Table Of ContentA POLITICAL THEORY
FOR THE JEWISH PEOPLE
A POLITICAL
THEORY FOR THE
JEWISH PEOPLE
CHAIM GANS
1
1
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To the memory of my parents Anshel and Yehudit Gans
CONTENTS
Preface ix
1. ZIONISMS AND POST-ZIONISMS 1
1.1. A Variety of Approaches 1
1.2. The Post-Zionist Challenge 8
1.3. The Narrative versus Its Interpretations 15
2. THE FACTS OF THE ZIONIST NARRATIVE 20
2.1. Was There a Protagonist? 20
2.2. The Protagonist, Its Age, and Its Nature 22
2.3. The Protagonist’s Adventures 43
3. THE MORALITY OF THE ZIONIST NARRATIVE 57
3.1. Three Zionisms 57
3.2. Proprietary Zionism 60
3.3. Hierarchical Zionism 72
3.4. Egalitarian Zionism 83
4. THREE POST-ZIONISMS 102
4.1. Between Hegemony and Post-Zionism 102
4.2. Contesting Zionism’s Historical Project 104
4.3. Civic Post-Zionism 111
4.4. Postcolonial Post-Zionism 118
4.5. Neodiasporic Post-Zionism 127
5. EGALITARIAN ZIONISM 141
5.1. Egalitarian Zionism and Its Rivals 141
5.2. Zionist Consistency and Historiography 142
5.3. Zionisms, Post-Zionisms, and Peace in Israel/Palestine 153
6. JEWISH NATIONALISM, ISRAEL, AND WORLD JEWRY 170
6.1. World Jewry: Exile or Diaspora? 170
6.2. Proprietary Zionism: Negation of Exile and Denial of Diaspora 173
6.3. Post-Zionism: Denial of both Exile and Diaspora 186
6.4. Egalitarian Zionism: Negation of Exile and Affirmation of Diaspora 199
Afterword 219
Notes 231
Bibliography 277
Index 291
PREFACE
The title of this book is ambitious, and perhaps so also is the book
itself—not only in its purpose, but also in the breadth of the spheres
within which it argues and the range of its adversaries. The book argues
both foundationally and in an applicative manner within the spheres of
historiography, history of ideas, analytic political morality, and consti-
tutional theory. It has both normative and explanatory components. Its
adversaries are mainstream Israeli Zionism on the one hand and Israeli
and Anglo-American-Jewish post-Zionism on the other. The latter’s crit-
icisms of Zionism represent also the main Palestinian and Arab depic-
tions and criticisms of the Zionist political idea and historical movement.
I conceived these ambitions for my book as a result of the way my
thinking about Zionism developed. I didn’t intend this ambitiousness
when setting out to write the book; it came as a discovery for me, which
I was happy to give expression to in the title. In 2008 Oxford University
Press published my A Just Zionism: On the Morality of the Jewish State.
That book deals mainly with questions concerning the status of the Jewish
community constituted by the Zionist movement in historic Palestine /
Land of Israel vis-à-vis the status of the Palestinians. Though it was very
critical of Israel’s major Zionist policies since the 1970s, it still argued
in favor of the Zionist political idea. A Just Zionism presented an inde-
pendent, constructive argument, free from polemics. It developed and
modified my general ideas on nationalism as elaborated in my book The
Limits of Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and applied
them to the concrete case of Zionism and Israeli nationalism. After the
publication of A Just Zionism I had the strong feeling that its theoretical
and practical significance could not become fully clear either to myself
or, probably, to its readers unless I compared it with other current inter-
pretations of the Zionist political idea and historical movement, and the
major criticisms of them made by the post-Zionist intellectuals. The
latter’s major arguments are of two types. One concerns the social ontol-
ogy underlying the factual components of the Zionist narrative, which
the post-Zionists claim is necessarily an essentialist social ontology. The
other type concerns political morality. Post-Zionist criticisms of the facts
of the Zionist narrative (mainly of pre-Zionist Judaism) led me to criti-
cize both this historiography itself and its post-Zionist critics, and to
