Israel in the world: from Sparta to court Jew

Under Netanyahu’s government, and with the war in Gaza, the State of Israel has found itself increasingly isolated on the international stage. The Israeli Prime Minister, a promoter of power politics, would like to make this a source of pride: “We are going to be super-Sparta.” But, asks Danny Trom, isn’t Spartan sovereignty a pseudo-sovereignty, especially for the Jewish people? Examining the political lessons drawn by Hannah Arendt from Jewish history, the sociologist identifies the requirements that the Jewish state must meet if it wants to ensure more lasting autonomy.

 

 

The agreement on the release of hostages and the end of the war in Gaza, brokered by the US president, was celebrated with great fanfare in the Knesset. It was a spectacular event, marked by two apparent motives: on the one hand, relief at seeing the hostages return and unanimous gratitude towards Trump, the “new Cyrus,” as he was called, the foreign king who liberated Israel; on the other, unease at the absolute domination of the United States, which holds the State of Israel in its hand and treats it as a vassal, as illustrated by the ostentatious deference shown to Trump. The relief tinged with unease reveals the truth of the moment: the State of Israel is more than ever under the protection of the greatest power of the day, to which it seems almost entirely subordinate. This directly contradicts Netanyahu’s recent and much-discussed statement that “We are going to be super-Sparta.” Launched as a challenge in the face of the growing isolation of the State of Israel shortly before the end of the war, the Prime Minister’s statement made a strong impression.

But if we take the trouble to put the statement back into its original context, the message was more hesitant: ”We are going to be Athens and super-Sparta. […] We have no choice.”

Athens versus Sparta: the founding metaphor

In our European imagination, Athens and Sparta are not just two ancient cities in conflict. Regardless of what they really were, they function as signifiers that are opposed in every way. Athens is the name of democracy, Sparta that of military oligarchy. Athens connotes freedom and openness to the world, Sparta authoritarianism and autarkic withdrawal into itself. Athens is the place of thought, Sparta that of war. Thus posited, the polarity excludes the possibility of being both Athens and Sparta at the same time. The Spartan future of the State of Israel, in a modern world that has Athens as its ideal, forces Netanyahu to specify that Israel is also Athens. But since Athens and Sparta represent two possibilities, one praised, the other reviled, it is the specter of the degeneration of Israel-Athens into Israel-Sparta that the Prime Minister raises for those who have been observing the internal politics of this state since the current coalition government came to power.

For Arendt, the agreement with the Arabs is the very condition for the salvation of the Jewish national home: either war will destroy the nascent state, taking the home with it in its downfall, or its victory will condemn it to become a Sparta against its will, which is tantamount to the spiritual destruction of the Jewish national home.

Indeed, since its birth, despite being born in war, the State of Israel has always thought of itself as a super-Athens in the making, unfortunately forced into increasing militarization. Its declaration of independence immediately and unequivocally established the principle of equality for all citizens and a commitment to peace with its neighbors. Despite the extreme heterogeneity of its population, in particular a significant Arab-Palestinian component, and despite the incessant external aggression it has faced since its inception, the State of Israel, as soon as it was proclaimed, gave itself the architecture of a representative democracy. And the Supreme Court, the cornerstone of the rule of law, which originally did not have as wide-ranging powers as it does today, was already able to restrain the executive branch in matters of war. Over the long term, Israel has effectively managed to increasingly conform to the spirit of Athens by perfecting modern democracy in its various facets.

The current coalition led by Netanyahu is unprecedented in that, by triggering the judicial reform crisis, it has reversed this trend for the first time, albeit slowed down by widespread popular and sectoral protest. The vast majority of Israelis certainly want Israel to remain Athens, but when expressed by the Prime Minister, this desire seems purely rhetorical. It clashes with a reality that directly contradicts it. The actions already taken or announced by this government simply belie any intention to align itself with this ideal known as Athens, continually demonstrating a desire to divert the State of Israel from its historical trajectory.

Since its birth, despite being born in war, the State of Israel has always thought of itself as a super-Athens in the making, unfortunately forced into increasing militarization.

Yet Athens, like Sparta, is devoted to war. Democracy does not exclude this in any way. But it arises as a war waged by citizens who protect the city they form, whereas Sparta, governed by a military caste, makes war the political art par excellence. It is therefore no coincidence that Israel is positively associated with Sparta in the Prime Minister’s speech, even if he hopes that this comparison will be perceived exclusively as correlating with the State of Israel’s relations with the outside world, which isolates it. For the mobilization of citizens presupposes democracy, since each combatant adheres to the objectives of the city insofar as they proceed from the general will. Here, the discord regularly distilled by the authorities in Israeli society weakens this process.

Thus, becoming Sparta in terms of the state’s relationship with the outside world prevents that same state from remaining Athens in terms of domestic policy. And the current coalition, by eroding the mechanisms that control, limit, and possibly hinder the power of the executive, thereby altering the balance of power, is working stubbornly to increase the strength of the city, which, step by step, almost imperceptibly, could one day, wake up as a super-Sparta that will in reality be a sub-Athens. This is why the massive demonstrations in Israel since the current government took office are calling for the rescue of democracy, and therefore of the State of Israel in the form it took at its birth.

Hannah Arendt and the specter of Jewish Sparta

Saving the State of Israel: this echoes Hannah Arendt’s article “To Save the Jewish Homeland,” written after the November 29, 1947, resolution of the United Nations General Assembly recommending the partition of Mandatory Palestine between a Jewish state and an Arab state, but before the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948. At this decisive moment, Arendt warned that Zionism had reached a crossroads: one path led to the creation of a state for the Jews, at the risk of destroying the Yishuv (Jewish society in Palestine) in war; the other towards the preservation of the Yishuv, which would require an agreement with the Arabs and therefore the renunciation of the creation of a separate state. The alternative posed by Arendt is simple: if the Yishuv becomes an independent state, it will have to face its Arab neighbors, who are determined to fight it, militarily, at the risk of its destruction. The possibility of a state for the Jews is imminent, because, as Arendt observes, this option is desired by the dominant forces of the Yishuv and by the Jewish world, which is now overwhelmingly in favor of it. Arendt believes that this choice is unrealistic because it is suicidal, given the balance of power at the time of her writing: if, by chance, this state were to be destroyed in war, it would spell the end of the national home from which it originated. This destruction, Arendt believes, would be an “unimaginable” catastrophe, the greatest that could befall the Jewish world, perhaps the beginning of the dissolution of the Jewish people itself.

But in this pivotal period, with a state for the Jews looming on the horizon, Arendt goes a step further, as she had already outlined in her famous article “Zionism Reconsidered,” published in Menorah in 1945: if this state emerges victorious from the war, a hypothesis she seriously considered (and which indeed proved to be correct), it will emerge isolated, besieged on all sides, facing the incessant hostility of its Arab neighbors. It will then, she predicts, be entirely absorbed by the struggle for survival and condemned to being nothing more than a “Spartan” tribal state. The Spartan becoming of this state will cut it off both from its regional environment and from the Jewish world in its Zionist and non-Zionist components, because it will fall short of the Jewish expectations nurtured throughout the people’s exile. The figure of the Zionist pioneer, capable, in Arendt’s own words, of “marvelous achievements,” will be replaced by the soldier devoted primarily to combat. Stationed at the borders, his gaze fixed on the external threat, he will turn away from his already partially accomplished work, leading to its disintegration. Arendt concludes that agreement with the Arabs is the very condition for the salvation of the Jewish national home: either war will destroy the nascent state, taking the home with it in its downfall, or its victory will condemn it to become a Sparta against its will, which is tantamount to the spiritual destruction of the Jewish national home.

Pseudo-sovereignty and the protectorate trap

Arendt was clearly mistaken. In the end, the opposite happened. It was the state that saved the national home. It certainly militarized itself to deal with aggression from its neighbors, but without renouncing its Athenian roots. Here, it is not so much that Arendt misjudged the balance of power on the ground during this chaotic period, since the victory of the Yishuv, which became the State of Israel, was widely doubted at the time. What led Arendt to her erroneous diagnosis, from the two decades of latent civil war in Palestine, which irresistibly led to a situation where a separate state appeared to be the only possible outcome, is that she did not draw a realistic conclusion.

In retrospect, it is therefore her plea for a federalist (or binational) solution to the conflict that seems unrealistic to us. Arendt’s opposition, on principle, to trading the Yishuv, the Jewish society of Palestine, for the state form, stems from her general vision of the postwar world, which she expressed as early as 1945: the only “antidote” to the return of the “walking corpse” that is the sovereign state, definitively discredited in Europe, is the federative reorganization of the world^[1] This is why, in this circumstance, she aligned herself with the position of the short-lived Ichud party formed by members of Brith Shalom, whose spokesperson was Yehuda Magnes, president of the University of Jerusalem: the future of the Yishuv as a state implies for it ipso facto, in the belligerent context of the Middle East, the future of this Jewish state as a Sparta, should it come to pass.

The Spartan future of this state will cut it off both from its regional environment and from the Jewish world in its Zionist and non-Zionist components, because it will fall short of the Jewish expectations nurtured throughout the people’s exile.

Equally in retrospect, what the State of Israel has proven is that a state of permanent war is compatible with democracy. And that the continuing state of emergency in which it has had to operate has not destroyed the rule of law. The phrase attributed to the Prussian minister Friedrich von Schrötter (or to Octave Mirabeau), according to which “Prussia is not a state with an army, but an army with a state,” has sometimes been transposed to the State of Israel .” Certainly, the IDF is one of the pillars of the State of Israel, and a military career has often been a springboard to the highest political offices. However, the military drew its credibility, not its legitimacy, from its position as commander-in-chief. And while in Prussia the senior officer corps was dominated by the aristocracy, it was the labor elite from the kibbutzim who populated the IDF command. Nothing here could be further from the aesthetics of the militarized Prussian state: the IDF does not march in goose step, nor does it put on a show in parades; at most, on Independence Day, the sky is torn apart by the air force, as if to signal that Israel has a long reach. Within the army, military salutes are not practiced, and soldiers call their officers by their first names. The informal nature of relations within the military indicates that this army of conscripts and reservists has remained firmly rooted in a particularly vibrant democratic society.

Arendt was definitely wrong, and she knew it. The proof is that in June 1967, after the Six-Day War, she confessed to her friend Mary McCarthy her anxiety about the possibility that the State of Israel would be destroyed by its neighbors. She had probably realized that, under the State of Israel, the national home she wanted to save still existed.

It remains to be seen what Arendt means by the “pseudo-sovereignty” of the Jewish state, the advent of which she fears. We can take a broad view of this: isn’t sovereignty a purely formal quality of any state, whereas in practice it is embedded in a world of widespread interdependencies that limit its scope? This pseudo-sovereignty would then be that of any state, except perhaps for a very great power capable of freeing itself from all limits. Moreover, such a state, if it were to exist, would be absolutely sovereign in order to be “truly” sovereign, and therefore to the detriment of the plurality of a world composed of nations. Historical experience shows that it would also be criminal. Arendt insists on this in her writings on totalitarianism, which made her famous.

But “pseudo-sovereignty” takes on a more specific meaning for us. For Arendt approaches the Middle East conflict from within the coordinates of Jewish politics. How will the emergence of a state for the Jews affect Jewish politics? That is the question she asks. Jews, a dispersed minority, were, wherever they lived and throughout history, forced to submit by collaborating with state powers, thus placing themselves under their dependence. It is based on this observation of the precariousness of the Jews that Arendt considers Herzl’s Zionism to be the first modern expression of an active Jewish politics, independent of the powers that be. Her admiration for Herzl stems from his audacious gesture: a political initiative aimed at freeing Jews from their usual submission, which was entirely vertical and reactive, consisting of supplication and deference to the powers that be.

Hannah Arendt’s admiration for Herzl stems from his audacious gesture: a political initiative aimed at freeing Jews from their usual submission, which was entirely vertical and reactive, consisting of supplication and deference to the powers that be.

With Zionism, reactive Jewish politics was thus transformed into active power. And it is precisely in this process, however desirable, that Jewish politics, Arendt warns, could lose its way, falling back into its old ways. It is here that the phrase “pseudo-sovereignty” takes on a specifically Jewish meaning: the small state that emerged from the Yishuv, surrounded on all sides, will necessarily fall under the dependence and goodwill of a great power. It will then become its servant. At the time Arendt was writing, this could have been the Soviet Union, but in the future it could be the United States, she foresaw. “Pseudo-sovereignty” here means that the existence of the small state will be conditional on the will of a large protective state. It is not that it will fail to be a state, but that in terms of Jewish politics, it will ultimately be regressive.

For the supposed sovereignty acquired, entirely formal, will in reality be nothing more than a mask for heteronomy, Arendt warns. Sovereignty certainly involves an element of illusion, but, as we have noted, this is true of any state. For the Jews, however, it will be a resounding failure, as it would amount to a regression to a past stage in the political condition of the Jews, once entirely determined by chronic insecurity and the search for a protector, which Zionism aims to overcome. Here we can immediately see why Arendt considers that only understanding and cooperation with Arab neighbors can avert this setback: a horizontal alliance with Arab neighbors, forged in the process of decolonization, would render any vertical alliance with a great power unnecessary. By abolishing, or at least mitigating, the external hostility of its neighbors, a more secure and sustainable plan for autonomy emerges.

Rather than deluding itself by aiming for statehood, the independence of Jewish society in Palestine will be strengthened by integrating into a more welcoming environment: “A home that my neighbor does not recognize or respect is not a home, but an illusion, until it becomes a battlefield,” Arendt wrote in 1945 in an article subtitled “Foundation for a Jewish Policy.”^[2] But Arendt pretends here to ignore that Arab hostility toward the Yishuv was constant, while until the mid-1930s, the Zionist movement did not openly or secretly consider the creation of a state for the Jews. If this had been the case, the alternative would not have presented itself to Arendt in such an acute manner at the time she took her position.

The shelter state that has come into being does not erase the problem of ultimate protection, in a context where pressure from its neighbors is constantly exerted on it. Forced to forge a vertical alliance with the greatest power of the moment, namely the United States, the State of Israel now appears to be on the verge of being placed under protection.

This position can be summarized as follows: renouncing a separate state is the only way to free Jews from their tutelage. It follows that the logic of conditional acceptance of Jews, which characterizes the political condition of the diaspora, must give way to the horizontal logic of mutual recognition in which the Yishuv must engage. That this path was obstructed and that the resulting state did not become a new Sparta does not mean, however, that the terms of the problem defined by Arendt are obsolete. For they shed light on the Zionist project in the light of Jewish politics, if we accept that Zionism did indeed aim to free the Jews from all protective tutelage.

The Holocaust demonstrated the necessity of this. And indeed, the State of Israel reflects this movement of self-protection, in the sense that it now appears as the shelter that Jews have given themselves so that it remains open to welcome them. It is likely that a national home could not have fulfilled this function. But the emergence of the State as a refuge does not erase the problem of ultimate protection, in a context where pressure from its neighbors is constantly being exerted on it. Forced to forge a vertical alliance with the greatest power of the moment, namely the United States, the State of Israel now appears to be on the verge of being placed under guardianship. Since all state power is fickle—as the Jews have experienced throughout their exile—the very existence of the Jewish state is then, in times of crisis, suspended at the whim of a sometimes inconsistent protector. As early as 1945, Arendt clearly perceived the historical significance that Zionist policy would have if it were to once again serve the interests of a foreign power: “The result would be a return of the new movement to the traditional methods of shtadlanut [traditional Jewish diplomacy] that the Zionists so strongly criticized and violently denounced.”^[3] Thus, Zionist policy would have been nothing more than a duplication, in the international arena, of Jewish policy, which was always in search of protective guardianship.

For a super-Athens: Israel’s other path

So, the Spartan future touted by Netanyahu is purely illusory, if by that we mean what he was aiming for, namely economic and military self-sufficiency, because in reality the isolation he advocates amounts to the alienation of the State of Israel from the interests of the United States. Sparta’s self-sufficiency was in fact based on incessant military conquests, and we assume that Netanyahu does not envisage Israel’s future in this way. Moreover, there is a constant in the policy of the State of Israel, which Henry Kissinger summed up in a striking phrase: “Israel has no foreign policy, but a domestic policy aimed at ensuring its security.” This policy is therefore consistent with traditional Jewish diplomacy, which has always had the sole aim of establishing alliances to ensure security. But it also risks repeating the mistakes of the past, since the Prime Minister is making the State of Israel as dependent as possible on a guardian who is currently benevolent towards it, but who may in the future be indifferent or hostile. All the signs of such a reversal are already pointing in this direction, including certain statements and decisions by President Trump, the most versatile politician a liberal democracy has ever known. Ukraine, abandoned and publicly humiliated by the American president, is turning to its neighbors for support, but this alternative is not available to the State of Israel. In order to avert such a scenario, any Prime Minister of the State of Israel will be condemned to take on the role of the “Court Jew,” whom Arendt sharply criticized, if only for his ineffectiveness.

But then, what is the alternative here? At the very least, it requires acknowledging what Arendt calls “pseudo-sovereignty.” This must be done while hoping for the irreversibility of the State that has come into being—a State whose existence is overwhelmingly desired by the Jewish world, both Zionist and non-Zionist, as it was when Arendt wrote. For Arendt was not anti-Zionist. That label is now reserved for those who wish to see the destruction of this state and with it the homeland it contains and on which it relies. Arendt’s question can therefore be rephrased as follows: “What can be done to save the Jewish state?”, given that, factually, the national homeland exists and is flourishing within this framework. In order for it to survive, it will have to work towards recognizing its objective interdependencies by multiplying its alliances with the outside world. Rather than a fantasized, unattainable autarky, which would border on dangerous tutelage, it must aim, on its own initiative, a relaxation of hostile external pressure, in order to integrate as much as possible into its environment, despite the chaos that reigns there, and thus make recourse to external protection less urgent.

Standing under the protective wing of a quasi-almighty power certainly confers a soothing sense of security, but it comes at a high price.

On its own initiative, and not under pressure: the Abraham Accords partially respond to this logic, while the long-awaited agreement on the release of hostages and the end of the war in Gaza, which has just come about, was obtained with a good deal of pressure on Israel. And the resolution of the Palestinian problem remains, whether we like it or not, the centerpiece of the process of integrating the State of Israel into its immediate environment. It is on this issue that any cooperative structure that has already been built could potentially collapse. As we are currently seeing, the guardian can force Israel to take the path of cooperation or push it to remain within its sphere of influence. But in either case, we must acknowledge the foresight of H. Arendt. For years, the State of Israel has appeared to the world as the tool of a great power: “for Jews who know their history, this will lead to a global wave of anti-Semitism,” to accusations that not only does this state serve its master and profit from it, but that it conspires to manipulate it.^[4] That is where we are today. Standing under the protective wing of a quasi-almighty power certainly confers a soothing sense of security, but it comes at a high price.

One important consideration remains: desired, actively sought integration does not imply that Israel should resemble the states in the region, but that it should get along and cooperate with them. Israel will then be able to remain a super-Athens, without considering becoming a Sparta as a realistic option. And Zionist policy will avoid sinking into a strict replica of traditional Jewish policy. It will prove that it is a successful attempt to ward off the most obvious dangers, which Jewish history has amply documented.

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Danny Trom