No, it is not a tenable statement in the slightest.

Put simply, there are a lot of historical and semantic problems with what Peter Beinart is doing. Part of that results from Dmitry Shumsky's work, which Peter Beinart only quoted page 8 of, and the fact that Beinart likely didn't look deeper or understand it fully. Part of it also, to me, is because Dmitry Shumsky's work strives to be revolutionary and as a result falls short of historical validity. Part of it may be that Beinart didn't want to understand, but that's more of my personal view, if I'm being frank.

It is, from a historical perspective, virtually impossible to argue that the Zionist movement did not view at minimum a state as crucial. One cannot view history from the period of Der Judenstaat onwards through the Zionist coordinating bodies that constituted the vast majority of the movement without seeing the very, very common theme of seeking statehood.

To tackle Shumsky's work first, you have to understand that he is writing in the context of an attempt at revision. There's nothing wrong with that as a concept; Shumsky posits that scholarship about the Zionist movement has been mistaken, by improperly imbuing history with hindsight. The problem is that Shumsky's work is often shoddy, on a historical basis. His introduction, for example, frequently misrepresents the work of other scholars, or uses misleading language. When Shumsky speaks of Anita Shapira's book on Zionism, titled in Hebrew "Like Every Nation" (in Hebrew transliterated with English letters, ke-chol am ve-am, or ככל עם ועם), he refers to it as the words that appear in Israel's Declaration of Independence, and claims that Shapira ignores the aspirations of other nations in drawing the comparison between Zionism and other national movements of the time. Not only is this mistaken, I'd argue, it's rather funny to draw the link to the Declaration as evidence of Shapira supposedly using hindsight to inform her view of the past. The reason I say that is not because that's not true, but because it's rather hilarious to make this argument. The theme of "like every nation" is integral to the Zionist movement, and has been for a long time. It isn't a phrase that just popped up as an idea one day in the Declaration.

Shumsky's treatment of Herzl is indicative of the problem Beinart is having with understanding, and makes the sleight of hand incredibly clear. Frankly, it's a little alarming that it's being made, and being published uncritically. Herzl, Shumsky's chapter title says, wanted "A Non-Jewish State of Jews". You may be wondering what precisely that means. Shumsky, by way of getting to the point eventually, claims that the standard tale of scholarship is that Der Judenstaat represented the classic view of a Jewish state, and Altneuland did not include statehood and is viewed as a shift in Herzl's thinking. Where he draws this from, I do not know. He certainly doesn't cite any scholars to draw the contrast. I've rarely if ever read this supposed claim. In fact, many of the scholars I've read insist that Herzl never shifted his views at all. Perhaps that's because while Shumsky insists that "In Altneuland...Herzl clearly states that the future sociopolitical entity that he envisioned in Palestine would not take the form of a state." While Herzl wrote of a utopian society, quoting one character claiming, "We have no state, like the Europeans of your time," this isn't the same as saying that there is no Jewish state there. The distinction is the difference between the form of utopia, and what Shumsky calls a state. You see, Herzl calls the New Society in Altneuland a commonwealth. One character puts it bluntly, saying:

We have come here not to choose the head of a state; since we are not a state.

We are a commonwealth. In form it is new, but in purpose very ancient. Our aim is mentioned in the First Book of Kings: 'Judah and Israel shall dwell securely, each man under his own vine and fig tree, from Dan to Beersheba.'

We are simply a large co-operative association composed of affiliated co-operatives. And this, our congress, is really nothing more than the general assembly of the co-operative association which is called the New Society.

This is the utopian end goal of Zionism in Herzl's world, but it is not an indication that Herzl "shifted". This was always Herzl's ideal version of the world, and most scholars agree. Indeed, most would also agree that Herzl's "New Society" is nothing more than a welfare state, and a nation-state exists there no less. The only author the comparison is drawn with is Joseph Adler, who wrote of the documents in 1962. Frankly, I don't have a copy of Adler's book. But if Shumsky's claim that scholars see the views in the books as "fundamentally different" is true, it should be easy to find in my library.

Instead, I find nothing of the sort. Avineri and Watzman, in Herzl's Vision, describe Altneuland as a political program in the form of a novel, and devote an entire chapter to it. Herzl lays out a vision of what is essentially a modern welfare state, they argue, and uses a rather tacky and kitschy (on this too I agree) fictional tale to do it. However, there is a shift, they note, in the concept of "statehood". Why? Not because Herzl's mind shifted, they note, but because Herzl's diplomacy did. By 1902, when it was published, to call for statehood outright might be too much for the Ottomans whom Herzl hoped to persuade and with whom he hoped to meet (and in some cases, did meet) to negotiate. Herzl presented to them his goal of "semi-autonomy" under the Ottoman Empire, and thus left his vision deliberately vague in Altneuland. Scholars recognize this, and Shumsky knows it; he even quotes Avineri saying it was a tactical consideration, from the very same book. But Shumsky, using 100 words where 10 would do, moves along with little resolution. He instead insists that Herzl may have actually believed this would be the case, and that Herzl's belief was in a non-Jewish state of Jews. Of course, this requires first Shumsky's lengthy exposition into literary analysis, and second a complete ignoring of anything Herzl said or did or wrote before and after. It's a little...impressive.

Perhaps the question is what a "nation-state" is. This, Shumsky fails to clearly or cleanly define. Thus it is easy for him to say that this isn't actually what Herzl wanted, because Herzl supposedly saw in Altneuland an autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire that didn't follow traditional nation-state paradigms. But how does Shumsky leave out all the diary entries? I'm not sure. The sleight of hand is really problematic, and Beinart's decision to do things the way he does by using this clearly heterodox view of history is rather frustrating.

Continued in a second comment, responding to this one.

Hi, sorry for coming to this conversation a little late, but I’ve always wanted to answer an askhistorians so I went looking for one that suited my expertise. First we need to consider how you’re asking the question. While a “nationalist movement” may have an obvious meaning today, one of the claims scholars have been making is that in the context in which Zionism began (fin de siècle Europe) the goal of a nationalist movement was not necessarily the creation of a fully independent nation state. In addition, it has longbeen well understood that Zionism is, and has always been a multivocal ideology, however, scholars have been reconsidering how central some elements of Zionism once considered peripheral (such as cultural Zionism) were to the movement.

Therefore, if I can reframe your question a little bit: prior to the 1940’s Zionism was by no means synonymous with the creation of an independent Jewish nation state. Rather both Zionist leaders and rank and file members held a plethora of ideas of what the shape and structure of a Jewish national unit (I just can’t think of a better word than that right now) would be, and especially in early Zionism (say pre 1920’s to pick a somewhat arbitrary date) the idea of an autonomous nation state was far from the most common desired national arangmement.

Shumsky’s books should be the obvious starting point for this conversation (both because Beinart cites it himself, and because it’s the most comprehensive work on the topic). However, while Shumsky treats his argument as if it is revolutionary, it is in fact building off of the work of numerous scholars (Derek Penslar, David Myers, Noam Pianko and later Michael Brenner) who have all been making the case that our understanding of the centrality of “statehood” to Zionism is largely the result of reading history backwards. To be clear all of these historians have something of a vested interest in decentralizing statehood from Zionism, however, they are some of the most respected scholars in the field, and unlike Shumsky, whose work is somewhat meandering and overly focused on semantics, I believe they have built a strong case that Statehood was a very slowly emerging consensus among Zionists, not an early default in Zionist thought.

In going through the evidence its helpful to think of the three main environments in which Zionism existed: Europe, Palestine and the United States. The most extensive work has been done on European Zionism. Derek Penslar’s work is the most helpful here, as it was beginning of a process of scholars recentering Herzl’s Zionism, and understanding his thought and language in the context of fin de siecle Europe. Penslar, along with other scholars such as Michael Stanislawski (and yes Shumsky) have shown that Herzl’s worldview was deeply shaped by the imperial European environment in which he existed. His imagination of what a Jewish State meant and would look like was an extension of that world view, in which he assumed imperial powers would rule over various autonomous national groups. While reading Der Judenstaat (especially in translation) it can be hard to imagine that he’s not speaking of a state in the way we understand the word today­–Herzl’s language was influenced by that of the logic of the Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman, empires of Europe and the various national movements within them, whom were vying for varying degrees of autonomy within an imperial framework. (continued in comment on this post)