Synthetic Liberal Zionism

Last week I picked up a 1985 biography of Zionist leader Haim (traditionally spelled Chaim but pronounced Khaim) Weizmann covering his early period as a Zionist leader up to the outbreak of World War I. I read it with one eye on the past and one eye on the present and future--looking for what Weizmann could teach me about leadership and policy.

Weizmann was a young man when Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, first emerged on the scene as a charismatic savior for Eastern Jewry in 1895. Weizmann joined the new Zionist movement and soon emerged as the first internal Zionist opposition leader to Herzl while he was a leader of Russian Jewish students in Central Europe. He founded the Democratic Faction, which unfortunately soon collapsed because of a lack of common ideology and policy. Weizmann sided with the Russian Zionist opposition to Herzl in the Uganda controversy of 1903-04 when Herzl proposed that the Zionists accept a British offer to settle Jews in British East Africa (today's Kenya) as a "night shelter" to avoid any more being killed and injured in pogroms in Russia. Weizmann sympathized with Herzl's reasons for accepting the British offer, but realized that lacking his own base he would have to settle with the Russian Zionists who opposed the offer. By the time of Herzl's premature death from a heart attack in July 1904 Britain was in the process of withdrawing the offer due to opposition from white settlers already within the colony.

But Weizmann, like Herzl, appreciated the importance of Britain to the future of the Zionist movement. Even though his English was quite poor (he spoke German, French, and Russian in addition to Yiddish and Hebrew) he moved to Manchester, England to take up a position as a lecturer in chemistry. 

The first wave of Zionism from 1882 to 1897 consisted of a move to settle Palestine with Jews as farmers. A number of new settlements were established but Jews still remained only a small minority within the overall population. Herzl came along with the idea of winning a charter for Jewish colonization of Palestine from the Ottoman Empire in exchange for helping to solve the Ottomans' financial problems. He spent the rest of his live vainly trying to convince the Ottomans to grant a charter through both direct approaches to the Sublime Port in Istanbul and to the capitals of the other great powers in Europe. 

From 1906 to 1910 Weizmann led a fight within the Zionist movement to create a synthesis of "practical Zionism"--settlement activity--with "political Zionism"--diplomacy--as he saw the two as reinforcing one another. This synthesis was dubbed "synthetic Zionism" and became the policy of the labor Zionist movement until statehood in 1948. From the Uganda offer to the Balfour declaration in November 1917, which was when Weizmann won a charter for settlement in Palestine, was the low point of the modern Zionist movement. 

Likewise, the period from the collapse of the Oslo process in October 2000 to the present and the near future is the low point of liberal Zionism. The Labor Party and Meretz collapsed within Israel losing three quarters of their strength within the Knesset compared to 1992. George W. Bush briefly paid lip service to mediating a two-state solution before he turned away in 2003. Barack Obama, the new hope of the Israeli Left, made a few speeches and then abandoned the issue to deal with more immediate concerns at home and abroad (the Great Recession, health care, two wars).  

The only real positive aspect of this period was the emergence of J Street in 2008-09 as an alternative to the hawkish AIPAC lobby that supported the Israeli government of the day, and was secretly pro-Likud. J Street, like Herzl's World Zionist Organization, is fixated on the big end goal of American mediation leading to a two-state solution. According to a senior J Street member, the organization doesn't do policy. Its function is purely agitprop (agitation and propaganda or lobbying). Likewise in Israel the Left has remained focused on the failed peace process to the exclusion of all other issues. 

Today we need a new synthetic Zionism or synthetic liberal Zionism. This new synthesis should within Israel emphasize economic and social issues that will allow the parties of the Center-Left to rebuild and recover their lost strength. In the United State it should avoid calling for American mediation until a policy is developed that will give such mediation a good shot at success. This means looking at other peace processes similar to that in the Middle East--such as the effort to win the independence of Namibia by ending South African occupation and the Northern Ireland peace process.  Peace processes in which outside mediation and pressure combined with internal opposition led the ruling parties to change their approach and negotiate seriously. 

AIPAC developed its own spin-off think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, in order to build credibility for its policy prescriptions. As soon as it is financially strong enough to launch its own think tank concentrating on Israeli politics, Palestinian politics, and comparative peace process analysis, J Street should do so. This, along with the building of grassroots chapters, is the American equivalent of practical Zionism today.

J Street, Post-Zionism and the Two-State Solution

This weekend J Street, the liberal Zionist pro-peace lobby, will be holding its third conference since its founding in 2008. In 2009 it attracted 1500 people to its first conference, this expanded to over 2,000 at its second conference last year, and it is expected to have over 2500 attendees for its third conference. This has worried the Zionist Right in America, aligned behind the dominant Likud Party and the other parties of the ruling coalition. They have been very inventive in the ways they attack it, which mainly amounts to guilt by association and obfuscation.  But J Street may not be much of a threat to their Greater Israel project.

David Frum, a former Bush administration official and a columnist at The Daily Beast, had a column in which he claimed that Post-Zionists were Anti-Zionists. Post-Zionism was a term coined in the 1990s to cover the Zionist members of the Israeli New Historians school of historiography.  The New Historians are/were a group of Israeli historians that wrote about Israeli history outside of the prevailing Zionist narrative. They range from Benny Morris and Tom Segev who are definitely Zionists, to Ilan Pappe who is definitely anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian to Avi Shlaim who is in exile in London and is highly critical of Israel and Zionism but supports the existence of Israel. The term was then applied to the Meretz Party and to the left wing of the Labor Party to mean those who were critical of Israel as well as of the Palestinians. Frum has reapplied it to refer to the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement that wants to start an economic campaign against Israel proper. His justification is that some liberal Zionists like Peter Beinart, a featured speaker at this J Street conference, are advocating a boycott of products produced by Jews living in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Daily Commentary Magazine, one of the original platforms of the neo-Conservative movement, sends out an email, which often attacks J Street. It does this by attacking progressive or radical organizations that J Street refuses to condemn, such as the Occupy movement, because J Street's pool of supporters share many positions in common with them. 

The Zionist Right in both Israel and America see J Street as a threat because it genuinely supports a two-state solution with the Palestinians, instead of paying lip service to it while building settlements meant to make it impossible. But this may soon be irrelevant because of developments in both Israeli and Palestinian politics.

On Tuesday the Kadima Party holds its leadership primary to determine who will lead the party into elections late this year or early next year (Netanyahu has not yet set a date for the general election). The two main contenders are former Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz and former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who is also the opposition leader. Polls put the party in the 10-13 seat range in the next election or less than half of what it won in 2009. It will be about the same size as Labor and Israel Beitenu, the latter being the party of Foreign Minister Avigdor Leiberman. With Kadima at this size the Center-Left will be too small to form a governing coalition without participation by the Likud or other parties of the Right. 

Meanwhile a similar situation prevails among Palestinians between the former ruling Fatah and Hamas. Many Palestinians see the two-state solution as having passed its sell-by date (the date printed on perishable food items) and now serving only as a cover for further settlement.

J Street is ostensibly dedicated to facilitating a two-state solution by lobbying for such a solution in Washington. But in reality it may really be aimed at extracting more contributions for liberal Democratic candidates from liberal Jews and to keep American Jewish youth involved in Zionist issues. But its alarmist rhetoric of now or never for a two-state solution may well backfire. Politics weren't right for a two-state solution in Obama's first term. They appear highly unlikely to be ripe--for the reasons listed above--during his second term. The Republicans aren't interested in mediating a two-state solution as they are beholden to the Evangelical base that supports the Israeli Right. If J Street continues with its rhetoric it may well neutralize the college students that it is presently bringing into the liberal Zionist fold as the next generation. They might actually come to believe in that rhetoric and so drop out of the struggle once the two-state solution is deferred again.

Kadima: Last Hope for the Two-State Solution?

Kadima has announced that it will hold primary elections for leader on March 27--about eight weeks from now--in anticipation of an Israeli general election in late 2012 or early 2013. Kadima is the centrist party that supporters of the two-state solution have pinned their hopes on since it was founded in November 2005. Since the June 1992 election that brought Rabin to power, Labor and Meretz have both lost three-fourths of their Knesset representation. But the creation of Kadima, the largest party in the Knesset by one seat, leaves the hope that there is a party that can replace Labor and serve as an anchor for a center-left peace coalition as an alternative to the Right.

Kadima has been a disappointment to many. It has avoided the curse of Israeli centrist parties, which tend to be a collection of defectors from other parties who join together without any coherent ideology and then collapse as pressures mount and personal rivalries flare up. The first of these, Rafi, was founded by Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, as a personal vehicle to pursue a grudge match with the Mapai Old Guard. After three years Rafi, which only won ten seats (out of 120 in the Knesset), minus Ben-Gurion joined with Mapai and Ahdut Ha'Avoda to form the Israel Labor Party. Rafi remained for a while as a faction within Labor led first by Moshe Dayan and then by Shimon Peres. But the three original party factions soon became personal camps of Dayan/Peres versus Yigal Allon/Yitzhak Rabin. 

Next came the Democratic Movement for Change led by Israel's leading archaeologist (and second chief of staff) Yigael Yadin in 1976. It lasted for three years before it split into rival parties. It was composed of a collection of former generals and industrialists from the Labor Party and a protest movement, Shinui, that merged to contest the 1977 election and change the electoral system. It won 15 seats but was unable to prevent Menahem Begin from forming a government without them. When Yadin joined the coalition government a few months later Shinui leader Amnon Rubinstein was upset. By 1979 they had split apart and Yadin retired from politics a broken man in 1981.

The last centrist party before Kadima was entitled The Center Party. It consisted of a number of defectors from the Likud and the former chief of staff Amnon Lipkin Shahak. It was formed in 1998 for the 1999 election. After polling around 15 seats initially it won only seven in the actual election. Within three years it was gone. Its Likud defectors returned to the Likud.

Kadima was founded as a personal vehicle for Ariel Sharon who suffered a major stroke less than two months after it was founded. This left the party in the hands of his deputy Ehud Olmert. Olmert formed a government with the Labor Party in 2006 but within months his public support disappeared due to Israel's poor performance in the Second Lebanon War against Hezbollah in the summer of 2006. In late 2008 the party held a leadership election to replace Olmert who was about to be indicted on corruption charges stemming from his time in the Likud. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni barely beat former chief of staff Shaul Mofaz. 

If Mofaz wins, he is likely to lead Kadima into a coalition with the Likud for a center-right coalition. If he loses in a close election, he could take his supporters into the Likud, or remain as a thorn in the side of Livni. Only if Livni wins decisively will there be a mandate for Kadima to remain as an opposition party.  If she wins in a close election and Mofaz doesn't return to the Likud, she may be under pressure to join the Likud in a coalition in order to avoid Mofaz defecting.

If Livni is successful, only the Palestinian end of the two-state solution is blocked. If she is unsuccessful, both ends will be blocked--the situation before Rabin was elected in 1992. 

Here is a link to a discussion on the future of the two-state solution on the website Bitter Lemons. It doesn't really discuss the internal politics of either Israel or Palestine but merely the policy positions of the two countries.

If not two-state then one-state?

The two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has for some time been unrealizable because it is blocked on both ends--by the Palestinian power struggle and the collapse of the Left in Israel and the Israeli party system. As a result a growing chorus of Palestinians, Arabs, and anti-Israel activists in the West have been calling for a one-state solution. There are basically three versions of the one-state solution, although its backers only talk about one of these. The first is the Greater Israel version in which Israel rules from "the sea to the river." Palestinians have few rights. This has proven to be unstable and unacceptable to the Arabs.

The second version is one in which all citizens are equal, ethnicity doesn't matter and "the lamb shall lie down with the lion." This is the naive version put forward mainly by the radicals, particularly Jewish radicals, in the West. It is based on a false equation with South Africa. In South Africa the resistance to apartheid was led by a principled Christian leadership composed of figures from the African churches and the African National Congress. The ANC in exile was led by Oliver Tambo, Nelson Mandela's former law partner who once trained to be an Anglican priest. The ANC had a policy forbidding the attacking of soft targets--terrorism. It only targeted military installations and government offices, with the aim of minimizing the loss of life. This is very different from the "armed struggle" of the PLO or Hamas. Most of the casualties of the liberation struggle in South Africa were black--caused by interorganizational violence in KwaZulu/Natal province where the ANC faced the ethnic Zulu organization Inkatha, which ran the Zulu homeland KwaZulu. The other main source of casualties were suspected informers.

In the Israeli-Palestine conflict while there have been many Palestinian victims of interorganizational violence among Palestinians, both in the 1936-39 Arab Revolt and in the 2007 Hamas takeover of Gaza, most casualties have been in fighting between Arabs and Israelis or by Palestinian terrorism. The overall number of casualties has also been significant. In this regard the Israeli experience is much more like that of South Africa's neighbor Zimbabwe. The African majority took power in Zimbabwe after a seven-year liberation struggle that cost the lives of between 20,000 and 50,000. Most of the dead were Africans but most white families suffered either death in the family or a severe wound due to the conflict. In South Africa relatively few whites were killed or severely wounded in either the war in Namibia or the ANC's guerrilla campaign. Both sides in Zimbabwe were left embittered by the struggle and half the white population had emigrated within two years of majority rule--although many of these later returned. Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe was embittered by his wartime experiences and the death of his first wife during the war.

The Zimbabwean peace deal was based on temporary guarantees to whites. Once these guarantees expired after seven years Mugabe began freezing whites out of the economy. He made it clear that the deal was that they could remain in the country only if their children emigrated. Many Israeli Jews feel that Arab acceptance of a sovereign Jewish presence will likewise be purely temporary. This is why nearly all Jews in Israel oppose a right of return for Palestinians to Israel. A one-state solution would effectively mean a right of return by incorporating the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza within Israel. It would mean the end of a Jewish majority and Jewish sovereignty.

The Lancaster House deal of December 1979 that ended the war in Zimbabwe was dreaded by most Rhodesian whites because Africa was a region dominated by one-party autocracies, not to mention kleptocracies. They correctly feared the same fate for their own country. For this same reason many Afrikaners (and English-speakers) feared majority rule in South Africa. They negotiated an end to minority rule only once they felt assured by the ANC leadership and that they had no choice in the long run. Israel still is situated in a region with similar characteristics to that of Africa in the 1980s. 

The third version is that of an Arab-dominated state. The Jews would be a tolerated minority as they once were in Arab states throughout the region and as the Copts are in Egypt today. Lebanese Christians have been unwilling to accept a Muslim-dominated state in Lebanon. This has resulted in two civil wars: a brief civil war in 1958 and a long very bloody civil war from 1975 to 1990. The refusal of Hezbollah to disarm or accept accountability for their actions threatens a repeat of the civil war. The fate of a single state ruled by either Jews or Arabs is the same--chronic instability.

Theodor Herzl in 1895 wrote Der Judenstaat (normally rendered in English as The Jewish State but actually meaning The State of the Jews), not The Binational State. Jews emigrated from Europe and the Middle East to Palestine with the dream of having a state of their own, not the nightmare of sharing a binational state with another people.

In Northern Ireland the logic of demography and politics dictated power sharing as the only stable solution to the conflict. It triumphed 33 years years after it was first tried and failed. Third time's the charm as they say. It may take decades before a two-state solution can be realized in the Middle East, but the one-state solution is a chimera, a mirage, not a solution.

Those who have read my early posts will know that I believe that Northern Ireland is much closer to Israel's past and present than South Africa. But South Africa or even Zimbabwe may be in Israel's future if it is not careful.