Israel: Why Be Normal?!

David Hazony writes in The National Review about the apparent success of the Zionist dream in granting Jews a state like everyone else:

...Israel is now a modern, developed state, with a strong economy that has, among other achievements, helped to drive forward the Internet revolution. It ranks thirteenth in the world in life expectancy--just below Australia and well above the United States. In sports, the country has become a player despite its size: Israeli soccer standouts compete for top teams in Europe, and Tel Aviv's basketball team has won three European championships in the past seven years. Israel's presence has been felt in the artistic fields as well. The architect for the World Trade Center Memorial, Michael Arad, is Israeli. Supermodel Bar Refaeli made headlines last year thanks to her on-again off-again romance with Leonardo DiCaprio, and an Israeli movie, Beaufort, was recently nominated for best foreign film at the Oscars. Compared to the conditions that prevailed when Herzl was writing, who can argue that the Jews have not normalized?

But it's not so clear that Israel should be hanging around with all the cool 'normal' countries:

No Israeli, after all, wants to adopt the brutal, Hobbesian rules of normal peoples in history--the willingness to use force indiscriminately, to commit atrocities for the sake of securing their existence. Political movements advocating expelling the Palestinians have not simply failed electorally, but have been banned as racist. Israel has had limitless opportunities to be on the darkest side of "normal," yet, with few exceptions, it has refrained from doing so. "Woe unto us," wrote the Zionist philosopher Eliezer Berkovits in 1943, "if the degeneration of the exile should lead us to a Hebrew nationalism along the European pattern. ... Not every form of [a Jewish state] is worth the trouble, and many a form could be unworthy of Judaism."

...Perhaps Israel's critics, despite their warped historical analogies, are right about one thing: Maybe normalcy really is overrated. In the wake of the 2006 Lebanon war, the influential Israeli journalist Ari Shavit suggested that Israel's preoccupation with normalcy had gone too far. The country's lackluster military performance, he argued, was the result of years of neglect stemming from the belief that, with the Oslo accords, Israel had finally entered the long-desired stage of normalcy. "We were poisoned with an illusion of normalcy, " he wrote.

But the constant hunt for normalcy does more than undermine Israel's ability to defend itself; it may also undermine Israel's ability to be genuinely unique. Natan Sharansky, who survived nine years in the gulag without acceding to his captors' demands that he become a normal Soviet citizen, sees the drive for normalcy as a narcotic, which could make Israel irrelevant to Jewish life: "The more 'normal' our nation is, the less appeal it has to Jews everywhere, both in Israel and in the diaspora; on the other hand, the more exceptional we allow Israel to become, the more powerful the idea of the Jewish state will be, in the eyes of all of our people."

Hazony nails it in his conclusion:

...The final problem with the Israeli quest for normalcy is that it is--well, abnormal. Every country has a national narrative that seeks to explain itself as special in some way. (In the United States, it is the widely shared belief in American Exceptionalism.) Why should Israel insist on being any different?

Read the whole thing.

The article is especially noteworthy for putting Zionism in the context of its historical goals.

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