It may seem surprising that, while the state of Israel has become a vibrant economy, a formidable military power, and a beacon of Western democracy and culture in the Middle East, Jewish religious opposition to Zionism has refused to vanish. Such antipathy deliberately ignores all these achievements and focuses on something quite different: how Zionism and the state of Israel have transformed what it means to be a Jew.
The transformation of a community bound together by a commitment to the Torah into an ethnic nation committed to a state is the main reason of the enduring Judaic opposition to Zionism.
Both Zionists and their adversaries agree that Zionism consummated the sharp break in Jewish history begun with the emancipation and secularization of the Jews of Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. Zionism spread among Jews who rejected religion and promoted a secular Jewish identity. A striking example of how Jewish nationalism came to be a substitute for Judaism was the call issued in 1923 by a young Jew to Vladimir Jabotinsky, the Russian Zionist leader: “Our life is dull and our hearts are empty, for there is no God in our midst; give us a God, sir, worthy of dedication and sacrifice, and you will see what we can do.”
It is thus natural that most serious opposition to Zionism has come from those who see the Zionist identity as a revolt against Judaism. When Zionism began to take root at the turn of the 20th century, most rabbinic authorities saw it as a dangerous tool to tear the Jews away from Torah and its commandments. Numerically, the Judaic opposition to Zionism may seem negligible, but Jewish history shows that rigorous minorities tend to become triumphant majorities.
While the rabbinical critics of Zionism express solidarity with their fellow Jews, in Israel or elsewhere, for them Jewish unity must be articulated around the Torah, rather than the flag. They prey for “a peaceful dismantlement of the Zionist regime” and often draw their inspiration from the recent collapse of the redoubtable Soviet rule that occurred without violence. Although quite a few Orthodox Jews may in practice have embraced the Zionist outlook, their attitude remains circumstantial. Most of them would be reluctant to reject, or even to attenuate, the authority of a Chofetz Chaim or a Brisker Rov, of a Satmar Rebbe or a Lubavitcher Rebbe, all of whom articulated opposition to Zionism.
Israelis usually take this opposition more seriously than do diaspora Jews. “I am not religious and I do not follow the current fashion among Israeli intellectuals of finding fault with Zionism and its history,” writes Professor Joseph Agassi of Tel Aviv University. “However, as an Israeli patriot and as a philosopher, I consider it essential to integrate the discourse of Judaic anti-Zionism into the badly needed public debate about our past, present and future.”
We can all gain by heeding this Israeli patriot’s opinion: Jewish opposition to Zionism draws its strength from classical Judaism and raises questions that should not be ignored.