3 - Two Contemporary Debates on Zionism and Secularism

Summary

Chapter 3 is constructed around two debates on matters of Jewish identity, religion, secularism and nationalism in Israel. These two are closely related, and the participants in both debates come from the mainstream of contemporary Zionism. Yadgar argues that these are “manifestations of an inevitable pushing of the Zionist Jewish identity crisis to its limits.” The first part of the chapter is largely constructed around the current panic among Israeli secularist concerning what they fear are signs of a top-down policy of “religionization,” where government agencies are allegedly forcing religion onto the secular public sphere (here is the place to note that I, too, have written on the subject; Yadgar references my work, and I believe we share a basic understanding and critique of the discourse at hand). Yadgar puts this debate in the wider context of the uses and misuses of “Jewish religion” by the Zionist state and its various agencies. He also shows how these uses are seen as acceptable when applied by the state to non-Israeli Jews. However, most importantly, Yadgar exposes the central premises dominating the secularist panic over this alleged “religionization.” He uses primary sources that attest to this public panic exposing the high degree of lack of self-reflection among Zionist secularists. As he argues, it may very well be that “religion” here is but a codename for the state’s (re-)distribution of power, and what seems to be the demise of the Israeli left.

The second part of the chapter deals with one (among quite many, I must note) debate over the pages of Israel’s leading liberal Zionist newspaper, Haaretz. This debate was anoccasion where leading Israeli public intellectuals discussed the apparent demise of the Israeli secularist, liberal left. Yadgar exposes the almost taken-for-granted (and baseless) one-dimensional identification between secularism and liberalism. More importantly, he uses this wide-ranging debate to expose the shallowness of the Zionist Israeli left, especially its inability to account for its fundamental reliance on that same abovementioned “biological” or racial nationalist logic of discrimination. As Yadgar shows, it is exactly the liberal Zionist, leftist position that states – demands, even – that Israel be identified not by a positively Jewish content of its politics, but merely (solely!) by the active preservation of a Jewish majority. In other words: the active preference of “Jews” – defined shallowly by their “blood” – over Palestinians or Arabs. Yadgar also shows in this part of the chapter how Jewish identity seems to have become a burden that the Israeli Zionist left feels nevertheless compelled to carry and of which it does not know how to relieve itself. The chapter also addresses the potential of Israeli identity as a way out of this predicament – but, this, too, ultimately proves to be a failed solution, as it does not allow a way out of what Yadgar calls the “Zionist Jewish identity predicament.”