The Fall of the Idols

Peter Beinart has a thought-provoking piece (gift link) regarding the shibboleth that the state of Israel “has a right to exist,” which, as he points out, is one of the few propositions that appears to have complete support across the elected political spectrum in America today. He denies that this concept makes any sense as applied to nation-states:

America’s leaders make this point most emphatically when discussing America’s foes. They often call for replacing oppressive regimes with states that better meet liberal democratic norms. In 2017, John Bolton, who later became a national security adviser in the first Trump administration, argued that “the declared policy of the United States should be the overthrow of the mullahs’ regime in Tehran.” In 2020, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called the People’s Republic of China a “Marxist-Leninist regime” with a “bankrupt totalitarian ideology.”These U.S. officials weren’t urging these countries just to replace one particular leader, but to change their political system — thus, in essence, reconstituting the state. In the case of the People’s Republic of China, which signifies Communist Party dominance, or Islamic Republic of Iran, which denotes clerical rule, this would most likely require changing the country’s official name.

Beinart’s argument is that there is quite literally nothing that the Israeli state could do that would lead the current American political establishment to reach a similar conclusion regarding it, and that this is true for a very large percentage of America’s Jewish citizens as well. But the problem runs deeper than that:

American Jewish leaders don’t just insist on Israel’s right to exist. They insist on its right to exist as a Jewish state. They cling to the idea that it can be both Jewish and democratic despite the basic contradiction between legal supremacy for one ethno-religious group and the democratic principle of equality under the law.

The belief that a Jewish state has unconditional value — irrespective of its impact on the people who live within it — isn’t contrary just to the way America’s leaders talk about other countries. It’s also contrary to Jewish tradition. Jewish tradition does not view states as possessing rights, but views them with deep suspicion. In the Bible, the Israelite elders ask the Prophet Samuel to appoint a king to rule over them. God tells Samuel to grant the elders’ wish but also warn that their ruler will commit terrible abuses. “The day will come,” Samuel tells them, “when you cry out because of the king whom you yourselves have chosen.”

The implication is clear: Kingdoms — or, in modern parlance, states — are not sacrosanct. They are mere instruments, which can either protect life or destroy it. “I emphatically deny that a state might have any intrinsic value at all,” wrote the Orthodox Israeli social critic Yeshayahu Leibowitz in 1975. Mr. Leibowitz was not an anarchist. But, though he considered himself a Zionist, he insisted that states — including the Jewish one — be judged on their treatment of the human beings under their control. States don’t have a right to exist. People do.

Some of the Bible’s greatest heroes — Moses and Mordechai among others — risk their lives by refusing to treat despotic rulers as divine. In refusing to worship state power, they reject idolatry, a prohibition so central to Judaism that, in the Talmud, Rabbi Yochanan called it the very definition of being a Jew.

Today, however, this form of idolatry — worship of the state — seems to suffuse mainstream American Jewish life. It is dangerous to venerate any political entity. But it’s especially dangerous to venerate one that classifies people as legal superiors or inferiors based on their tribe. When America’s most influential Jewish groups, like American leaders, insist again and again that Israel has a right to exist, they are effectively saying there is nothing Israel can do — no amount of harm it can inflict upon the people within its domain — that would require rethinking the character of the state.

Nothing could possibly be more obvious than the only kind of democracy that can exist in Israel proper, and the territories controlled by it, i.e., the West Bank and Gaza, is some form of herrenvolk democracy, as distasteful as it is to use that particular phrase in this context. Unfortunately that phrase captures precisely the status quo, and at this point any reasonably foreseeable future (The idea of a two-state solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict is becoming more fanciful every day, and now seems about as realistic as the idea of a one-world government, and similar pie in the sky fantasies of the Enlightenment Fan Club).

This is a problem without a morally acceptable solution that is also a possible solution in the world as it currently exists or is likely to exist. So we are going to get something else.

. . . See also this interesting interview with Beinart.