A State Like Any Other State or a Light Unto the Nations?

At the height of his career, David Ben-Gurion wrote in Israel's Government Year Book:

Two basic aspirations underlie all our work in this country: to be like all other nations, and to be different from all the nations. These two aspirations are apparently contradictory, but in fact they are complementary and interdependent. We want to be a free people, independent and equal in rights in the family of nations, and we aspire to be different from all other nations in our spiritual elevation and in the character of our model society, founded on freedom, cooperation, and fraternity with all Jews and the whole human race …¹

These two contrasting and often conflicting aspirations have characterized the Zionist movement from its very outset and the State of Israel during the last seventy years. On the one hand, there was the desire that a Jewish state would put an end to viewing the Jews as the eternal "others" and return them to the "normal course of history". To be a nation like any other nation, ke-khol am ve'am—this phrase even entered Israel's Declaration of Independence. On the other hand, there was the striving for the prophetic ideal to be a "light unto the nations"—or la-goyim.² A Jewish state, the logic went, had to reach for higher ideals than other nations, and to be a model state.

The conflict between normalcy and uniqueness was not a brainchild of Ben-Gurion, but deeply engrained in the Zionist idea. Theodor Herzl believed that only when the Jews, "like all other nations" had their own state, antisemitism would cease and they would be respected by the world. He was supported by other Zionists in this longing for a normal existence. Addressing the fifth Zionist Congress in 1901, his closest associate, Max Nordau, demanded an end to the peculiar situation of the Jews especially with respect to their occupational structure, and proclaimed the beginning of a normal existence, similar to that of all other nations: "The Jewish people can only be redeemed from its bitter misery once it leads a normal economic life on its own soil."³ Jacob Klatzkin formulated the tasks of Zionism as follows: "In Eretz Israel the Jewish people will regain their normality. … Only by being rooted in its own soil will they leave behind their elitist Jewish traits and become a real people."⁴

A prominent example of the Zionist longing for normality was the long-time leader of the Zionist movement. Chaim Weizmann is reported to have responded with great pride, when asked by an aristocratic British lady admirer if the Jews really wanted to give up all that made them special over the millennia, just to become another Albania: "Yes! Albania! Albania!"⁵ The eminent Oxford philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin, who told this story, was later asked a similar question by the Russo-French philosopher Alexandre Kojève: "Jews … with their rich and extraordinary history, miraculous survivors from the classical age of our common civilisation—that this fascinating people should choose to give up its unique status, and for what? To become Albania! How could they want this?" Berlin's reply was sharp:

However it might look to the world in general, to condemn the oyster for wishing to avoid the sufferings that led to the disease that might, in some cases, result in a pearl, was neither reasonable nor just. The oyster wished to live an oyster's life, to realize itself as an oyster, not solely to serve as the unhappy means of enriching the world with masterpieces of art or philosophy or religion that sprang from its sufferings.⁶

The concept of a normal nation, or a fictitious "Albania", however, always competed with the claim to be and to remain a special nation with a unique state, based on divine promises and their secular transformations. Rather than regarding his new movement merely as a means to liberate Jews from oppression and to lead them back to their old homeland, Herzl had much more ambitious plans of an "experiment...