Traditional Jews still oppose Zionist state

The Irish Times
Friday, 8 December 2006
By Yakov M. Rabkin

Israel has within its borders an unusual and little known group: Jews who oppose the Zionist movement that helped create their state. Yakov Rabkin explains

Abstract:

Israel has within its borders an unusual and little known group: Jews who oppose the Zionist movement that helped create their state.

...

Wednesday of last week was the anniversary of the 1947 United Nations resolution to partition Mandate Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab entities. Those opposed to the idea of two separate states appear to have lost.

The majority of the UN members voted for the partition. A minority objected, including most Arab inhabitants of the region where the state of Israel was to be established. Their hostility to the Zionist project has not subsided in spite of the recognition of Israel by several Arab states.

What is less known is that many of Palestine's traditional Jews objected to the Zionist project even more resolutely, and their opposition has also refused to go away. These Jews did not pretend to understand "the Arab mind" but drew on mainstream Judaic sources to outline perilous consequences of the unauthorised use of force "against the nations".

Several Palestinian Jewish leaders had made their opinion known to the UN, and some had asked for protection from "Zionist rule". Most religious Jews remained aloof from the Zionist project. Only a few, including the former chief rabbi of Ireland, Isaac Herzog, supported the establishment of the state of Israel. (His Belfast-born son, Chaim, was the sixth president of Israel, from 1983 to 1993.) Israel's founders emphasised the need to "normalise" the Jewish people. Israelis were to become a nation like any other nation.

Normalisation meant building a new muscular people attached to the soil. It implied militant secularisation, a radical negation of the Jewish tradition and its values. Zionism was a revolution that aimed at transforming the very nature of the Jew.

Traditional Jews view the exile from the land of Israel two millennia ago as a divinely ordained act that only the Messiah will end. According to this view, it is particularly wrong to "rebel against the surrounding nations" in order to conquer the land of Israel. This is one of the reasons why most traditional Jews living in Israel take no part in the army and its activities.

Many traditional Jews object to the fact that it is a human initiative and not obedience to the divine providence that has brought millions of Jews to the land of Israel. They deem that the persistent dangers facing Israel's Jews stem from the revolutionary nature of the Zionist project.