Israeli Politics and Jewish Culture

Abstract

The creation of the State of Israel in 1948 met much resistance. In the intervening twenty-five years the Israeli experience has been subjected to much criticism. Some of this resistance and much of the criticism have come from Jews who feared that the political organization of the state and the concomitant functions of controlling and managing power are antithetical to Jewish cultural and ethical orientations. If, to many Jews, a Jewish soldier or a Jewish policeman were symbols of liberation from the threat of massacres and pogroms and the humiliation of defenselessness against anti-Semitic assaults, to others these figures have represented a setback for the moral purity of the Jew, who exemplifies a higher ethical existence, a retreat from the vision of a transpolitical society. That vision did not include such demands of collective physical and material existence as the delineation of territorial boundaries, the organization and the employment of military power and the assumption of collective responsibility for economic viability.