A FINALWORD about the book’s title. I first heard the term Hebrew republic from Hillel Kook, a minor Zionist celebrity, whom I met in 1975. I was a young political scientist living in Jerusalem and had written a series of articles on Israeli affairs for the New York Review of Books.Kook had read them and decided I needed some mentoring. He was then a man in his sixties, still robust and almost always accompanied by (and in what seemed intimate conversation with) his striking new wife. He sported a gray goatee, tweed jacket, and had a lean aspect—a modern Jewish aristocrat, I thought, with an air of precise, perpetual disappointment. He was the nephew of Jewish Palestine’s first chief rabbi, Abraham Isaac Kook, and had been an aide to Revisionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky. In the 1940s, under the pseudonym Peter H. Bergson, he organized the New York–based Emergency Committeeto Save the Jewish People of Europe, the first American group to organize against the Nazi horrors then unfolding.
Kook became a member of the first Knesset in Menachem Begin’s Herut party—which he left in disgust after one term. Israel, he began to warn, was heading for a fall because it had not shaken free of its revolutionary Zionism. It had failed to enact a written constitution. It was still in the thrall of old socialist Zionist institutions. It was being blackmailed by rabbis. It was completely lost regarding its own minorities. It had failed to redeem the real promise of Zionism, which was to create a “Hebrew republic.” These ideas struck a chord, but there was something so familiar, so material, about Kook’s liberalism that I could not quite believe it applied to the bloodied, noisy, metaphysical Israel emerging around me after the Yom Kippur War. He died near Tel Aviv in 2001, and I had not been in touch with him for years.
But more and more I’ve been thinking about him, and how he personified Gramsci’s famous dictum that the pessimism of the intellect should be coupled with the optimism of the will. So let us say, willingly, that it will take another generation to implement a Palestinian peace and, with it, slowly realize the vision of a Hebrew republic, which is actually a return to the most original Zionist vision. Fresh arguments will have to be made for this inspired vision, in Israel and in Western democracies. And fresh arguments, coming at a dark moment, have to pass a plausibility test that standard arguments, however stale and improbable, do not. Then again, a generation or more is not too much to ask. That is the time it took all of us to create the disaster we will now have to unmake.
Avishai neglected to mention that Bergson also founded the Hebrew Committee of National Liberation, to support Israel's struggle for independence from Great Britain.
on his website on his website, in PDF format. An excerpt I found particularly interesting: