This is not the first time the word “Zionist” has come under attack. Back in 1975, 72 nations supported a United Nations resolution that called Zionism “a form of racism and racist discrimination (35 nations were opposed; 32 abstained). The resolution was reversed in 1991. But here we are again, no UN resolution this time round (at least so far), but, instead, international student protesters, many of them Jewish. Most of them have never known a Jewish state governed by anyone except Benjamin Netanyahu – who is part of what I fear most: but more on that later.
So back to basics: What is Zionism anyway? Put simply, it is the belief in the legitimacy of and the moral obligation to support a Jewish state — first and foremost, to protect Jews from persecution, and even outright obliteration; secondarily, to exercise the right of every people to pursue its own religious and cultural artistry.
Especially in the light of attempts by Nazi Germany (but also Czarist Russia, Stalin’s USSR, and others) to eradicate Jews from the face of the earth, most Jews I know – indeed, most people I know – are, therefore, Zionists. What even these Zionists may fail to grasp is that a Jewish state is not just a minor appendage to what makes Judaism what it is; the existence of a Jewish homeland has, since biblical times, been a sine qua non of Jewish being.
A Jewish commonwealth of some sort goes back to King David some 3,000 years ago. In medieval times, the area was contested by warring Christians and Muslims, but throughout it all, Jewish settlements of some sort remained, while Jews outside the Land prayed regularly to return “home.” Open the Bible that is central to Judaism, almost at random, and the Land, this land, is already there.
The idea of Zionism as a modern nation state, however, is more recent. Pretty much none of the Middle Eastern states existed until after World War I, when the Ottoman Empire that owned most of it was dismantled and the victorious powers (England and France) carved them out: Syria here, Jordan there, Jewish Palestine elsewhere, and so on. None of them were independent at first; they were all colonial creations. Only eventually did they develop their own sense of nationalistic selves.
In the competition for independence there were winners and losers. The various Arab states in the region expelled their Jews – who settled in Israel and were absorbed there as examples of the very persecuted Jews for whom the Jewish state was founded. But the people we call Palestinians faired more poorly. When the surrounding Arab states decided not to admit the existence of a Jewish state, but, rather, to attack it, Arabs within that state were displaced as well. Some fled the war zone, expecting that an Arab victory would enable them to return. But also, the Jewish government under attack by Arabs without feared the rise of Arabs within as a fifth column, and expelled many of them. These are the Palestinians who were not absorbed by neighboring Arab nations, and who have ever since been living largely in refugee camps. Various powers have arisen to represent them, Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and its successor the Palestinian Authority (PA), first and foremost. Hamas is a terrorist organization that fought the Palestinian Authority and emerged victorious in Gaza, from which it seeks to eliminate Israel and its Jews.
But—there is a big “but.” The current Israeli government is itself a corruption of the Zionism that I and my many friends espouse. My Zionism believes that every people deserves a national home. To be sure, the nationals who inhabit such a home would have to admit the legitimacy of a Jewish state next door, and so far, that has not happened. But the Israeli government has played its own role in discouraging a peaceful solution. Among other things, it has empowered Israeli hyper-nationalists to persecute Arab farmers and take over their land on the West Bank. The current Israeli coalition, in particular, includes religious extremists and nationalist expansionists who are indeed racist and who behave like the fascist thugs of Mussolini’s time.
My kind of Zionism deplores that kind of Jewish government. It accepts the claim of Palestinians to have a home of their own – the two-state solution, as it has been called. Hamas rejects that solution: hence its attack, designed to frighten Israelis away from any Palestinian state at all, lest it too be taken over by Hamas-type anti-Israel and anti-Semitic fanatics.
Can you oppose those Israeli governmental policies that you judge as immoral? My Zionism says it is not just possible but mandatory.
Can you oppose Israeli policies yet not be anti-Semitic? My Zionism says you can, as long as your solution is governmental/political policy change, not the dissolving of the Jewish state as somehow illegitimate.
Can you oppose the continuing war on humanitarian grounds and still be a Zionist? You can, as long as your opposition does not whitewash away the actual culprits on the other side, Hamas; and as long as you support the principle of Israel’s legitimacy and the right of Israel to protect itself (like any other sovereign nation).
Can you join others to advocate for a Palestinian state and still be a faithful Jew? You can, as long as your partners in protest do not advocate or sloganize about such a state as being a replacement of Israel; and as long as they and you do not imagine that the entire Palestinian condition has been brought about entirely by Israel. International politics is messy; only in misguided ideological posturing is there always a single bad-guy oppressor and a single good-guy victim.
I, frankly, do not see how Jews cannot be Zionists. Do we really believe that anti-Semitism is gone for good? That Jews will never need a haven that guarantees us the right of sanctuary, with sufficient independence and means to guarantee it? Are we really in denial about the threat of Hamas, of Iran, or Hezbollah; and their desire to murder every one of Israel’s 7,000,000 Jews? I doubt it.
But here’s the kicker: the Netanyahu government’s alliance with the right-wing settlers movement that is systematically menacing and even murdering West Bank Arab farmers, in what truly is an exercise in ethnic cleansing. One argument to oppose the war is the terrible slaughter in Gaza, which less and less looks either militarily or morally sustainable. Another is the immediate need to elect a new government that will roll back the specter of west-bank Jewish fascism. Were the settlers to win, I would still be a Zionist but a theoretical one, supporting a Jewish state, but not the semi-fascist one that it becomes.
Proper Zionism is neither racist nor oppressive. It is the Jewish People’s right to a Jewish state in its historic homeland; to live there in peace and harmony; and to extract from our own experience as an oppressed minority the obligation to oppose the parallel oppression of others.