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Summary: The ideas of "The Jewish State"
Review: Zionism, the ideology that brought the modern state of Israel to life, cast a parabolic arc over the twentieth century. Launched by Theodor Herzl just before the century began, the Zionist movement reached its blazing apogee at mid-century when David Ben-Gurion led Israel through its War of Independence. Since then, according to Yoram Hazony in his new book "The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel's Soul", the trajectory for Zionism has been an ever-steepening descent toward the horizon of Jewish consciousness. In Hazony's view, the gravitational force for this descent has been provided in large part by the writings of the great Hebrew University sociologist Martin Buber and his academic and literary descendents.The labors of these three men; Herzl, Ben-Gurion and Buber, described concisely but with insight and passion, provide the narrative thread for Hazony's book. His views are of course much more in line with the nation-state ideas of Herzl and Ben-Gurion, but he treats the universalist ideas of Buber with intellectual rigor and fairness. This is not suprising, because for Hazony, ideas are what matter most. Herzl's famous phrase "No man is strong or wealthy enough to move a people, only an idea can do that," is a good one sentence summary of Hazony's main theme. Ideas created modern Israel. Ideas have brought it to its current self-doubting impasse. What Israel needs now, more than anything else, are ideas big enough to, in Hazony's eloquent closing words "assist the Jewish people to again become a nation of grandeur and a blessing to all who befriend them, perhaps even to all the families of the earth."
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