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Open Letter to My Students 80: What I Believe About Israel

Posted on July 24, 2025 | 1 comment

After my latest Open Letter on the generation split among Jews, regarding Israel, I have been asked what I would say, were I to be in dialogue with those who do not think as I do. So here goes…

At stake are three questions:

1. Do Jews even have a right to a nation state? 

2. If so, where? 

3. Given that they have such a state, and conceding that a Jewish state (like all states) must guarantee their citizens’ safety, how should that state prosecute its current war?

Would-be Jewish critics must first concede that it is the Israelis, not Diaspora Jews, who were massacred on October 7; it is they, not we, whose lives depend on the war-time decisions that we discuss from the comfort of our studies and dinner tables. Still, the ripple effect is impacting Jews everywhere. We all have a stake not just in Israel’s survival, but in the kind of state that Israel is. It is painful watching it move implacably toward excommunication as a rogue state in the community of nations. Also, Israel’s policies impact anti-Semitism toward Jews in general. Finally, Israel came into being as a Jewish state, not just an Israeli state. Jews world-wide have the right to an opinion.

With that in mind, I begin with Question 3: Israel’s war in Gaza. 

If you read deeply about past Israel-Arab wars, you cannot but marvel at  the complexity of military decisions and how little we outsiders knew at the time. So too now: lacking military expertise ourselves, we must draw conclusions from a host of rival reports, some reliable and some not. I give greater credence to the free press in Israel than to reports from within Gaza that are subject to totalitarian Hamas propaganda. It matters, then, that many reliable Israeli voices, some of them in the military and security establishment itself, suggest that the war is no longer tactical but punitive, political, or driven by right-wing ideologues intent on driving the Arabs out altogether.

To complicate matters, Hamas leaders, sitting comfortably nowhere near the war zone, are happy to see the war continue. Even as I write this, international negotiators from Qatar itself are rejecting Hamas proposals as being unworthy of even bringing to the table. So peace may be impossible, no matter what Israel does, but more bombing and killing, more population displacements, and the non-stop demolition of infrastructure that provides food and medical care are looking increasingly suspect. 

So in Question 3, I am increasingly critical of Israel’s government and its right-wing coalition partners who sometimes admit outright that their goal is to make good their biblically based “right” to own it all. “From the river to the sea” is a despicable phrase no matter who says it, Arab or Jew. 

More troubling are Questions 1 and 2, where critics deny the very right to have a Jewish state; especially on the biblical land that was once Judea/Israel, and then renamed by Rome as Palaestina (Palestine).  

Their most strident objection is that Israel is the fruit of imperialistic colonialism. But just the reverse is the case. If anything, Jews are the indigenous people to the area. To be sure, the Amorites, Jebusites, and so on were there first, but that was in pre-antiquity, akin to the multiple tribes that preceded classical Rome. Jews are to Judea as Romans are to Rome. Dig deep enough in Israel’s soil and you get biblical cities, Maccabean homes, and ancient synagogues. The return of Jews to the biblical and rabbinic Jewish land is a lesson in anti-colonialism, even though their internationally approved right to return to part of it does not entitle them to claim it all.

True, the return was facilitated by colonial powers. But so too were the Arab states that came into being simultaneously: not just Israel, but Syria, Iraq, and Jordan too were colonial inventions, part of the 1916 pact whereby Francois Georges-Picot for France and Sir Mark Sykes for England unfurled a map of the Ottoman empire to carve a set of arbitrary states out of it. 

In the Arab-Jewish war of 1948, all these just-being-born states fought not only to defeat one another but to expand territory as well. Jordan hankered after the entire West Bank. Iraq sought parts of the Galilee all the way to Haifa. Egypt dreamed of owning the Negev and the Mediterranean coast. 

Yes, contrary to the angelic picture offered many of us in synagogue religious schools, we now know that Israel too sought territorial expansion. And yes too, Israel was born by an ethnic people (the Jews) seeking to return to its geographic roots, its legitimate home-land. To oppose Israel, however, but not all the other ethnically derived states that the twentieth century birthed (Rumania, Slovakia, Serbia, Croatia, and so on) is anti-Semitism. 

Still, all such states are properly held to moral standards – which I addressed above.

There is some hope – at least long-term. British foreign secretary and then prime minister Lord Palmerston (1784-1865) opined that nation states have interests, not friends. “Interests,” he averred, “are eternal and perpetual” but “we have no eternal allies, and no perpetual enemies.” In other words, even enemies can become allies – as we now see with Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and maybe even Syria and Saudi Arabia in the near future. In time, we may see a Palestinian state as an ally – but only if both sides wish it to be so. Continued war and takeovers, whether in Gaza or the West Bank, are not the way to get to “Yes.”

Palestinians, like Israelis, want a home, but looking homeward can be good or bad, depending on where you train your vision. Neither side can look to what home once was, as if to restore some prior golden age when Muslim powers relegated Jews to subservience; or when biblical kings owned Israel/Judea, centuries before Islam was even born. We Jews cannot convince radical Islamists, but we can do the right thing ourselves. 

Israel is a proper and necessary Jewish state; it needs secure borders; it does not need more territory. 

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Open Letter to My Students 79: Mamdani Long-Term, and the Jewish Future

Posted on July 7, 2025 | Leave a comment

As intellectual Gertrude Stein lay dieing, her disciples are said to have pleaded with her, “Gertrude, Gertrude, what is the answer?” She responded, “What is the question?” Everything depends on the question. 

Hence, the Passover Haggadah’s “Four Children” narrative. What makes each questioner wise, evil, or naive is the question they ask.  

What question, then, should we ask about Zohran Mamdani’s election as the Democratic party’s mayoral candidate in New York City? Wall Street wonders how a socialist mayor can run the city that is the epicenter of American capitalism. Jews agonize over an anti-Israel candidate who even advocates the “globalization” of the Intifada.  

 These are real issues, and immediate ones. But long-term, we might wonder whether the voting pattern that brought Momdani his victory spells something larger: the passing of one Jewish era and the birth of another. Trigger warning, first: if you are a baby boomer or older, you might not like the answer. 

Precincts populated by older and established Jews voted against Mamdani. Precincts where young Jews predominate voted for him. The explanations are several. Young people who suffer from New York’s high cost of living found Momdani’s populist socialism appealing. Momdani also mastered the social media by which young people follow the news. But many young Jews supported him not just despite his anti-Israel rhetoric, but because of it. 

This Jewish generational split may be temporary. But what if it is more? What if we are witnessing a genuinely historic moment: not just the end of the boomer generation’s influence but the end of the entire era. As boomers continue aging out of their influential years, the younger generations’ ambivalence about Israel may become the new norm.  

At stake is what has been called “Jewish Civil Religion,” an idea that goes back to a 1967 article (“American Civil Religion”) by sociologist Robert Bellah.[i] Bellah analyzed religion into its component parts: beliefs, sacred holidays,  sacred stories (or “myths”), a code of behavior, and so on. All of those, he said, are offered by just being American. “Americanism” is itself a sort of shadow religion to which all Americans can feel that they belong.

In 1987, Jonathan Woocher applied Bellah’s theory to American Jews.[ii] Side by side with their official Judaism, he said, Jews here are fiercely loyal to a civil Jewish religion, in which pride in Israel is central. Its sacred “myth” is the story of near destruction in the Shoah, but rebirth in the Jewish State. Its rituals include missions to Israel, or even (acting out the myth) travel first to Auschwitz and then to Israel to celebrate redemption there.

Israel in the 1980s, when Woocher wrote his book, was threatened as much as (and maybe even more than) it is today. Israelis were regularly being killed or maimed by terrorist attacks, to the point where Israel launched an all-out invasion of Lebanon in 1982. But the attacks continued. A 1983 assault on an IDF base caused 60 Israeli casualties.1984 ended with the UN denouncing Israel as “not a peace loving nation.” In 1985, Israel had to down two Syrian MIGs; and sink a terrorist ship just off the coast in the Mediterranean; on October 7 of that year (yes, October 7) Palestinian terrorists hijacked a ship and then shot and dumped overboard the body of a wheelchair-bound American Jew, Leon Klinghofer. 

But through it all, the sacred myth remained intact, because Israel still looked to be on the side of the angels. In the face of the crisis, Yitzchak Shamir (right-wing Likkud) and Shimon Peres (left-wing Labor) formed a unity government. We were shocked to hear that in Lebanon, Israeli officers looked away, while their allies, Christian militias, massacred the Muslim population in Sabra and Shatila. But almost immediately, the Knesset empowered a Supreme-court appointed commission of inquiry, which censured those involved and forced several resignations.[iii] In 1985, an Israeli court convicted west-bank settlers of terrorism and even murder. Can we imagine that happening today?

I will not address here the complex situation in Gaza, because debate over the extended war there hides more obvious and unforgivable travesties on the west bank. Israeli settlers, often aided by the IDF itself, are systematically taking over Arab land, while terrorizing and even killing its long-time owners. This wanton behavior hardly comports with our civil-religion tale of an Israel to be proud of. 

This Jewish civil religion animated the baby-boomers’ love affair with Israel. Their Gen X  children grew up with at least some familiarity with it. Not so, the millennials who supported Mamdani; they were born well after these glory years of a Jewish State with a conscience. They have probably never even heard of the Jewish civil religion from the 1980s; and if they have, they would find it laughable. 

Every generation has a window of influence, usually the period from about age 40 to 65 or 70. Boomers born in 1946 to 1964 are now 61 to 79 years old. Their Gen X children (born 1965–1980, now aged  45-60) are still a moderating bridge to what’s coming. But tomorrow will be written by generations who see Israel altogether differently. That is not just a generational turnover; it is a change of era. 

Some caveats apply. The current war may end with Hamas, Hezbollah, and even Iran so weakened, that Gaza can be rebuilt into a Palestinian partner with Israel. The Israeli electorate may at last drive out its current ruling coalition and the west-bank adventurists whom it is empowering. Maybe also, the absurdity of demanding the dismantling of a Jewish state because of so-called “colonial” beginnings will dawn on the American Jewish critics; who simultaneously may discover the vast majority of  their Israeli Jewish counterparts who supported this war because Hamas had to be destroyed, but who deplore the Jewish thugs as much as they, the American millennials, do.   

It may be too that the Jewish youth in New York are so utterly different from the rest of the country that my entire analysis is irrelevant. But I doubt it. The Mamdani phenomenon may repeat elsewhere, with other Mamdanis, and other Jews too who will attain their own era of influence while believing that Zionism is evil, and that the Israel of their parents was an illusion. That is what scares me. 

[i] Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Dædalus 96:1 (Winter 1967), pp. 1-21.

[ii] Jonathan Woocher, Sacred Survival (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).

[iii] https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-kahan-commission-of-inquiry

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Open Letter to My Students 73: October 7, Revisited

Posted on February 6, 2025 | 1 comment

Last week, while lecturing in Miami, I went to see Nova, a traveling art installation described as “an in-depth remembrance of the brutal massacre at the Nova Music Festival on October 7…. the largest massacre in music history.”

I say I went to “see” it, but “see” doesn’t do the experience justice. I was totally immersed in it; and through it, immersed also in Israel’s trauma and (by extension) in the Jewish condition through time. I am congenitally an optimist, so I loved Nova’s insistence that,despite it all, “we will dance again.” That said, the exhibit hammered home what some of my long-time liberal friends who are not Jews – and even some who are – do not, I fear, fully comprehend. 

I don’t mean just the all-out protesters on college campuses. I mean good solid friends who support a Jewish state and who phoned me in solidarity on October 8 or 9; but who, later, as the war ground on, became fixated on the need for an immediate peace, because war is inherently bad and Israel had done too much damage already.

I too question much about the policies of Israel’s right-wing government; I too watched the Gazan suffering in horror. Neither my friends nor I have the benefit of military intelligence, but were we to know all the facts, we would probably agree on a great deal. So I am not arguing policy here. I am not arguing anything at all. I mean only to say that something very deep within me was confirmed by the Nova visit, something that I find hard to convey to even these lifelong friends: the realization that the October 7 victims were my people, that my people were being slaughtered once again.

I visited the Nova exhibit from a sense of Jewish obligation – the way one visits a Holocaust Memorial, hardly out of curiosity, much less to be entertained, or even just to learn something that we don’t already know. Not a day goes by without my thinking about the butchery that felled so many Jewish innocents. Some victims were not Jewish, mind you. But they were collateral damage, caught up in the wrong place at the wrong time. October 7 was the underbelly of the human race unleashed upon Jews, first, last, and foremost.

The exhibit consists largely of some warehouse space, filled with detritus from the actual Nova campsite: tents, camping gear, skeletons of burned out cars, clothes scattered everywhere. Visitors shuffle along in the semi-darkness, stopping every few yards to watch videos recorded during and immediately after the attack.

I watched each video at least twice over, the scenes of Jews who came to dance through the night and greet the morning sun, only to be murdered wholesale by Hamas attackers who shout over and over, ”Allah is great” and (at one point) “We are heading for Paradise now, guys.” A Jewish survivor describes the scene afterward: “Kids tied to a tree, naked girls tied up everywhere you look.” As I took it all in, I recited what I could remember of El Malei Rachamim, the signature Jewish burial prayer composed after similar slaughters by Ukrainian Cossacks in 1648. I thought back to Chaim Nachman Bialik’s epic poem that memorializes the 1903 Kishinev pogrom. “Get up and head for the city of slaughter…. See for yourself the trees, stones, and fences laden with spattered blood and dried out brain matter.” 

I shed Jewish tears left over from 1648 and 1903 and so many other times as well. There must be a chamber of the heart where old tears get saved up like a bank account, and then accrue with time, to be withdrawn and spent on the likes of October 7.   

It goes deeper than the heart, however. We properly differentiate head from heart: the cold rational intellect that thinks versus the warm, emotional sentiment that feels. We either believe something strongly or feel something deeply. I both felt and thought my way through the Nova exhibit; but my tears came from somewhere deeper.

They came from what the Yiddish calls kishkes; in English, “the gut.” A “gut punch” is a surprise blow to the stomach that stops you in your tracks, takes everything out of you, and leaves you reeling, shocked, dazed, enraged, and afraid for your life. 

This is more than just metaphor. Scientific research posits an actual brain-gut connection. There is clearly a well of commitment, devotion, and faithfulness that transcends both head and heart, both thinking and feeling. We do not even know it is there, until we feel threatened to the very core of our being. 

It is, I think, the personalized outrage that comes when one’s family is threatened; and what I cannot adequately convey to others is that Jews like me do somehow sense that Jews everywhere and through all time are an extended family. I don’t mean rank tribalism, because anyone can become Jewish by choice. But in so doing they do not so much convert as they join the family. I am proud of that family, of its heritage and its commitment to a wise and compassionate world. I particularly deplore other Jews whose immoral behavior defiles everything Judaism hold dear: Bernie Madoff and Harvey Weinstein in America; the right-wing Settler Movement in Israel. I applaud responsa that insist on the rightness of informing on our own wayward family members whose behavior is evil.[i]

By the same token, I am happy to engage critics of Israel’s war in Gaza. I am critical myself. But those critics need to know that Israel is my family. They can take issue with me but only if they also make a shiva call to offer their condolence. People who celebrated October 7 celebrate also my own imminent demise, for I am a Jew.

Edmond Fleg (1874-1963) was a French Jew, totally assimilated, until 1894, when Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French army was imprisoned on the trumped-up charge of treason. The episode awoke in Fleg his all-but-completely suppressed Jewish identity. “I am a Jew,” he wrote, “because born of Israel and having found it again, I would have it live after me.” By Israel, he meant the People, not the state, which didn’t yet exist. But the Dreyfus case convinced him, as it did Theodor Herzl, that only a Jewish state could be counted on to shelter Jews unwanted elsewhere and to protect them, come what may. I would say, “I am a Jew, because having been born of it and never lost it, I know not just in my mind and heart but in my very gut how right Herzl was, and how Jewish I really am.

[i] See, e.g., https://www.jewishideas.org/article/reporting-and-prosecuting-jewish-criminals-halakhic-concerns

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Open Letter to My Students 65: Thoughts on Israel Part 2: The Student Protests in Perspective

Posted on May 16, 2024 | Leave a comment

It’s time to see the campus protests in perspective. Why do students protest? And how does a Zionist like me respond?

            The “why” has many answers. 

            Start with the human urge to matter. When you’ve given or heard your share of eulogies, you realize that except for their immediate families, most people, for most of their lives, don’t live for anything terribly profound. They work, travel, golf, take the kids to the doctor, figure out what’s for dinner, go bowling. But deep down inside, there stirs a desire to matter; and to document our mattering for posterity. American soldiers in World War II scrawled graffiti on European walls announcing “Kilroy was here.” Antique shops still sell grammar school desks where generations of students etched initials into the wooden surface.

            There is also a demographic answer. You need a certain amount of leisure time to worry about mattering, and college students have that. Between 1961 and 2010, the weekly average of hours spent studying dropped from 24 to 14.[i]  Add in class time, and you get, roughly, a 30-hour week. Some 17 hours go into socializing, dating, joining groups, having fun. 

            And there is an existential answer. The practice of musing on what life is all about starts in adolescence and deepens at College, where people read, think, discuss, and debate; and when nothing matters quite so much as deciding who we shall become and with whom we shall become it. 

            I mean no disrespect when I say that student protests are the equivalent of marquis lights on Broadway, announcing the next generation’s coming of age, a young people’s version of “Give my regards to Broadway and tell ‘em I’ll be there.” But it is a Broadway-like presence that is endowed with moral purpose, a proclamation that their existence as appendages of their parents has ended, that they are individuals to be taken seriously. It is also what Emil Durkheim called collective effervescence, the experience of being part of something big, grand and glorious: we are not alone; we are one among hundreds, even thousands, united in a cause beyond ourselves.

            The cause varies: in July of 1908, Young Turks overthrew the Ottoman Sultanate and founded modern Turkey. On May 10/11, 1968, some 40,000 French students marched to champion the Marxism of Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao Zedong. On May 4, 1970, student protests against the War in Vietnam climaxed with the killing of four Kent State students in Ohio. The list goes on and on: Students Against Apartheid in South Africa; student sit-ins in the Jim Crow segregationist south. And now, student solidarity with Palestinians. 

            Not all causes are alike; not all of them turn out, in retrospect, to be equally legitimate or even desirable. The same Young Turks who brought down the Ottoman sultanate later launched the Armenian genocide. France is better off having defeated the Marxists.  

            It’s always tricky trying to learn from history, but a few things seem clear. Student protests come and go. They tend to happen in good weather, often just before students leave school for summer vacations. Protests do have their revolutionaries; they also have an abundance of peaceful and well-intentioned moral activists; but students join for a whole host of reasons, and overall, as in any crowd behavior, most participants have not deeply studied the issues in question. Even the slogans they yell can mean different things to different people.  

            It follows that in the campus protests now roiling our country, we should avoid tarring everyone with the same brush. I will ignore for now the “fellow travelers” who join protests mostly for the effervescent thrill of it all – a not inconsiderable proportion, actually. But even the seriously engaged ones span a gamut of opinions and motivations. Some of them really are bad actors: haters of Israel, anti-Semites who celebrate the Hamas butchery (rapes, murders and all), and would demolish Israel and kill every Jew in it, if they could. But most of the students are in other categories. A good number of them are legitimately horrified by images of Gazan civilians buried under bombed out rubble or lacking medicine, food and water.       

            Whether you agree with the cause or not, some of the students quite legitimately protest in favor of a Palestinian State and, by extension, against Israel’s right-wing government which has done everything it can to make such a state impossible. If I were of Palestinian descent, I would probably do the same thing. And there are lots of Jews involved, Jews who are no less Jewish because they despise the current Israeli coalition and abhor the suffering of innocents in Gaza. I do wish they showed parallel sympathy for the traumatized Israelis who just want to return home and live out their lives without being attacked again. But they are not our enemies; not traitors to the Jewish cause. We know these people. They are our children, our students, our families; They are us. 

            There is much about the protests to deplore: the biased presentation of Israel as the enemy; the group amnesia that conveniently forgets the Hamas barbarism that began the war; the politicized left-wing faculty who advocate rather than teach, enflame rather than instruct. But the Israeli government is, at the very least, complicit, if only because of its West Bank policies that compromised its moral high ground years ago and that continue unchecked each day. It’s complicated, and, as I recall from my own student days, students are genetically endowed to take sides without necessarily reveling in nuance. Their parents and grandparents who have learned to balance complexities should not rush to the ramparts to embrace simplicities on the other side. 

            One such simplicity would be to overgeneralize anti-Semitism as the dominant motivation. We should recognize that one can, sometimes, criticize Israel but still be proudly Jewish. It is also true that even poorly advised protests can sometimes have positive outcomes: the French Revolution’s reign of terror was a horrendous chapter in world history; but “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” still rings true. 

            I believe that Israel must achieve security and safety for its inhabitants; but I worry about the cost to innocent human life, and suspect that Israel is being drawn into the morass of guerrilla warfare that is inherently unwinnable (think Vietnam and Afghanistan) – especially if it leaves Israel without allies and alienates it from the next generation of Diaspora Jews. I am outraged by its failure to reign in the extreme right wing, who do believe in ethnic cleansing, and are trying to finish off the west bank while no one is looking. 

            I believe that this moment in time calls on us Diaspora Jews to strengthen the hand of Israeli protesters against this government. I believe that Israel need not stand alone; it can reaffirm its ties to allies, first and foremost the United States itself. I believe that war is indeed hell; that this war cannot end too soon. And I hope that when it does, it will not be too late for the Jewish People, in Israel and beyond, to regain its moment in the moral sun.

[i] Cf. https://flaglerlive.com/college-study-time/#gsc.tab=0; https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED511233.

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Open Letter to My Students 64: Thoughts on Israel Part 1: I am a Zionist. So are Lots of People Who Say They are Not. Back to Basics. And What I Fear Most.

Posted on May 13, 2024 | 9 comments

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.

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