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The combination of nationalism and religion in Israel- as in
I
Africa or Asia-cannot , therefore, be evaluated only by Western
parameters. This does not mean that the pessimistic implications of
both O'Brien and Benvenisti will not come true . It does mean that
many political manifestations in Israeli society cannot be understood
solely against a background of Western experience. Therefore,
al-
~
lowances must be made for the unexpected, which will be considered
by some miraculous and by others absurd . The present existence of
two rival executives within the framework of a "national unity"
government is a case in point .
Finally , one must reflect on the possible consequences of the lit–
tle perceived but potentially important conflict between "space" and
"territory." The two concepts are usually confused and seen as over–
lapping. They have, however, profoundly different roles in Jewish
history. Space is basically an abstract concept which can be defined
in a variety of rational , ethical , religious, and mythical terms with
little or no relation to reality. Territory, on the contrary, is a
physical, geographical space , filled with solid content , idealized by
folklore , ideology, and traditions.
For millennia Judaism and Jewish identity have been deter–
mined by time and space, not by territory. What makes a Jew a Jew
is the calendar he lives by, not the land he lives on . Nothing is more
significant in this sense than the prayer a Jew continues to recite
three times a day to ask for rain or dew, according to the meteoro–
logical conditions of Palestine, irrespective of his living in snowy
Russia or desert Africa. Furthermore, the places Jews did inhabit,
the ghettos, shtetls, and mellahs of Europe, Asia, and North Africa,
were spaces and not territories. It is instructive to recall that Vilna
was known to the Jew as "Jerusalem of Lithuania. " When, in the
course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these Jewish spaces
came into conflict with Europe's national territorial states, the conse–
quences could not be but tragic in spite of formal guarantees of
equality .
The great insight of the Zionist movement was to understand
the deadly implications of this clash and to secure, out of sheer need
for survival , a territory for at least part of the Jews. However, this
momentous achievement has taken place at the very moment in
which larger and larger segments of the industrialized world realize
that it is precisely the mastery of time and space and not territory
that promises the biggest economic and military returns. The
resources of air and outer space, information systems , or, as the
