Jews and Power
By Ruth Wisse
Schocken, New York
2007, $19.95, pp. 256
The Road (to Power) Less Traveled
Ruth Wisse, the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish literature at Harvard University and a spirited polemicist on many issues of Jewish concern, has written an interesting and provocative book on the relationship between Jews and power. It is not about the unwarranted power, economic and political, anti-Semites and others believe Jews possess, or the power to influence American foreign policy that Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer recently made a public issue. Rather, Wisse contemplates how Jews exercise power and argues that they have had something of an aversion to wielding power in their own interests.
Wisse begins with Biblical times, when Jews used military power to conquer their enemies, who eventually conquered them. Back then Jewish power was exercised under the aegis of God’s law and injunctions and defeats were understood as a withdrawal of His sanction. Since, in Jewish understanding, it was the transgression of God’s law that explained their defeats, it is not surprising that in the period after the destruction of the Palestinian-Jewish political entity, its capital and the Second Temple by the Romans, the Jews became quiescent in trying to reestablish their power and their state. They left it up to God’s will.
Without a state, territory or army with which to exercise power, Diaspora communities developed what Wisse calls a “politics of complementarity,” in which “Jews tried to win protection by proving their value” to rulers. They were variously successful, and often unsuccessful, in so protecting their property and their lives. But this kind of politics lost its effectiveness, surprisingly, when Jews were “emancipated” and given the same rights, more or less, enjoyed by other citizens or subjects, beginning with the French Revolution. For, she writes, the same democratic policies that gave rights to Jews—and made possible the increase in their economic influence and their role in the world of culture—also gave rise to the rise of modern anti-Semitism.
“Blinded by their apparent political progress and thrilled by the real augmentation of their civil liberties, Jews failed to appreciate that replacement of a single autocratic ruler by an elected assembly had potentially reduced rather than increased their political influence,” Wisse writes. “The same press that occasionally drew attention to their plight could also inflate demagogic accusations against them.”
This is an interesting thesis but the rise of modern anti-Semitism—that is, anti-Semitism based less on the refusal of the Jews to convert than on their presumed power and influence and, more dangerously, on their purported ineradicable racial difference—has many possible causes.
Others have noted the connection between anti-Semitism and modern democracy which, for the most part, stands in opposition to anti-Semitism. But in recent years, the view that anti-Semitism is uniformly an ideology of the Right has been supplanted. Certainly that is its main home, but since 1967, we have seen that the Left, too, can also be hostile to Jews and Jewish interests. The Leftist platform against Israel sometimes spills over into a kind of anti-Semitism. Whatever its causes, as Wisse recounts it, anti-Semitism climaxed with the murder of most of Europe’s Jews, which led to the fulfillment of the political movement, Zionism and the recreation of a Jewish state, both of them responses to anti-Semitism.
To this point there is much to learn and little to argue with in Wisse’s analysis. (Though I note in passing that her thesis on the rise of modern anti-Semitism applies only to a limited degree to the United States.) However, when it comes to the debate that has dominated the history of Zionism and the Jewish state, Wisse firmly takes sides.
The early Zionist movement and its leaders, David Ben Gurion and Chaim Weizmann among them, were undoubtedly naïve, as Wisse posits, to think that the Zionist aim could be achieved through the benevolence of the great powers. Power in its most direct sense, armed force, was also necessary if the nascent Jewish community of Palestine was to be protected and a Jewish state established. The farsighted Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the father of what is called Revisionist Zionism, called for the establishment of a Jewish military force as early as World War I even though it would be fighting under a British flag. Such a force would establish the rudiments of Jewish armed might, which was essential if a Jewish state was to be created, Jabotinsky argued. But the dominant leaders of the Zionist movement, with their social democratic inclinations, were reluctant to see force as a necessity. In time, they came aboard, and Wisse credits the two armed forces, the official Haganah and the Revisionist Irgun Zvai Leumi, as equally effective in establishing the Jewish state against British and Arab opposition.
In 2007, it is clear that Jabotinsky’s view has prevailed. But the course of events that handed victory to the Revisionist vision, might have gone differently. The history of this victory was shaped by political decisions and by no means was it inevitable. Wisse, however, is convinced that Jabotinsky was right from the beginning, and as such, that his hard line heirs in the Likud have been right to stand in the way of the establishment of a Palestinian state and the return of the occupied territories.
At this point in her discussion, Wisse drops her even tone and displays a degree of partisanship that strikes me as over the top. For example, what are we to make of her characterization of the origins of the Oslo agreement?
“Skirting the democratic procedures of their country, several renegade Israelis who were funded by Jewish donors overseas met in secret with PLO leaders to assure them that Israel would acquiesce to the very ideas that its voters rejected.”
“Renegade”—-in what sense? “Jewish donors overseas”-—what Israeli political orientation does not have them? “The very ideas that its voters rejected?” Yitzhak Rabin had been elected by Israeli voters and polls have shown again and again since then that most Israelis would accept the formula of peace in exchange for the territories, which was the essence of the Oslo agreement.
Wisse’s characterization of an agreement that once offered hope—-to the many Israelis who supported this approach and would be the first victims of its failures—-hardly seems fair.
If the peace movement in Israel is in disarray, it is not only because of the intractability of most of the Palestinian leadership as well as of the Arab and Muslim states. One must also note that the actions of Israeli hard-liners and leaders have played a role: Settling and expanding Jewish colonies in the occupied territories, and more than doubling them since Oslo, makes the solution that seemed to be the only one possible, impossible.
Conceivably there is no solution: The hostility of the Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims to the Jewish state is perhaps unchangeable and eternal. To my mind, war as far as the eye can see is the only future, and Israel must expect to maintain armed forces that consume an enormous part of its gross domestic product, more than that of any other nation.
Israel’s leaders, in particular those who promulgate the Revisionist outlook, have created a situation that makes no other prospect possible. But some of us think another course might have been chosen, and a different result might have been attained.
Nathan Glazer is Professor of Sociology and Education Emeritus, Harvard University, a former editor of the journal The Public Interest, and author most recently of the book, From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architecture’s Encounter with the American City.
