Related Resources On NationalJournal.com Well-Read Wonk: "Israelis and Palestinians" (July 24, 2003) · Social Studies: Like It Or Not, Israel's War With Hamas Is America's, Too (April 2, 2004) · Social Studies: Israel's Sharon Is Up To Something In Gaza. But What? (Feb. 20, 2004) · Insider Interview: Israel's Lipkin-Shahak: Peace Is Possible, Even If Not Easy (Feb. 25, 2004) · Recent Polling On The Middle East Additional Information On The Web Introduction to Zionism, from the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs · Declaration of the Establishment of Israel (1948) · The Palestinian National Charter (1968) · Number of Palestinian Casualities in Current Intifada · Number of Israeli Casualities · The 2003 Geneva Accord · Operational Concept of Israel's Security Fence

By Paul Starobin, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, April 23, 2004

JERUSALEM -- The new normalcy in my tribe's home turf -- that would be terrorism-threatened Israel -- is to avoid target-rich public transportation options, especially the buses, and to resign yourself to being frisked just about everywhere. One such check happened just off King George Street in West Jerusalem, at Cafe Hillel, to which a young security guard in a black windbreaker admitted me with a wave of her metal-detector wand. (The apple pie with nuts tasted good, but no need to linger.) The new normalcy is to sit and stew in a Tel Aviv traffic jam while police conduct a bomb sweep of a neighborhood, and to indulge in black-humor jokes about how maybe the early Zionists should have accepted Imperial Britain's first offer of a homeland in Uganda. Top off those experiences with an edgy visit to the occupied West Bank with an unarmed Jewish settler who steered us through a remote patch of Palestinian farmland -- and you bet I heaved a sigh of relief after clearing customs to catch an El Al flight to New York.

Was Zionism a monumental mistake -- for the Jews, that is? I wonder. One core aim of Zionism -- to restore the lost self-respect of the European ghetto Jew -- was achieved with the successful establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948 and the nation's rise as the reigning military power in one of the toughest blocks in the world -- the Arab Middle East. Nobody messes with Israel without paying a price. But the other core purpose -- to provide a sanctuary and refuge for Jewish people in the shadow of the Holocaust -- looks like a tragic and, to a certain degree, self-inflicted failure. For Israel has turned out to be one of the least safe and most stressful of all places for a Jew to be. Counting its war of independence, the country has fought three major set-piece wars with its Arab neighbors, conducted a prolonged campaign against guerrillas in Lebanon, and confronted two violent uprisings mounted by Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza, the second of which, the so-called Al Aqsa intifada, continues to rage. The wars took the lives of more than 20,500 Israeli soldiers, and the current uprising has killed more than 900 Israeli civilians in suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks over the past three years. For this year's Passover holiday, when Jews celebrate their divine deliverance from bondage in ancient Egypt and subsequent passage to Palestine, the terrorism risk was sufficiently high for Israel's police commissioner to advise citizens with gun licenses to keep their weapons close at hand.

Nor is any relief on the horizon. Hatred of Israel, accompanied by a trafficking in vicious anti-Semitic images, is rampant in the Arab and broader Islamic world. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to have Israel unilaterally withdraw from Gaza while annexing major West Bank settlements and foreclosing the right of Palestinian refugees to return to Israel proper -- a plan blessed by George W. Bush on April 14, even as European leaders condemned it -- is sparking further outrage. Meanwhile, avowed enemies such as Iran, a state run by Islamic fundamentalist mullahs, appear bent on obtaining an atomic bomb -- a weapon that Israel presumably possesses, although its government has never officially acknowledged that. "This place could turn into a massive killing ground," notes Benny Morris, a prominent Israeli historian of Zionism who lives in Jerusalem.

Amid this trial, which is also sapping the Israeli economy, Jews are fleeing Israel in a growing reverse exodus. One destination, somewhat improbably, is Russia, to which an estimated 50,000 Russian Jewish emigres to Israel have returned; another, not so surprisingly, is America, which already houses an Israeli Diaspora numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Meanwhile, the Jewish Diaspora in the United States and elsewhere is helping to keep Israel afloat with its philanthropy: Israel annually receives some $1 billion in private donations from outside sources. The general idea of Zionism was that Israel would support the Diaspora, not the other way around.

Painful Ironies
Considering this ripe basket of grim ironies, it seems fair to say that the present state of affairs -- a Jewish people in Palestine living under siege and forced to be a supplicant to a more secure Jewish community living among the goyim -- is nearly the opposite of what Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, promised before his death a century ago. In his manifesto, The Jewish State, first published in 1896 in Vienna as Der Judenstaat, Herzl proposed to solve "the Jewish Question," by which he meant the question of anti-Semitism. Believing that anti-Semitism was a consequence of the Diaspora, he was convinced that a gathering of Jews in a new homeland in Palestine would remove the source of aggravation. "The Jews, once settled in their own State, would probably have no more enemies," he wrote. "We shall live at last as men on our own soil, and die peacefully in our own homes." Whoops. Jews are dying on their own soil -- but not peacefully. This is self-respect purchased at a very high toll.

America tends to miss how overwhelmingly tribal life is for Jews in Israel -- perhaps because Americans have been sold a propaganda poster, smartly designed for their particular sensibilities. The defining rendition of the Zionist narrative in the popular mind is Leon Uris's best-selling 1958 book, Exodus, which was turned into the hit 1960 movie by Otto Preminger. Set in pre-Israel Palestine, the movie starred Paul Newman as a trim, blond, blue-eyed Jewish resistance fighter who falls in love with a beautiful blond American widow, a Presbyterian. The widow, played by Eva Marie Saint, comes to identify with the underdog Zionist cause, which the Newman character likens to the struggle of Concord's minutemen against King George's redcoats.

Not the least of the problems with this parallel is that America and Israel have very different underlying rationales. Whereas America is a kind of nation of nations, a state for people of diverse ethnic and religious character, Israel is by definition a state for Jews. That's the whole point. The most dynamic Zionists in today's Israel are the religious settlers in the occupied territories -- proud and combative tribalists to the core. When I asked Sandy Amichai, a Los Angeles native who decades ago moved to the Kfar Etzion settlement in the West Bank, near Hebron, whether she favored expulsion of West Bank Arabs, she replied, "Why not? There are so many Arab countries. Let them go settle the desert in Jordan."

Of course, other countries, too, are home to a particular type of people. What makes the Israel case more complex is that the Jews have also believed that God ordained them to be "a light unto the nations." Jewish experience has over the millennia swung between these poles -- between the outward-focusing spiritual mission and the inward, self-protective dictate of the tribal ethos -- and has never resolved what is probably an irreconcilable tension. Modern Israel, as the offspring of a long-odds nationalist movement, has always displayed a bias toward the tribal pole, but now the trauma of terrorism is powerfully reinforcing this tendency. Thus Israelis are imploring their government to complete "the fence" -- a physical barrier on the West Bank, to accompany one that already exists in the Gaza Strip -- to thwart would-be terrorists along Israel's borders.

Taken together, the security barriers, which could also provide a convenient way of annexing Jewish settlements in the West Bank, would effectively seal Israel off from the outside. One critic, the Jerusalem-based writer Danny Gavron, says that the project "creates a new ghetto" and therefore "is the ultimate irony of Jewish history." But his is very much a minority voice. The majority view is, "We need to build high walls, so high the eagles cannot soar over them." I heard this from the influential Israeli demographer Arnon Soffer, who has the ear of Sharon, over coffee and pastry at the Dan Accadia, a luxury hotel in the Mediterranean resort town of Herzliya, not far from where Soffer was born. Soffer had his own brush with terror just over a year ago, when a suicide bomber blew up a bus he was traveling behind. He leaped out of his car and helped rescue workers tend to dying and maimed passengers. "I don't want to see them [the Palestinians]," Soffer declared. "Maybe then we can be good neighbors."

Worried about the migration of not only would-be suicide bombers but also Bedouins crossing illegally into Israel, Soffer would electrify the fence; patrol it with snipers; disconnect water, gas, and electricity systems from Palestinian-controlled territory in the West Bank and Gaza; and train Israeli youth for "a prolonged war of existence." As "recompense for such a difficult ethos," he writes in a pamphlet laying out his views, "there will be the building of a more beautiful Zionism and the absorption of immigrants (the Jews will come because anti-Semitism continues everywhere, unfortunately)."

The argument doesn't add up -- a "more beautiful Zionism" in a perpetually threatened Garrison Israel? Denial is never healthy, and isn't there a point at which Israel's bulldozer-like search for security begins to undermine that very goal? "It is Jewish pathologies that will ultimately destroy the Jewish state," warns Middle East analyst Henry Siegman, a Jew whose parents smuggled him out of Nazi Germany and who has long been a critic of Israel's settlement policies and treatment of its Arab minority.

That's a harsh assessment, but whether or not Zionism was flawed from the start, it certainly seems to have reached a point of crisis, both as an inspiring idea and as a practical way of life. And this matters -- not just for the Jews, but for the world. Although embattled nationalistic movements are a commonplace, no nationalistic cause is as entwined with the larger issues and fault lines of global politics as modern Zionism is. Not least, the crisis of Zionism has implications for the ability of America to achieve its policy goals in the Middle East and in its wider confrontation with Islamic militancy.

The U.S. and Israel
One question for Washington policy makers is whether it makes sense for the United States to keep underwriting Israel's escalating battles with its foes. Since 1949, Israel has received a total of $94 billion in U.S. aid, more than any other recipient during that period, according to the Congressional Research Service. Of the nearly $4 billion currently awarded to Israel annually, some $3 billion goes to Israel's military, including money for Israel's purchase of weaponry deployed in the occupied territory. When Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder of the Palestinian militant group Hamas, was assassinated in March outside a Gaza City mosque, he was killed by a missile strike from an Apache helicopter paid for with U.S. military aid. After the attack, the new leader of Hamas threatened retaliation against the U.S. and said, "God declared war against America, Bush, and Sharon." On April 17, Israel mowed down that leader, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, also with an Apache. In this fevered atmosphere, one of the traditional rationales for assistance to Israel -- the need to aid a Western-style democracy in the generally autocratic Middle East, in hopes of nourishing a broader democratic trend -- seems unpersuasive.

Israelis themselves tend to see very little prospect of a more democratic Arab Middle East. They widely applauded the U.S.-led toppling of Saddam Hussein, but this support was based on the belief that Saddam had developed weapons of mass destruction, posing a potential threat to Israel. Israelis personally lack faith in the neoconservative plan of Paul Wolfowitz and company to reform Arab political culture, a plan that battle-weary Israelis view as naive. "Arab society appears to be fairly immutable," the historian Morris told me in a conversation at his Jerusalem apartment, which is lined with first-edition copies of books by John LeCarre and other prominent Western writers. Israel, he reflects, is "a branch of Europe in the Middle East -- the most vulnerable promontory."

It's time for Americans -- including Jews, but not only Jews -- to hold a conversation about Israel and Zionism and the chronic difficulties of Jewish nationalism. I've traveled my own "lost illusions" odyssey, which spurred me to write this essay. I grew up steeped in the Zionist story, and I beamed with pride when a non-Jewish high school teacher one day praised in the classroom the martial exploits of the plucky Israeli army in its winning battles against superior Arab numbers. Back in the summer of 1981, at the age of 23, I was a volunteer on an Israeli kibbutz just over the Mount Carmel ridge, near Haifa. I slept under the stars by the Red Sea in the Sinai Desert (at that time under Israeli control), climbed my way up to the Jewish martyrdom shrine of Masada, near the Dead Sea, where Jews killed themselves rather than surrender to the Romans some two millennia ago, and felt awestruck at my first sight of the Wailing Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem. I even, at that time, pondered settling in Israel, which seemed to possess a vitality, or at least an intensity, that America lacked. I was attracted, you might say, to the tribal thing.

And yet, as far back as the early 1980s, I was arguing over the telephone with the rabbi at my hometown temple in central Massachusetts over his call for the congregation to rally behind Israel in its invasion of Lebanon -- an invasion that culminated in a massacre of Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatila camps by the Israel-aligned Lebanese Christian Phalange forces. An independent Israeli commission found government and military leaders, including Sharon, then defense minister, indirectly responsible for the atrocities, and it likened the role of Israeli rulers to that of Russia's when bloody pogroms were waged against ghetto Jews in Eastern Europe. These days, tribal polemics such as The Case for Israel, a recent book by Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, exasperate me -- must Jews exempt the telling of their own story from the classic Jewish commitment to open-ended and rigorous inquiry? Although the story of modern Zionism is complicated, as is every nation's formative tale, the main facts are not in dispute. They just tend to get twisted or selectively deployed to serve partisan points. It's time for some untwisting.

Jewish Nationalism
In presenting Palestine as a safe haven for Jews and genuinely believing this to be the case, Herzl should have known better, says professor Robert S. Wistrich of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, a British Jewish emigre who's one of the world's leading experts on anti-Semitism. We're meeting in the faculty lounge of the Mount Scopus campus, which affords a spectacular view of the Old City. Easily the most visible landmark is the golden Dome of the Rock, Islam's third-holiest site, marking the spot from which Muslims believe the prophet Mohammed ascended to heaven. The original Zionist slogan -- "A People without a land for a land without people" -- managed to miss not only the Arab inhabitants of turn-of-the-century Palestine but also the religious significance of this ground to the broader Islamic world. Herzl's failure to consider Zionism as a fresh incitement for anti-Semitism was "perhaps even a fatal flaw" of Zionism, Wistrich said. But Herzl was caught up in the ideological movement sweeping Europe in favor of what proved to be the most explosive and seductive "ism" of the age: nationalism, which in practical terms took the form of campaigns for self-determination that threatened to undermine a wobbly international order based on multiethnic empires. "Political Zionism differed from other manifestations of European nationalism, mainly in the fact that its sacred national soil lay outside Europe," notes the historian Norman Davies in Europe: A History, his 1996 book. "Otherwise, it possessed all the characteristics of the other national movements of the day."

There were, in fact, adamant Jewish opponents of Zionism -- including the founder of American Reform Judaism, Isaac Meyer Wise. He viewed Jewish nationalism as a mistaken avenue that, by fostering the separateness of the Jews as a people, would undermine Judaism's unique spiritual mission as "a light unto the nations." His view was actually a modern recasting of the perspective of the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah, who even as he foretold the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in the sixth century B.C. proclaimed that Judaism could flower in the Diaspora under a new covenant with God.

Born in the Bohemia region of Central Europe in 1819, Wise studied in Prague and was a child and devotee of the French Revolution, a passionate believer in its promise of a liberal order in which the assimilated Jew had a central place. In this context, America, on whose shores he arrived in 1846, was a New Jerusalem, a land of unbounded opportunities for all immigrants, including Jews. He settled in Cincinnati and founded the American Israelite, an influential newspaper; his daughter married New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs, who also became a prominent anti-Zionist voice.

In 1885, 11 years before Herzl published Der Judenstaat, Wise presided over a conference of Reform rabbis gathered in Pittsburgh. There, the rabbis approved a declaration of principles stating: "We recognize, in the modern era of universal culture of heart and intellect, the approaching of the realization of Israel's great Messianic hope for the establishment of the kingdom of truth, justice, and peace among all men. We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine ... nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state."

But this conference proved to be a high-water mark for the anti-Zionists. The nascent Zionist movement grew and triumphed. Isaac Meyer Wise, who died in 1900, four years before Herzl's death, became a footnote to history and, even as a footnote, something of a politically incorrect embarrassment: His three-page entry in the Jewish Encyclopedia, published shortly after his death, managed to omit mention of the anti-Zionist beliefs at the heart of his philosophy of Judaism. Herzl lies buried in a grandiose tomb atop, naturally, Mount Herzl, in a park run by the World Zionist Organization in the Jewish section of Jerusalem.

Zionism's Triumph
One basic reason for Herzl's victory was the powerful romantic appeal of the Zionist idea -- an appeal from which all nationalisms draw sustenance. Whereas Wise took his philosophy to the arid point of wanting to remove the phrase "next year in Jerusalem" from the Passover Haggadah, the book annually recited by Jews gathered around the Seder table, Herzl thrilled Diaspora Jews with the possibility of turning that wistful sentiment into a living reality.

An even more important factor was the Holocaust. Although Herzl died well before Adolf Hitler's rise to power, he was right to see Europe as an increasingly threatening place for Jews. After World War II, when the enormity of Hitler's crime became widely known, the cause of Israel powerfully engaged the sympathies of Western powers, including the United States. The establishment of a Jewish state even won support from the Soviet Union, a Communist nation and Cold War rival. And to the extent that Jewish nationalism's moral claim was superior to that of any other nationalism, it was based on the Holocaust. In the sad history of modern genocide, nothing rivaled the massacre of 6 million Jews.

But Jews won their state most of all by fighting for it -- which is to say, in the bloody tradition by which most independent sovereign territories, including the United States, are established. The so-called "New Jew" in the land of Palestine, the Jew who had irrevocably abandoned the ghetto, was prototypically the Warrior Jew, a latter-day Maccabean. In a cafe in Tel Aviv, I met up with a sterling example of the type -- Yoash Tsiddon-Chatto, a Romanian-born organizer of the Haganah, the principal Jewish militia in pre-Israel Palestine, and a former Israel Defense Forces fighter pilot. He's now 77, but he greeted me with a bone-crushing handshake before sitting down and delivering his take on Zionism. He started with a tale about how he almost punched out a British RAF officer who, back in the 1950s, made some anti-Semitic comments. "Zionism is not only a national movement but a cultural one," Tsiddon-Chatto said. "A Zionist is someone who wants to remake the Jewish character." After thousands of years of ghetto experience, "it's a job that will take more than the 50-plus years the country has had."

The British, who administered Palestine on behalf of the allied powers following World War I, were driven out by Jewish insurgents whose terrorist acts included blowing up the wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in which British commanders were based. (That was a deed of Menachem Begin's Irgun, not the Haganah.) Then Jewish forces drove back Arab armies -- far enough, at least, to carve out a narrow patch of territory that included Tel Aviv. Warrior Zionism scaled its mythic peak with Israel's lightning-quick victory in the Six-Day War of 1967. With Egypt mobilizing its forces in the Sinai, and Jordan and Syria preparing to attack, Israel launched devastating strikes crippling the Arab air forces and ended up with possession of new territories that included the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. Against their humiliated Arab foes, the Jews appeared invincible. But the victors faced an unanticipated problem: what to do with its newly conquered territories, inhabited then by 1.1 million Palestinians. Today, the Palestinians in the occupied territories number 3.6 million, living amid 230,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank and 7,500 in Gaza.

Sapped by Victory
In hindsight, the aftermath of the Six-Day War appears as a lost opportunity for Israel to reconcile the claims of Jewish nationalism with the rising claims of Palestinian nationalism. The challenge was to come to terms with a movement that Zionism had itself helped spur by showing previously unorganized Palestinians what could be achieved by unwavering political and martial attention to the goal of self-determination. With Golda Meir's Labor Party running the government, the party's No. 2 man, Lova Eliav, a former Mossad undercover operative, argued for keeping the territories as a bargaining chip and barring Israeli settlement there, to broker a peace deal in which Palestinians would be given their own state in return for recognizing Israel's sovereignty. In an interview at the Tel Aviv apartment where he has lived for seven decades, Eliav, who's now 82, replayed the argument he made at that time. "I said to Golda Meir, 'There are two national movements claiming the same territory, and while we have full historical rights to all of it, so do they.... I don't love the Arabs, but we have to live with them.' "

But Meir, viewing the newly conquered territories as vital to Israel's security, would have none of it. "For me, the supreme morality is that the Jewish people has a right to exist," she told a group of Israeli intellectuals who agreed with Eliav. Meir's majority faction drove Eliav out of the party -- "They broke my political neck," he says -- and the settlements proceeded, with crucial government assistance in establishing electricity lines and other infrastruc- ture, under the aegis of the Labor Party. This history is important to remember, because critics sometimes cast Israel's settlement policy as a partisan initiative of right-wing Likud Party leaders in cahoots with religious fanatics. But Likud did not take power until 1977, under the leadership of Menachem Begin.

By opting for settlements and becoming embroiled in the day-to-day problems of occupation, Labor was set on a road toward surrendering its pre-eminence in Israeli politics. The party was also on its way to depleting itself as an imaginative force in steering Zionism in new directions that would take the movement beyond a survivalist territorial imperative. "It's as if the last ounce of creative Zionism dried up in the euphoria over the '67 war," Hebrew University's Wistrich told me.

Zionism's creative vacuum does have some leaders in Israeli society scrambling to find ways to invigorate the movement -- alternatives to the now-withered agricultural kibbutzes that were once a prime breeding ground for Israel's leadership class. One imaginative advocate of a New Zionism is Avishai Braverman, the energetic president of Ben Gurion University, which is based in the Negev, Israel's southern desert. "Zionism, to survive, needs a revolution -- a cultural revolution, a moral revolution," he told me, citing the $60 billion that Israel has spent on occupied territories as "a misapplication of resources." His proposal: Resettle Israelis away from the Tel Aviv metropolis into the Negev, which contains 60 percent of the area of Israel proper but only 8 percent of its population; and also into the sparsely populated Galilee in northern Israel. Both areas are magnets not for Jews but for migrant Arabs from neighboring countries; if the trend continues, Braverman and others believe, Jews in Israel could find themselves a minority almost everywhere except Tel Aviv.

Braverman would draw Jews to the Negev with the lure of cheap housing and the promise of a new Silicon Valley in the desert -- high-tech industry drawing on his university's research talent to pioneer world-class products in such areas as biotechnology. "We lost a vision of greatness," he said of Israel. Enthusiasts include Haganah organizer Tsiddon-Chatto. His daughter, Orna Berry, is a venture capitalist who formerly served as Israel's chief scientist and has also sought to foster high-tech development in the Negev. "The 21st century is the brain century," Tsiddon-Chatto told me, his daughter at his side, nodding. "It is the Jewish century.... What we have to do, simply, is to go to work."

"Go South" was the mantra of David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, who retired to a Negev kibbutz and is buried near there in a simple tomb overlooking a lovely patch of desert hills roamed by wild rams. He viewed the Negev as "one of the Jewish nation's safe havens" and hoped to see it bloom. But it hasn't happened yet. And Braverman's hopes of fulfilling the dream in a post-industrial, post-agricultural fashion face obstacles, including the lure of places like California's Silicon Valley for techno-smart Israelis and the seeming inability of the Israeli government to do any kind of long-range planning amid its crises on the security front.

Where Zionism Still Thrives
There is one place where the soil for Zionism remains highly fertile. It's tempting to focus blame for Israel's myriad problems on the settlers in the occupied territories -- and these days many Israelis do just that, deriding the settlers as crazies and the settlement policy as folly. The leftist Israeli historian David Ohana, a refugee from Morocco, says that the religious-messianic spirit of the settlers is foreign to Zionism, and thus their movement is "a mutation." But even though the settlement policy does look like folly, it is hard for me to see how the settlers and their aspirations fall outside the boundaries of basic Zionism, which after all began as a project to resettle the Land of Zion. It may be that the settlers, the black sheep on Israel's political landscape, are being demonized for communal sins that other Israelis don't want to see in themselves.

I spent an afternoon with Yeheskel Klein, a leader of the Gush Etzion movement, which houses some 25,000 Orthodox Jews in a bloc of 17 settlements in the Judean Hills some 15 miles south of Jerusalem and 15 miles north of Hebron, well inside the occupied West Bank. The bloc would be annexed as part of Sharon's "disengagement" plan. As we made our way out of central Jerusalem in his sedan, equipped with a plastic windshield to protect against rock-throwing Palestinians, he told me his story. Born in Haifa in 1953, he was active in a youth pioneer movement. After high school, in 1971, he decided to join the religious kibbutz of Kfar Etzion, within the Gush Etzion bloc. His father, a Holocaust survivor and former Israel Defense Forces officer, was not pleased; "My parents wanted me to be a doctor," Klein said with a smile. But his brother followed, and Klein now lives at Kfar Etzion with his wife, six children, and four grandchildren.

As we approached the settlement, Klein pulled off the main road and turned onto a rock-strewn dirt track the Jews here call the Path of the Patriarchs. It was an old Roman byway -- and even before then, "we think Abraham walked on it," Klein told me -- and it's a six-hour donkey ride from Jerusalem. We stopped to inspect the remains of a mikveh, a ritual bath used by Jewish pilgrims of antiquity to clean themselves in preparation for entering Jerusalem. In the distance, we glimpsed the Arab village of Nahlen, just a five-minute drive from Kfar Etzion and these days a place that no Jew enters, day or night. Unlike some settlers, Klein does not favor expelling Arabs from the West Bank. But he believes that Israel should have formally annexed the territory after the Six-Day War, with Arabs allowed to remain if they acknowledged Israeli rule.

Inside Kfar Etzion, which is guarded around the clock, I'm shown a film, Pioneers in the Judean Hills, that stresses how tightly bound the kibbutz is to the Zionist movement and the creation of modern Israel. According to the film, Jewish settlements in this area date back to the 1920s but were destroyed in Arab riots in 1929. A second settlement arose in the 1930s but was again wiped out by the Arabs. In the early 1940s, a third try was made after Holocaust survivors were smuggled into Palestine. In the war for independence, fighters at Kfar Etzion took a stand to prevent Arabs marching up from the south from reaching Jerusalem. The kibbutz eventually fell to Jordanian legionnaires and Arab irregular forces, and all of the defenders were ordered into a bunker, where they were massacred. Ben-Gurion is quoted as saying: "If a Jewish Jerusalem exists today, Israel owes its gratitude first and foremost to the defenders of the Etzion bloc." Following the Six-Day War, Kfar Etzion was re-established for a fourth time. "We have returned to our homeland," the narrator concludes, to stirring music.

After the film, I'm introduced to Jerry Katz. He was born on the kibbutz in 1947, evacuated as a 4-month-old infant on the eve of war (his father was killed defending the settlement), and moved to America; he came back after Kfar Etzion's re-establishment. As the chief gardener, he supervises a small group of Palestinian laborers who arrive in the morning and depart at day's end. "I drink coffee with them, but I don't forget to take the gun," he tells me. I pile in the car with Klein for the drive back to Jerusalem. On the approach to the city, the highway shoulder is lined with tall concrete slabs to protect riders from being picked off by Arab snipers pointing guns out of apartment buildings on the overlooking hillsides.

It's a long way from Kfar Etzion to the posh Tel Aviv suburb of Savyon, lined with million-dollar homes. Savyon is an Israeli version of a well-to-do Long Island neighborhood -- anyone who lives here, by definition, has made it. Moshe Arens, a hard-line Likudnik, a former defense minister and ambassador to the U.S., and one of the last of the old Zionist lions, welcomes me to his place. A native of Lithuania who grew up in New York City, Arens in his youth joined Betar, the Zionist group started by Ze'ev Jabotinsky and later spearheaded by Menachem Begin. Its original goal was to establish a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan; the Betar symbol was a map of Greater Palestine with a rifle slung across it. Arens long ago gave up on so broad a territorial interpretation of Israel -- no more than a 30 percent non-Jewish minority in a Jewish state is practical, he told me.

We spend an hour or so discussing the political complexities of the settlements, the tide of Arab population growth working against the Jews in Israel, and the thorny matter of the fence, which Arens supports even though he doubts it will do much to thwart terrorism. "They'll find ways to go over the wall, under the wall," he says of would-be attackers. I put my core question to him: Was Zionism a mistake? "It was not a mistake," he replies with emphasis. Israel has been a refuge for threatened Jewish communities in North Africa and elsewhere, and if it had been established 10 years earlier, Arens said, it could have saved millions of European Jews from the Holocaust. "Israel is a success story, and on a world historical scale, it is one of the greatest success stories."

I have an idea of how bad it got for the Diaspora Jews of Europe and elsewhere. I've visited the remains of Hitler's Auschwitz and heard Holocaust survivors describe their experiences, and I've walked the isolated patch of ground, north of the Chinese border in Russia's frigid Far East, to which another murderous, anti-Semitic dictator, Josef Stalin, shunted Jews in the Soviet Union. I've talked to an old woman in the tiny Belarussian village of Starobin, home to my ancestors, who witnessed the massacre of the town's Jews, including possibly a relative of mine, by the Nazis. Part of me sides with Natan Sharansky, the Russian Jewish dissident who's currently minister for Jerusalem and Diaspora affairs in Sharon's government. Sharansky had a pretty good comeback to a group of French Jewish intellectuals with whom he met recently in Paris. As Sharansky related the encounter to me, the intellectuals told him that Zionism was passe in its insistence on a state for a single people, the Jews, because the future rested with multiethnic societies. Sharansky responded: "I don't understand why Israel has to be the first to give up on the idea of a nation-state. Why not France?" And yet, even France, which certainly doesn't lack for national chauvinism, has been a leader over the past 50 years in the largely successful experiment to bind Europe's once-warring nation-states into the European Union. Proclaiming Israel "an anachronism," the European historian Tony Judt last fall proposed, in The New York Review of Books, turning Israel proper and the occupied territories into a single binational state for Arabs and Jews. It sounds nice in theory, but surely, as most Israelis believe, this is a recipe for disaster. Given the demographics, the Jews would eventually be outnumbered and, given all the blood that has already been spilled, they would very likely be driven out of the state in the pattern of "ethnic cleansing" that has been the rule in the Middle East for centuries. If the opportunity for a binational state ever existed -- a fringe group of Zionists supported this idea in pre-Israel Palestine -- it has long since passed.

So any last hope for Israel's security lies with a genuine two-state solution that would give the Palestinians a respectable sovereign territory of their own. But prospects for this outcome are diminishing because of Sharon's annexation plan and because the only outside party -- the White House -- with the leverage to force Israel to deal fairly with the Palestinians is supporting this plan. And while a two-state solution might placate the Palestinians and reduce the terrorism threat from that quarter, it would not necessarily lessen the threat to Israel from Islamic militants elsewhere, who, after all, advocate its liquidation. Fortress Israel appears set in concrete, you might say.

The Greater Miracle
Modern Israel is the story of a heroic and courageous nationalist movement that has survived against all odds and helped renew Jewish culture, including its language. But the more distinctive achievement belongs to the United States -- and for that matter, also to its northern neighbor, Canada -- both of which have fashioned liberal pluralist societies that, whatever their faults, have transcended tribalism. Jews certainly have reason to feel grateful. About one-third of East European Jews migrated to North America from 1880 to 1920, according to the Peopling North America project at the University of Calgary. The Holy Land was an alternative, but from 1881 to 1914, 80 percent of all Jewish emigrants from the Russian empire came to the United States and only 3 percent went to Ottoman-ruled Palestine, according to Jonathan D. Sarna, professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University. "They voted with their feet," says Sarna, who is also chief historian of the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. Both my grandfathers, along with my father's mother, were part of the East European migration to North America, and I'm glad they set foot where they did.

The standard Zionist position, embraced these days even by Reform rabbis in America, is that a Jew living outside of Israel -- a person such as myself -- is in exile, in galut, and thus presumably at some risk, given the eternal hazard of anti-Semitism. But America has been a relative paradise for Jews since their first settlement in New Amsterdam (which became New York City) 350 years ago. Anti-Semitism has on the whole waned over this time period, and I myself can't recall ever being a target, save when a junior high school mate said that the Jews killed Christ.

It turns out that the story of the Jewish community in America is not only one of safety and prosperity. It is also, in its own way, a story of the development of a "New Jew" -- not the Warrior Jew that Israel by environmental necessity developed, but nevertheless a self-confident Jew bearing little trace of the stereotypical Meek Jew of the European shtetl.

Israeli Jews sometimes say that America's assimilated Jewish community is in danger of effacing itself. It is true that the proportion of Jews in the U.S. population has dropped from a peak of 3.7 percent in the 1940s to 2 percent these days, and this drop is partly because of intermarriage and partly because of a declining birthrate among Jewish families and a spike in the number of single, unmarried Jews. But Sarna, who has written a new book, American Judaism: A History, argues that the Jewish community in the U.S. has "an astonishing vitality." "If an American Jew in the 1930s had gone to sleep and woke up," he says, "he would be astounded at the number of Jews who attend Jewish day care and the number of Jewish adult education programs," for example. At the same time, Jews remain leaders in the arts, education, business, and science in numbers well beyond their weight in the population. In America, it seems, the Jews have found what has eluded them -- and perhaps can never be found -- in Israel: a balance between their historic tribal and outward-looking missions.

It can always be said, and some Jews always say it, that the clock is a minute from midnight, that the Jews in 1920s Germany also thought they were fully accepted members of society. But several centuries of experience have yet to show Isaac Meyer Wise to be misplaced in his faith in America as a blessed place for Jews. Amid the savageries that have attended modern Israel's determination to carve out a spot for itself in the Middle East, Wise's argument that Jewish nationalism could taint the soul of Judaism is not looking so bad, either. My wife and I, recently back in the Washington area after a four-year tour in Moscow, are raising our young children in the Reform Jewish tradition, and I expect that one of these days, I am going to talk to a local rabbi about elevating Isaac Wise to his deserved place in the pantheon of Jewish prophets.

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