Why Reviving Zionism is Crucial to the Survival of Israel

A nation's integrity doesn't rest in its military, or its economy or even its self-interest. These are all dependent on its core ideology or belief system. Without that, even the strongest and most secure of nations is nothing more than a paper tiger waiting for a breeze to blow it over.

A nation's core ideology must answer three questions.

1. This is who we are

2. This is why we are here

3. This is what we plan to do in the future

Like virtually every Western country, Israel's own core ideology, Zionism, has all but withered away.

Virtually every major party in Israel is either post-Zionist, pre-Zionist or anti-Zionist. The major governing parties, Likud, Labor and Kadima, have become post-Zionist parties, occasionally dressing up in the flag and cloaking their agenda in the colors of Zionism. This leaves the pre-Zionist Haredi religious parties such as Shas and UTJ (which paradoxically would not exist were it not for Zionism), concerned only with sustaining their own particular communities from the treasury. And of course the left wing and Arab Anti-Zionist parties such as Meretz, Shinui or Balad.

Israel's crisis is not a military crisis or even a demographic crisis. Both are solvable problems, to which the solutions are fairly apparent. Israel's crisis is a crisis of faith. A crisis of its core ideology, Zionism.

The great struggle between the conservative Herut and the socialist movements, transmuted into the clash between Labor and Likud, has become irrelevant as Labor and Likud have lost any real ideology or principles. Sharon understood this reality and employed it to demolish both, creating Kadima out of the rubble, a party based purely on corruption and greed, devoid of any ideology or principles.

Labor's principles were devoured by decades of its own corruption, while the Likud lost its principles by failing to pass them on to the next generation. The link between Herut and Likud exists now only as a fiction. The middle aged Likudniks might be able to tell you who Jabotinsky was, and might even know what he stood for. The younger generation is lucky if they can recognize his name.

Labor meanwhile remains as the public face for a network of corruption carried through by the state's socialist institutions, some now privatized. Both Likud and Labor now stand on the brink of irrelevance. They are not post-Zionist so much out of ideology, as out of a lack of ideology. Sharon's creation of Kadima took into account that the bulk of Labor and Likud MK's had come to represent nothing more than corruption and greed. So he created a party just for them. Kadima, the party of post-Zionism.

How have we fallen so low?

The answer lies in a dilution of the meaning of Zionism, from a plan to build a thriving Jewish state in Israel, to fighting for its survival within increasingly shrinking borders. Israel now approaches the 1967 borders. Once it reaches those borders, the next stage will be the dismantling of Israel, perhaps to the borders of the proposed UN compromise.

Today what most people associate with Zionism is fighting for Israel's right to live. But fighting to live is not an ideology, it's a desperation strategy. If you must fight to live, then you're already on your deathbed.

When the Zionist dream turned into reality, like most realities it had plenty of warts and ugly spots. It was not a utopia and the day to day details often weren't pretty at all. Idealism gave way to naked greed, to a culture of being constantly on the make, and laughing at the folly of idealists. The Knesset, this one and so many before it, represent that ugly side. They are post-Zionist because they are post-idealistic. They are a gathering of politicians without ideas, only agendas.

Today only religious zionism remains as the largest outpost of Zionism in Israel, but even within religious zionism the death of idealism has long since set in, and the truly committed are a minority within a minority. They remain the last source of Zionist parties in Israel, but they have circled the wagons around the settlements as the last stand of Zionism in Israel. And that too highlights the same problem, to fight for your right to exist is not enough.

Reviving Zionism runs right into the vision problem again. Zionism cannot simply mean standing up to terrorists or refusing to give up land. Those are negatives. They are things that you are agaisnt. Not things you are for. To revive Zionism requires a positive vision, one that envisions Israel as it should be.

The left beginning with Rabin and Peres succeeded in articulating a positive post-Zionist vision, which took its tack from the post-Western visions that fueled the New Britain or the America of Immigrants. The New Middle East in which Israel would be simply another nation, open borders and open trade, that appealed perfectly to a generation tired of war, and eager to enjoy the good life of their European counterparts.

The post-Zionist vision has since crashed and burned, but the Likud has offered no opposing positive vision, only criticisms that it has gone too far. And that is why the left has managed to continue steering Israel from one concession to another, and from one disaster to another. When Rabin and Peres took office, they didn't simply gain control of Israel, they gained control of the nation's ideological belief system.

The Arab wars wore down Israel from without, while the left stabbed the country in the back from within. The combination paved the way for every succeeding disaster between Oslo and Hamastan. To end this reign of error, requires reviving Zionism with a positive vision.

A Zionist vision based on resisting terrorism is not enough. Instead the question must be answered, "Where do you see Israel in 25 years and what do we have to do to get there?"

Zionism gained currency once because it expressed a positive vision of collective national destiny. Because it linked the land of Israel to the Jews and the Jews to the land. Because it proclaimed that there was no solution to the Jewish problem except in Israel. Those things are still true, the problem is that too few people say these things anymore unless they're old men or wearing knitted Kippahs.

The challenge of reviving Zionism is to make it relevant again, not simply as an antidote to terrorism. What the left understood all too well, is that telling people that we must fight to hold onto the land, raises the inevitable question, why keep fighting just to hold onto the land. If Israel is nothing more than a plot of land we live in, then it has no more meaning than a plot of land in Europe or Africa. The dilution of Zionism removed that context and turned Israel into nothing more than land. Land without ideas is nothing more than dirt, and no one can be expected to die for dirt.

That means answering these three fundamental questions in a way that ties into the concerns, dreams and hopes of a new generation;

1. This is who we are

2. This is why we are here

3. This is what we plan to do in the future

The left's post-Zionist answers were, that we are just another Middle Eastern people here to make money and have a good time. And that in the future we will drive from Tel Aviv to Cairo and then to Ramallah, eat, drink and hit all the nightclubs. Israel will be Hong Kong to the Middle East's China. And there will be good times for everyone except the stuck up datim.

Simple answers that appealed to people. Those answers stopped being relevant after the first suicide bombing, but that has not stopped the trend of post-Zionism from dominating Israel's cultural landscape, because there was no renewed Zionism to displace it.

If Israel is to survive however, like the four questions asked by the sons of the parents at Pesach, a new Zionism must answer those questions.

It must answer those questions in a way that speaks to the experiences of a generation born and raised in a cynical political environment. It must answer them in positive terms, rather than negative ones. It must answer them in a cultural landscape fragmented by ethnic divisions. It must look toward the future and articulate a vision that is one part dream and one part reality.

It has been done before and can be done again. Religious Zionism has part of the answer, but only a small part of it. Its vision is too narrow and difficult for the majority of Israelis to embrace any time soon. A religious vision based on a religious life is not enough. Israel must have a vision of Zionism that appeals as much to secular Jews as it does to religious Jews.

It must begin from the premise that the land and the people are one. And it must go back to the roots and wellsprings of Jewish striving that broke forth in the 19th century, and build a new beginning for us all.