Paul Vallely: Have suicide bombs also shattered the ideals of Zionism?

Even those sympathetic to the Israelis must admit there is an irony in the response of the nation's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, and his bellicose foreign minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, to the latest suicide bombs. Some 22 people were killed outright and more than 100 wounded in the outrage, which was the first bomb inside Israel proper since November. The Israeli leaders' response was to refuse the Palestinians permission to travel to London for a conference next week to discuss the reform of the Palestinian administration.

In doing so they have opened themselves to accusations that it is they, as well as the bombers, who are obstacles to peace with their insistence that an iron fist is the only way to put an end to Palestinian violence – despite the fact that they have used their whole arsenal of tanks and planes and the terrorism continues.

Many British Jews seem increasingly uncomfortable with this. Most hold their tongues in solidarity. They know there is more than one truth to speak – and that speaking only one effectively denies the others, perhaps not intellectually but certainly in terms of practical politics. Yet new voices continue to be heard. A few months ago it was the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, lamenting that the current situation "is forcing Israel into postures that are incompatible in the long run with our deepest ideals". Now another leading Jewish thinker, Jacqueline Rose, has spoken out. Currently making a film for Channel 4 about America's relationship with Israel, she said recently: "It is the task of the intellectual to think thoughts, to say things, that can't be said anywhere else."

What is particularly interesting about her contribution is that it goes beyond an exploration of the contrast between the current situation and the great insights of the Judaic tradition on Western thinking from Moses Maimonides and Spinoza to Freud and Chomsky on everything from juridical, allegorical and existential declarations to the celebration of diversity and intellectual freedom. She is anxious to do it within the context of Zionism:

There is a kind of cliché position on the left where, if you support Palestine, then you can use Zionism as an insult – which I think is wrong and naive, because Zionism is one of the most powerful collective identities of modern times and if you don't understand that, then you are in serious trouble.

Zionism – the idea that Jewish identity can only find fulfilment in the geographical homeland of its biblical past – has always been controversial. Many Orthodox Jews saw it as an impertinent anticipation of God's providence. Others felt that the Judaic exclusiveness which came from the covenant of chosenness with God rested in the unique status which came with diaspora. Some Progressives wanted to strip Judaism of its ethnic and nationalistic aspirations. But Zionists saw in their belief something political as well as religious, messianic and eschatological in the idea of the Jewish people as a nation in its homeland. There was an idealism to it. Martin Buber, the philosopher who was one of the key Zionist leaders described himself as a "Hebrew humanist" and emphasised the rights of the Arab people. He wrote:

We Jews, we of the blood of Amos, Jeremiah, Jesus, Spinoza and all the earth-shatterers who, when they died, were unsuccessful, we know a different world from this one which subscribes only to success.

Yet many Jews are now asking how much of this survives. The interdependence of faith and reason, philosophy and politics, idealism and activism, which Zionism brought inevitably created a dual perspective, each side of which fed the other. It inspired individuals to articulate a new political reality and yet at the same time stand critically apart from it. But many Jews now sense this richness is being stripped away. Instead of incarnating an ideal they see that Israel is becoming just another state in the Middle East.

There are all kinds of dangers in this. It opens human suffering to the numbers game: 22 Israelis died in the double bombing but 50 Palestinians were killed by Israel in the month before, and so on. And it has political consequences too. It opens Israel to the possibility of a change in attitudes by the US. Given the power of the Jewish lobby, and the support of right-wing Christians (who see the restoration of Jerusalem as the pre-cursor to the second coming of Christ) such change might seem unlikely. But then most Jews in Germany thought that in the Thirties their community was too rich, too powerful and too influential for anything to happen. And the ability of Christian millennialists to discover new signs and portents is legendary.

Such shifts can happen. In 1983 Donald Rumsfeld, then a high-powered executive in the pharmaceutical industry, went to Baghdad as President Ronald Reagan's special envoy to meet Saddam Hussein. After the meeting American companies sold Saddam components for chemical and biological weapons – including anthrax and bubonic plague cultures – even though they knew he was daily using chemical weapons in his war against Iran, then Washington's prime enemy. Today Rumsfeld, as US defence secretary, is perhaps the most fierce of the hawks demanding war on Iraq to curb its weapons of mass destruction. Change when it comes can be dramatic.