Moshe Berent taught in the departments of Sociology, Political Science and Communication at the Open University. He holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Technion in Haifa. He received his master’s degree in philosophy, under the supervision of Prof. Yosef Agassi, from Tel Aviv University. He received his doctorate in comparative political history from Cambridge University in England; Among his instructors was the renowned sociologist and nationalism researcher Ernest Gellner. Wikipedia page
The goal of the Zionist movement was to bring about the normalization of Jewish existence: “to be a nation like all nations”. Israel is not a “nation like all other nations” since, unlike the normal nation-state, it does not recognize the existence of an Israeli nation. According to the official national ethos, the so-called “Zionist”, Israel belongs to the “Jewish nation” and not to its territorial nation. At the center of the book is the claim that the identity between religion and nation, that is, seeing Judaism as both religion and nation, and the absence of a nation-state or an Israeli republic constitute a major source of Israel’s fundamental problems and its inability to solve them: the question of the status of religion; relations between secular and religious; the question of the status of non-Jews, especially Arabs; the question of the Constitution; the inability to decide on the question of borders, and the paralysis in all the matters related to going to war, let alone making peace. A necessary condition for solving these problems is the separation between religion and nationality, the recognition of the existence of an Israeli nation without distinction between religion, race or sex, and the establishment of Israel as a republic, that is, as the Israeli nation-state. Does an Israeli nation really exist? What is this nation’s attitude toward the historical “nation of Israel”? What is its attitude toward the Zionist movement? Under what conditions is it possible for non-Jews to integrate as people with equal rights and obligations into this nation? These and other questions are at the center of the book before us. Dr. Moshe Berent teaches science at the Department of Sociology, Political Science and Communication at the Open University. He holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Technion in Haifa. He completed his master’s degree in political philosophy at Tel Aviv University under the supervision of Prof. Yosef Agassi. He received his doctorate in comparative political history from Cambridge University in England, and among his instructors was the renowned sociologist and nationalism researcher Ernest Gellner. Among his publications is the book “Who is an Israeli” (together with Joseph Agassi and Judith Buber Agassi).
The present book goes against some accepted truths in Zionist historiography and the Israeli public. The Zionist movement was founded by Herzl as a movement for the “Jewish matter”, that is, the solution of the Jewish problem in Europe through mass immigration of Jews to a Jewish nation-state. With Herzl’s death and after the Uganda crisis, there was a change in the Zionist leadership’s perception of the movement’s goals. It was no longer perceived as responsible for the “Jewish matter”, but as a project for the slow building of the Land of Israel as a “spiritual center” or “model society” center, designed to be populate, at least in the foreseeable future, with a small Jewish elite, while most of the Jewish people were destined to remain in the Diaspora with all that this implies. Thus, the fact that on the eve of World War II there was no Jewish state, as well as the fact that the settlement numbered only about 450,000 people, are not only the result of British and Arab opposition, but mainly of the policy of the Zionist movement, which shambled on the matter of the establishment of a state and opposed mass Jewish immigration out of fear that it would harm the “model society” they wanted to create here. Since the Zionist movement did not consider itself responsible for “the matter of the Jews”, it also did not consider itself responsible for the fate of European Jewry, and did not act, as was expected of it, to save Jews during the Holocaust.
*Available in Hebrew copies only.
