Preface
The State of Israel, the Land of Israel -- The Statist and Ethnonational Dimensions of Foreign Policy
Daniel J. Elazar
One of the great political issues of our time is how
ethnonationalist movements seek to express themselves through
statehood and how the two dimensions of statehood and
ethnonationalism interact. Dr. Shmuel Sandler of Bar-Ilan
University, a Fellow of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs,
who in an earlier book wrote about the conflicting
ethnonationalist claims of Jews and Palestinians expressed in the
conflict between Israel and the Palestinians over the territories
Israel occupied in the wake of the Arab-initiated Six-Day War,
here has turned his attention to the interaction of ethnonational
and statist considerations within Israel in foreign policy
matters. Dr. Sandler points out that Israel is both a strong
nation and a strong state.
Jewish nationalism is one of the first of the world's
nationalisms, dating 3,000 years and more. Jewish statehood
however, after more than 600 years of independence and, with a
brief interruption, 1,500 years of self-governance in their own
land, was interrupted by the dispersion of the Jews for at least
fifteen centuries. Although Jews settled in Israel in every
century, it was only in the latter part of the modern epoch that
the Zionist movement initiated the return of the people of Israel
to the land of Israel for the unambiguous political purpose of
reestablishing a Jewish national home in the land and achieving
independent statehood. Thus the very reasons for seeking
statehood were clearly ethnonationalist.
Unlike similar ethnonational groups in Europe and elsewhere, the
Jews had the dual task of reestablishing themselves in their land
and achieving statehood. Not surprisingly the result was to
strengthen both the ethnonationalist and statist elements in the
renewed State of Israel. Through historical exploration of these
phenomena during the pre-state period before 1948 and analysis of
the first forty-plus years of Israel's foreign policy, Dr.
Sandler takes a close look at the interaction between these two
elements -- the roots and demands of each, and patterns of
reinforcement and conflict between the two perspectives. As a
case study, the Israeli experience helps us understand the
interaction of these two phenomena and at the same time enhances
the study of Israel itself. This book provides us with insights
into Jewish conceptions of nationalism and statehood and Israel
as a Jewish state. Dr. Sandler's book helps us to determine how
Israel has reconciled the two dimensions of its character as the
state of the Jewish people to increase our understanding of how
Israel functions as a state, especially in its foreign relations.
One of the basic tensions built into Israel's founding is between
Israel's functioning as a state like all others and its role as
the state of the Jewish people. This question is likely to
persist until some equally dramatic transformation of the Israeli
polity takes place. The continued existence of a Jewish
diaspora, essentially worldwide, containing some twice as many
Jews as are located in Israel, only exacerbates that tension.
This makes the Jewish dimension of Israeli policy more important
and real, and more complex to deal with.
The Zionist founders of the Jewish state were strongly committed
to the principle that Israel would indeed be concerned with
Jewish interests first and foremost. But they also expected that
if not all, then the vast majority of Jews in the world would
live within Israel's boundaries, thereby reducing the possible
distance between Israel as a state and Israel as the state of the
Jewish people. As yet, that has not happened. Thus the real
Israel and its government must work within the context of the
reality they know with all its possibilities and limitations.
This is the first volume of a study that Dr. Sandler and his
students are conducting through the Workshop in Jewish Foreign
Policy which he has established as a joint project of the
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and Bar-Ilan University.
In addition to this book's contribution to the study of this
growing area of international relations, it is also a
contribution to the growing field of Jewish political studies, as
the first book-length study of Jewish foreign policy from this
perspective. Jewish political studies concern themselves with
the phenomena of Jewish political life in theory and practice.
Issues of international relations and foreign policy are part and
parcel of this subfield of political science and Jewish studies.
Here, too, Dr. Sandler's work is informed by recent work in the
field that adds another dimension to what he and his colleagues
have been studying.
Dr. Sandler's work was and continues to be carried out under the
auspices of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, which
pioneered in the development of Jewish political studies. We are
pleased to present this work to the public in the knowledge that
Dr. Sandler has embarked on an enterprise which should carry him
far in his contribution to both aforementioned bodies of
knowledge and, in the process, enlighten us all on a major new
fact of postmodern international politics.
