National Agenda : A Kinder, Gentler Zionism for Israel? : Yitzhak Rabin’s election victory heralds a change in the values of the Jewish state that emphasizes secularism and pragmatism. That does not please everyone.

During a private, post-election victory celebration among old-time Labor Israel’s supporters the other day, an elderly woman who has backed the party ever since she fought in successful struggle for independence raised her glass in a toast.

“I can finally feel good about being an Israeli again!” she exclaimed.

It was a sentiment commonly heard among party stalwarts thrilled by the victory of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the restoration after 15 long years of a true Labor-led government. It reflected a sense, felt on all sides of the political divide, that Labor’s victory will mean not just a change in politics, but for better or worse a change in the values of the Jewish state.

Elections in Israel are regarded as gauges not just of political opinion, but also of the state of Israel’s identity. Ever since the late Menachem Begin and his Likud Party toppled Labor from power in 1977, critics have claimed to see a drift to the political and religious right in Israel--toward a militaristic, less tolerant, less open society and one less respectful of democratic values.

Now, in an electoral stroke, a pair of liberal parties anchor Israel’s new government. Not only is the Likud Party excluded, but so are groups further to the right, as well as religious parties that had aggressively pursued a campaign to make the country more pious.

The dramatic switch reignited lingering disputes over the very nature of Israel and especially its founding ideology, Zionism. And it could mean significant change not only to the politics of the Jewish state but also to the rhythm of its everyday life.

Both contenders in the ideological debate claim to be the heir to authentic Zionism, which at its most basic holds that Jews need a state of their own.

To Labor boosters, however, Rabin’s victory means revival of a kinder, gentler Zionism, one laced with a heavy dose of pragmatism. In their view, Israel is meant to engender normalcy for a people long burdened by persecution; in Israel, Jews for the first time are meant to feel at ease with the world at large. The centuries-old “Jewish question” would be resolved by making Israel a state like others in the liberal, modern Western mold that Jews throughout history helped to construct.

Within this stream of Zionism runs a strong, secular current and a disregard for tradition--the whole late 19th-Century idea of leaving Europe’s Jewish ghettos to return to the ancestral homeland in Palestine was, in part, a revolt against religious-centered Judaism, and some ultrareligious Jews to this day consider the state a sacrilege. But these historical Zionists were bent on creating a New Jewish Man--an identity nourished by the land, by work and security.

To others, however, including the downcast followers of the deposed political right wing, this brand of Zionism represents an elite, soulless vision of Jewish life. To them, insisting that Israel be like any other country smacks of trying “to pass” for non-Jew. Israel must function on its own terms and with its own values protected by its own arms--and to heck with what outsiders think.

Over time, the right found common cause with groups that emphasized the religious roots of Israeli identity. The establishment of Israel in the Promised Land was not an accident but an affirmation of the God-driven history of the Jews, in this religious view. Jews were in Israel because they were Jews--not simply because they were refugees. All Jews, whether they are persecuted or not, should return to the land.

These two branches of Zionism clashed over the very map of Israel. For Labor Zionists, although Palestine was the ancestral home for the Jews it was also a land that could be divided if needed to serve the interest and survival of the State of Israel.

For the right, led by Likud, such division was blasphemy. You could no sooner divide the Promised Land than you could lop off one of the Ten Commandments. As in biblical disputes of birthright, no part of the patrimony could be ceded--least of all to Arabs, who became stand-ins for the ancient enemies of the Israelites who had first settled in the Land of Milk and Honey.

Although the territorial dispute is the best-known battlefield for the ideological struggle, it is not the only one. There is also a cultural and civil debate that is bound to intensify now that Labor has resumed power. Clashes will rage on issues ranging from bus schedules on the Sabbath to religious instruction in the schools; from the production of non-kosher meat to the induction of religious students into the army.

It is unlikely that either side will win these struggles unconditionally. In a sense, it is misleading to read into the results of any one election--the latest one included--judgments about the state of Israel’s identity.

Israel is a land of competing elements. It is more accurate to say that the June election went a long way toward setting the bounds of Israel’s struggle for identity along lines running between the secular and religious, the dovish and warlike, pluralistic and intolerant, self-confident and fearful.

In his inaugural speech to Israel’s Parliament, Rabin placed himself squarely in the camp of a Zionism rooted for 100 years in the search to bring a sense of normalcy to the Jewish people. “It is our duty to ourselves and our children to see the new world as it is now,” he argued. “To discern its dangers, explore its prospects and do everything possible so that the State of Israel will fit into this world whose face is changing.”

Rabin urged the country to shed historic insecurities: “No longer are we necessarily ‘a people that dwells alone’ and no longer is it true that ‘the whole world is against us.’ We must overcome the sense of isolation that has held us in its thrall for almost half a century. We must join the international movement toward peace, reconciliation and cooperation that is spreading over the entire globe these days--lest we be the last to remain, all alone, at the station.”

His was as an echo of a goal expressed more than a century ago by Theodore Herzl, the founding theorist of Zionism, who yearned for a “promised land . . . where we may at last have hooked noses, black and red beards, bow legs without being despised for it. . . . Where we can at last live as free men on our soil. . . . Where the offensive cry of ‘Jew’ may become an honorable appellation like German, Englishman, Frenchman; in short, like all civilized people.”

This state of normalcy, in the view of many Israelis, has been impossible because of the continuing conflict with the Jewish state’s Arab neighbors. “Healthy nations, healthy people, are not obsessed with issues of existence and survival,” Amnon Rubenstein, a member of Rabin’s Cabinet from the leftist Meretz party, wrote a decade ago.

As a step toward ending the conflict, Rabin is taking a conciliatory approach toward the Palestinians. Peace with them, he reasons, will quickly be followed by peace with Jordan and perhaps other moderate Arab states beyond Israel’s border. Bellicose Syria and its vassal, Lebanon, may take longer to come around.

Rabin has largely stripped the West Bank and Gaza of the mystic quality attributed to the territories by Likud and its allies. Borders will be set in line with Israel’s defense needs; the rebellious Arab population will be freed from Israeli control and given self-rule. Even Israeli settlements in the territories are now classed in different categories: “security” for those deemed necessary for defense, “political” for those created only to make an ideological claim to all the land.

Audibly absent in Rabin’s inaugural were references to the biblical and indivisible Land of Israel that were a staple of his predecessor’s rhetoric. Rabin appealed for “tolerance and the creation of conditions for religious and secular to live together in mutual respect.” With the statement, he signaled a scaling back of religious and hyper-nationalist influence through government regulation.

As opponents assess the changed climate implied by Rabin’s election, they have a lightning rod in the new administration’s education minister, Shulamit Aloni. A leader of Meretz, the liberal party that is Labor’s senior coalition partner, Aloni is outspokenly secular, favors humanist education and speaks approvingly of the need to bring outside influences into the life of Israel.

“Deliberately or otherwise, by giving Aloni the education portfolio, Rabin was nailing his colors to the liberal mast--an outward-looking Jewishness,” wrote the Jerusalem Report magazine.

Likud and its religious allies attacked Aloni volcanically. Rabbi Eliezer Schach, the spiritual head of the United Torah party, called Aloni a “woman who hates religion. . . . With her in charge, there will no longer be the nation of Israel in the Land of Israel, but rather a nation like all other nations.”

It was not only the rabbis who barricaded themselves behind a spiritual view of Israel and its need to maintain certain articles of faith. In his parliamentary farewell as prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir argued passionately that the Land of Israel--a term that encompasses the disputed West Bank and Gaza Strip--is a kind of glue that keeps the nation’s spirit together.

Shamir also blasted Aloni. “She will excise all links to Jewish tradition from the school syllabus and all links between that tradition and the Land of Israel,” he warned.

Nonetheless, the election results fractured the right wing’s unanimity on the wisdom of its demands to hold all of the territories. Shamir’s defense minister, Moshe Arens, left public life saying that the Gaza Strip can and should be separated from Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu, setting the stage for his own campaign to succeed Shamir, has been hinting that the land should be viewed primarily as a security asset--not a tool for spiritual redemption.

“There is a feeling on the right that Israelis care less and less about territory for territory’s sake,” observed Ehud Sprinzak, a political scientist and expert on Israel’s right wing.

The success of the Tsomet party, led by a former general, Rafael Eitan, highlighted the attraction of a more pragmatic conservative line. Eitan pledged to keep the West Bank and Gaza under Israel’s control, but mainly for defense. At the same time, he attacked the policy of giving draft deferments to religious students. He also criticized government handouts for favored projects of the religious parties, and the corruption associated with such spending. The positions made an impact on non-religious voters, and Eitan quadrupled his party’s parliamentary membership from two to eight seats.

By contrast, the Tehiya party, which ran on almost no issue other than the virtues of keeping the entire Land of Israel, was skunked in the latest election, losing the three seats it held in the last Parliament.

Even among the Israeli settlers who live in the disputed territories, there is reassessment. Moderates--many of whom settled in the West Bank for the cheaper and more spacious housing offered by the government rather than out of religious or nationalist zeal--are criticizing extremists for isolating their movement from the mainstream of Israeli society.

Disarray on the right may give Rabin some room for maneuver, but he still must contend with a rightist fringe that has threatened violence if Palestinians are given self-rule. Sprinzak, in his book “The Ascendance of Israel’s Radical Right,” has raised the specter of civil unrest.

How Rabin performs will go a long way toward defining Israel’s place in the world of the 1990s. Is it to join the ranks of modern states that matured after World War II and have begun to grasp the limits of power and the need to respect differences with their neighbors? Or is Israel more like the embryonic states of Eastern Europe, groping through ethnic and cross-border strife?

In his historic pamphlet “The Jewish State,” the visionary Herzl maintained that his plan was “in its essence perfectly simple. Let sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe, large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation. The rest we shall manage for ourselves.”

A century later, that “perfectly simple” plan is still in transition and its proper management a subject of intense dispute.

The new Israeli prime minister described his program as a path toward peace, prosperity, economic well-being and equality.

“Once we have traveled this road,” he said, “we shall have a strong state, a good state, a state in which we will all be proud to be citizens and partners in the great effort. The answer is within us; the answer is ourselves.”

Legacy of a True Believer

The nationalist movement known as Zionism originated in Eastern and Central Europe in the latter part of the 19th Century. Its founding father was Theodore Herzl, an Austrian journalist who, ironically, believed that Jews should assimilate into Western secular culture. But because he felt that widespread anti-Semitism made that impossible, he convened the first Zionist Congress in Switzerland in 1897. It made creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine the goal.

The nature of that homeland and its relation to the rest of the world has been a matter of ideological conflict almost ever since. One side strives for a country like any other, while the other side believes Israel must stress its uniqueness.

A Matter of Alliances

Israeli political parties have come and gone since 1973, often splitting off from one another or joining in new coalitions between elections.

The parties winning seats in the latest Israeli election are grouped as follows: Labor and Meretz on the left; Likud, Tzomet, and Molodet on the right; the National Religious Party, Shas, and United Torah Judaism representing the religious bloc; and the Democratic Front (Communist) and Arab Democratic Party.

The current ruling coalition groups Labor, Meretz, and the religious Shas party, which won six Knesset seats.

Elections--Knesset Seats

1973 1992 Labor and Left 62 56 Likud and Right 39 43 Religious 15 16 Far Left and Arab 4 5