Israel’s Independence Day Marks a 75-Year Odyssey From Left to Right The Jewish state has lived up to its miraculous creation, but not in the way its founders expected. By Elliot Kaufman
How did Israel, a liberal cause at its founding 75 years ago, become right-wing? You could begin the tale in 1935, when a Jewish state was still far from assured. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the father of right-wing Zionism, despised by the socialist mainstream, made a promise and a threat to David Ben-Gurion, the Labor Zionist leader of Palestine’s Jewish community:
“I can vouch for there being a type of Zionist who doesn’t care what kind of society our ‘state’ will have; I’m that person. If I were to know that the only way to a state was via socialism, or even that this would hasten it by a generation, I’d welcome it. More than that: Give me a religiously Orthodox state in which I would be forced to eat gefilte fish all day long (but only if there were no other way), and I’ll take it. . . . In the will I leave my son, I’ll tell him to start a revolution, but on the envelope, I’ll write, ‘To be opened only five years after a Jewish state is established.’ ”
That Jabotinsky’s heirs kept his promise and threat allows us to trace the nation’s journey from left to right as the world’s most successful postcolonial state.
In 1944 right-wing Zionists revolted against the British, the colonial power blocking desperate European Jews from immigrating to Palestine. Ben-Gurion, focused on a postwar settlement, opposed the revolt. His forces betrayed hundreds of members of the Zionist underground to the British. This turned Jew against Jew and could have easily spiraled into civil war. But it didn’t. “There will not be a fratricidal war,” said Menachem Begin, successor to Jabotinsky. “Perhaps our blood will be shed, but we will not shed the blood of others.”
A worn-down Britain withdrew from Palestine in 1948, and Ben-Gurion declared Israeli independence. Rather than create an Arab state alongside it, as the United Nations had envisioned, five Arab armies invaded Israel immediately. The Irgun, Begin’s paramilitary, sought to smuggle in weapons to resupply Jerusalem during the fighting. Ben-Gurion knew, however, that a state with private armies would be a tinderbox. He suppressed Israel’s far-left military faction and ordered his new Israel Defense Forces to fire on the Irgun’s weapons ship, setting it ablaze. Again, Begin refused to retaliate: “It is forbidden for brother to raise a hand against brother.”
East Jerusalem, with Judaism’s holiest sites, fell to Jordan, which expelled every last Jew. Yet Israel emerged with one army under a single command, loyal to the state. This unity, achieved via the ruthlessness of the moderates and the restraint of the extremists, allowed the country to develop the social solidarity to hold off repeated invasions, integrate hundreds of thousands of refugees, liberate Jerusalem and stand firm against terrorism—all while flourishing as a democracy.
Labor Zionists, secular and Ashkenazi, governed Israel for its first 29 years. But Jabotinsky’s envelope had been opened. The “Second Israel,” led by traditional Mizrahi Jews expelled from Arab lands, powered Begin’s 1977 election victory, known as ha’mahapakh, the upheaval. The right would push for a more-Jewish state and attempt to break the power of the left-wing Ashkenazi bastions, from kibbutzim to state corporations, unions and, most recently, the Supreme Court.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose father had been Jabotinsky’s secretary, led free-market reforms in the 1990s and 2000s, unleashing a dynamic Israeli economy with a gross domestic product per capita exceeding Britain’s. In 2020 Mr. Netanyahu secured the Abraham Accords, a diplomatic flanking maneuver that junked the liberal consensus on a moribund peace process. Now, as the country shakes, he leads a once-unthinkable all-right-wing government into uncharted territory.
One man who foresaw Israel’s transformation was political theorist Leo Strauss, a Jabotinskyite in his youth. In 1956 he wrote to the editors of National Review with a then-outrageous argument: Zionism was conservative. When “the moral spine of the Jews was in danger of being broken” with false promises of European emancipation, he wrote, Zionism had held Jews to their Jewishness. “Zionism was the attempt to restore that inner freedom, that simple dignity, of which only people who remember their heritage and are loyal to their fate, are capable.” It “helped to stem the tide of ‘progressive’ leveling of venerable, ancestral differences; it fulfilled a conservative function.”
Even a purely political Zionism, he explained in a 1962 speech, was bound to raise deeper questions of culture: How should citizens of a Jewish state live? A serious cultural Zionism, in turn, had to conclude that Jewish culture’s most profound sources and purposes are religious. The logic of Zionism, he said, leads to Judaism.
Welcome to Israel, the new global center of Jewish life and learning. Israel has experienced a religious and cultural renaissance, leaving the old socialist Sparta in the dust. Scripture is woven into hit songs and novels, lives of piety the stuff of TV dramas. Birthrates remain elevated among all types of Jews. The “national-religious” lead a settlement movement to return Jews to Judea and Samaria, the biblical heartland from which Jordan had expelled them. These Jews, piling into the officer corps, may one day lead the army.
Meanwhile, Israel’s Labor Party, discredited by the waves of Palestinian terrorism that answered Israeli peace offers, has been reduced to four Knesset seats out of 120. Only foreign pressure and an increasingly aggressive Supreme Court, protected from ideological change by its unique selection mechanism, preserves the left’s power.
Israel’s opposition is now center-left and center-right, led by new parties with little vision beyond stymieing Mr. Netanyahu and his religious allies. They can be formidable, however, when the right forgets that favorable demographic trends for the future don’t settle disputes today. The judicial-reform fight has proved that. But here, too, is a confirmation of change—even the opposition to the right has shifted rightward, dropped all talk of surrendering territory and draped itself in the flag.
India, founded a year before Israel, provides a parallel. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s secularist first prime minister, stopped short of crushing religion, even making certain concessions to help legitimate the new state his party would dominate for decades. Like Ben-Gurion, he was confident that traditional religion would wither away with progress.
Over time, however, some Israeli Jews and many Indian Hindus sought deeper meaning for their states. Had they won sovereignty merely to modernize along British lines? Looking for a different source of values and solidarity, both nations have seen a conscious return to religion, in many cases yielding not at all traditional national-religious fusions with great vitality and expectations.
The outcomes in Israel and India may be as different as Judaism and Hinduism, but the challenge for the right is the same: to marshal the best in its tradition to revise what is no longer sustainable from the old regime. The worry is that it will marshal the worst to squander its national inheritance.
Once upon a time in Israel, the left-wing majority knew how to lead and the right-wing minority knew when to hold fire. The combination produced a state worthy of its miraculous creation. Now, as Israel’s third generation beckons, the roles are reversed and neither side is content. The right struggles to consolidate control; will its flailing only tighten the no longer subtle restraints on its power? The left convinces itself that the greatest danger to Israel is the majority of its fellow citizens; will it ever accede, like Jabotinsky and Begin did for a time, to a different kind of Jewish state?
Only Mr. Netanyahu keeps his eyes fixed on Iran rather than internal squabbles. Increasingly it seems that he must solidify the state and redeem the revolution or be devoured in its wake.
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