The end of Zionism; the renewal of Diaspora Judaism.

The Rabin-Arafat accord has been greeted by the Diaspora Jewish populations in the United States, Canada, and England with a notable restraint. Contrary to the huzzahs in the media and the gloating of the White House officials, and with the exception of the idelological peaceniks on the Jewish Left, there has been only a moderate acclaim of approval for the inauguration of an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement. The applause from the great majority of Diaspora Jews has been formal, politically correct, but very cautious and scarcely heart-felt, I think. Commentary, the leading organ of U.S. Jewish opinion, and under Norman Podhoretz's editorship for long vehemently Zionist, has had a very hard time expressing enthusiasm for the Rabin-Arafat agreement. The other prime journal of opinion circulating among American Jews, the international edition of the Jerusalem Post, has communicated clearly the actual hostility of most of its editorial staff to the agreement, something it would not have dared to do if it had felt that the majority of its readers strongly supported the accord. The ultimate reason for this moderate response, I would argue, has been the still only partly conscious perception that the Rabin-Arafat accord represents the end of Zionism.

The security and triumph of Israel has been regarded, at least since 1948, as the integrating element in the public culture of Diaspora Jews, the single most important ingredient by far in the affirmation of a Jewish consciousness. Since the 1950s a Jew in America, Canada, and England was someone committed to political Zionism, which meant an independent Jewish state in perpetual victorious conflict with its Arab neighbors, and, at least since 1967, the subordination of Arabs within Greater Isreal or their exclusion entirely. It was as simple as that: If your heart was warmed and your brain positively stimulated by this prospect, you had an identity as a Jew, whether you lived in New York, Toronto, or London.

It was easy enough to say--and Israelis always said it--that the Diaspora Jews provided only moral and fiscal support while the Israelis personally endured repeated wars against the Arabs and frequent danger from terrorist attacks, that the Diaspora Jews were vicariously engaging in an exploitative projection onto Israeli heroism and blood-letting. This view had substance. although it undervalued the fiscal and political support of Isreal from American Jewry which made Israel's survival possible. Its validity does not detract from the reality that Jewish self-identity in the past forty-five years of the Diaspora has depended, in my opinion, much more on political Zionism than on religion. Identification with embattled Israel and pride in its triumphs has been the hallmark of Disapora Judaism, now set on a course of reversal by the prospect of peace with the hitherto intransigent Arab states and especially by accommodation with the hated Palestinians. The political and military triumphs of Israel were the counterbalance in the mind of Diaspora Jewry to the impotence that the Holocaust signified. They were the energized and integrating force in the shaping of a universal Jewish identity. Now that will be attenuated, perhaps in a short time fully superseded.

I suspect that the accustomed clear vision of the Jewish identity is in course of deconstruction and steady erosion as a result of the Rabin-Arafatt accord, and I doubt if the Israelis have thought for a minute about what the reversal of the course of Zionism of the past half century would do for Jewish identity in the Diaspora--how devastating this revolutionary change in policy could be for millions of Diaspora Jews, especially in English-speaking countries, whose public culture, in so far as it had a Jewish ingredient, was predicated on the maintenance of the course of political Zionism.

The Rabin government was pressed to reach a settlement with the Arabs so that Israeli security would be immeasurably enhanced, thus enabling Israel to turn to its festering economic problems. Israel's highly skilled Jewish work force is currently much underutilized, and 300,000 recent Russian immigrants in addition to at least half-a-million highly educated native Israelis are underemployed. Peace with the Palestinians and Arabs would remove, it was believed, the greatest impediment to the inflow of investment that would develop Israel's high-tech economy and maximally use its workforce. Israel will also have to go further toward deregulating its demand economy and reducing the obstacles to development represented by its dinosaur labors unions. But the prospect that external investment for high-tech development will follow an Arab and Palestinian peace is a good one, and in view of the profound discontent of well-educated Russian immigrants, a necessary one. Israel can possibly become the Singapore, perhaps the Japan, of the Middle East, absorbing Palestinian and other Arab workers into a dynamic engine of industrial and commercial growth. Twenty years from now the Arab-Israeli wars could seem as remote and strange as the Roman-Jewish conflicts.

Diaspora Jews can only wish Rabin-led Israel well in this pursuit, but they may feel an aching emptiness right now. With the prospect of the dissolution of the political Zionism Diaspora Jews have known for so many decades, I suspect there is a huge gap emerging in their culture--and religious--lives, for Zionism has been the kernel of their spiritual consciousness in so far as it had a Jewish character.

When the numbness slowly wears off, three consequences will follow, especially among bicoastal American Jewry, joined by groups in Toronto and London. First, as the era of political Zionism lapses, there will be a reversion to the culture Zionism advocated in the second and third decades of this century by Asher Ginsberg (Ahad Ha'am) and Judah Magnes. There will be much-enhanced investment from English-speaking Jewry in the currently impoverished and somnolent Israeli universities and research institutes, and a flurry of personnel exchanges between the Israeli centers of learning and science and American universities, facilitated by Jewish philanthropy.

The second outcome of the waning of political Zionism will have much greater consequences, but one not likely to please the Israelis. Political Zionism having been eroded as the center of Jewish identity, there will be a shift to exploring reinvigorated religious identity. This will mean gains for various shades of Orthodox and Hasidic Judaism, but more important it will refocus the search for a liberal, reform, reconstructed Judaism of dynamic quality and broad appeal that was pursued in the first forty years of this century but which, I would argue, largely lapsed because of the shift of attention to political Zionism in the 1940s and '50s. The long-range (over the next three decades) outcome of the Rabin-Arafat accord will be a Jewish religious renaissance in the Diaspora.

The regaining of the momentum in the shaping of reform and reconstructionist Judaism, broken off around 1950 with the concentration of resources and thought upon political Zionism, will have little to do with the Israeli situation (where political expediency has meant the muzzling of liberal, modernized Judaism). With their new focus on the accoutrements of material prosperity midst high-tech development, the Israelis may well feel increasingly uncomfortable about the Jewish spiritual renaissance in America. For American Jewry this resumption of religious growth will furthermore present an opportunity to go back to the fifties and sixties and take a broader road of dialogue and cooperation with Christian churches. That road was blocked at the time, I think, by the unwise decision of the American Jewish Congress and other communal leadership organizations to insist on absolute separation of church and state, which contributed not only to expunging prayer and Bible-reading from the public schools but to the spurning of public aid for parochial education, with highly negative consequences for financing Jewish childhood education. Now such policy mistakes can be rectified and a new era of Jewish-Christian fellowship can be inaugurated. Twenty or thirty years from now, as a result of the demise of political Zionism, there will probably be greater interest among American Jews in intellectual and social interaction with Catholic and Protestant churches at home than in an Israel now become inextricably involved with a dynamic Muslim Arab culture while pursuing domestic prosperity. Israel, in other words, will become orientalized and Arabized as it becomes the dynamic economic center of the Eastern Mediterranean and it will become culturally alienated in large part from English-speaking Jewry.

Finally, the coming of peace with the Arabs will be a boon to Jewish educational and other cultural institutions in the Diaspora. In many American cities there is a Beth Israel or Mount Sinai hospital, representing the direction and capability of Jewish public charity before the overwhelming commitment to Israel in the late 1940s. On the other hand, there are only two Jewish-sponsored American universities, neither very affluent or distinguished. Now that Israel will soon need less urgent charitable support, Jewish gifts can flow to Yeshiva and Brandeis universities and found new centers of learning and research in America, to parallel the pre-Zionist era establishments in the medical field. Now suitable support can at least be directed to Jewish childhood education, which remains poorly funded and badly organized.

Insofar as the Rabin-Arafat accord leads to a general peace and Israeli economic partnership with the Arab, the Israelis will be surprised to discover a leveling down of Diaspora aid as American and other Diaspora Jews belatedly turn inward to develop their own public institutions. Their identity no longer driven by political Zionism, the Diaspora Jews will move to recreate a Jewish consciousness based now on religious and cultural thrusts from within their own communities.

That doesn't mean there won't be for a long time a nostalgia for the good old days of political Zionism and the heroic garrison state of greater Israel that gave a new meaning of reversing auto-emancipation and military strength to the hitherto gloomy archetype of Jewish history, with its two millennia of fear and impotence. Decades from now the half-century between the 1942 Baltimore conference when American Jews acceded to Ben-Gurion's extremist demand that creation of a Jewish state in Palestine take precedence over everything else in Jewish life (even the rescue of European Jewry from the Nazis), and the recent accord of September 1993, will stand out as a unique, discrete, and discontinuous era in Jewish history.

Neither Israeli nor Diaspora Jewry will ever be the same as a result of the handshake between Arafatt and Rabin in the White House garden. 1993 will join 1095, 1492, 1648, 1917, 1933, and 1948 as a moment of critical alteration in the Jewish fate.