism, and Nationalist Socialism

I se.ek to examine the nature of the ideology that guided the eentral stream of the labor movement in the proeess of nation-building and to investigate how it met the ehallenge of realizing its aims. In many respeets, the puipose of the book is to analyze the way in whieh the ideology and aetions of the labor movement molded the basic principles of Jewish society in PalestineJtheJY^uy) and its patterns of development in the period before the War of Independence (1948-49). In this sense, this book is a study of the intellectual, moral, and ideological foundations of present-day Israel and a reflection on its future. Speaking of the Israeli model of nation-building, however, raises a question of general significance: is a national movement whose aim is a cultural, moral, and political revolution, and whose values are particularistic, capable of coexisting with the universal values of socialism? The leaders and ideologists of the labor movement used to answer this question unhesitatingly in the affirmative. They maintained that the movement’s synthesis of socialism and nationalism was its main historical achievement and its claim to uniqueness among labor movements. From the beginning of their political careers, the founders persistently claimed that in Eretz Israel (Palestine) the aims of nationalism and socialism were identical, and that they complemented and supported one another. In this book I examine this position and counter a number of current opinions. I ask whether a unique synthesis of socialism and nationalism was ever achieved in Palestine; I_also examine a more complex and difficult^ problem, namely, whether the founders actually intended to create an alternative to bourgeois society, or whether very early on they realized that the two objectives were incompatible, and therefore, from the beginning, they renounced the social objective. Was equality a genuine goal, however longterm, or was it only a mobilizing myth, perhaps a convenient alibi that sometimes permitted the movement to avoid grappling with the contradiction between socialism and nationalism? Here I question one of the founding myths of Israeli society and its national epic. Another fundamental question concerns the nature of Jewish nationalism as understood and developed by the founders. Was the nationalism of the labor movement_and its practical expression, the pioneering ideology of eoaquering the land—first by means of a Jewish presence and Jewish labor and later by force, if necessary—in any way special? Did it have a universalistic. IN THIS BOOK

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INTRODUCTION

humanistic, and rationalistic basis that distinguished it from the nationalism flourishing in Eastern Europe, where Zionism originated, or was Labor Zionism simply one of the many variations of the historieal, ethnie, and reli- gious brands of European nationalism? Did it ever have the potential to ^ overeome the religious substanee of Jewish nationalism and thus establish a j liberal, seeular, and open soeiety, at peaee with itself and its neighbors? Eor the sake of brevity and eonvenienee, I use the term labor movement to refer to the central stream of the Histadmt (the General Federation of Jewish Workers in Eretz Israel), and not to the whole movement. The labor movement eonsisted of two parties—Ahdut Ha’avoda (United Labor) and Hapo’el Hatza’ir (Yonng Worker)—whieh in 1920 founded the Histadrut as a eomprehensive social, political, and economic organization, gave it its purpose, and enjoyed unehallenged domination of it until these two parties fused in 1930 within the framework of Mapai, the ^Wrkers’ Party of Eretz Israel. The defeetion of Hakibbutz Hameuhad (the United Kibbutz Movement) and the urban Eaetion B in 1944 and the establishment of a new politieal party, whieh symbolieally adopted the name Ahdut Ha’avoda and in 1946 merged with the small left-wing party Po’alei Tzion (Workers of Zion), did not really ehange the balance of forces and the general lines of development. Similarly, the existenee of the Marxist Hashomer Hatza’ir (Young Watchman) did not diminish the dominanee of Mapai in the Histadrut and in the Yishuv, the Jewish community of Palestine. Likewise, the establishment in 1948 of a unified Mapam (United Workers’ Party), comprising the “new” Ahdut Ha’avoda-Po’alei Tzion and Hashomer Hatza’ir, did not have signifieant effeets on the power relationships in the labor movement. Mapai eontrolled the movement and molded it in its image. The founding of the Labor Party in 1968—the result of the tripartite union of Mapai; Ahdut Ha’avoda, whieh in 1954 had split from Mapam; and Rafi, the Ben-Gurion group that in 1965 broke off from Mapai—and the ereation in 1969 of the common front with Mapam (Maarach) only had the effeet of demonstrating even more elearly the hegemony of the eentral ideologieal force, whieh had persisted for nearly seventy-five years. Every society is ruled by an elite. In this book I hope to reeonstruct the saga of the labor elite and its long march toward a nation-state. Israeli society was molded and assumed its present form in the deeisive years of the British mandate. At the end of the 1920s, a few years before they gained offieial eontrol of the Zionist movement, the labor elite had already aequired a position of unquestionable moral, soeial, and cultural authority in the Yishuv. In 1933 Mapai became the dominant party in the Zionist movement: in the eleetions to the Zionist Gongress, it reeeived 44 percent of the vote. Two years later Ben-Gurion beeame ehairman of the Zionist Exeeutive and of the Jewish Ageney’s Executive. Erom that point on the labor movement provided Israeli soeiety with such a strong model of development that

INTRODUCTION

5

even after its fall from power in 1977 no real changes occurred in the economic, cultural, and social life of Israel. After more than forty years of continuous political activity, the original leaders of the movement founded the state of Israel and shaped its first twenty years. Representatives of the original and now expanded nucleus of the movement, members of the Second Aliyah (the immigration wave of 1904-14) and the Third Aliyah (1919-23), fixed its objectives, laid its organizational foundations, and built its political and economic power structures. They both formulated its ideology and put it into practice themselves. The theorists were also political leaders who controlled the political, social, and economic institutions they had set up. In the democratic world, this phenomenon was unprecedented both in its depth and in its continuity. Thus, it is particularly significant that at the end of these long years of dominance a movement that claimed to be socialist had not created a society that was special in any way. There was no more justice or equality there than in Western Europe, differences in standard of living were just as pronounced, and there was no special attempt to improve the lot of the disadvantaged. An informality in personal relations and other characteristics typical of an immigrant society lacking class consciousness and a traditional elite could not hide the dry statistics that accurately reflected wide differences in standards of living. Moreover, by 1977 not only was Israeli society not different from any other developed society, but its social policies lagged far behind those in France or Britain under the Labour government. In secondary and higher education, in the advancement of the poorer classes, and in the provision of assistance to the needy and the “nonproductive” elements of society, Israel in the first twenty-five years of its existence was guilty of conscious neglect, continuing the policies that the same elite had maintained in the days of the Yishuv. Secondaiy education, a prerequisite of upward mobility in a modern society, was expensive and inaccessible to large numbers of laborers, salaried employees, artisans, shopkeepers, and new immigrants. Until the revolt of the Black Panthers in the early 1970s, Israel did not have any social policies at all. This was not due to lack of sensitivity but derived from ideology. The Third Aliyah was the only immigration wave with a revolutionary potential, but this potential was never realized, and its members adopted the conceptual outlook of their predecessors. Members of the Gdud Ha’avoda (the Labor Corps, see chapter 4), an original creation of the Third Aliyah, who refused to submit to the modes of thought and principles of the old leaders of the movement were thrust aside, abandoned politics, or left the countiy However, the generation of the War of Independence proved to be conformist and unoriginal. None of its leaders, writers, poets, and fighters had

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INTRODUCTION

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anything important to add to the heritage of the Second Aliyah. Where ideology was concerned, this was a sterile generation. Due to this ideological stagnation and continued attachment to the Second Aliyah’s aims, BenGurion’s Mapai, even though it led the Jews of Palestine in their War of ImJependence, did not effect any social changes; nor had it any intention of doing so. Moreover, the lack of universal values explains the moral, political, and intellectual paralysis of the Labor Party, which was founded immediately after the great victory in the Six-Day War of June 1967. Since independence, Israeli society has been engaged in a struggle over the future of the territories conquered in June 1967. If we wish to understand why Israelis have not yet succeeded in ending their hundred years’ war with the Arabs, in drafting a liberal constitution and a bill of rights, we must examine the world of the founders and their legacy. The historical struggle between the labor movement and the revisionist Right was a struggle over the methods of implementing national objectives, not over the objectives themselves. It was a struggle for the control of a society which Ben-Gurion’s Mapai, by exploiting the ideological polarization of the interwar period, turned into a war between good and evil. Indeed, the nationalist ideology of the Jewish labor movement was to conquer as much land as possible. Moreover, under the auspices of the mandatory government, a free-market economy flourished in Palestine, which was a paradise for capitalists, businessmen, and members of the liberal professions. This policy included an absence of direct taxation of income and large-scale importation of private capital (75 percent of the capital that entered Jewish Palestine between the two world wars was private). The entire Zionist movement, including the labor movement under the leadership of Mapai, supported this policy enthusiastically for national reasons: those who favored the Jews’ immigration sought economic development at any price. No social consideration was allowed to stand in the way of national interests. Due to this policy, promoted by Mapai, the Jewish Yishuv of the 1930s became a typical bourgeois society, with significant social and economic discrepancies. I contend that the inability of the labor movement under the leadership of its founders and immediate successors to curb aspirations to territorial expansion, as well as its failure to build a more egalitarian society, was not due to any objective conditions or circumstances beyond its control. These developments were the result of a conscious ideological choice made at the beginning and clearly expressed in the doctrine of “constructive socialism. ” Constructive socialisniAs generally regarded as the labor movement’s great social and ideological achievement, a unique and original product, the outstanding expression of the special needs and conditions of the countiy But in reality, far from being unique, constructive socialism was merely an Erutz Israeli version of nationalist socialism.

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To avoid any misunderstanding or confusion, I have used the term nationalist socialmn despite the fact that it does not figure in an American dictionary, where the more usual term national socialism is preferred. But national socialism, which was commonly used at the beginning of the twentieth century, has been contaijiinated by its association with the Nazis. However, the adjective nationalist, although not traditionally used, in its strict sense describes one of the variants of socialism accurately. There is a nationalist socialism just as there is a democratic or revisionistic socialism, often known as social democracy. Here let us remember that until the second half of the twentieth century, European social democracy remained faithful to the basic premises of Marxism. Similarly, in contrast to the so-called utopian socialism, Marxist socialism was also known in the*^ old communist circles as scientific socialism. Later we shall see that Chaim Arlosoroff (1899-1933), one of the major leaders and theoreticians of the Zionist labor movement, strongly promoted the idea that Jewish socialism cannot be anything but national. Nationalist socialism, properly understood, appeared in Europe in the last years of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth as an alternative to both Marxism and liberalism. In contrast with social democracy, this ideology of national unity par excellence was the product of an encounter between anti-Marxist and antireformist tendencies in socialism on one hand and ethnic, cultural, and religious nationalism on the other. The uniqueness of European nationalist socialism, whose origins can be traced to the pre-Marxist socialism of Proudhon, in relation to all other types of socialism, lay in one essential point: its acceptance of the principle of the nation’s primacy and its subjection of the values of socialism to the service of the nation. In this way, socialism lost its universal significance and became an essential tool in the process of building the nation-state. Thus, the universal values of socialism were subordinated to the particularistic values of nationalism. In practice, this was expressed by a total rejection of the concept of class warfare and by the claim of transcending social contradictions for the benefit of the collectivity as a whole. This form of socialism preached the^ organic unity of the nation and the mobilization of all classes of society for the achievement of national objectives. According to the theory, this process was to be led by natural elites, whose membership was determined not by class, origin, or educational qualifications but by sentiment, dedication, and a readiness to make sacrifices for all. Nationalist socialism quite naturally disliked people with large fortunes, the spoiled aristocracy, and all those to whom money came easily and who could allow themselves to be idle. It lashed out mercilessly at the bourgeoisie whose money moved from one financial center to another and whose checkbook, close to its heart, served as its identity card. In contrast with all these, nationalist socialism presented the working man with both feet firmly planted on the soil of his native coun-

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INTRODUCTION

try—the farmer, whose horizons are restricted to the piece of land he tills, the bourgeois, who runs his own enterprise, and the industrial worker: the rich and poor who contribute the sweat of their brow, their talents, and their money to increasing the collective wealtin^A^ o. k ^ According to this(sc^ol of thought^, the only real social distinction is between the worker and the person who does not work, that is, the “parasite. ” These social categories replaced the Marxist division of society into a class that owns the means of production and a class that does not. This form of socialism was careful to speak not of “proletarians ” but of “workers, ” and to distinguish not between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie but between “producers ” “parasites.’’ Nationalist socialism taught that all kinds of '^workers represented national interests; they were the heart of the nation, and their welfare was also the welfare of the nation. Thus, workers standing beside the production line and the owners of the industrial enterprise were equally “producers.” Similarly, nationalist socialism distinguished between the “positive” bourgeois, the producer, and the “parasitic” bourgeois, between “productive ” capital and “parasitic” capital, between capital that creates employment and adds to the economic strength of society and speculative capital, capital that enriches only its owners without producing collective wealth. So we see that nationalist socialism fostered a cult of work and productive effort of every kind. (All workers were regarded as deseiwing of protection from the incursion of foreigners. Nationalist socialism wished to close its country’s borders to foreign labor, and also to foreign capital when it competed with national capital, and considered the right to work as the right of every member of the nation. Nationalist socialism sought to manifest a natural solidarity between productive national wealth and the worker, between the owners of capital, who provide jobs, and the nativeborn workers. This was a partnership of interests, but also an ideological partnership: all social classes were to unite in an effort to increase national wealth. All had to contribute to the capability of their society to compete against other nations. According to nationalist socialism, the fate of each social group was organically linked to that of all other classes, and all members of the nation were responsible for one another. Class warfare was obviously out of the question. Indeed, nationalist socialism was based on the idea of the nation as a \ cultural, historical, and biological unit, or, figuratively, an extended family. The individual was regarded as an organic part of the whole, and the whole took precedence over the individual. The blood ties and cultural ties linking members of the nation, their partnership inTfieTotal national effort, took precedence over the position of the individual in the production system. To ensure the future of the nation and to protect it against the forces threatening to undeiTOine it, it was necessaiy to manifest its inner unity and to mobilize all classes against the two great dangers with which the nation is faced ■-

INTRODUCTION

9

in the modem world: liberalism and Marxism in its various forms. Liberalism views society as a collection of individuals forever struggling for a place in the sun, a sort of open market in which the sole driving force is personal gain. Marxism views society as a place of conflict between hostile classes, groups driven by the inner logic of the capitalist system to fight one another relentlessly. The originality of nationalist socialism was that it refused to accept society as a theater of war. It also refused to contemplate any intermediate or partial .solutions. Nationalist socialism rejected neo-Kantian refonnism, out of which democratic socialism developed; it rejected AustroMarxism, which tried to deal with the national question within the Marxist framework; and it also rejected attempts to bring Marxist economic thinking in line with technological and scientific developments at the beginning of the century. Nationalist socialism repudiated all this mighty intellectual effort for one basic reason: all schools of thought involved in it belonged to a conceptual universe rooted in the principle of class warfare. However, at the same time as it denied class warfare, nationalist socialism actively favored a solution to the social problem. No one who had the nation s future at heart, it claimed, could remain indifferent when large segments of the national body were sunk in poverty and degradation or when one segment of society existed through the exploitation of another, and it made no difference whether the exploiters constituted a majority or a minority. Although nationalist socialism detested the owners of fortunes and abhorred uncreative, egoistic, and speculative capital, it never objected to private capital as such. If capitalists did not sink their money in production, contribute to the enrichment of society, or employ workers, they were incorrigible parasites, but the fault lay with unproductive capitalists, not private capital itself When various forms of private capital were productively invested in enterprises serving national objectives, they fulfilled their purpose and were not to be touched. When, however, capital served only the interests of its owners, when the capitalists were motivated only by personal gain, the well-being of the community required that the capitalists be disciplined and brought under control. Thus, the aim of nationalist socialism was not the socialization of the means of production, and its attitude to private capital was solely functional. In the same vein the attitude of nationalist socialism to the individual was always based on the following criterion: the benefits he or she was able to confer on the various strata of the national community. These principles of nationalist socialism were the main, if not the only, features of the constructive socialism of Alidut Ha’avoda and later Mapai. From its inception, the rise of nationalist socialism resulted from three concurrent and partly overlapping phenomena: the retreat from Marxism, the crisis of liberalism, and the emergence of organic nationalism as a social force that swept away the masses. Thus, nationalist socialism was, by its very nature, hostile to democratic socialism. Democratic socialism renounced

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INTRODUCTION

the prospect of social revolution in the foreseeable future, but it did not abandon the Marxist conceptual framework and did not adopt an order of priorities in which national objectives were given first place. Similarly, democratic socialism regarded itself as the heir to liberalism and not its grave digger, and it considered democracy a positive value in itself Finally, democratic socialism opposed tribal nationalism, which emerged as the antithesis of the liberal nationalism of the beginning of the nineteenth century, and refused to accept its worldview, which contradicted the historical philosophy of Marxism. Marxism was the heir to the rationalism of the eighteenth century, and Marx can be regarded as the last philosopher of the Enlightenment. The new nationalism, however, constituted a total reaction to the principles of the eighteenth century. Tribal or organic nationalism swept over all of Europe, and by the end of the nineteenth century it had supplanted liberal nationalism, based on the principles of the Enlightenment and French Revolution. The rise of organic nationalism was a pan-European phenomenon, and it found expression not onfy in Germany, where unification had come very late, but also in France, the oldest and best-established nation-state on the European continent. The new nationalism was a nationalism of “Wood and_soil,” a cultural, historical, and, finally, biological nationalism. This form of nationalism undermined the foundations of liberalism and offered a total alternative. It fomented anti-Semitism in Western Europe and transformed the Dreyfus Affair from an ordinary trial for treason into a world drama. Organic nationalism condemned liberalism on moral, intellectual, and political grounds; for many people, it symbolized the bankruptcy of the Enlightenment. In Central and Eastern Europe, however, in the multinational empires, this cultural and biological nationalism reflected the will to revival of downtrodden peoples—peoples whose political independence had been taken away from them and whose cultural identity had in many cases been suppressed. But the two types of nationalism did not always develop in reaction to each other; their growth was often parallel, and their degree of success depended on cultural, social, and political conditions. These conditions were radically different in Western Europe and in the eastern part of the continent. In Western Europe nationalism appeared first as a political and legal phenomenon. The nation came into being through a long process of unification of populations, which were very different in their ethnic origins, cultural identities, languages, and religions. To the east of the River Rhine, however, the criteria for belonging to a nation were not political but cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and religious. German, Polish, Romanian, Slovakian, Serbian, and Ukrainian identities came into being not as the expression of an allegiance to a single independent authority but as the result of religion, language, and culture, which were

INTRODUCTION

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veiy readily regarded as refleeting biologieal or raeial differenees. Here the nation preceded the state. The thought of Johann Gottfried von Herder was most relevant to Eastern Europe, not the teachings of Locke, Kant, Mill, or Marx. In particular Marxism, which deliberately ignored the national question, which it saw as a relic of the past that would vanish with the onset of modernization and industrialization, never penetrated beyond a thin layer of the intelligentsia. Eor the same reason, democratic socialism, which recognized the strength of tribal nationalism but refused to submit to it, was never really a force in Eastern Europe. In Central and Eastern Europe the concept of citizenship lacked significance, and the idea of a civil society never carried the weight that it did in the west of the continent. Thus, liberal democracy was also unable to develop into a real force in that part of the world. In those regions the individual was never regarded as standing on his or her own and as having an intrinsic value; a person was never anything but an integral part of a national unit, without any possibility of choice, and the nation claimed absolute allegiance. Any other allegiance could be only secondary and necessarily subordinate to national objectives. The entire collective energy was directed to the attainment of these objectives, and the supremacy of particular values over universal ones was firmly established. This was the historical and intellectual context in which the modern Jewish national movement came into being. Organic nationalism is far more relevant to its history than the revolutionary socialist movement. Zionism was born into a world of violent and vociferous nationalities, a world with no national or religious tolerance, a world in which the distinction between religion and nation, or between religion, society, and the state, was unknown and perhaps inconceivable. Such distinctions were luxuries that only the Western European societies could afford. In this respect the peoples of Eastern Europe were not dissimilar to those of the Near East at the beginning of the century: the struggle for national revival was paramount, and each nation knew that all its gains were necessarily achieved at the expense of other nations. This situation was regarded as the natural order of things. Thus, neither Marxism nor liberalism could really succeed in that part of the world. In fact, the opposite was the case: both Marxism and liberalism were considered a mortal danger to the nation. Both threatened to tear apart its fabric of ethnic and cultural unity. The rationalism of Marxism and of liberalism, the view of the individual as the final object of all social action which was common to Marxism and liberalism, the concept of class warfare which gave Marxism its meaning, or the principle of individual competition central to liberalism obviously menaced the very foundations of national identity. That is why Marxism and liberalism stirred so strong an opposition in these areas. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, however, such an opposition also emerged in Western Europe and began to be a real force in

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INTRODUCTION

France, the land of the great revolution of 1789, the land of the rights of man, and the home of the most progressive liberal society on the continent. In the last decade of the nineteenth century it became apparent that in French society too there were forces that rejected the individualistic and rationalistic concept of the nation. If the nationalism of “blood and soil” had begun to demonstrate its power even in France, what could be expected in Eastern Europe? The fact that Zionism appeared at a time when the universal and humanist principles of the national movements, as a distant legacy of the eighteenth-century revolutions, had been shattered even in Western Europe is tremendously important. From the point of view of the educated and the assimilated, Zionism was a natural response to the failure of liberalism as a rational and antihistorical system, to its inability to neutralize tribal nationalism, or at least to keep it within reasonable bounds. The Dreyfus Affair dramatically highlighted the crisis of liberalism and of modernity. Where the Jewish people were concerned, the Dreyfus Affair placed an enormous question mark over the future of emancipation in Europe. In the liberal circles to which Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) and Max Nordau (1849-1923) belonged, France was not only the accepted model of a liberal society but also an example of future developments in Central and Eastern Europe. That was why this rebellion against modernity shocked them so profoundly and brought them to such radical conclusions. Herzl represented that segment of the Jewish intelligentsia that looked to the West, and not only hoped for emancipation’s success but was prepared to pay full price for it. That price, as we know, included the obliteration of Jewish national identity. This, however, was not the situation of Eastern Europe, where the great majority of the Jewish people lived. In the Russian empire, which was the Second Aliyah’s point of origin, in Austrian Galicia, and in other parts of the two multinational empires, emancipation was only just beginning. But, already at that early stage, the Jewish intelligentsia realized that emancipation’s underlying principle presented the Jewish people with an entirely new challenge. Eor the first time in their histoiy. Eastern European Jews, faced a real danger to their collective identity. For the first time there was the possibility that the future of the Jewish people depended on each individual’s personal decision. Liberal individualism suddenly appeared as a real threat to the continued Jewish people’s existence as a homogenous and autonomous unit. Thus, Zionism was not only a reaction to increasing insecurity but also a Herderian, not to say tribal, response to the challenge of emancipation. For David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973), Zionism was not only an answer to the Jews’ distress but a solution to the loss of identity that threatened the Jewish people.^ There is no doubt that in a most basic manner, Zionism came into being because of the breakdown of security in the Pale of Settlement, the gradual destruction of the Jewish economic infrastructure, and the rise of

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INTRODUCTION

13

anti-Semitism in Western Europe. But until the beginning of the 1920s, there was a simpler and easier solution to pogroms and economie discrimination: emigration to the United States. And, in fact, among the masses of Jews who left Eastern Europe in the thirty or forty years prior to the passing of the American immigration laws in 1922, only about 1 percent or slightly fewer came to Palestine. Eor this minute minority, a pioneering elite in all respects, Zionism was more than an attempt to save themselves or their possessions; it was a.response to the degeneracy with which the processes of modernization threatened Jewish society. Moreover, ideological Zionism was, from the beginning, the preoccupation of a minority, which understood the Jewish problem not in terms of physical existence and the provision of k/ h c, i economic security but as an enterprise for rescuing the nation^rom the dan- , J 'A 1 ger of collective annihilation. Only with the closing of the gates of the xy United States did Palestine become a land of immigration, although even then it was not an entirely ordinary land of immigration. Even someone who had no choice but to land on the shores of Jaffa and Tel Aviv was viewed as fulfilling a national mission. In this sense, Dan Horowitz and Moshe Lissak’s assertion that Israeli society “sprang up as a result of ideology” and that “immigration to the country was motivated by ideology” is perfectly true.^ But the creation of Israeli society was also due to the existential necessity of rescuing European Jews from destruction. The first three waves of immigration were a consequence of an ideological decision, but the number of immigrants and of those who remained was small. A Jewish society capable of standing on its own feet would never have come into being in Palestine if the first two waves of mass immigration had not occurred in the 1920s and 1930s. The Polish Fourth Aliy ah (1924-26) and the German Fifth Aliy ah (1933-39) were definitely motivated by distress, and it was these that laid the true infrastructure of Israeli society. These waves of immigration provided the necessaiy foundation for building the Jewish state and enabled the Jewish Yishuv to conquer the country. Zionism found its moral justification in existential necessity. The fact that Palestine was the only place in the world to which European Jews could escape in the 1930s and 1940s gave the Yishuv a moral credibility and political support without which the state of Israel may not have come into being. From the time the Nazis came to power until the wave of immigration from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, Palestine and later Israel were first a place of refuge. Thus, even if Israeli society was largely an ideological creation,^ one should not forget that it sprang up to an equal extent as a result of the upheavals that took place and are still taking place in Europe. But even more important, all national movements of the last two hundred years were nurtured by norms and values that over time were translated into concrete political categories. There was never a national movement that did not tiy to realize “ideological” aims: the definition of national identity in (-

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INTRODUCTION

cultural and historical terms, self-rule as a step toward independence, the realization of independence, and the founding of a nation-state. In this respeet Zionism was not unique. The unifieation and independenee of Italy and Germany, the long war of the Poles—full of revolts with no ehance of suecess, from the division of Poland into three parts at the end of the eighteenth eentury until their resurreetion at the end of the First World War— and the struggles of the Slovaks, the Czeehs, the Ukrainians, and the Baltie peoples resulted from the kind of ideologieal impetus that led to the growth of the Jewish national movement. Israel is a soeiety in which a national consolidation and a sense of ethnic, religious, and eultural partieularity created by a common history preceded the realization of independenee and the eonstruetion of a national state. In this respeet Israel is not dissimilar to ^ other states in Central and Eastern Europe. VAJ r0 Tx. rfy - _

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