THE JEWISH STATE: The Struggle for Israel’s Soul.

By Yoram Hazony. Basic. 433 pp. $28

For decades, the conflict between Israel and the Arabs—both the Arab states outside its borders and the Palestinians within—dominated the daily lives and consciousness of Israelis. "The Siege" is the label Conor Cruise O’Brien once gave the struggle and the mentality it produced among Israelis. It dictated everything from political discourse to ideology to which brand of car they could buy (for years, Subaru was the only Japanese brand available; other automakers scrupulously honored the Arab League embargo). But now the Siege is lifting, and Israelis find themselves facing turbulent internal issues they have long put off: church versus state, majority rule versus minority rights, and, broadly, what it means to live in a Jewish state.

The last question is at the heart of this book. In Hazony’s view, the very concept of a Jewish state is under systematic and relentless assault from the country’s own cultural and intellectual establishment. Virtually everywhere he looks—in the classrooms, books, museums, movie theaters, courtrooms, even in the barracks of the country’s proud citizen army—he sees materialism, deception, despair, and a loss of Zionist fervor. And he considers the Oslo accord with the Palestinians yet another betrayal of the dream of a Jewish state.

Although Hazony—who heads a Jerusalem think tank and has been an adviser to hard-line former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—holds strong, nationalistic views, he has written not a screed but a thoughtful and provocative historical analysis and critique. The book traces the development of the idea of the state from Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) to his ideological heir, David Ben Gurion (1886–1973), and chronicles their political and ideological battles with other Jewish leaders.

Hazony contends that a small faction of German Jewish intellectuals, led by the philosopher Martin Buber (1878–1965), mounted a rear-guard action against classic Labor Zionism from their redoubt at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The intellectuals favored a binational state in which Jewish identity would take a back seat to secular citizenship. Although Buber and his followers were discredited and vanquished by Ben Gurion, Hazony argues that their anti-Zionist ideology infected the second generation of the Israeli elite, and that this generation has now retreated from the vision and dreams of its forefathers.

To his credit, Hazony doesn’t flinch from criticizing the Zionist giants he so admires. He accuses Ben Gurion and his heirs in the Labor Zionist movement of pursuing concrete achievement at the expense of ideas and vision, thereby leaving themselves vulnerable to Buber’s intellectual counterattack. He contends that the Jewish settlement movement, which first arose after the triumphant Six Day War in 1967 and grew markedly in size and fervor after the Yom Kippur War in 1973, fell victim to the same syndrome: It built fortress communities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip while never adequately articulating a compelling moral basis for doing so.

But Hazony overestimates the impact of a small group of isolated academics and underestimates the benefits of Israel’s transformation. Though true believers scorn it as betrayal, the shift away from ideological fervor is nearly inevitable in post-revolutionary societies, few of which can sustain the fire and vision of the revolution’s founders. Aspects of Israel’s transformation are regrettable: the loss of egalitarianism and sense of community, and the eroding of the nation’s distinctive culture and work ethic. But there are gains as well, for Israelis and Palestinians, from living in a mature, prosperous, and bourgeois society striving to make peace with its neighbors and with itself.

—Glenn Frankel