Vernon Bogdanor reviews German-born American historian Michael Brenner's latest offering as an author
June 1, 2018 15:26"Dr Weizmann, I do not understand,” declared an aristocratic British lady in the 1930s to the leader of the World Zionist Organisation, and later Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann. “You are a member of the most cultured, civilised, brilliant and cosmopolitan people in history and you want to give it all up to become — Albania?” Weizmann thought for a few moments and then replied: “Yes! Albania! Albania!”
In the 1930s, most Jews on the Continent would have grasped at an Albania had it been available. And, indeed, part of the dynamic of Zionism was, in the words of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, to secure “the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign state”. But was that enough? Albania, after all, tended to be ignored by the rest of the world and its contribution to civilisation was marginal.
Most Zionists believed that the Jews were not, in fact, “like all other nations” but had something special to offer to them. Herzl saw the future Jewish state as an “experiment for the well-being of all humanity”. Orthodox Jews believed, in the words of the daily Aleinu prayer, that “God did not make us like the nations of other lands — our destiny is not the same as anyone else’s.”
Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, a secular Zionist, claimed that, “two basic aspirations underlie all our work in this country, to be like all other nations, and to be different from all the nations”. But he thought that, “these two aspirations are complementary and interdependent”.
It is, however, the ambivalence between particularistic and universalistic aspirations that is the theme of In Search of Israel, a sparkling account of how Zionism came to be transformed by the practicalities of constructing and defending a state.
Brenner concludes, and few will disagree, that the Israel of today is hardly a normal state, and not many would claim it to be a light unto the nations. To its enthusiastic admirers, Israel is a paragon, but to its numerous enemies it has become a pariah, while for some Israelis the sense of Jewish uniqueness has mutated into hubris and self-righteousness. Albania remains as far away as ever.
But what state has ever satisfied the ideals of its founders? The Zionists did not achieve all that they set out to do, but they did succeed in transforming the position of Jews by turning them, for the first time in nearly two millennia, into subjects of history rather than objects.
In Search of Israel shows, with great lucidity and clarity, how it was done. It is one of the most penetrating books on Zionism to have appeared for many years.
Vernon Bogdanor is Professor of Government, King’s College, London.