Zionism: A Personal View

The other day someone asked me point blank to tell them what Zionism means to me.  Can it be put quickly and succinctly, even if it is only my own opinion based on my own eccentric experiences as a Jew who has lived in many countries but never given up his American citizenship?  Let me try.

 

1.  In a world of hostility and danger for Jews, as it has increasingly become in the last few decades, including in the West where intellectuals have succumbed to the mind-numbing myths of political correctness and post-modernism, Israel (that is, Zion) represents the only point of safety and leverage left to Jews.  We seem to be back in the same position the world was in during the 1890s, with pogroms in Eastern Europe, newspapers and political parties worrying over the Jewish Question, the agonies of the Dreyfus Affair in France and the Mendel Beylis case in Russia, if not quite on the eve of the Holocaust in the late 1930s.

 

2.  Jewish Law (Torah in its widest and most dynamic acceptance) can only be fully effective within the land of Israel, where there is a Jewish government and state with all the political, military, economic and social institutions implied by a modern nation.  However, I exclude the more extremely exclusivist and bizarre religious fundamentalist trends in many of the extreme-religious sects inside and outside of the State of Israel. Hence the primacy of the land and the institutions of Israel, beyond the basic questions of security and survival.

 

3.  Though Diaspora, Exile and dispersion once meant a kind of biological safety mechanism, wherein when one or two small Jewish communities were annihilated by pogroms or other persecution, most individuals would survive around the world and eventually reconstitute themselves as a religious community, there is a danger of over-concentration of Jews in one place, right smack in the middle of one of the most volatile and fanatical parts of the world; but my view of Zionism does not require all Jews to leave the Galut (exile), only that they recognize its importance in reasons one and two.

 

4.  The existence of the State of Israel and Jewish loyalty towards does not exclude or overtake citizenship in other countries, such as the United States, Canada and Australia, where tolerance and full emancipation exist.  Diaspora and Ingathering of Exiles go hand-in-hand, because for me, as a modern Jew, there is much richness and comfort “among the nations” and there is much a Jewish nation offers to the wider civilization in which it forms a significant component.  We are too small a people to live alone, isolated from the rest of the world; and yet we are historically and culturally too specific to lose our identity through total assimilation.  Except for those who cannot see the world rationally or historically, we pose no existential threat to anyone else. 

 

5.  Yet, having lived myself already through several "impossible" events, such as the Shoah and 9/11, I cannot give myself the luxury of believing that a second Holocaust is impossible nor that my family and myself are safest in a world without a "Zionist entity" or a Western Civilization.  Today moreover, thanks to convenient transport and communications, many Jews move to and then back to their countries of birth or adopted citizenship from Israel, as well as travel from and then return to Israel, their loyalties and cultural commitments remaining strong for each in a mutually dependent way.