In the political domain, specifically regarding the Jewish-Arab conflict in Israel, the conceptual foundations of ordinary discourse are built upon the Western political and semantic code. Particularly since the late 1960s in America, reinforced by the Vietnam War and the debate that surfaced in its wake, the language of political morality -- what is 'politically correct' ­- of right and wrong, was determined by the United States. Freedom and equality proved to be the political symbols to expose the repressive character of regimes from China and the Philippines, from Rumania and the Soviet Union, and to South Africa and Iran. Israel, as a Western-style cultural outpost in the heart of the Middle East, could do no better than actualize elemental Western values in its own domestic political arena. Any suspicion that Israel fails to affirm itself as adequately conforming to Western expectations will inevitably cast doubt on its political acceptability.

As such, certain expressions of Jewish nationalism, like Zionist settlement and Israeli rule over Arab-inhabited areas in Judea and Samaria were condemned as racism. The very liberation of parts of the Hebrew homeland was derided as alien occupation. Pioneering entrenchment in Eretz Israel was thus denounced as colonialism. The very desire for cultural continuity in Jewish history will serve notice for some in the West that Israel has descended into the dark pit of medieval clericalism. In the name of Western values and their policy implications, the delegitimization of Israel advanced. It rests significantly upon targeting the ideology of Zionism as ultimately inconsistent with a just resolution of the Arab question in Israel. Political slogans that often appear no more than mundane clichés are served up to demand, or rationalize, further Israeli territorial capitulation: territories- for-peace, Palestinian self- determination, and PLO statehood.

But at the root of Israel's alleged obligation toward the Arabs lies the political paradox in its relationship to the West. Only by fulfilling the political agenda formulated in Washington, Paris, and other Western capitals, and approved by the American Civil Liberties Union and Amnesty International, will allow Israel to earn the privilege to be part of the legitimate West. Yet in so fulfilling the Western agenda Israel will pulverize its Zionist ideological armor and, moreover, play into the hand of those who conspire to the piece-by-piece (or: peace-by-peace) dissolution of the Jewish state. A Western style solution to the Arab question should be seen as a political issue grounded in a broader civilizational predicament, as Israel pursues its path in the Middle East and in the world.2

The Jewish people has, ever since the dawn of human history, carved out its own particular peoplehood, unwilling to be swallowed up by more universalist or internationalist enterprises. Hebrew nationalism faced Hellenistic civilization, later the rise of Christianity and Islam, subsequently major European forces like liberalism and marxism. In all cases, the religious integrity and cultural cohesion at the foundation of separate Jewish peoplehood were directly challenged. In the twentieth-century, Zionism as the contemporary political idiom and organizational form of Jewish nationalism appropriated its historical niche in this saga of a small, but determined, people sustaining its collective existence with independent principles ­- along side of, but separate from, the nations of the world. The state of Israel therefore symbolizes an ancient struggle, not just for Jewish existence, but for assuring the Jewish essence at the core of the people's national heritage which encompasses religious, moral, and political dimensions in history.

Elucidating Israel's Essence

According to Zionism, resting upon the solid foundation of Torah and Judaic tradition. Eretz Israel is the singular and unconditional homeland of the Jewish People alone, regardless of fleeting historical circumstances connected to the demographic make-up of the land. Zionism as a specific national movement did not recognize any alien element to deny the unique Jewish right to the land. Neither Ben-Gurion nor Golda Meir considered the fact of Arabs in the country as a reason compelling ideological collapse or implying national illegitimacy.3 According to modern Israel's founding document in 1948, the state is designed first and foremost to serve the purposes of the Jewish people. In a striking assertion of renewed sovereignty, Ben-Gurion proclaimed the establishment "a Jewish state called the state of Israel." Non-Jews, who constitute close to 20% of the Israeli population, are presumably relegated in the state of Israel to assume a markedly secondary role, in as much as they are not members of the national community -­ the Jewish people ­- that is the singular political public within the state.

The land and the state are designed to serve as the foundation for Jewish spiritual fulfillment. Zionist self-actualization, the rejuvenation of Hebrew as the spoken tongue, and a safe homeland for secure Jewish life are the core purposes of Israel. However, Israeli society is not composed solely of Jews, and its springs of action and interaction in the social, economic and cultural realms touch the lives of Jewish and Arabs alike. The character of the state does not therefore overlap the character of the society. The state is, by and large, uni-dimensionally Jewish but society in Israel is pluralistic, appearing as binational (Jewish-Arab) and tri-religious (Jewish, Muslim and Christian, in addition to the Druze community).

The disjuncture between state and society is a source of social and political tensions, and can stimulate radical expectations to resolve this structural incompatibility. Perhaps the state should try and fashion a society in its own compact image; or the society, particularly its Arab-Muslim component, might influence the state's character to accord with the country's diverse ethnic makeup. It is clear that in either case, the present situation is unsatisfactory both to the Jewish and Arab sides. And while bi-national or bi-religious states are not unusual in the Middle East, as in the cases of Egypt, Iraq and Morocco, the absence of full Western-style democracy there obviates the problematic of arranging a fair distribution of power among diverse communities. Coercion rather than consent, certainly authoritarian rule, remains the bedrock of political order in such Arab countries. But in Israel, Jews and Arabs, enmeshed in a troubled encounter for so long, consider conflict-resolution according to democratic criteria, though difficult, a necessary and even workable task.

A Nation-State or a Pluralistic State?

The idea of a Jewish nation state posits the Jewish people as the collective political personality at the heart of Israeli sovereignty. A nation state by definition is designed for a single national community and, by implication, reduces other individuals and groups to the distant margins of public affairs. Therefore in Israel as a Jewish nation state only Jews would exercise power, only Judaism would be an official religion, only Hebrew would be an official language, and Zionism would be the sole ethos of ideological legitimacy. A nation state, as in Japan or Ireland, belongs to one particular people and no other.

The idea of Israel as a pluralistic state, recognized in itself in the 1948 Proclamation Document, reflects the democratic impulse toward openness and tolerance of non-Jews for the unfolding period of statehood. Arabs were to be accorded equal rights as Israeli citizens and to participate in public affairs; at the same time, they were not to be impeded from preserving and cultivating their communal attributes, regarding language, religion, and culture.

The pluralistic model closely resembles the character of America established as a new political entity, without the historical bedrock of an old national ethnic people. The United States was to be open to anyone -­ and this is its universalistic spirit -­ who regardless of race, color, or creed, chose to merge with others who do not share the same personal autobiography. Thus, an American of Armenian origin became governor of California and an American of Italian descent serves as governor of New York, just as Americans of Black-African origin have become mayors in all the large American cities. A Jewish-American was Mayor of New York City and a Cuban-American has been elected Senator from the state of Florida.

But it is inconceivable that Israel can be a permanently integral Jewish political entity, fulfilling the classic goals of modern Jewish nationalism expressed by the Zionist movement, if it fully applies the American paradigm. The westernization of Israel must necessarily signify its fundamental de-Judaization and de-Zionization.

Ideological Decline and the End of Zionism

Zionism, with its own ideological subset varieties, advanced through several stages during the last 100 years, from the moment of articulation to its contemporary condition. The following summary of developments highlights the historical contours of Zionism.

· The essence of Zionism was in its origins to represent the national idea in place of the religious idea as the spiritual axis of Jewish life. Halakha, faith, and tradition, which had united the Jewish people and enriched its spiritual and intellectual world, were now to concede primacy to Zionist ideology. The global age of nationalism had penetrated the House of Israel and undermined its historical self-consciousness as the Torah-defined Chosen People.

· Zionism won acclamation and recognition by the British Balfour Declaration in 1917 as a dramatic breakthrough in the Jewish people's political struggle. Most significant was the fact that the document, in recognizing the right to a Jewish national home in Palestine, virtually ignored the Arab inhabitants of the country. And though accorded civil and religious rights, the Arabs -­ referred to as 'non-Jews' -­ would enjoy no national or political rights as would the Jewish people. This Jewish political victory was a confirmation of Zionist ideology and a major step toward the establishment of a Jewish nation state.

· Israel's founding in 1948, itself the culmination of Zionism, became the opening for an important change in the ideological climate of the times. The new democratic state assumed responsibility toward all its citizens, both Jews and Arabs, in a way in which equality would emasculate, minimally erode the concept. Zionism in the fashioning of Israel's ideological, social, and political life. The encompassing Israeli state framework would come to supersede the narrow framework of Jewish Zionism. Thereafter, this 'end-of-Zionism' scenario surfaced in the mid-1960s in two events concerning the Arab community. On the one hand, the Al-Ard organization was judged a seditious and anti-Zionist Arab movement and declared illegal;4while on the other hand, the Israeli government decided to dismantle the Military Government which had been established in 1948 to impose special security supervision over an Arab population suspected of anti-Israeli sentiments and, perhaps, 'fifth column' tendencies. The Al-Ard episode did not lead to more stringent state supervision, nor did it interfere with a turn toward greater liberalization. The dampening of Zionist ideological enthusiasm, during years of low immigration levels and hardly any manifestation of classic Zionist mobilization, contributed to elevating the Arabs' status and facilitating their integration within Israeli society.

Israel' s official response to the liberation of the biblical heartland of Eretz Israel in 1967 was vivid testimony to the ideological rot at the Zionist core. The government did not juridically annex Judea and Samaria, did not postulate a policy of political retention, nor did it advocate Jewish settlement as part of the historical Return to the land. The translation of Israel's ideological passivity into political terms implied a willingness to withdraw from the captured areas in 'exchange for peace' with the Arabs. Neutralizing Zionism in Israel's political calculations, as in the Labor Party's 'Allon Plan' following the Six-Day War, was itself designed to attract Jordan to the negotiating table. In the end, it may be said for the 1970s and 1980s, that Jerusalem gained neither Zionism nor peace. The Americanization of Israel's political culture in those years, catapulting thinking of the liberal-leftist vintage, frowned on Jewish settlement activism and pressured Israel toward territorial withdrawal. President Carter was to become a predominant representative of this American thinking and policy-making. It became fashionable to draw an analogy between Black rights in the United States and Arab rights in Israel, as legitimate expressions of minority struggle in Western democratic societies.5

· In 1977 President Sadat of Egypt projected the value of peace against the value of Zionism onto Israel's national agenda. In order to achieve a peace treaty with Egypt, Israel was compelled, or so it concluded, to withdraw from all of the Sinai Peninsula and even to abandon and ultimately destroy its 'flower in the desert' -- the Yamit settlement bloc of one town and seventeen agricultural moshavim. An ideologically contorted and emotionally pained Israel meandered its way toward regional acceptance. Only an Israel that was willing to agree to its own ideological delegitimation, or minimally to suspend the country's ideological principles, could enjoy the political fruits, be they momentary or lasting, of peace with Egypt. Settlement activity, the Zionist vanguard in pre-state days, succumbed at Camp David in 1978 to the primacy of Arab-Israeli reconciliation.

· The virtual ideological demise of Zionism was transformed into the celebration of democracy in the 1980s. It was this idea which came to fill the ideological vacuum; indeed, democracy became the new ideology of Israel. The election to the Knesset in 1984 of Rabbi Meir Kahane heading the Kach Party, which called for Arab expulsion from the country, elicited powerful revulsion in establishment circles, among the cultural elite, the intelligentsia, the academic community, and the media pundits. They employed the most virulent language to condemn and besmirch the man and his anti-democratic views in a flood of hatred, whose excessiveness was far out of proportion to the fact that Rabbi Kahane's party had won only one seat in the Knesset of 120 seats. President Chaim Herzog was in the forefront of the anti-Kahane campaign and remonstrated against racism in the name of egalitarian democracy. The President showed his disapproval by refusing to receive MK Kahane following the election, an unprecedented act of ostracism, inasmuch as he received all 119 other elected MKs among whom were anti-Zionist Arabs and Communists.

The state educational system, including educational programs in the Army, along with Knesset members from the Right and the Left, became standard-bearers in the democratic crusade. The Kahane episode was thus successfully exploited to affirm positive content in Israel's ideological life, after Zionism had been virtually relegated to the dustbin of modern Israeli history.

Grass root attempts to pump nativistic ideological vitality into the body politic, as in the case of the Gush Emunim movement in Judea and Samaria, did not affect the overall trend toward official de-Zionization. Yet this religious and radical settlement movement claimed to represent Zionist continuity and, beginning in the mid-1970s, pursued with great tenacity the national homecoming enterprise into the mountain heartland of the country. In concrete numerical and physical terms, Gush Emunim scored impressive successes: by the early 1990s, more than 140,000 Israelis were settled in 140 new Jewish cities, towns, and villages throughout Judea and Samaria. But the record of Gush Emunim in the political domain was much more complex and less sanguine. For Israeli government policy did not transform the new social reality into a policy of territorial annexation, and this due to compelling domestic, demographic, and international reasons. Indeed, though Jewish settlement is a sacred Zionist value, popular support for further settlement activity was mixed. Moreover, consistent with the Camp David Accords from 1979, the Israeli government under the nationalist Likud party was committed to Arab Autonomy in the disputed territories. Palestinian nationalist claims which enjoyed virtual global support were a serious impediment to the Zionist march forward in Eretz Israel.

· In July 1992, Israel was politically transformed into a bi-national Jewish-Arab state. It was then that the leftist Rabin-led Labor government was formed with the support of Arab votes. A Jewish minority government could only function with the consistent support provided by two Arab political parties in the Knesset. This was the first time in Israeli history that the Arabs determined what government would be established in Jerusalem. Thereby, the Israeli Left sought Arab collaboration in its thirst for power against the broad spectrum of the nationalist and religious sectors of society. The narrow Left-Arab parliamentary majority provided Yitzhak Rabin with the ability to neutralize the Jewish Knesset majority, allowing him to recognize the PLO in 1993, and to begin the withdrawal from Judea, Samaria, and Gaza in 1994. It may then be concluded that the Arabs acquired the upper hand within and over the state of Israel and within the land of Israel as a whole. All the while, the Israeli Left posed as the ideological repository for the sacred values of peace and equality, which had been turned into the lethal ideological ammunition firing away at the House of Israel.

The Democratic Mystique versus the Zionist Ethos

Liberalism as a guiding ideology in new states appropriately belongs to a later stage of development. New states first require social cohesion and national unity, in order to undertake the broad challenges at the start of a new political journey. The individualistic spirit of liberalism, focusing on private rights and human diversity, can weaken or even dissolve the sinews of collective purpose. Israel's national Zionist construction beginning in 1948, and as a continuation from earlier decades in the yishuv's development, could be hindered by Arab demands for equal opportunity -- however legitimate they might seem to be. A state of fifteen million Jews -- rather than some two-to-three million during the 1960s, or even one of 4.5 million in 1994 -- would be a more consolidated entity and therefore better prepared to permit the sentimental vagaries of liberalism and the uncomplicated openness of democracy to accommodate a growing Arab minority population. Nevertheless, the small state of Israel from the start officially related to both Jews and Arabs as one fundamentally undifferentiated citizen body.

In her biography My Life, Golda Meir relates an anecdote which vividly captured the liberal impulse in the early days of the state. In referring to the role of the National Insurance Institute, that is responsible for social welfare programs, she said: "I went to Nazareth myself to hand the first cheque to the first Arab woman who had her baby in a hospital there, and I think I was more excited than she was." Golda also discussed the plight of the Arab refugees whom she earlier had tried to deter from fleeing Haifa, and was concerned lest their loss signify both Israeli guilt and the impossibility of Jewish-Arab coexistence. "There were some Jews in the yishuv who said, even in 1948, that the Arab exodus was the best thing that could have happened to Israel." But for Golda, "No serious Israeli ever felt that way." Historical documentation nonetheless has since revealed that there were some serious Israelis, among them Prime Minister Ben-Gurion and Foreign Minister Sharett, who did feel 'that way'.6

The Palestinian refugee problem that arose against the background of Israel's founding has been ever since a most fundamental impediment to conflict-resolution. Refugee return, as recognized in principle by a United Nations resolution from December 11, 1948, and a persistent PLO demand, would seem to right a human wrong. From the Israeli perspective, it would constitute a grave threat to the viability of a Jewish-majority state. This was perhaps a matter of relative injustice -- or possibly an instance of divine justice -- rather than being a search for absolute justice.

Central to the democratic experiment is the need for consensus among all groups in society, so that a shared outlook on basic values will assure mutual coexistence. But in Israel such a consensus is hardly existent. An elemental Jewish value like aliya (immigration) is suspect to the Palestinian Arabs as a threat to their national integrity in the land. At the same time, Arab solidarity with the PLO and Hamas is a sign of blatant disloyalty to Israel. Arabs in Israel have shown great hostility since 1993 toward former Arab collaborators who worked for Israel's national security being absorbed in Israel. In these circumstances democracy is unable to provide common emotional ground to transcend the political significance of divergent Jewish and Arab group identities and aspirations. Integrating their separate visions would seem basically unfeasible. Intense group bonds, markedly separating Jews and Arabs (Muslims) from each other, pointed to the secondary role of universal Israeli citizenship to fashion the social map of the country. The brutal murder in February, 1992 of three Israeli soldiers by Israeli Arabs, citizens of two towns in the Galilee, was a stark instance of the gulf dividing Jews and Arabs in Israel. Since then, 'Muslim Fundamentalism' in Israel and illegal Arab smuggling of weapons into the country are other examples illustrating that, when all is said and done, Jews and Arabs are traveling on parallel political tracks. These two tracks are probably destined to intersect and conflict according to the rules of politics, despite the laws of physics.

This deadlock results from the very different ideological changes experienced by Jews and Arabs since statehood. While the spiritual universe of the Jews contracted, the Arabs of Israel took flight toward religiously enriching and ideologically satisfying fulfillment. They discovered and established their proud identity as Arabs, as Muslims, and as Palestinians. The Jews were interested in trying to accommodate and pacify the Arabs in the coin of democratic appeasement, but the Arabs seemed riveted to a vision of power and victory. Israel, at one and the same time, facilitated the crystallization of Arab ideological strength while emptying its own holy vessels of classical Judaism and modern Zionism.

In the name of democracy, Israel had moved incredibly to the edge of national dissolution via ideological deviancy. Former President Herzog had himself conveyed this transformation in Israeli thinking when he wrote that, "In periods of quiet, the nation devoted itself to its main objectives namely, creating a democratic society, absorbing immigrants, developing education and a system of justice and achieving economic independence."7 The ultimate Zionist value of Jewish immigration (aliya) was now secondary to the fashionable and mesmerizing magic of democracy. Political form was submerging national authenticity when, in a flourishing closing, Herzog defined the creation of "a healthy, free, democratic society" as the underlying goal and success of the state of Israel. The idea of Jewish normalization, as an aspect of the Zionist national project, had been metamorphosed into Jewish alienation from its selfhood. Just as the price of Jewish acceptance in the modern European Enlightenment period was to abandon Jewish particularist identity, so Israel would submerge its collective identity among the Family of Nations.

It should now be clear that the concerted effort within Israel, by various parties and movements like Peace Now, to close Judea and Samaria as a field for Zionist settlement, was never merely the result of a certain political approach toward resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict, by trading territory-for-peace. That is a facile explanation and only marginally correct. The more accurate and comprehensive explanation is that the Israeli willingness to play politics with the territorial card was part of a profound and comprehensive process toward de-Zionizing Israel. Denigrating Jewish pioneers in Samaria and castigating the old ideal of Hebrew Labor as a racist doctrine were two sides of the same ideological coin. Leftist chastising of the nationalist camp had subtly merged with the championing of greater Arab rights throughout Israel.

The Future of Jewish Nationalism

The Supreme Court of Israel was called upon to adjudicate in the matter of 'Zionism and Democracy' in Israel when it permitted the Progressive List for Peace, a virtual pro-PLO Arab party, to participate in the 1988 Knesset elections. Three justices -- Meir Shamgar, Shlomo Levine, and Moshe Beisky -- were in favor, while two justices -- Menachem Alon and Dov Levine -- voted to nullify the List. The justices had to interpret a clause in a law that permits disqualifying a party "if its goals or actions signify the negation of the state of Israel's existence as the state of the Jewish people." Justice Dov Levine pointed out that the Progressive List for Peace in its platform includes a demand for full equality between Jews and Arabs. According to the Justice, this demand stood in contradiction to Israel's existence as the state of the Jewish people. He explained that a democratic state for all its citizens, denying a policy of preference to Jews, would signify the end of the Jewish state, the idea of which was clearly its founding principle in 1948.

A Jewish nation state in itself would assure Jewish primacy without interfering with the particularist existence of the Arabs in Israel. Yet no longer would the Arabs enjoy special minority treatment of 'positive discrimination', as in university acceptance criteria or virtual non-payment of taxes, not to mention military exemption. Put another way, Israel would practice a policy of classical liberalism toward the Arabs rather than a policy of special affirmative action for an alleged disadvantaged population.

Yet a profound irony lies at the core of Israeli liberalism in its battle with Jewish nationalism. Leftist totalitarianism, that of the socialist brand or of the liberal variety, has coexisted since Israel's founding with formal democracy and its various institutional and procedural accessories. It should now be very apparent that Israel's numerical democracy has turned into the negation of Jewish nationalism; in truth, it is the denial of Jewish peoplehood as a primary social reality and the political hub of the state itself. 'Majority tyranny', composed of Jews and Arabs, stifles the free spirit of Jewish values and suffocates Zionism as the catalyst of Israeli national policy. Liberalism and totalitarianism become the twin side of the ideological coin, through the Left's arrogation of power by a combination of lies and deceit, betrayal and disloyalty. One would have hoped that the Jewish people in Israel would have deserved, or demanded, a better lot.

An 'end of ideology' scenario for Israel would stress state-building functions and undifferentiated policies for all citizens and inhabitants of the country, this at the price of dampening Jewish energies which might otherwise be invested in popular Zionist mobilization. The routinization of procedures and the universalization of principles have replaced the high tension of ideological sacrifice. For a people in a prolonged state-of-war, and facing rivals and enemies whose spiritual stimulants are exceedingly strong, the place of ideology cannot but be a central issue. To 'normalize' Israel in a Western liberal fashion, based on individual rights more than collective responsibilities, could pulverize the solidity of Zionism as the activist, dynamic, and virtually permanent revolutionary ethos of twentieth-century Jewish nationalism. After all, Jews have come to Israel over the decades and generations, not for personal liberty (which is nonetheless a weighty value), but for national liberty as a people in control of its destiny.

The condition of Jewish existence in Israel is rent today by the juxtaposition and partial combination of two alternatives: the particular Judaic essence at the heart of Jewish nationalism, and political imitation of non-Judaic universal values. It is this basic existential tension which remains at the crux of the Jewish dilemma and its present manifestation regarding Jewish nationalism with its Zionist facet. The dialectic of Zionism is that it offers political freedom but at the risk of spiritual dissolution. Yet the process of Zionist development, which in the twentieth-century has created a confrontation of competing ideas, may become the historical crucible out of which a new Jewish national synthesis may arise.

NOTES

l. Amnon Rubinstein, The Zionist Dream Revisited.: From Herzl to Gush Emunim and Back, New York: Schocken, 1984.

2. Moshe Ben-Yosef (Hagar), Hakfiya Hatarbutit (Cultural Coercion), Jerusalem: Sefrei Mossad Lehafatzat Hasefer Hatov, 1979. The author was a remarkably original and insightful observer on the historical and ideological foundations of modern Israel.

3. See David Ben-Gurion, My Talks With Arab Leaders, Jerusalem: Keter, 1972, pp. 51-55 and 80-83.

4. The al-Ard political group in the 1960s was the most striking case of an extreme anti-Zionist Arab nationalist movement in Israel. See Jacob M. Landau, The Arabs in Israel: A Political Study, London: Oxford University Press, 1969, pp. 92-107.

5. A noteworthy example of the Americanization of Israeli political culture concerns the struggle for human rights -- but basically for Arabs alone -- through the efforts of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (founded in 1972), B'tzelem (founded in 1988), the Rabbinic Human Rights Watch (consisting mainly of Conservative and Reform rabbis), and Sikuy another organization founded in 1991 with a similar agenda committed to Jewish-Arab equality in Israel.

6. Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 24-26 and 207.

7. Chaim Herzog, The Arab-Israeli Wars. War and Peace, New York: Vintage, 1984, p. 372.