Review: The Paradox of Liberation - The Jewish Chronicle

By Michael WalzerYale

University Press, £16.99

During the last century, many peoples under alien rule gained independence, usually after considerable, often violent, struggle, spearheaded by various nationalist groups.

Successful national liberation movements have typically had to fight against two principal foes. First, of course, is the alien ruling power from whom they seek independence. The second consists in the quietist attitudes and ideologies prevailing among the territory's population that have tended to reconcile the inhabitants to their lot and thus accommodate them to subordination. Foremost among such attitudes and ideologies have been the traditional religions of the people.

The paradox that Michael Walzer examines in his new book arises from the phenomenon of popular resentment - those whom the nationalists wish to liberate rejecting or resisting the actions of their "liberators". Such resentment is rooted in devotion to traditional religion.

Citing Israel, India and Algeria as countries whose histories exhibit this paradoxical pattern, Walzer contends that, although each of their national liberation movements that won independence were secular and democratic, militant forms of religious nationalism arose soon after independence: the Hindutva movement in the case of India, messianic Zionism in Israel and radical Islam in Algeria.

These religious movements ended the hegemony of the secular liberal elites that had won these countries' independence

Being a longstanding centre-left, social democrat, Walzer deplores the trend he chronicles. In his book, he addresses why this came about and how best it might be reversed.

His prescribed remedy is for secular liberal and democratic nationalists to harness traditional national religions to their cause by engaging with and drawing upon them rather than casting them aside, as liberationists were formerly inclined to do. He concludes: "[Those] committed to national liberation… have to engage closely with the tradition of their nation while sustaining at the same time a fierce opposition to all the versions of traditionalist passivity and oppression… I recommend it to any readers who share my conviction that many nations, including these three, still need to be liberated."

The type of engagement Walzer favours is the kind of cultural "ingathering" of such cultural Zionists as Hayim Nahman Bialik.

Walzer writes: "The laws, custom, practices, and implicit understandings that made the communal life of the exile possible… might well teach contemporary Israelis… how different Jewish communities could coexist... alongside… other (non-Jewish) religious communities…

"The new Israeli majority might learn a lot from the experience of the old Jewish minorities."

One thing Israelis will not find in Jewish tradition is any imprimatur for denouncing fellow Jews merely for expressing opinions with which they disagree, as Walzer did last December in signing a letter that called for the boycott of Israel's Education Minister Naftali Bennett, leader of the modern Orthodox nationalist party Bayit Yehudi - The Jewish Home.

Bennett's "offence" was to have expressed opposition to the two-state solution, a view that many other mainstream Jews now share.

Walzer would do well to take a leaf out of his own book and practise what he preaches.