Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

THE DISTINCTION 3O3
justify Israel's ethnocentric policy prompt one to ask if the two authors would
be willing to live as Jews in one of the Eastern European states they praise, or
would they rather settle in a more normative, liberal democracy?
Throughout the book, the genuine attachment that many Jews feel for
Israel is presented as a national consciousness. This lack of discrimination
between, on the one hand, an attachment based largely on painful memories
and post-religious sensibility with a touch of tradition and, on the other
hand, desire for national sovereignty diminishes the work. Unfortunately, the
authors seem unaware that nationality is not merely a sense of belonging to
some collective body; it is more than a feeling of solidarity and a common
interest, for otherwise Protestants would be a nation, and so would cat lovers. A
national consciousness is primarily the wish to live in an independent political
entity. It wants its subjects to live and be educated by a homogeneous national
culture. That was the essence of Zionism at its inception, and so it remained for
most of its history until recent times. It sought independent sovereignty and
achieved it. There have been other Jewish solidarities, but most of them were
not national, and some were even expressly antinational.
But since the Jewish masses are not keen to live under the Jewish sovereignty,
the Zionist arguments have had to be stretched beyond all national
reason. The weakness of today's Zionist rationale lies in its failure to acknowledge
this complex reality, in which Jews may be concerned about the fate of
other Jews, yet have no wish to share a national life with them. Another serious
flaw in Rubinstein and Yakobson's book, which is common to all the advocates
of the "Jewish democracy," concerns their understanding of modern democracy,
and this calls for a brief analysis of this controversial conceptual system.
Today there are many definitions of democracy, some complementary,
some conflicting. Between the end of the eighteenth century and the middle of
the twentieth, it mainly denoted government by the people, as opposed to all
the premodern regimes in which the sovereign ruled over his or her subjects
by the grace of God. Since the Second World War, and especially since the
Cold War, the term has been used in the West to denote liberal democracies,
which of course did not stop the socialist states from seeing themselves as
popular democracies of even higher quality than the Western parliamentary
variety.
This persistent ideological confusion calls for an analytical and historical
separation between liberalism and democracy. Liberalism was born in the
heart of the Western European monarchies, which it proceeded to curb by
creating parliaments, political pluralism, separation of powers, and the rights
of subjects vis-à-vis arbitrary power, as well as certain individual rights that