Ruin of Israel long been foreseen
Late Zionist philosopher: Brutality Zionism’s penultimate stage
“The national pride and euphoria that followed the Six-Day War are temporary and will bring us from proud, rising nationalism to extreme, messianic, ultranationalism. The third stage will be brutality and the final stage will be the end of Zionism.” These are the words of no anti-Zionist, who are multiplying rapidly, but a self-proclaimed Zionist philosopher. However, Yeshayahu Leibowitz did not live long enough to see how far ahead of everyone else in Israel he was and how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is seemingly taking it upon himself to prove these predictions true. Described as “the conscience of Israel” by no less an eminence than Sir Isaiah Berlin, he arguably always had the best interests of Jews at heart. But what makes Leibowitz stand out from everyone who fulfills this criterion is that he was also not afraid to speak up to politicians with no foresight and/or sense of humanity that failed to bring Israel back from the path of self-destruction.
What self-defense?
“Israel has a right to defend itself.” It is a refrain frequently invoked to justify Israeli responses to attacks launched against its citizens by Palestinian fighters. Yet not every Israeli has accepted that truism. Indeed, if there is a single individual who best represents the challenge to such thinking it is the late Yeshayahu Leibowitz.
A fierce embodiment of the Socratic gadfly, Leibowitz (1903–1994) was unafraid to use strong language to criticize Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian people and territories, which commenced in 1967.
“The corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the State of Israel,” he said in his typically provocative style. For Leibowitz, the occupation meant that Israel forfeited its right to retaliate in self-defense, and he was ever vocal about this position.
His outspokenness, eloquence, and polymathy helped establish him as Israel’s premier public intellectual.
A secular brand of Zionism
Yeshayahu Leibowitz was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1903 into a family of religious Jews. They were Zionists, adherents of the pan-national movement founded in Europe whose goal was to establish a sovereign state for the Jewish people in their historical homeland, namely, the land of Israel. A brilliant pupil, Leibowitz studied chemistry and philosophy at the University of Berlin, and then medicine in Koln and Heidelberg, before moving to Basel to finish his medical degree while the Nazis rose to power in Germany. In 1934, he immigrated to Palestine and took an appointment as a professor of biochemistry, and later neurophysiology, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he taught for nearly six decades. In addition to publishing numerous books and articles on everything from the history of science to the philosophy of Maimonides, he was the editor of the Encyclopedia Hebraica, and a frequent public speaker on Jewish thought, ethics, and philosophy.
Like his relatives, Leibowitz was a committed lifelong Zionist, yet he grew disillusioned by the use of Judaism as a political tool and as a justification for Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories. As an antidote, he developed his own secular brand of Zionism, which was simply “the endeavor to liberate Jews from being ruled by the Gentiles,” as he wrote in his 1992 book Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State.
Leibowitz’s positions were shaped by his understanding of Judaism as a religion of praxis, i.e., a normative system of mitzvot, biblical commandments in the Torah observed by practicing Jews, not as a political ideology or a national identity. Contrary to recent interpretations of Zionism inflected with religious and messianic flavors that fail to realize it is “a purely political movement”, Leibowitz challenged the notion that the Jewish people have a divine right to the land of Israel. He reminds us that even though there has been ideological yearning for return, “Judaism existed for 18 centuries without statehood and without territory.”
He moreover warned of the dangers of idolizing sovereignty and military power. Divinely sanctioned land claims were, for Leibowitz, tantamount to a form of tyranny, or as he called it, “Judeo-fascism”. Unfazed by any backlash, Leibowitz condemned the invocation of messianism and the sanctification of military power. These, he said, amounted to “a modern incarnation of false prophecy” and “a prostitution of the Jewish religion”. Since the nineteenth century, he maintained, Jewish people are no longer defined by Judaism, and there’s nothing that Israel can do because “the crisis is not a political one” and “the state is not a repository of values”. The occupation led to the erroneous belief that military force can be useful for solving political problems, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
After 1967, when Israel captured the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the so-called Six-Day War, after fighting Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, Leibowitz warned about the heavy moral price Israel would pay for using sacred terminology to describe its victory. Ascribing religious significance to the state and hiding its aggression behind a facade of religious piety constitutes a form of idolatry, he argued, that leads to moral atrocities committed in the name of the state. On the massacre in the village of Qibya in 1953, Leibowitz wrote (translated by Moti Mizrahi from Hebrew):
“We must ask ourselves: where do these young people come from, who have no moral qualms about carrying out such atrocities, and who have the urge to carry out such acts of vengeance? These young people are not the rabble. Rather, they grew up on and were educated in the values of Zionism. They are the product of applying the religious language of the scared to social and national affairs. This practice is common in our education system and in our public advocacy.”
In Leibowitz’s schema, there can be no religious claim to the land of Israel because any such a claim is based on a confusion “between the Jewish people as the bearer of Judaism and the sovereign state instituted by these people as its instrument”. Moreover, Leibowitz denied that the Land of Israel was holy and that the Jews had a special right to it, writing that “the idea that a specific country or location has an intrinsic ‘holiness’ is an indubitably idolatrous idea” and that “talk of rights is pure nonsense. No nation has a right to any land.”
From persecuted to persecutor
Though Leibowitz recognized the value of Israel being a sovereign state with supreme authority within its territory, he also warned of the danger that would come from elevating Israel’s sovereignty above all else. “Sovereignty is a lofty and precious value for Israel,” he said, “for it means that the Jewish people will not be subject to other nations. But elevating the power contained within statehood to a supreme value is a very major source of harm.”
From the perspective of the government of Israel, the 1967 War was a spectacular victory. Israel defeated the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in less than a week. It also captured the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. Leibowitz did not celebrate the win. Instead, he articulated his prediction that Israel would now become the rodef (persecutor) rather than the nirdaf (persecuted) as the Jewish people were in the golah (diaspora) before the 1948 establishment of the state.
“What happened in June 1967 transformed Israel,” he said in an interview in 1985, “into an instrument for the violent domination of another people; this, I fear, may be the ruin of the state of Israel; Jews here may go the route of the white minority in South Africa.” In other words, the day after that victory in 1967 Israel “decided” that it is now engaged in a war of conquest, rather than defense as evidenced by continuous settlement expansion. He even correctly predicted that there may come a day in this war of conquest when “the US may pressure Israel by cutting back aid”. He explained in the same interview, lambasting those who think Israel will always be a strategic asset to the US regardless of its actions:
“Remember Vietnam? Three American presidents ruined their political careers because of Vietnam. After a while, the American people could stand it no longer, and the US withdrew. I think it might be the same for Israel; sooner or later, the American people will get tired of supporting our dirty policies. Why shouldn’t they? We are mercenaries for America’s interests, just as South Vietnam was a regional mercenary for the US. And all the aid we receive from the US is corrupting Israel’s society and economy. We invested about $4 billion in Sinai before we evacuated it, and the Lebanese war cost us about $3 billion. These are the fruits of colonialism and imperialism.”
It is important to emphasize how radical Leibowitz’s ideas were at the time — almost heretical. After all, European Jews were themselves victims of persecution and genocide only decades before. Leibowitz forced his fellow citizens — many of them concentration camp survivors and refugees — to question whether the trauma of the Holocaust justified the occupation of the Palestinian people.
Furthermore, he warned of the negative consequences for both sides of the conflict. “Today, Jews have security everywhere except in the state of Israel,” he said, long before the October 7 attack by the Palestinian resistance group Hamas. The occupation, Leibowitz predicted, would corrode Israel’s social fabric. It will “bring about a catastrophe for the Jewish people as a whole; it will undermine the social structure that we have created in the state and cause the corruption of individuals, both Jew and Arab.” The occupation would also hasten the destruction of democracy in Israel, where Jews enjoy rights and liberties, such as freedom of expression and movement, while in the occupied territories, Palestinians are denied those same freedoms. There can be no true democracy when people are deprived of their civil and political rights, Leibowitz argued. For that reason, he supported conscientious objectors and called on Israeli soldiers to refuse to serve in the occupied territories.
Long-term solution over conflict management
Leibowitz also advocated for what is known as a “two-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is premised on the idea that just as the Jews cannot deny the existence of the Palestinians, the Palestinian people cannot deny the existence of the Jewish people. Both have a right to exist. He believes that the “great victory of 1967” was really a curse in disguise because it prompted some Israelis to think about depriving the Palestinian people of their rights.
“(Golda Meir) claimed there was no Palestinian people, but the Palestinians consider themselves to be a people, and that is the decisive point. Most historians and sociologists deny the existence of a Jewish people, most historians and sociologists. However, we are not interested in the opinion of other people as to whether the Jewish people really exists. It’s our business. The same goes for the Palestinians; it is not Israel’s business to decide whether a Palestinian people exists or does not exist.”
In his book, Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State (1992), Leibowitz wrote, “Only one way out of this historically created impasse is feasible in the present situation, even if neither side recognizes it as just nor finds it really acceptable: partition of the country between the two peoples,” recognizing that a two-state solution requires an unconditional withdrawal from occupied lands.
After the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, Israel, under the leadership of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), under the leadership of Yasser Arafat, came close to implementing a two-state solution with the backing of the Clinton Administration. But extremists sabotaged the effort.
These days, a two-state solution seems like a distant, fading memory. In 2005, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu resigned in protest at the Israeli withdrawal from the occupied Gaza Strip. Since then, right-wing governments — including the current one headed yet again by Netanyahu — have focused more on managing the conflict than on finding a long-term resolution to it through peace negotiations.
Although they both supported a two-state solution, Rabin and Leibowitz were hardly political allies. In 1993, when Leibowitz was set to receive the prestigious Israel Prize, the highest honor the government can bestow, Rabin — who was army chief of staff during the Six-Day War — threatened to boycott the ceremony should organizers proceed with such plans. Rabin objected to the philosopher’s persistent call for conscientious objection to military service in the occupied territories. Leibowitz withdrew his nomination but remained a fierce social critic.
In early 2023, a group of Israeli reservists announced their refusal to serve in protest of a proposed controversial judicial overhaul led by the religious-nationalist and messianic factions of Netanyahu’s government. In an interview for 60 Minutes, members of the organization Ahim La’neshek (Brothers in Arms), called the overhaul “an existential threat” to Israel, echoing the same dire warnings Leibowitz sounded decades ago.
The article was compiled using resources from JSTOR archives.