Herbert Zweibon

The Jewish Revolution by Israel Eldad, philosopher, journalist and underground leader, now reissued by his son Arieh Eldad, serves as a stirring reminder of what Zionism could and should be.

Eldad wrote the book three years after Israel’s brilliant victory in the 1967 War. Israel was at the height of her power, international standing and self-confidence. The seeming impossible dream of restoring Judea and Samaria to the Jewish people had in six short days been realized. Eldad believed that the state’s territorial achievements, its emergence as a geopolitical factor and the awakening of world Jewry to a new solidarity with the State of Israel had opened up the opportunity to fulfill a revolutionary Zionism for the redemption of the entire Jewish people.

In some ways Eldad was prescient. He noted the beginning of Zionist awakening among the Jews of the Soviet Union and believed it would one day become a tide that would carry millions of Soviet Jews to Israel. He believed that the reconversion of Palestine (the name Rome used to wipe out Jewish Israel) into Eretz Israel would go forward. And indeed a few years after the book was published the Gush Emunim movement began to create Jewish communities throughout Judea and Samaria.

Eldad was also prescient in identifying dangers from within, including an apologetic, defensive mindset and a Jewish sense of justice that had failed abroad and to which some Jews now sought to give full rein with a message of peace, love and happiness to the entire Middle East.

Nonetheless the book is full of hope and faith. Eldad writes: “Those parts of Eretz Israel that have been liberated with the nation’s blood and love cannot be given up. …Also from the point of view of our own sense of history and self-esteem such a withdrawal is inconceivable. It goes against our inherent patriotism, our firm conviction that we are not engaged in a campaign of conquest and colonization, but are coming back to Zion, our home.”

Eldad could not have conceived of the depths of the disaster to come. He could not have fathomed how, in little over thirty years, Israel would be acting, as Steve Feldman of the Zionist Organization of America puts it, “like a floundering business liquidating its holdings. Clearance sale. Going out of business after 59 years. Everything must go. No offer, no matter how unreasonable, will be rejected.” Those who guide the state have lost all self-respect, given up the will to live, forfeited even basic rationality. As Eldad’s son notes in the Afterword, the leadership of Israel has become a stone weighing down the Zionist revolution rather than a cornerstone in the edifice supporting it.

Eldad argues that “an essential non-conformity is the primary characteristic of the Jewish people.” This led to the heavy involvement of Jews in a series of harmful utopian ideologies and finally to the Zionist Revolution. Even this “essential nonconformity” seems to have vanished. Since Eldad wrote, large numbers of Israelis have jettisoned Zionism altogether, a development captured in the oft-used term “post-Zionism.” They are in headlong pursuit of “normalization,” oblivious to the impossibility of the Jewish state being “like all the nations.”

Painful as it is to read The Jewish Revolution in the light of its betrayal, Eldad reminds us that the re-emergence of the state after two thousand years showed that Eretz Israel lay hidden deep inside the heart of every Jew and was able to reemerge intact when the time came. There are many Jews in Israel with faith, courage and determination, who would respond to a leader prepared to reinvigorate Zionism, to defend Jewish rights, to make the state stand tall once again. A people that produced Herzl and Jabotinsky can reach again for the stars.