Zionism, as conceived by Herzl, was intended not only to rescue Jews from physical threats but also to save them from the corrosive psychological consequences of being everywhere an embattled minority.
But even among the Zionists there were many infected with the anti-Jewish biases of surrounding societies. While Herzl conceived of the national home as a refuge for all Jews, the Russian socialist Zionists who came to dominate the Zionist movement dreamed of building a socialist utopia peopled by a New Jew. They were very often hostile to both middle class and religious Jews, and they formed their biases against both groups in large part through absorption of European society’s attacks on religiously traditional Jews and the Jewish commercial class.
Similarly hostile to Herzl’s vision were a number of German Jewish intellectuals who came to the Yishuv championing the concept of a cultural homeland and opposed to creation of a Jewish state. They argued that Jews had evolved beyond narrow nationalism and should devote themselves exclusively to Judaism’s universalist spiritual mission. But their views were shaped largely by their having taken to heart the widespread European indictment of Jews as an “alien nation” and their wishing to reform the Jews and foreswear a Jewish state in order to assuage that hostile opinion.
In the 1930’s, as conditions in Europe worsened, many of the socialist Zionists opposed large-scale immigration as bringing in the wrong Jews and compromising the socialist experiment, while the cultural Zionists opposed immigration as serving the unholy goal of nation-building. Some even supported imposing limits on Jewish immigration such as those established in Britain’s infamous 1939 White Paper.
The war, the Shoah, and creation of the state marginalized such voices. The nation undertook the ingathering of survivors in Europe and the Sephardi Jews of North Africa and the Middle East, and Israel’s Jews overwhelmingly dedicated themselves to the state’s survival and well-being.
But Israelis were confronted with a persisting Arab siege. Recurrent hopes that the Arab world would reconcile itself to Israel’s existence and establish normal inter-state relations went unfulfilled. Expectations, for example, that the Arabs’ losses in the 1967 war would oblige them to negotiate with Israel, or that the treaty with Egypt would entail genuine normalization, end anti-Israel and anti-Semitic demonizing in that nation’s media, mosques and schools, and would be quickly followed by treaties with other Arab states, were dashed. And the continuing siege kept alive old predilections of Jewish self-blame and self-reform in the face of chronic attack.
The election in 1977 of Israel’s first non-Labor Zionist government was a turning point for such tendencies. Its significance went beyond simply policy differences between the Likud and Labor parties. On the territories captured in the 1967 war, the major difference was with regard to Judea and Samaria: Labor advocated a territorial compromise along the lines first proposed by Yigal Allon, with Israel retaining key strategic areas while allowing the rest, particularly heavily populated regions, to revert t Arab rule. The Likud position was that all of Judea and Samaria, the heart of the historic Jewish homeland, should properly be in Jewish hands for reasons of history, religion and justice, and that, in any case, all of this area was strategically vital; the accommodation of the Palestinian Arabs should entail granting autonomy under Israeli sovereignty.
But, for all the substantive differences, both stances reflected recognition that the Arab siege was going to continue, that the state must be ready and able to defend itself, and any arrangement for the territories must allow for this.
In contrast, the perspective of the Peace Movement that had evolved in the wake of the 1967 war was that Israel’s retention of captured territory was now the major source of Arab enmity and if Israel would only return virtually to its pre-war lines, peace would follow. Both major parties rejected this view as having no basis in reality.
