The brief answer is no; intellectually it contains very little that was not voiced fifty or one hundred years ago by the critics of Zionism. Politically it is a negligi­ble force; most citizens of Israel are probably unaware of the existence of this school of thought. It is of psychological interest as a manifesta­tion of antipatriotism such as is found occasionally on American campuses but seldom if ever in Europe, let alone in other continents. The British poet George Canning wrote about the anti-patriots, ''A steady patriot of the world alone, / The friend of every country but his own." But Canning wrote about the Jacobins, and he did them a grave injus­tice; the Marseillaise, after all, invokes l'amour sacre de la patrie. It can be endlessly discussed whether in retrospect patriotism has done more good than evil, but this is outside the field of interest of these critics preoccupied with one sort of nationalism alone, that of the Jews.

As some of the post-Zionists saw it, the early Zionists, and espe­cially the Labor Zionists like Golda Meir, were not so much wicked people as they were foolish, narrow-minded nationalists, worrying only about the problems of their own people and disregarding all oth­ers. True, they were not internationalists. But how would internation­alists have survived in an age of aggressive nationalism?

There was the reprehensible slogan (according to the post-Zionist narrative): "Land without people to the people without land." It was never an official slogan, and in fact it had been coined by a non ­Zionist. But it is true that in the early days there was a tendency among Zionists to play down the presence of the Arabs in Palestine. This was a mistake and there were warning voices within the Zionist camp from the very beginning. But let us stop for a moment. The country was not empty, but how many people lived there? There are no exact numbers for the early twentieth century, but four hundred to five hundred thousand is not an underestimate as far as the territory of the future state of Israel was concerned. Of these, not all were Arabs, and of the Arabs thousands were bedouins, that is to say, nomads.

Thus it cannot be argued that the country was heavily populated or intensively cultivated. Four hundred thousand (if there were that many), is roughly three percent of the present population of greater Cairo. True, not many Jews came, or could come, to Palestine between 1900 and 1948, and the Arab population was growing fast. But even in 1948, when the British mandate ended and Israel came into being, the Arab population of Palestine was less than half the population of Vienna. It is perhaps understandable that, seen in this light, Herzl and his colleagues should have thought that the problem was soluble, espe­cially in view of the fact that, in 1900, a modern Palestinian national movement did not yet exist.

A critique of Zionism has to start elsewhere. Theodore Herzl's pre­diction, in 1898, that within fifty years a Jewish state would come into being was amazingly correct. Neither Herzl nor anyone else could fore­see that the Jews of Europe did not have much time. A Jewish state that could have absorbed millions of Jews did not exist when it was  needed most-in the 1930s and '40s. In other words, the Jewish state came too late. But it could not have come earlier.

Is it permissible to criticize the state of Israel? This is a rhetorical and, in the final analysis, nonsensical question. No government and no political movement is beyond criticism. But are not critics of Israel, some argue, automatically dismissed as anti-Semites even if they are Jewish? Such arguments are unacceptable, but it is also true that behind the cover of "anti-Zionism" lurks a variety of motives that ought to be called by their true name. Often, in the 1950s under Stalin, the Jews of the Soviet Union came under severe attack and scores were executed, it was under the banner of anti-Zionism rather than anti-Semitism, which had been given a bad name by Adolf Hitler. When in later years the policy of Israeli governments was attacked as racist or colonialist in various parts of the world, the basis of the criti­cism was quite often the belief that Israel had no right to exist in the first place, not opposition to specific policies of the Israeli government.

Traditional anti-Semitism has gone out of fashion in the West except on the extreme right. But something we might call post-anti­Semitism has taken its place. It is less violent in its aims, but still very real. By and large it has not been too difficult to differentiate between genuine and bogus anti-Zionism. The test is twofold. It is almost always clear whether the attacks are directed against a specific policy carried out by an Israeli government (for instance, as an occupying power) or against the existence of Israel. Secondly, there is the test of selectivity. If from all the evils besetting the world, the misdeeds, real or imaginary, of Zionism are singled out and given constant and relentless publicity, it can be taken for granted that the true motive is not anti-Zionism but something different and more sweeping.

 Zionism can be criticized for a number of reasons, among them the belief in the impossibility of assimilation. The fact that assimilation had been impossible in some countries during certain periods did not mean that it was doomed forever. On the contrary, assimilation and the eventual disappearance of Diaspora were inevitable. Nor was there any reason to assume, with Jacob Klatzkin and other Jewish thinkers, that there was a "spirit of Judaism." The Jewish religion has always been one of laws, observations, and taboos, not one of philosophical ideas. A national spirit might develop through living together in a land, a community of fate, speaking the same language and sharing (to a weater or lesser extent) the same beliefs, but there can be no "Jewish" spirit.

Herzl declared at the Zionist Congress that "we are one people."
To what extent is this still true? Jews had lived for too long separated from each other in different parts of the world to share a great many common features. Hence the dubious character of the automatic Right of Return law, which had been passed soon after the establishment of the state. While one can see the wisdom and morality in granting cit­izenship to every Jew persecuted as a Jew, should citizenship be grant­ed to every Jew as an intrinsic right? And is the state ofIsrael better off today as the result of the indiscriminate immigration of hundreds of thousands, most of them lacking the inspiration and the motivation of the early Zionists?

Herzl's basic intention was to restore dignity and security to the Jewish people, but how could security be achieved in a part of the world so highly charged with nationalist and fanatic religious emotions like the Middle East? (And whether it could be achieved anywhere else is equally doubtful.)

The post-Zionists' discussion along these lines has been modest.
With the establishment of the state, a new age has dawned. The post­Zionists did make a contribution towards demythologizing Zionist and Jewish history; the state and society were by then strong enough to survive without all kinds of mythical constructs about historical rights. In the final analysis, a Jewish state had come into being because of the existential needs of the Jews, not because of the many Zionist precursors ranging from Shabbetai Zevi to Daniel Deronda.

Academics are accustomed to arguing in a universe of abstractions.
Hence it was no surprise that the post-Zionists should tend to ignore reality to some extent. They were inclined to forget that they were not teaching in American or Swiss universities (in secure countries recog­nized by their neighbors and the rest of the world), situations very much in contrast to that of Israel, which was and is a country still under siege. The anti-Zionists decried the milit~ization ofIsraeli soci­ety and it was of course true that such a process had taken place. But it was also true that there was no real prospect of peace. This milita­rization had not taken place by choice: Israelis did not enjoy spending so much on their defense budget and so much of their time serving on reserve duty. Post-Zionists decried the dubious moral character of Zionism and Israel, as if morality had been a factor in the emergence of nation states or in the migrations that have been a crucial factor in the history of mankind since time immemorial.

Golda Meir and the others of her generation were not the near saints Zionist hagiography has made of them. But they were, as a lead­ing post-Zionist has noted, idealistic and modest people who were not out for personal gain. They worked for the good of the community as they saw it. They sacrificed careers and an easy life in the pursuit of their dreams. Above all, they had their convictions. The Israeli propo­nents of postcolonialism had no such sacrifices to make; in fact, they could be accused of a certain duplicity. For they seem not to be both­ered by the fact that many of them live and teach in countries that (they believe) are not theirs by right, that one hundred fifty years ear­lier had belonged to another people, in universities which would never have come into existence but for the Zionists. Some of them have moved on to Oxford, New York, and San Diego (places which, alas, also belonged to other nations at one time), but most have not.

The real backlash from the demise of Labor Zionism comes not from the assistant professors but from the right wing and the reli­gious Orthodox. Their ideas have little impact, partly because they speak in jargon. They do this, it seems, because if they were under­stood, the great majority would reject it in disbelief, above all the Middle Eastern Jews on which the postcolonialists pin such high hopes.

In the elections of 2001 in Israel, marginalized Beersheva with its Mizrachim-Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origin-and other fairly recent immigrants gave Sharon 72 percent of the votes; in wealthy establishment, Ashkenazi Kfar Shmaryahu, got 28 per­cent.) They will have no influence because, unlike the fanatics of the right, they will not fight for their ideas, such as they are, and this is always decisive in politics.

After Colda Meir had retired, three years before her death she wrote her autobiography. She observed:
 "When it became fashionable [in later years] for young people to deride my generation for its rigidity, conventionality, and loyalty to the Establishment, it was about intellectual rebels like A. D. Cordon [a Russian-Jewish Tolstoyan who in middle age went to work the land in Palestine] and [the poet] Rachel [Bluwstein] and dozens of others like them that I used to think, -No modern hippie, in my opinion, has ever revolted as effectively against the establishment of the day as those pioneers did at the beginning of the century. Many of them came from the homes of merchants and scholars, many even from prosperous assimilated families. If Zionism alone had fired them, they could have come to Palestine, bought orange groves there, and hired Arabs to do all the work for them. It would have been easier. But they were radi­cals at heart and deeply believed that only self-Iabor could truly liberate the Jews from the ghetto and its mentality and make it possible for them to reclaim the land and earn a moral right to it, in addition to the historic right."

What all the pioneers had in common was a fervor to experiment to build a good society in Palestine or at least a society that would be better than what had been known in most parts of the world. This sounds very naive, and it is certainly no longer politically correct. It is also anachronistic. Who needs self-labor on the land in the age of automation and agricultural surpluses? Of course this was not the state of affairs one hundred or even sixty years ago. Golda Meir and her generation of pioneers could not have known this, but perhaps the post-Zionist critics will grant that there were at least mitigating cir­cumstances.

Meir also wrote in her autobiography about crossing Beersheba in 1947 to visit her daughter in the Negev. What was then a small, dusty Arab village (there were probably more camels and sheep than people at the time), is today a city of 165,0000 It even has a university. If Golda Meir were to visit the university she would be given a refresher course on Zionism by the local post-Zionist teachers. They would berate her for not being a feminist, for never engaging in a systemic critique of the Zionist patriarchal hegemonic discourse, for failing to tell Israeli women that they were marginalized and that they should recognize their moral kinship with Palestinian Arabs. She would also be told that Zionism had been a colonialist enterprise and that the Mizrachim were also victims of exclusion and subordination.

But where Allan Hart  is correct, indeed, the problem of Jerusalem is the most difficult on the road to peace.

It was mainly because of Jerusalem that the Camp David nego­tiations broke down in 2000. In all negotiations since, the question of Jerusalem has been postponed to the end of the agenda as the least tractable. The hope, it seems, is that Jerusalem will never be discussed, that there will be a failure to agree on the other bones of contention.

Theoretically there are a variety of solutions for Jerusalem. Like Chandigarh, the capital of two states in India, it could be the capital of both countries. Or it could be the capital of neither, becoming again a corpus separandum, a separate entity, as envisaged in the partition plan of 1948, with unfettered access to all holy places. It is frequently forgotten now that in 1947, the Zionist leadership had been willing to accept the partition plan according to which Jerusalem would not have been part of the Jewish state, and this refers not only to the Temple Mount and the Wailing Wall but the new predominantly Jewish quar­ters of Jerusalem, where, after all, some 15 percent of the total Jewish population of Palestine made their home at the time.

There may not even be the need to change the Basic Law passed by the Israeli parliament in 1980, according to which "Jerusalem com­plete and united" is the capital of Israel-for nothing in that statement precludes it being also the capital of another country. Is it likely that the religious-nationalist fervor that makes the problem intractable will diminish in time? Perhaps, but not in the foreseeable future. This may be difficult for Americans and Europeans to understand; few of them would mount the barricades to keep the center of administration in their present capitals.

Why should it be different in Jerusalem? Why declare Jerusalem the eternal capital of Israel in a world in which there is nothing eternal? (Even Rome is only the eternal city, not the eternal capital.) Is it a religious-political syndrome that can be found elsewhere too? An Israeli poet, at one time my swimming partner in the pool of the Moria Hotel, who lived nearby, opposite the city wall, wrote a poem about the air above Jerusalem being filled with prayers and dreams like the air above cities with heavy industry. But it is also filled with curs­es and evil passions and, as Yehuda Amichai wrote, "from time to time a new shipment of history arrives."

But is it right to put all the blame on the dead hand of history gen­erating the passions of aggression and war? How to get rid of this dead­ly burden? Psychiatrists have offered advice on how to deal with the Jerusalem syndrome in the case of individuals, but they are powerless to deal with groups of people, especially if they fail to even begin to understand their predicament. Both sides will have to suffer a great deal more until readiness for a compromise can be achieved.

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