Zeev Sternhell - Political Views

Political Views

Regarding Zionism, Sternhell said in an interview with Haaretz:

I am not only a Zionist, I am a super-Zionist. For me, Zionism was and remains the right of the Jews to control their fate and their future. I consider the right of human beings to be their own masters a natural right. A right of which the Jews were deprived by history and which Zionism restored to them. That is its deep meaning. And as such, it is indeed a tremendous revolution that touches the lives of each of us. I felt that revolution when I immigrated to Israel alone at the age of 16. Only then, when I disembarked at Haifa from the ship Artza, did I stop being an object of others' action and became a subject. Only then did I become a person who is in control of himself and not dependent on others.

Sternhell is a long-time supporter of the Israeli peace camp and writes critically in the Israeli press about the Israeli occupation and policy toward the Palestinians. In The Founding Myths of Israel (published in Hebrew in 1995) Sternhell says the main moral justification the Zionists gave for the founding of Israel in 1948 was the Jews' historical right to the land. In the epilogue, he writes:

In fact, from the beginning, a sense of urgency gave the first Zionists the profound conviction that the task of reconquering the country had a solid moral basis. The argument of the Jews' historical right to the land was merely a matter of politics and propaganda. In view of the catastrophic situation of the Jews at the beginning of the century, the use of this argument was justified in every way, and it is all the more legitimate because of the threat of death hanging over the Jews. Historical rights were invoked to serve the need of finding a refuge.

Sternhell argues that after the Six-Day war in 1967, the threat to the Jews had disappeared, which changed the moral basis for retaining conquests:

No leader was capable of saying that the conquest of the West Bank lacked the moral basis of the first half of the twentieth century, namely the circumstances of distress on which Israel was founded. A much-persecuted people needed and deserved not only a shelter, but also a state of its own. Whereas the conquests of 1949 were an essential condition for the founding of Israel, the attempt to retain the conquests of 1967 had a strong flavor of imperial expansion.

Sternhell sees Jewish settlement on the West Bank as a wish of religious Zionism and part of labour Zionism, that the more moderate part of labour Zionism was unable to withstand because this wish was in line with deep Zionist convictions. He sees settlement on the West Bank as a danger to "Israel's ability to develop as a free and open society", because it puts nationalistic aims over social and liberal aims.

He says something fundamental changed with the Oslo agreements: "In the history of Zionism the Oslo agreements constitute a turning point, a true revolution. For the first time in its history, the Jewish national movement recognized the equal rights of the Palestinian people to freedom and independence." He ends the epilogue with: "The only uncertain factor today is the moral and political price Israeli society will have to pay to overcome the resistance that the hard core of the settlers is bound to show to any just and reasonable solution."