Most American Jews have embraced the Labor Zionist wing of Israeli politics, while expressing disdain for the legacy of hard-line right-wingers. The most basic reason for this uneven split among American Jews is not hard to find in Eran Kaplan’s “The Jewish Radical Right: Revisionist Zionism and Its Ideological Legacy.”
But “The Jewish Radical Right” explains more than just the ideological split. Kaplan’s book should attract two quite different kinds of readers: those with a scholarly interest in the exotic origins of this branch of Zionism, and those who are just interested in the astonishing evolution of Israeli politics.
It has been a long and instructive road for the right-wing in Israel, stretching from Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the prophet of Revisionist Zionism in the 1920s and 1930s — to Menachem Begin, whose ascension to political power in 1977 shocked so many American Jews — to Ariel Sharon, the nominal head of right-wing politics in Israel today.
Latecomers to the history may be startled to learn that the formative ideas of right-wing Revisionist Zionism grew out of the same soil as European fascism.
“Like other radical right wing movements in Europe,” Kaplan writes, “Revisionism was a revolt against rationalism, individualism and materialism.”
The ideological struggle then convulsing the world posed the values of Enlightenment against those of a very nativist (in today’s vocabulary, “racist”) national identity.
In that nativist thought, members of each proper nation were blood-related and shared a distinctive spiritual quality and mission that gave meaning to their individual lives. Without that collective identity and mission, individual lives would be empty — as indeed most lives seemed to be in the early part of that century, especially after the disastrous World War I. Thus, individual will had to be subjected to the national will, in the totalitarian mode of thought.
“Jews all have one will,” Jabotinsky said. In 1932, Abba Achimei, a Revisionist leader, proclaimed that the Western democracies had “reached a state of bankruptcy … this century belongs to youth and dictatorship.”
The Labor Zionists were a rare blend in that dark period. They understood that the Jews would not long survive without an authentic Jewish identity in a Jewish land, but they were nevertheless stubborn children of the Enlightenment, as expressed in prophetic Judaism — fully committed to individualism and political modernity, including democracy.
As Europe slid into totalitarianism, America grew into the saving center of those Enlightenment values, which American Jews embraced, of course (not yet knowing that they would have to reckon someday with the challenge of those values to Jewish continuity).
However, ideology is always trumped by circumstances on the ground. In an epilogue, Kaplan sketches the evolution of right-wing Zionism, which follows the changes in the survival needs of Israel. Readers can then fill in daily with the latest news. According to Kaplan, Jabotinsky’s complete ideology “was reduced under Begin’s leadership to a one-dimensional ideological platform: territorial maximalism stirred by an existential fear of the non-Jewish world.” When the Jews from Arab lands emerged politically, they followed Begin’s lead and the Labor Zionists were turned out.
Benjamin Netenyahu did try to rally the right wing to revive Jabotinsky’s goal “to create a national culture for the Jewish nation that did not have to make any compromises, including territorial ones, in the name of universal values.”
But, again, ideology was trumped by the circumstances. The intifada movement became more intense and implacable, fired up by the rise of radical Islamism. Concerns spread not only about basic security, but also about demographic changes — the specter of a growing Arab population within Israeli borders that would impinge on Jewish national identity. Addressing those joint concerns, Ariel Sharon, long the scourge of liberal Israelis, kidnapped the right-wing apparatus and eventually proposed a conditional withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank. The plan has now garnered the support of 7 out of 10 Israelis, but has scandalized others, including the true heirs of Revisionism.
This book is mainly about the ideological origins of Revisionism. It is a significant contribution to the scholarly study of Zionism, based on Kaplan’s Ph.D. thesis on the subject. Much of the language is academic — especially in Kaplan’s effort, in another ironic twist, to find a connection between the original Revisionists and those left-wing Israeli intellectuals of today who call themselves “post- Zionist.”
However, his succinct and not altogether unfriendly presentation of the Revisionist role in early Zionism, and his sketch of the changes that have taken place, should be of interest to the more casual reader.
“The Jewish Radical Right: Revisionist Zionism and Its Ideological Legacy” by Eran Kaplan (234 pages, University of Wisconsin Press, $35).