I was just informed that it will not appear.
My editor wrote to me:
I just wanted to let you know that the English edition editor decided to kill the opeds, so your piece will not be running in the supplement. I'm sorry about that and appreciate the work you put into it.
Freedom of expression, Haaretz-style.
Read and enjoy, or not.
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'SECULAR ZIONISM': NO LONGER A FAITH-BASED PROGRAM
Is "secular Zionism" already – or is it soon to be – an oxymoronic term, one that contradicts its own essence? Has secular Zionism lost its ability to maintain the faith?
Of course, 'secular Zionism' is not identical to 'secular Zionists'. On the one hand, it is readily obvious that not all religiously observant Jews are Zionists. All one needs do is to watch the Israel flag burning ceremonies of the Neturei Karta at Lag B'Omer time or recall those black-coated ones hugging Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at one of his antizionist conferences. On the other hand, one need not be religious to be a Zionist and the majority of Jews who are Zionists are secular in their private worlds not to speak of non-Jews, many of whom seem to be more assertive and non-yielding in their political support of an independent Jewish polity than a good few Jews as well as Zionists.
Nevertheless, it is hard to imagine today a scene like the one that took place in 1937 when David Ben-Gurion asserted in his testimony before the Peel Commission in 1937 that if he had to identify the basis of the Jewish claim he would admit that ''The Bible is our mandate''. Secular Zionism today, it is my understanding, rejects religion as a component in nationalism. It was Ze'ev Sternhell who, a decade ago in Le Monde, formulated it this way: "The new Israeli, Jewish but secular…has begun over the last years to forge an independent identity which has nothing to do with the religion of his forefathers and 'divine promise'". Religion is rejected mainly due to a fear that it is irrational and therefore, uncontrollable.
But even without religion, secular Zionists were, in the past, the standard bearers of Jewish resurgence in the land of its forefathers. The first kibbutzim were considered instruments in the "conquest of the land". The first community to be established over the former Green Line in the late summer of 1967, even prior to the Kfar Etzion return, was Merom HaGolan of the Kibbutz Me'uchad movement. What then is the danger in the concept "secular Zionism", not only for its own continuity but for the state of Israel?
A.B. Yehoshua, a fellow traveler, expressed it this way: "Zionism…was only intended to mean there should be a state of Israel, and it only applied to the formation of the State by 1948. After the State was achieved, it stopped meaning anything."
In essence, secular Zionism thus promotes removing the soul from Jewish nationalism. Not only are the areas of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, intrinsically bound up with the historical formation of the Jewish people and the development of its religion and culture, excluded in a political sense from ever belonging to Israel as the expression of the entirety of Jewish national feeling but they are removed from what Jewishness is in a very existential sense.
Secular Zionism thus formulated cannot accept a Tabernacle at Shiloh where the tribal portions of the Land were allotted or a Hebron where David was first king or a Shchem where Joseph is buried. "Territories" become a terrible burden for they define the Jewishness of Zionism as an intercopulation that secular Zionism feels is a negation of their worldview. And since it is themselves that is what is important, for true secularism is a form of liberation of the individual which places the person - and not the nation and not the homeland -
But it also has turned on itself. Sternhell's magnum opus of Zionist criticism, his "The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State" attacks the socialist, liberal and democratic values of Israel's pioneers of the Mapai party and the Histadrut labor federation.
Amos Oz also contributes to the self-destructiveness that is secular Zionism. In an effort to be liked and appreciated, for that is the basic human frailty he shares with those who shake off the aspect of religion that nurtures Zionism, he was able to write a perfidy such as this two years ago: "The Jews were kicked out of Europe…just like the Palestinians were first kicked out of Palestine and then out of the Arab countries, or almost". In his desire to be held as a paragon of humanism, or to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature that constantly eludes him, he frees Zionism's enemy from the essential evil it has displayed through riots, serving Hitler and most recently, the suicide-bomber phenomenon. Zionism is no different that Palestinianism. Secularists of the world, unite! would be his rallying cry and only the upsurge of Hamas would seem to unsettle him.
Secular Zionism, in this self-destruct mode, is also a handicap for mainstream Zionism. It justifies the opponents of Israel as a Zionist creation, from Williamsburg to Durban to Ramallah. Sternhell's prognosis of ten years ago was that "the second Zionist revolution - humanist, rationalist and secular - is already under way". I would suggest it has taken a detour and is way off track. Far, far off the road to Zion.
But there's a catch. With this losing of faith and the losing of its way, a failing secular Zionism faces competition from religious Zionism and that places a greater responsibility on those who believe. If religious Zionism is to be truer to the original path of political Zionism, despite its secular roots, it cannot remain insular-oriented nor can it permit itself the luxury of ignoring those among it who seek the extreme. Faith without deed is an inadequate political philosophy.
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