MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti political commentator Marianna Belenkaya) - On August 29 it will be 110 years since the first Zionist Congress took place in Basel. It gave birth to the Zionist organization led by its first president Theodore Herzl. Disputes about Zionism have not abated since then not only in the Jewish community but far beyond it.
What is Zionism? What goals should it pursue? Should it exist at all?
Let's make one point clear right away: the Zionist movement is heterogeneous and consists of religious, practical and political Zionists. At different times they engaged in heated debates, united and separated. But they all had a common goal - to establish the State of Israel. They specified at the Congress in Basel that Zionism was striving for the formation of a national home for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel, which would be guaranteed by international law. In simple terms, they wanted to find a place on Earth where Jews would be safe, wouldn't feel alien and could develop as a nation. The founders of Zionism believed that this goal could not be achieved without their own land and state.
Paradoxically, it is the Muslims, including those who do not recognize Israel's right to exist, who use the phrase "Zionist formation" in its true meaning. Israel embodies the Zionist dream and Zionist ideology forms its foundation. This is a fact, not an opinion. This is exactly why Israel's real birthday was August 29, 1897, on the opening day of the First Zionist Congress. After the event, Herzl wrote in his diary: "At Basel I founded the Jewish State..." At that time many thought he was crazy, but the state of Israel exists today, although now, almost 60 years after its foundation, there are still disputes as to what it should be like and what role Zionism should play in it.
An article by Dr. Daniel H. Gordis, Vice President of the Mandel Foundation, written half a year after the recent Lebanese-Israeli war, appeared on a Russian website to mark the event, and this is no accident. This is what he wrote: "No, Israel's not a failure. The State is a huge success. But, I would still claim, it's not doing for the Jews what the original Zionists had hoped. And part of the national funk has to do with precisely that."
He emphasized that the first Zionist ideologists had promised that if a Jewish state was created, it would be the only place on Earth where Jews would be safe. For some time it seemed that Zionism carried out this promise but the summer of 2006 put an end to the illusion of security.
The publicist writes that many Israelis wonder - if Zionism has not justified itself, why did they build the country in the marshlands and send their children to wars? He himself replies to this question -- Israel's goal was the hope, not statehood as such. It is with good reason that the Zionist movement and later on the state accepted the verse called "The Hope" (HaTikvah) as its anthem. They wanted "To be a free people in our land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem."
Gordis believes that if Israel seized to exist, everything Jewish would be damaged. He makes this point: "A people cannot long for sovereignty for two thousand years, find itself at the precipice of extinction, bounce back, get a state and then lose that, too, and march on as if everything was OK."
It goes without saying that these words may be addressed to many members of the Jewish community, for instance, to Avraham Burg, a former Knesset speaker and the son of one of the founders of the State of Israel. His recently published book "Defeating Hitler" has evoked a huge response. He writes, among other things, that Zionism has not liberated the Jewish people, but became a disaster, which led to the formation of a concentration-camp-like ghetto. The Arab newspaper al-Shark al-Ausat carried a review of the book under the title "Jews against Israel." But this is not quite correct. Burg is rejecting today's Israel, not the existence of the state as such. He writes about the return to "spiritual Zionism," restoration of the Jewish identity, which is eclipsed by the notion of "the Israeli." He is not alone - Jews voiced such ideas throughout the history of Zionism.
There are grounds to argue with Burg and his soul mates on many points. One of them is whether Jews in Europe were safe during the last millennium. We remember well the history of German Jews who dreamt of assimilation but were burnt alive in Auschwitz; a century before similar dreams of the French Jewry were ruined by the Dreyfus affair. This happened throughout Jewish history. Now Israel gives hope to the Jews.
On the other hand, thinkers like Burg are raising very important issues - can a democratic state be exclusively Jewish in the modern world? Can a state be a democracy if its laws are largely based on religious principles? Doesn't Zionism lead to racism and why its criticism is considered tantamount to antisemitism? Can a state live with a permanent feeling that "the whole world is against it"?
The Israelis will have to answer this question regardless of their convictions - for the sake of their state's advance. It is a fact that nobody is going to relinquish it. Today Israel and the Jewish people are facing the same problems as the European Union, Russia and many other countries. These are primarily issues of self-identification and survival. The Russians, for one, smashed with abandon the myths of the past and imperial Soviet ideology after the Soviet Union's disintegration. But a nation cannot exist without myths and ideals, which form the gist of ideology. Europe put tolerance on the pedestal of its ideology and lost its instinct of self-preservation for some time. Many other countries, above all Muslim, are on the horns of the dilemma of combining democracy with religion, globalization with self-identity.
In the same manner, Israel makes no sense without Zionist ideology. But what will it be like in the modern world?
The opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.
