Summary
Catastrophe Zionism and its polarity utopian Zionism, as Lahav presents them in her Prologue: for catastrophe Zionists Israel serves primarily as a safe haven against repetition of the catastrophes that befell the Jews; for utopian Zionism Israel should be constructed as a model state — a polarity, with unity against diversity, that resounds through Simon Agranat’s opinions and the Agranat Commission’s reports (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 165-178).
Details
- Lahav traces catastrophe Zionism entering Agranat’s own worldview in the 1930s, when his volunteer defence of illegal immigrants taught him the urgency of political shelter: until then his Zionism had meant a model society of liberty and social justice where the Jewish genius could bloom, with rescue from persecution no significant part (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 895-930).
- In the founding years Lahav argues the survival anxiety of 1948–1953 strengthened catastrophe Zionism — history as a chain of calamities perpetrated against the Jews — and conspired to tame utopian Zionism’s hopes for a just legal system worthy of the prophets (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 1095-1110).
- The tension between the two is Lahav’s frame for the legal profession’s security dilemma: restraining the executive and maintaining the rule of law against a constant sense that the state held on by the skin of its teeth (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 1100-1110).
- In the later chapters Lahav has catastrophe Zionism repeatedly overpower the utopian strain: the Eichmann Trial nourished “never again” as a fetish legitimating any means to preserve the state; Yeredor projected catastrophe Zionism’s collective vision with the Arabs as the new “other”; and the Agranat Commission’s rhetoric confirmed a “nation in arms” in which even judges were forever mobilised and could only “correct that which needed correction” within the Zionist narrative (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 1912-2791).
- The Epilogue holds the two together in the post-Agranat court: a revived jurisprudence of rights alongside a “jurisprudence of repression” legitimating the occupation regime in Gaza and the West Bank (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 2836-2861).
Related pages
Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, Zionism, Simon Agranat, Negation of the Diaspora