The crisis of faith in Israel and Zionism

By: Mark Mazower, historian, professor at Columbia University / The Financial Times
Translation: Telegrafi.com

After the 7 October massacres carried out by Hamas, few reactions stood out like the yellow star worn by Israel's ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan. Protesting the inaction of the Security Council in the face of atrocities, he explicitly evoked the memory of an earlier generation of European Jews under Nazism. What made this gesture so provocative was that it spoke to the state of mind in Israel today, at a time when international public opinion seems to be turning against it.

The palpable shock that followed the Hamas attack partly reflected the scale, speed and brutal nature of the killing: it was arguably the largest loss of civilian life in Israel – in one day – since independence. However, the intensity of the state's reaction cannot be explained by numbers alone, nor by the direct impact of images of the massacre. Erdan's gesture conveyed an unprecedented sense of encroachment that can only be understood in historical terms.

As a political creed, Zionism only dates from the late 19th century and took some time to become dominant. Many Jews preferred the idea of ​​assimilation, and a certain anti-Zionist current in particular ran through the Jewish socialist movement. For a long time, even those Jews who chose to emigrate generally did not go to Palestine.

The rise of Europe's interwar right made the idea of ​​Zionism more compelling, but the real turning point came surprisingly late with the Biltmore program of 1942, when American Jews supported the call for unrestricted migration to Palestine. After World War II, the gradual closing off of other possible destinations helped the Zionist cause. Independence itself did this, and the Jewish population of the new state soon doubled thanks to immigrants from Arab countries and Eastern Europe. After the war, Zionism's claim that the answer to anti-Semitism was Jewish independence seemed to be vindicated by the events themselves.

None of Israel's security crises in the following decades fundamentally challenged the Zionist creed that the safest place for Jews was to be in their own state. Thanks to the refusal of its Arab neighbors to recognize it, the country existed in what appeared to be a permanent state of war. However, the events of 1967 demonstrated Israel's military superiority in a conventional conflict. Its main (and never resolved) problem was how to turn territorial gains from the battlefield into lasting peace.

The 1973 war was more difficult, but the result was the same and the geopolitical consequences even more favorable: Soviet influence weakened, US hegemony extended throughout the Middle East, and Israel enjoyed special and increasingly close with Washington.

All of these conflicts were military, in which Israeli civilian casualties were light. The latter notably changed during the second intifada of 2000-05, but Israeli policing and repression kept them within politically acceptable limits. (Palestinian casualties were higher, but insignificant in international terms.) In recent years, the prospects for a peaceful normalization of Israel's diplomatic position have seemed closer than ever.

In short, nothing prepared the Israelis for the attack in which their country proved unable to prevent the killing and kidnapping of ordinary civilians – on the scale seen on October 7. Perhaps, for the first time since independence, it faced an attack that called into question the basic premise of the Zionist dream: that a Jewish state would be the safest home for Jews.

Erdan's action speaks of the changed perspective that has already opened. As originally worn by defenseless Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, the yellow star was imposed on them by a regime dedicated to their extermination. On the other hand, the man who last month chose to keep her in New York represented the very condition that was supposed to be the answer to the problem: his gesture seemed to question whether it really was.

What made his gesture even more surprising was that it relied on an implicit comparison between the mighty Third Reich, the continental hegemon and the most industrially and militarily advanced state in Europe at the time, and Hamas – a militant organization that ruled a small, overpopulated territory where two-thirds of the population live in poverty and where most depend on international aid to survive. The fact that a relatively small and weak adversary can provoke this kind of reaction tells us how deep the crisis of faith runs within Israel. Time will tell if it makes sense. /Telegraph/