What Shlomo Avineri's insights can teach us about Israel's war - opinion

Linch-pinned by “crown-wearing Tyre… whose traders the world honored” (Isaiah 23:7), biblical Lebanon was a wonderland of bustling seaports, pristine forests, and friendly kings, most memorably Hiram. 

Having been “a lover of David,” Hiram heeded enthusiastically King Solomon’s suggestion of an alliance, whereby the Lebanese shipped south the cedars with which Solomon built his Temple, while Israel sent shiploads of wheat and oil to the north. 

Now, as an Israeli-Lebanese ceasefire unfolds, no such harmony is expected on either side of the border. Yet the deal can be expected to hold for some time and thus calls for preliminary conclusions from the longest Arab-Israeli violence since 1948. 

And this introspection should be inspired by the wisdom of another Solomon, Shlomo Avineri, Israel’s foremost political thinker, who passed away a year ago tomorrow. 

A MAJOR historian of political thought, socialism, and Zionism, Avineri emerged during a 59-year career at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as the doyen of Israel’s political scientists. 

Even so, Avineri spent much time outside the ivory tower, frequently appearing on radio and television and writing in various newspapers, including this one. Besides this role as a public intellectual, he also helped shape history, first as director-general of the Foreign Ministry, and then as a monitor of elections in new democracies. 

This rare mixture of scholarship and public service was enhanced by an even rarer combination of sobriety and honesty, all of which an injured Jewish state now begs more than ever before. 

Avineri’s realism surfaced tellingly in 1989, when he dismissed as naïve Francis Fukuyama’s End of History claim that the Cold War’s end marked the “endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution” and liberal democracy’s emergence as “the final form of human government.”

The following decade, after the Soviet Union’s disappearance, Avineri cautioned that despite its shrinkage and weakness, Russia would remain a major global player. 

Subsequent events vindicated Avineri on both fronts. Russia indeed restored its superpower status, and then led an authoritarian backlash that resisted Western democracy’s global advance. 

The same sobriety emerged in Avineri’s takes on events in Israel. 

THOUGH ONE of the earliest supporters of the two-state idea, Avineri said Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s antisemitic speeches disqualified him as a peace interlocutor. 

In the same spirit of sincerity, Avineri’s hostility toward the Right’s assault on the judiciary did not prevent him from criticizing the High Court of Justice for having assumed authorities that no other Supreme Court wields. 

Avineri passed away when the war, which now hopefully winds down, was young. We, therefore, do not know how he would have summed it up. However, two principles – one diplomatic, the other political – can nonetheless be guessed. 

The diplomatic wisdom is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be fully “solved” at this stage of its history.

Pointing at this conflict’s potent mixture of religion, nationhood, territory, and narrative, Avineri compared it with the conflicts in Cyprus, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Kashmir, where the same elements have been at play for generations while efforts to strike full peace failed. At the same time, he observed, in all those cases, smaller deals emerged, ones that stopped short of peace but also prevented war. That aim, wrote Avineri, should guide Israel’s dealings with the Palestinians. 

That statement was made while the Olmert government was trying to hammer a peace agreement with the Palestinian Authority. Avineri thus expected no comprehensive peace agreement but thought a less pretentious deal, one that would avoid currently insolvable issues like refugees and Jerusalem, was both reachable and imperative. 

That was in 2008. In 2021, Avineri turned to pragmatism’s other side, warning Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that his strategy of ignoring the Palestinian problem and bribing Hamas “will sooner or later lead to an explosion.” (“The collapse of Netanyahu’s conception,” Haaretz, May 27, 2021.) 

Now, with that prophecy realized, and with the explosion’s Islamist engineers crippled, one can imagine what Avineri would tell Netanyahu today: Offer the Palestinians what you never gave them: dignity, respect, and hope.

Avineri's second postwar statement

AVINERI’S SECOND postwar statement would likely have regarded ultra-Orthodoxy and its relationship with the Jewish state. His general attitude does not need to be guessed. Ultra-Orthodox Israelis are not his enemies, he said in his last interview, and he also did not believe in trying to change them, for instance by demanding their men work or their schools teach English, math, and history. 

At the same time, Israel shouldn’t finance men who choose not to work, or schools that shun its core curriculum (Interview with Yair Sheleg, Ofakim, February 2023). 

This was said before the outbreak of the war that drove a wedge between ultra-Orthodoxy and the rest of us, especially Religious Zionism. 

Now, faced with ultra-Orthodoxy’s refusal to join a war of defense, and its stubborn leaders’ unchanged demand to etch in stone their flock’s draft dodging, Avineri may well have turned to his most successful book, The Making of Modern Zionism (1981), which presented, one by one, diverse versions of Zionism, from the spiritualistic Ahad Ha’am to the nationalistic Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and from the Marxist Dov Ber Borochov to the messianic mystic Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Kook. 

The subtext of that rainbow compilation was that what united those thinkers was larger than what separated them. That is why Avineri was a great admirer of the historic alliance between Zionism’s socialist and religious wings. That is also why he would now have called on the Israeli Left to restore its alliance with Religious Zionism, including the settlers, in order to end the horse-thieves’ alliance between Netanyahu and ultra-Orthodoxy’s anti-Zionist rabbis and hacks. 

Though foreigners, too, referred to him as “Shlomo” rather than Solomon, this wisdom, like the rest of Shlomo Avineri’s insights about the future of Israel, the Mideast, and the world, would have been Solomonic. 

www.MiddleIsrael.net

The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of the bestselling Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sefarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership.