Nationalizing Judaism: Zionism as a Theological Ideology by David Ohana (review)

There is no better way to set the scene for a review of this book than with a synopsis of its final chapter (coauthored with Michael Feige), an evocative and illuminating interpretive depiction of David Ben-Gurion's December 1973 funeral. Its key aspects having been planned and scripted by Ben-Gurion himself, the funeral was both intentionally and unintentionally symbolic of many of the key ideological and political issues, challenges, and dilemmas faced by the Zionist project and the Israeli state twenty-five years after independence and just a few weeks after the end of the traumatic Yom Kippur War.

The burial location was not in Jerusalem but on the edge of the southern desert, at the site of the study and research center that Israel's first prime minister had created adjacent to his chosen place of residence, Kibbutz Sde Boker. The choice of residence and gravesite alike reflected Ben-Gurion's wish to inspire a new generation of Israeli youths to turn their backs on the comforts of urban living and take up the task of settling the Negev and "making the desert bloom." For Ben-Gurion, there was no contradiction between the assertion of the state's central role in the organization of Jewish national life—the principle of mamlakhtiyut (sovereigntism or statism), which he, more than any other of the late Yishuv's and early state's leaders, had been responsible for articulating and institutionalizing—and Israelis' continued commitment to personal engagement in the settlement and cultivation of the land. Yet even as the graves of David and Paula Ben-Gurion became sites of dutiful pilgrimage for dignitaries and ordinary citizens alike, it was the knitted-kippahwearing members of the national religious movement's offshoot Gush Emunim, not the secular kibbutzniks of Labor Zionism, who were to take the lead in building new settlements and bedroom communities— and not in the Negev Desert but on the occupied West Bank. Israel was to remain, in some sense, in a state of permanent revolution, but its course was to take a very different ideological direction from that envisaged by its founding father.

Or was it so different? Is the explicitly and avowedly religious and messianic nationalism of the disciples of the Rabbis Kook (father and son) who came to dominate the settler wing of the national religious movement marked by underlying continuities with or fundamental differences from what Ohana terms the "Promethean messianism" and secular "political theology" predominant among Israel's founding generation? That is the question overhanging all of the essays included in this collection. As is evident from the very first chapter (coauthored with Ari Barell), Ohana retains great admiration for the daring scope and ambition of Ben-Gurion's plans, first seriously laid out during the Second World War, for the integration of technical expertise, political power, and the pioneering ethos of a mobilized nation to create the infrastructure and political capacity for the intake of an anticipated massive inflow of refugees from Europe (the "Million Plan"). (A version of this plan ended up being implemented in the early 1950s in the context of the flight of Jews from Arab countries in the Middle East and North Africa.) This was, as Ohana sees it, a form of political utopianism that was married to a firm, modernist belief in the transformative potential of twentieth-century science and technology.

Yet clearly, in the light of Israel's political trajectory over the half century since the 1967 war, Ohana cannot help but wonder whether any form of political theology or "Promethean messianism" is not liable to lend itself to the revival of religious forms of political messianism divorced from a capacity for rational analysis and incapable of a realistic understanding of the bounds of the politically possible (let alone the ethically justifiable). Each of these essays wrestles with these questions through the lens of a prominent Israeli political or intellectual leader's works, or through the analysis of the evolving depiction...