What Israel Can Learn from the Canaanites

Until the election-night surprise of Yair Lapid’s centrist Yesh Atid party’s second-place finish, a different canonical story dominated the coverage of Israel’s 2013 election season. In late 2012, domestic and international outlets seized upon the rise of Naftali Bennett, whose clean-shaven, high-tech image recast national-religious annexationism as the new cool among young conservatives.
Unfortunately, more attention was paid to Bennett’s American-inflected charm and boyish good looks than to his telling branding campaign: a redesign of Israel’s hard-right National Union and National Religious Party under the inclusive, simple-to-remember banner of “The Jewish Home.” The power of adapting a country’s raison d’être as political slogan is not to be underestimated: most Jewish Israelis, however sympathetic to the national-religious agenda, are at least basically on board with the legally-enshrined concept of the state as a “Jewish Home”.
However, the story of Naftali Bennett’s successful sloganeering (measured though it was on election night, with the party scoring 12 of 120 seats) is not simply one about the effective use of well-worn tropes. Rather, “The Jewish Home” represents a potent reaction against the century-long assertion of Israeli identity as separate from and superior to Jewishness—a harbinger of great consequences for the political and cultural future of Israel.
Contrary to popular belief, the founding idea of Israel as a Jewish state was bitterly contested from the start—as nativists bent on creating a Hebrew-speaking “new Jew” clashed with traditionalists who carried a Diaspora sensibility about what it would mean to build a Jewish polity. A few decades into the argument, a few radical voices on the secular right staked an even bolder claim: that the new Hebrew-speaking society in Palestine should embrace its classical Levantine roots, pursue integration within the Arab Middle East, and sever ties with the conditioned cowardice of the Diaspora.
Led by such men of letters as Yonatan Ratosh, A. G. Horon, and Aharon Amir, these “Young Hebrews”—known by popular pejorative as “Canaanites”—envisioned a big, brave Israel at ease with its Arab neighbors and its Middle Eastern environment. In today’s Israeli political climate, however, the Canaanite idea is taken for a contradiction in terms. Since Israeli voters’ razor-thin rejection of Shimon Peres’ vision for a “New Middle East” in 1996, successive governments of both the right and center-left have doubled down on “fortress Israel”—internally dynamic, but sealed off hermetically from its natural neighborhood.
As the rise of Bennett’s “Jewish Home” and the Likud’s “Jewish Leadership” faction evince, the contemporary right seeks to couple a security policy of hyper-fortification with a retreat from secular Israeli elite culture in favor of something resembling a Third Jewish Commonwealth. The center-left is equally to blame: though open to disengaging from the Palestinian territories and allergic to theocracy, its standard-bearers in Tel Aviv and Herzliya are blissfully unaware of their Levantine neighborhood, preferring to imagine Gush Dan as a Hebrew-speaking strip of prime real estate somewhere in Iberia or Florida. The overwhelmingly secular Ashkenazi constituency behind Yair Lapid’s electoral upset is complicit, whether openly or coyly, in a Lapid family legacy of disdain for Mizrahi influence on Israeli culture—exemplified by the otherwise laudable Tommy Lapid’s famous calls against the Levantinization of Israel, a country which happens to be located in the heart of the Levant. When Tzipi Livni preaches the importance of securing an amicable divorce from the Palestinians, one wonders whether she hopes that by signing a peace treaty and acceding to territorial realities, Israel can check out of the Middle East’s great sound and fury once and for all. Of additional import, neither approach to the future of Israeli political culture has much of a role for Arabs, who comprise a fifth of the country’s citizenry and are unlikely to be persuaded into mainstream participation in an Israel ignorant of its Levantine environment.
Broadly speaking, contemporary Israel has a lot to learn from the Canaanites. Although nativist Hebrews would be happy with many developments in Israeli society over the course of the last half-century—the emergence of a Mizrahi majority, the vibrant renaissance of Hebrew language and literature, and the development of an internationally successful Israeli brand independent of Diaspora Jewishness—there is certainly a lot about which to be concerned.
Given the overlapping deficiencies of Israel’s right-wing and left-wing political cultures, the absence of a Canaanite voice in the national discourse bodes poorly for the development of a genuine, lasting security for Israel that cannot be bought with military spending and intelligence alone. Next to the question of military survival, the primary challenge of Israeli nation-building in the twentieth century was that of kibbutz galuyot, the ingathering and assimilation of Diaspora Jewish populations from around the world into a cohesive society on the Mediterranean’s eastern shore. Aside from military and territorial imperatives, the next great challenge of Israeli nation-building will be getting 6 million Jewish Israelis, half of them of European cultural origins, to feel comfortable in the Middle East. And yet tens of billions of security dollars and hundreds of miles of concrete barrier later, Israeli political culture is no less anxious than before—producing electoral stunners by Jewish-before-Israeli right-wingers and secular European escapists alike.
If Israeli movers and shakers are willing to learn from the Canaanites (whose originally far-right spokesmen pragmatically joined the pro-peace left after 1967), they can hope to move beyond the “fortress Israel” paradigm and toward a genuine, regionally-integrated sort of security. For the first time in its history, Israel would be able to turn its economic dynamism outward toward its natural backyard—becoming an engine for development and liberalization through trade and exchange. This must inform how policymakers handle a two-state solution, if sane enough heads prevail to allow for it: it must require guarantees of normalization with Arab neighbors, and mustn’t fall into the “divorce” trap as proposed by members of the center-left.
What both Moshe Feiglin and Ali Abunimah both have right is that Israel/Palestine is a single land and a natural economic unit; though their mutual opposition to partition is stubborn and impractical, it is true that Israel and a future Palestinian state will have to get used to being closer neighbors than almost any other pair of sovereign states. Embracing elements of the Canaanite idea can make the difficult process at least a bit less daunting.