The Jewish State by Yoram Hazony (2000, Hardcover)

The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel's Soul is a powerful assessment of "post-Zionist" Israeli culture--the Jewish movement that seeks to overturn traditional notions of Israel as a Jewish state. Author Yoram Hazony, who has been a participant in some of the most significant stages of the Middle East peace process, investigates the cultural and political history of post-Zionism, the extent of its current influence, and its potential effects in the future. The Jewish State includes a previously unknown story about some of this century's most important Jewish intellectuals--including Hannah Arendt, Martin Buber, and Gershom Scholem--who opposed the establishment of Israel, and later leveraged the power of Hebrew University to depose David Ben-Gurion and defame the Labor Zionism that helped give birth to Israel. Hazony imagines that a few individuals with more sensible ideas, better attuned to the desires of Israel's people, might be able to reestablish that nation "as a guardian of the Jews and a source of strength to them.
Historian Hazony looks back at Zionism and its dreams and goals, and at the struggle to make a Jewish homeland a reality, and finds that contemporary Israeli leaders seem strangely uncomfortable with the very idea of a Jewish state. The reason being that the Zionist movements' present day leaders and thinkers are former socialists and leftists. They are trying to "modernize" Judaism by reinventing it into a quasi religion whose tennets of faith revolve around democracy, blindness to reality (that the arabs have no desire for peace, only "piece by piece") and western wishy washy relativism which when placed into the hands of people who believe that their version AND ONLY THEIR VERSION is right cause a government to institutionalize suicide for the state in slow stages. Such was the way of Rabin, barak, Peres, Sharon and now Olmert.
Hazony shows why these leaders are uncomfortable with classical Judaism and historical Zionism.