Based on the experience of Eastern Europe, some predicted, even then, the risk inherent in the “realistic” strategy of attempting to assimilate within Europe, even if it were initially successful. Zionism advocated emulating the nations of Europe in a different way. Rather than attempt to soften the power used against Jews as defenseless individuals – the traditional tactic perfected by the assimilationists – Zionists proposed the pursuit of independence for Jews as a group. Instead of trying to abandon Jewish culture, Zionism proposed developing a modernized version and using it as the unifying glue of a separate Jewish state located on defensible space, where one could both be safe as a Jew and be accepting of all other peoples.
There has not been a year since Jewish settlers first moved outside the defensive walls of the Old City of Jerusalem in the early 19th century that the fraction of world Jewry living in Zion has not increased. They are now the majority. Israel has become an oasis of Jewish and secular cultural productivity the likes of which the world has rarely seen. From the most assimilated to the most traditional, Jews throughout the world began to hold their heads up higher after the Israeli victory in the Six-Day War of 1967 and have continued to do so ? and that includes those Orthodox Jews who rejected Zionism because of a focus on the “cultural modernization” that was a peripheral part of its program.
Moreover, Zionism has not just been a success for maintaining the survival, success and dignity of Jewry. It has also proved an inspiration to others. The Jewish role in the development of the Left may be more obvious, but the alternative approach that Zionism laid out for coping with modernity has been no less influential.
The story of the American Christian Right is the most striking example. The return of the Jews to their land has been a source of inspiration to Bible-believing Christians in their attempt to maintain their own identity and faith in a corrosive modern world. That this large group of Christians has so emphatically shaken off prior Christian anti-Semitism must be seen, by those who believe in a God who works in history, as a miracle of our day on the order of the reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty itself – and they are directly related.
George W. Bush, as an individual, is a striking example of the fundamental decency of Bible-believing Christians in America. As a politician, he has also reaped the rewards of appreciating their virtues where others could not.
Both Zionism/traditionalism and assimilationism/liberalism have roots in the Prophets, as liberalism has (often cynically) claimed. Isaiah did say: “And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more” (Isaiah 2:4 and similarly in Micah).
However, judging among the nations and rebuking many people so that they beat their swords into plowshares was stated as the task of the Messiah, not actors and professors with illusions of moral superiority fueled by an agenda of resentment. In the current world, justice will come only from the words of Joel: “Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears: let the weak say, I am strong” (Joel 3:10).
Modern liberalism must be viewed as one more aspect of the false messianism that has bedeviled Jewish history and is now loose in the world at large. In the 2004 election a majority of the American electorate rejected liberalism’s path of self-hatred, from which genuine justice can never come, and chose self-renewal — chose life. Jews, in particular, should seek to understand why. It is our only hope of survival in the world until the true “end of history,” which all those who pray await.