Better Baruch Spinoza than Meir Kahane?

On the left, you’re looking at the philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), the Amsterdam-born son of Portuguese Sephardic conversos. He was a radical secular rationalist. This soft-spoken, eloquent thinker reached for thought and life beyond religious orthodoxies and the tribe, a position for which he was expelled from the Jewish community. The exile sat well with his intellectual disposition.

On the right, you’re looking at Spinoza’s antithesis, Meir Kahane (1932-1990). He was born in Brooklyn and immigrated to Israel in 1971. A Jewish supremacist, a religious fanatic, and a terrorist, he championed a Jewish theocracy totally cleansed of Palestinians. Itamar Ben Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, is one of his many devoted followers. Once deemed garishly extremist, his ideology has become mainstream in Israeli politics.

Better a lasting peace than the eternal sword? Better one civic state than apartheid? Two states than mass expulsion? Avishai Margalit’s Decent Society than Bibi Netanyahu’s genocidal society? “A light to the nations” in the diaspora than Sparta in the Eastern Mediterranean?

Better Baruch Spinoza than Meir Kahane?

These are the tensions that illuminate Israel’s profound crisis as it approaches its seventy-ninth birthday. They have a contemporary ring, but at their core they draw on an age-old quest, at once intellectual and existential: the Jewish Question. They are also partly inspired by Philip Roth’s dueling binaries in his 1993 novel Operation Shylock:

Better to be marginal neurotics, anxious assimilationists, and everything else the Zionists despise, better to lose the state than to lose your moral being by unleashing a nuclear war. Better Irving Berlin than Ariel Sharon. Better Irving Berlin than the Wailing Wall. Better Irving Berlin than Holy Jerusalem! What does owning Jerusalem, of all places, have to do with being Jews in 1988?

In 1988, diasporism, which posits that a thriving Jewish presence is best enriched and sustained in dispersion rather than a sovereign state, was all but expunged from Zionism’s historical narrative. Assimilationists, anxious and otherwise, who believed assimilation in the home countries was the safer and more enlightened life for Jews, were branded traitors or cowards, even by those who lived outside Israel. The general impression, and it was a correct one, was that their position was as insignificant as their numbers. Two Hebrew words beautifully captured the psychology of the act of migrating to and leaving Zion: to migrate to it was an act of ascent, Aliyah; to leave was to be a yored, one who descends.

But by 1988, the Jewish state’s own choices were animating Roth’s mischievous rooting for Berlin’s path against Sharon’s. He had rich material to work with: the entrenched occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem; the ever-expanding settlements; the brutal suppression of the 1987-1993 Intifada, which had first erupted in Gaza; the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and seizure of its south… These aggressions would not only belie Zionism’s claim to unimpeachable innocence and invite closer scrutiny of its legacy in Palestine, but would also, more alarmingly, begin to cast doubt on its raison d’être: that a homeland would finally offer peace, safety, and security to Judaism’s children.

The Jewish Question, therefore, was never truly settled, even as dissenters were all but written out of mainstream discourse on the Zionist project. And that Israel, in temperament and conduct, had itself aggravated, even envenomed, the very question its creation was supposed to answer is a searing indictment of political Zionism’s pretensions. In the aftermath of Hamas’s terrifying October 7 attacks, and Israel’s genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing campaigns in the West Bank, soul-searching of extraordinary reach and gravity has taken place across Jewish constituencies worldwide. The perennial question sits squarely at its heart.

But tragically, there is nothing remotely unexpected about Zionism’s epic failure. It was foreseen, most poignantly by a long line of Jewish critics, all, in Adam Shatz’s eloquent telling, prophets outcast. Such was their prophecy in the early days, when Jewish settlements were mere scatterings in Palestine; such was their dire warning in the euphoric formative years of the state; such was their lamentation when it conquered Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem in 1967 and kept them; such are their progeny’s condemnations today, at the height of Israel’s might and at the nadir of its moral purchase.

People like me who live on the other side of the fence can only bear witness to this very painful, uniquely Jewish conversation. To my mind, far more than our own longstanding quarrel with this Sparta, it is the most consequential for the story of Israel-Palestine. For the story of Israel and Lebanon, Israel and Syria, and the region, and Iran, and Turkey, and the world. And inevitably, Israel and the Jewish Question.

In a recent interview with Haaretz, the aging Israeli sage Margalit expressed doubt about the durability of a society “burdened… by three tensions, any one of which could tear a country apart: Jews and Arabs, Mizrahim and Ashkenazim, religious and secular.” He sounded like a Zionist “mugged by reality.” And what has the wise man always feared most?

That leaving this country will become like leaving the kibbutz. I watched people leave the kibbutz one by one, quietly at first, almost ashamed, and then openly, asking for a pickup truck to help move their stuff. The state of Israel is connected to the wider world because of a population of about 200,000 people. If that population is harmed and weakened, what happens then?

It is not clear which 200,000 Margalit has in mind. I have to assume he is referring to the Israeli elite that might still form the potential nucleus of a sane nation and a Decent Society. If my conjecture is valid, the philosopher’s hope for his country is indeed faint. Because had they the interest, let alone the wherewithal, to re-engineer Zionism’s marrow and denude it of its messianism, he would have nothing to fear. 

On Another Note

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ essay in the June issue of Vanity Fair, “The Next Black President,” is seminal. It is an extraordinarily sophisticated study of empire, by turns layered and straightforward, sprawling and succinct, scathing and forgiving. It spans continents and histories and peoples, but cradles the black American and Palestinian experience. Among its many thought-provoking insights is the devastating demands empire makes on the liberated descendants of its victims when they accede to power, and the inheritance they betray in yielding to them:

Perhaps it is naive to expect Harris, a candidate for the American presidency, to speak in the same register as [Fannie Lou] Hamer, who was its antagonist. But it was that very antagonist whom Harris and her party claimed as a champion. The dynamic is familiar—Barack Obama’s claim of Martin Luther King Jr. was similarly incongruent. That is because a black presidency is a contradiction—it owes its power to a movement against racist state violence at home but seeks an office which has always practiced racist state violence abroad.

But what was known in 1964 was largely abandoned in 2024, and what was offered instead was a questionable survivalist theory of democracy—one that proposed to erect a shield over one group while providing weaponry to destroy another. For reasons moral, pragmatic, and perhaps mostly ancestral, the next black presidency will have to think bigger. To its list of adversaries—which include a renewed white supremacy, a rapacious billionaire class, an energetic Christian nationalism—it must add another, perhaps more formidable than them all: empire.

Magnificent, in my register!

Amal Ghandour’s biweekly column, “This Arab Life,” appears in The Markaz Review every other Friday, as well as in her Substack, and is syndicated in Arabic in Al Quds Al Arabi.

Opinions published in The Markaz Review reflect the perspective of their authors and do not necessarily represent TMR.