From labour Zionism to New Zionism

Conclusions

The evidence in this article suggests that the appeal of New Zionism is due at least in part to its ability to breach the gap between the excessively routinized ideology and current events in Israel. Labour Zionism had provided its adherents with a new, secular national identity, the core value system which consolidates a society.¹ It remained accepted and served to legitimize the political center as long as it fulfilled this function. But once it failed to do so, it lost all appeal. The state and, consequently patriotism for its own sake, had become the only remaining value. Without further justification, the young regarded this patriotism as “sounding like slogans from a Zionist book.”² By equating patriotism with Zionism, routinized Zionism was identified with what it had itself rejected. And, indeed, without a value system delineating national identity, patriotism is meaningless. The events of the Six Day War did not create the crisis of identity, but precipitated it by making Israelis aware of it. These events also favored New Zionism above all other attempts to formulate a new Israeli ideology as a basis for a renewed national identity. An ideology based on Jewish religion may not have been as successful under different circumstances. Under the given ones, it furnished the best answer to questions existential to Israelis.

In Palestine, and during the early years of Israel, the young were surprisingly conformist,³ and this is another factor helping to explain their subsequent dissatisfaction, quest, and discovery of a renewed value system. Having internalized the truncated version of Zionism only, they were less well equipped to draw on discarded components of the ideology in order to make sense of current affairs. They, more than their elders, had to find new answers, since for them the old ones had been disparaged. Thus, the young became aware of the inefficacy of routinized Zionism merely because they had been so well socialized to it. This applies equally to the Soviet Union and to China. In both these societies, socialization of the young to the prevalent ideology is very effective, and therefore makes the young more aware of its failings. New Zionism does not appeal only to large sections of the young in Israel, but seems to have influenced attitudes in general. The recent law declaring united Jerusalem the eternal capital of Israel is a pertinent case in point. There has been general consensus in Israel on the status of united Jerusalem as its capital, and this was tacitly accepted by part of the international community. But to declare so publicly at a time of delicate negotiations regarding the autonomy of the West Bank (of which East Jerusalem forms a part) is another matter altogether. The law serves no apparent useful purpose: it has alienated even friendly foreign nations, and has not improved Israel's foreign relations in any way. Yet, it received an overwhelming majority vote in parliament, which included Labour members. It seems that its main function was to proclaim New Zionism the ideology of Israel. By so doing, Zionism has turned full circle, starting from a secular revolutionary ideology and gradually turning into a legitimizing one, until routinization had reached a point of no return. Thereupon, New Zionism reformulated the original revolutionary ideology in religious terms, and succeeded in gaining first the support of the young, and subsequently of a large part of the general Israeli public.

At first glance, Israel seems a unique case from which one cannot generalize. Israel is exceptional on numerous points, but the following three are particularly relevant to this discussion: (a) its political center had no coercive power, and was, therefore, more vulnerable to challenges to its position; (b) its population is part of a much larger people living in various countries other than Israel, yet identifying itself as a single nation; and (c) due to its geopolitical position, the entire country is more than usually vulnerable to threats from neighboring states, which reject its very existence. Furthermore, the country is poor in natural resources. Both of these make Israel and its political center unusually dependent on outside aid, principally from non-Israeli Jews. These are exceptional circumstances indeed, but then each historical case has unique features. These need not prevent the possibility of drawing general conclusions, provided the relationship of such features with the process studied is made clear. Since the political center of Jewish Palestine was exceptionally vulnerable to challenges, routinization occurred more quickly than might normally have been expected. In fact, most stages of Zionist routinization did occur in the pre-state period. An ordinary regime can be maintained by clever legislation, as well as economic measures, such as taxation and monetary policy. Challenges to the power center can thus be met by various means. But when a political center has no coercive power, ideological appeal is of greater importance. Every additional step in routinization broadens the base of support further, and thus averts the threat posed by the challenge. It was therefore used more frequently in Jewish Palestine than in any other post-revolutionary society, speeding up the entire routinization process and leading to such an extreme case of routinization in such a relatively short period.

Other post-revolutionary societies seem to have undergone a similar process, albeit at a slower rate. It is beyond the scope of any one article to make a detailed analysis of this process in more than one society, but I shall bring a single example of routinization of Soviet ideology to illustrate its occurence. According to Marx, the state would become obsolete once society had become classless. In 1919, Lenin maintained that the state would be used by the Soviet classless society to destroy class exploitation elsewhere, and would be dissolved only when the entire world had become classless.⁴ According to Stalin, in 1924, the proletarian state was an instrument for the suppression of the bourgeoisie.⁵ By 1956, Khrushchev in his famous speech to the Twentieth Party Congress made the state synonymous with Soviet society.⁶ The change of meaning given to the concept “state” is a pertinent example of ideological routinization. In 1919 it could no longer become obsolete, since it was required to maintain power. But as the revolution had only just occurred, adherence to ideological dicta was still considered imperative. External threats, which were real enough at the time, seemed the most convincing justification for delaying implementation of an important ideological component. By 1924 the political center was better entrenched, yet still challenged by the peasantry. Stalin no longer felt compelled to emphasize the temporary character of the state, yet deemed it necessary to justify its permanent existence. It was therefore defined as a necessary instrument for combating counter-revolution. By 1956, no hint indicated that the state was an instrument of suppression; by then it was a positive, integral part of the social order, the mainstay of society. Thus the meaning of the concept changed with each new challenge, first external, later internal. And each change of meaning served to legitimize the political center: as the protector from external threats, as the protector of the revolutionaries and, finally, as the leader of the entire society.

Ideology may not be as important to a political center which has coercive power than to one which lacks such power, but the above example shows that it does have some importance even in a totalitarian state, where coercive power is certainly evident. In this respect, too, the Israeli case is probably more extreme, but not substantially different among post-revolutionary societies. Its unique features explain the specific contents of each stage of ideological routinization, and the timing of ideological revival, but not the general direction of routinization. Thus, the dependence on world Jewry provides explanations for the last two stages of routinization; the constant external threat made the experience of the Six Day War particularly traumatic and expedited the search for a new meaningful ideology and national identity. But these were not determinants of the general direction in which routinization proceeded, which is always towards further legitimation of the power center. The conclusions drawn from the Israeli case should therefore apply to other modern post-revolutionary societies, both with regard to ideological routinization and to generational shift in ideological allegiance.