Ehud Luz. Wrestling with an Angel: Power, Morality and Jewish Identity, trans. Michael Swirsky. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. 350 pp.

Abstract

Perhaps no subject is more actual than the relationship of Zionism and the State of Israel to the exercise of military power. Ehud Luz's passionate cri de coeur appears, at first glance, to cover much the same ground as Anita Shapira's earlier Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881–1948: both books analyze comprehensively the way Zionist thinkers, writers, and activists struggled with the moral limitations on the use of force and violence in the acquisition of Jewish sovereignty. But Shapira's focus is more on political history, while Luz treats primarily writers and rabbis, ranging from the ultra-Orthodox pacifist Aharon Shmuel Tamares, the Labor Zionist poet Natan Alterman, the messianic Zionist Zvi Yehuda Kook, and the secular apocalyptic Uri Zvi Greenberg. Where Shapira ends her story with what she describes as the emergence of a new Israeli mentality in the wake of the 1948 war, Luz brings the debates up to virtually the present day. Shapira leaves readers—perhaps unwittingly—with the impression that the values of havlagah (self-restraint) which characterized Labor Zionism in the 1930s were largely replaced by a more ruthless ethos of retaliation: after 1948, Labor Zionism came to adopt the position of its Revisionist archrival. Yet, as Luz demonstrates, the debates of the prewar period continued, if in a new key, in the half-century after Israeli sovereignty.