For nearly 60 years, I have split my time between Israel and North America. After a string of Benjamin Netanyahu’s governments, the Gaza war, the Iran attacks, plus more than a half-century of occupation and at least $300 billion in American aid, I cannot recall a time when being identified as a Zionist seemed so awkward among American liberals, whom I count as kindred spirits.
In 2024, Pew reported that among Democratic and Democratic-leaning respondents under 30, 47 percent said their sympathies lay more with Palestinians, and just 7 percent with Israelis. Democratic candidates who decline to use the terms apartheid or genocide when talking about Israel flunk the progressive wing’s entrance exam. Last year, a flier reportedly distributed by a local activist group blamed “Zionist white supremacists” for rent increases in Crown Heights.
Ordinarily, I would not be inclined to defend Zionism as a movement. It’s not because I reject its history and achievements. It’s because as a movement, it has long been anachronistic. Fifty years ago, I was already arguing that we were in a “post-Zionist” era — that Israel had graduated into a diverse, established country, with culture wars of its own, and did not need to present a united front as if it were still soliciting, say, recognition from the Truman White House. If what one means by Zionism is being pro-Israel, well, I’m pro some Israelis, anti others.
And yet, the debate over Zionism now seems inescapable in America, especially since some Israeli leaders seem unable to retire the term. Zionism, as my late friend, the writer A.B. Yehoshua, put it, is “the ketchup poured onto every plate.” In the current Israeli election campaign, even centrist leaders opposing Mr. Netanyahu are promising a Zionist government, their proxy term for a coalition not reliant on Arab Israeli parties to make a majority — not in wartime, anyway. More generally, they say, they want a Jewish and democratic state, yet feel the need to signal that they will not sacrifice the former to the latter. Just what they mean by democratic, if cooperation with Arab parties is precluded, they leave to our imaginations.
Which brings us to the real issue at hand. The most fair-minded critics of Zionism pose a question, which is not a bad one. Can any Jewish state, any product of Zionism, possibly be a country worthy of the democratic liberalism that progressives in America are fighting for? Is a Jewish and democratic state a contradiction in terms? Prominent critics of Zionism — Jewish ones included — insist that Americans ought to advocate equality of citizenship in any state, irrespective of ethnicity, religion and race, while Zionism seems to presuppose some sort of Jewish supremacy. Haven’t Mr. Netanyahu’s grotesque governments been, in this context, more the effect of Zionist ideology than the cause of its debasement?
In some ways, yes, and in another, no, actually. There were three distinct Zionist ideologies in Israel’s prehistory — political, religious and cultural — which have left marks on the country’s current political leaders. These ideologies can coexist in our imaginations, but each defines a distinct historical crisis, each presents a distinct solution, and each has implications for the kind of state Israel can be.
The first Zionism, political, is arguably inconsistent with democratic life; the second, religious Zionism, inarguably so. Yet the third, the cultural kind, is consistent with democracy. Its acolytes — secular Israeli liberals who are the most affluent, educated and internationally minded third of the country — are in a multigenerational struggle and fighting for the future of their country. They could use the support of American progressives, not some sweeping dismissal of Israel’s very existence, which, ironically, only plays into the hands of Israel’s right-wing populists and theocrats.
The first Zionism is the most familiar. The problem it purported to solve was unyielding persecution of Jews and the psychic wound of powerlessness. Good luck trying to assimilate into Western countries; the Holocaust is the ultimate proof that this hope is forlorn, political Zionists would say. Israel’s rejection by the Arab world fell in the same category. Defiance, in this rubric, is also a mass therapy. Citizenship in the Jewish state is embodied in the Law of Return: Jews were hunted on racial grounds, and so their state includes, and privileges, anyone with a single Jewish grandparent. So long as Israel sustains a Jewish majority, and accords civil rights to minorities, it is democratic enough for the Middle East. Though political Zionists are often secular, they may also bow to Orthodox piety to engender national solidarity.
Which raises the second Zionism, the easiest one for American liberals to disdain. Call it cultic Zionism, so as not to degrade the word religious. Cultic Zionists want a Jewish — or more precisely, a “Jewist” — state, quite like Islamist theocracies: promised land, a holy city, holy law, perfect (or at least superior) commandments underlying ethics, a metahistory of kingdoms and messianic projections, a skewed archaeology turning Judean artifacts into irredentist claims. Rabbinic courts and Halakhic law would supersede civil courts. About the role of women, or the rights of homosexuals, the less said the better.
But a third Zionism, the one that built the country, saw things quite differently: cultural Zionism, which morphed into the Labor Zionist settlement project from 1905 on. This focused on the adoption and development of modern Hebrew, along with the socialist political economy that enabled Hebrew to proliferate as a language of work and self-reflection in pioneering internal colonies.
Cultural Zionism’s cadres are products of the 18th- and 19th-century Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskalah, in Europe, who saw secular modern culture to be inevitable and attractive. Rabbinic authority, they thought, would justifiably be superseded by liberal norms and evolutionary science. Yet they also saw themselves as custodians of liturgical Hebrew, fabulous texts, legal precepts and prophetic ideals not bound by Talmudic constraints, of musical forms and poetic grandeur — all of these — which might be transformed into material for individual artistic innovations.
The problem cultural Zionism sought to allay was not the impossibility of assimilation but the certainty of it — that is, in Western liberal countries such as the United States and Western European nations, where granular Jewish life would be dissolved by the languages and cultures of host nations and so would be reduced to synagogues and kitsch. The goal of cultural Zionists was a secular and distinctly Jewish national home as un-self-consciously and inclusively liberal as France is, well, French.
By 1925, Labor Zionist culturalists, settling in collectives on land purchased from absentee landlords, had begun dispossessing thousands of Palestinian tenant farmers, helping to provoke the bitter conflict that we know. But these settlers considered that their lands would amount to a small sliver of Arabia and that a modernizing Hebrew-speaking civil society could, with statehood, assimilate Arabs and Druze as full citizens.
How do these various Zionisms fare in America? The first two, political and religious Zionism, while dicey for American liberals, are easier for them to understand. That’s because they refract Israel through the prism of American Jewish experience: a dream palace of religious longing and ethnic solidarity in the face of bigotry — a big synagogue with an air force.
In contrast, few Americans — or American Jews, for that matter — can perceive, let alone appreciate, Israeliness, or the cultural Zionism as it exists in the Jewish state. They don’t typically sit in cafes on Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard, go to a Shalom Hanoch concert or read a Lea Goldberg poem. They don’t go to Hadassah hospitals, where, entirely in Hebrew, they are treated by an integrated team of Jewish and Arab Israelis — physicians, nurses and pharmacists. They don’t see, in short, that a democratic Hebrew Republic, while not yet fully realized, is plausible, or that Israelis advancing the political and religious Zionist ideas that Americans default to continue to obstruct it.
The tragedy of this lack of understanding of cultural Zionism is that instead of American progressives expressing fellow feeling for Israeli progressives, they assume that the latter, owing to their Zionism, cannot exist. So, they engage in boycotts of Israeli technology start-ups, news organizations, film institutes, scientific labs and universities — the very institutions that incubate Israeli liberalism, and which Mr. Netanyahu is already only too happy to starve. Indeed, their boycotts seem to justify Israeli rightist tropes that Jews are condemned to be hated.
Since American sympathies are on the line here, I hasten to add that sympathy for Palestinians is possible in Israel, too, and especially for Palestinian leaders who are reciprocal enough to choose a common future over a fight to the finish. Palestinians need Israeli liberals as much as they need American ones, after all. Israelis, Palestinians and Americans can safely consider the moral prestige of historical Zionism as beside the point. But in no country does liberty defend itself. Americans should realize that Israeli liberals, too, need them for that fight.
Bernard Avishai, a visiting professor of government at Dartmouth College, is the author of “The Tragedy of Zionism,” “A New Israel,” and “The Hebrew Republic.”
Source photographs by Culture Club via Getty Images and the Library of Congress via Unsplash.
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