The ethnic Jewish state

Israel's political and cultural leaders and her intellectuals seem not to know the meaning of Israel or the mission of the Jewish people. Small wonder the soul of the State of Israel is beginning to wither. 

Right now Israel represents herself as a Jewish State with little more to define that Jewishness than: some mythic history; the Diaspora; lip service to a body of rituals few understand, whether or not they practice it; the idea that Jews are more moral than other peoples; or, the experience of a common threat to all Jews. To preserve Israel’s identity on that basis is to subscribe to a definition of national identity that quickly reduces to a sense of common ethnic roots. That association of national sentiment with ethnicity is fraught with spiritual danger. The combination of nationalism with ethnic identity has an horrific historical record, especially for the Jewish people who repeatedly in Diaspora found themselves on the short end of the nationalist ethnic stick. 

The decrying of the State of Israel from the left is really a mute expression of the vacuousness of the Jewish people's spiritual condition. It is far from clear the left is wrong; though, of course, the left's solution to the problem – to embrace a sort of vapid universalism and a utopian disgust with the struggles of the lived experiences of Israel's sons in their homeland – is just as spiritually hollow as the right's ethnic nationalism, which doesn't help to resolve the matter.