I'm in my hotel in Cairo, suffering culture shock, and have a little more to say about my new hero, Theodor Herzl.
No movement to change U.S. policy in the Middle East is going to work without including Jews, to a greater or lesser extent. To capture Jews, you cannot just batter Zionism. You can’t go around with a big anti-Zionist button–as I generally do. Because Zionism won, more than 60 years ago.
To be an effective counter to Zionism within the Jewish community, you must understand why it is that Zionism won, and why Jews from Franz Kafka to Noam Chomsky to Douglas Feith were swept up in this movement; and you must honor that impulse.
Herzl was a political genius, a Jewish Niccolo Macchiaveli. And why did a rich, successful, assimilating journalist, a bad Jew by his own description, who didn’t know his ass from his elbow on a synagogue altar, why did Herzl throw himself in with Jewish nationalism. For a very simple reason: Jewish dignity.
Herzl was shocked, in his mid-30s, to discover that there were limits on his own achievement in Europe. He had bought the promise of western society: That Jews were emancipated and with their unique gifts could do anything in those societies. And then he realized that they could not, there was a glass ceiling, a wall of vituperation. He was as upset about this as Gloria Steinem or Frederick Douglass and basically threw his career and life away to do something abut it.
The central message of Herzl's experience (reading the Diaries) is that he hated the humiliation of anti-Semitism so much that he first thought to convert the Jews en masse, before he elected the better route, to use Jewish powers to cultivate the leaders of European nations. As I said before, he wears a stiff smile as the Kaiser and his aides crack anti-Semitic jokes.
So concerned is he with his dignity, that in all his meetings, Herzl frets about what he is wearing. Do his gloves match his morning coat. Did he remove the right glove too early? Why is Max Nordau showing up at the First Zionist Congresss in a frock coat, not white tie, as he was commanded?
The emphasis on Jewish dignity is why he captured the imagination of the Jews, and why privileged intellectuals in New York can speak even today about the national liberation movement of the Jewish people.
The problems with Zionism, which are now defeating it, are nationalism and the Israel lobby—19th century based race-based thought, and the manipulation of western elites. But the beauty of Zionism is that it was a movement of human dignity.
This is the heart of Herzl that we can seize on. The best moment in the Diaries, which unfortunately I did not bring with me, is when Herzl having grandly founded the Jewish state in 1896, asks three years later, What is the Testament of the Jewish People? And his answer is: Make your state in such a way that the stranger will feel comfortable among you.
This line comes as a thunderclap. Well nothing like that has happened. The great teaching of Herzl, human dignity and the abiding of the minority in your land, has been destroyed by the Jewish state. I guess this makes me post-Zionist. Zionism won, and Zionism has now failed. But the way to lead Jews away from Zionism and forward, into the 21st century, now, is to embrace the greatness in Herzl.
