Is Israel's Aggression a Question of Pride?

By Ira Chernus, AlterNet. Posted June 11, 2009.

Is national pride a truly sacred value? Few Jews will say so directly. But for many Israeli Jews, and for most American Jews since the Six Day War, religion and nationalism have been intertwined. The theologian Emil Fackenheim fused them in his very influential idea that, since the Holocaust, God has given the Jews a new commandment that trumps all others: The Jewish people must survive as a distinct people, or else Hitler's goal of a Jew-free world will be realized.

Now Israel is the fundamental symbol of Jewish survival. So Israel's war victories have an "inescapably religious dimension" because they keep Israel safe from destruction.

But when I heard Fackenheim speak a few years after the Yom Kippur war, I discovered that his real belief was rather different. Someone in the audience asked a question: "You say that Israel must fight its enemies to insure Jewish survival. Yet what guarantee is there that Israel will win every war and always insure Jewish survival?"

The distinguished theologian gave this rather shocking reply: "There is no guarantee. Israel may indeed be destroyed. But the important point is that next time we will go down fighting."

There was no need to spell out the obvious implication: If we go down fighting, we can feel proud of ourselves, even if the last Jew disappears from the earth. Survival is not as sacred to us as pride, and pride comes from fighting the enemy. "Never Again" means never again will we let ourselves be shamefully herded to slaughter without resisting to the last woman and man.

This commitment has always been a central pillar of Israeli life. The widely admired, recently deceased Israeli author Amos Elon wrote (in his 1971 best-seller, The Israelis) that the memory of the Holocaust "explains the obsessive suspicion [and] the towering urge for self-reliance" that marks Israeli Jews. But he added that the same memory also plagues Israelis with "a suspended confusion, a neurotic constriction ... compounded by pangs of conscience, guilt and shame."

Israeli children are taught in school about "the disgraceful shame and cowardice" of all victims of anti-Semitic massacres in the Diaspora, to convince them that only a Jewish state with an invincible army could take away the shame. And Israelis exaggerate the degree of Jewish resistance to the Nazis because it "seems essential to their dignity as a group."

Elon knew that the theme of shame and pride lay at the very root of Zionism. In his biography of Theodore Herzl, he claimed that the father of the Zionist movement was motivated, above all, by "wounded pride" -- being denied what he thought was his rightful place among the elite of European society, simply because he was Jewish. Herzl was well aware that he was making national pride a sacred symbol. He urged the early Zionists to "turn the Jewish question into a question of Zion."

Even earlier, the first important Zionist writer, Leo Pinsker, told the Jews (in his famous tract "Self-Emancipation"): "You are foolish, because you expect of human nature something which it has never had -- humanity. You are also contemptible, because you have no real self-esteem and no national self-respect. National self-respect! Where can we find it?" Pinsker's answer, the answer of most Zionists ever since, was: only in a nation-state of our own.

Pinsker's words and Herzl's wounded pride reveal one root of the profound dilemma that has kept Israel trapped in a seemingly irrational cycle of intransigence and conflict for all these years. It is shameful and contemptible to let oneself fall victim to persecution, the argument goes. But Gentiles will always be persecutors. So Jews living in Diaspora will always feel shame and self-contempt. The mistake that Pinsker, Herzl and most other Zionists made was to assume that a state of their own would free them from this trap.

Instead, the state became a projection of the individual Jew, writ large. And the surrounding Arab nations became projections of individual Gentiles. Since Gentiles were by definition persecutors (according to the dominant Zionist worldview), the inevitable political conflicts between Israel and neighboring Arab peoples were bound to be seen as merely more of the same old persecution and victimization, bringing with it the same sense of shame.

Every tangible goal of Israeli policy became a symbol of the ultimate goal: defeating the Gentiles in order to escape from shame, to gain pride and self-respect.

See more stories tagged with: america, israel, obama, foreign policy, palestine, middle east, west bank, gaza, settlements

Ira Chernus is professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder and author of Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from World! Sign up now »