Did Early Zionist Thinkers Seek Something Other Than a Sovereign Jewish Nation-State? It’s Complicated

In Beyond the Nation-State, the Israeli historian Dmitri Shumsky argues that a number of Zionist thinkers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries saw as their goal something other than the creation of a Jewish nation-state in the Land of Israel. The American rabbi Judah Magnes and the German theologian Martin Buber—both of whom favored a binational Jewish-Arab state—are the most famous examples. But Shumsky also calls attention to figures in the Zionist mainstream, including Theodor Herzl, his Russian-Jewish precursor Leon Pinsker, Vladimir Jabotinsky, and even David Ben-Gurion. Allan Arkush credits Shumsky for his “eye-opening” approach to some of these figures, but ultimately finds the book a failure because of what its author “chooses to overlook”:

Although Shumsky has written op-ed columns in [the left-wing Israeli newspaper] Haaretz denouncing one or another aspect of Israeli policy toward the West Bank, supporting the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement (BDS), and calling for an end to Jewish sovereignty over the Old City of Jerusalem, he doesn’t reject the idea of a Jewish state. All he wants to see is a better sort of Jewish state.

The aspiration to transform Israel clearly lies behind the publication of Beyond the Nation-State, but it does not suffuse the book, which is focused—until the very end—exclusively on the past. Nonetheless, some of the evidence presented by Shumsky the historian seems to be tailored to substantiating the thinking of Shumsky the polemicist.

[Thus,] Beyond the Nation-State is marked by many forced and unsatisfying readings of both original sources and other scholars’ work, some of which make his argument seem stronger than it really is, while others make the work of his colleagues seem weaker. . . .

By brandishing the authentic Zionist pedigree of currently unpopular political ideas in Beyond the Nation-State, Shumsky seeks to strengthen them in a future where Israel will be reduced, he hopes, to what he sees as its proper dimensions.

Read more at Jewish Review of Books

More about: History of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, Vladimir Jabotinsky

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society