Reclaiming Zionism |
A few days ago, a tempest in a teacup occurred that the vast majority of the Israeli public were not aware of. An esteemed Israeli literature professor, who identifies as part of the Zionist left, wrote a moving, albeit apologetic, open letter to his non-Zionist left-wing comrades. In it he addressed his complicated and delicate relationships with issues that have stood at center stage in the Israeli debate for decades, but have intensified since October 7: the army, the feeling of belonging to a collective, and of course the occupation. The replies ranged from heartwarming thanks to, as is expected at these fringe edges of the political spectrum, ugly and often personal attacks.
Across all of them, however, one question was repeatedly raised: what is even the difference between the Zionist left and the non-Zionist (or anti-Zionist) left? To put it differently, what is Zionism to begin with? Because by defining it, one can correctly place their political worldview in regard to Israel.
The answers, again, ranged widely. Some equated Zionism with Jewish supremacy, territorial expansion, and oppression. Others reduced it to an objection to the current government, or to the widespread phenomenon of “Bibism” as a whole. As one known author and former Haaretz journalist wrote, “if the hilltop youth are the embodiment of today’s Zionism, how can I be a part of it?”
These are important questions, I think, but they have little to do with Zionism. A while ago I wrote an article for my Substack about the misuse and abuse of well-defined terms for political arguments, and the dangers that follow. It is what Foucault called a floating signifier, a term that its meaning and can be filled with content by different social groups to rally around, and what the Germans call Kampfbegriffe. In both formulations, the word itself becomes a weapon, not a definition.
But Zionism has a definition. It is not an opinion or an interpretation. While immensely demonized, Zionism is the name of the national movement of the Jews. Like every other national movement that arose in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, Zionism calls for the self-determination of the Jewish people and for recognizing them as a people who share a common culture and religion, language, history, and some form of a geographical homeland. It is what Leon Pinsker called Auto-Emancipation, and it was heavily influenced by the success of other national movements of that time.
Moshe Hess, for example, named his seminal 1862 work Rome and Jerusalem, drawing on the successful 1861 unification of Italy and the Risorgimento that began in 1848. Jabotinsky, the ideological forefather of modern Likud, took great influence from the Polish national movement, which at that time fought bravely for its own self-determination, one separate from the Slavo-Russian one, similar to what the Ukrainians do today. Herzl himself took much from German nationalism, which defined peoples as historical Völker needing a territorial state.
Even if one believes that modern nationalism, or nationalism as a whole, is a modern-cultural construct, as Marxist thinkers such as Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm have claimed that it is nothing more than imagined communities, reality dictates that the world is defined by nation-states that give sovereignty and self-determination to a community that sees itself as a community. As the Declaration of Independence rightly puts it: “the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State.” Zionism is nothing else but that. If someone recognizes the Jewish people’s right for self-determination, then he is a Zionist. If not, he is none – or anti – Zionist. It is not my definition. It is simply the definition.
This does not absolve Israel or Zionists from their policies, but eventually, that is what those are: policies. Those policies, as the forefathers of the Israeli state determined, are to be dictated by a liberal democracy via an elected government. And policies, as is expected in democracies, ought to be criticized, sometimes objected to, and even opposed. Theoretically speaking, one can be fervently against Netanyahu’s government and its policies and remain a Zionist. You can even be convinced that Israel is committing the crime of crimes in the Gaza Strip and be a proud Zionist.
The confusion between a national movement and the policies carried out by the state that manifests that movement is not merely an intellectual error; it is a political one, and a consequential one at that. When the meaning of Zionism is stretched to encompass everything from that comically put phrase “they stole my country” to the personality of a certain prime minister, the term ceases to function as a concept and begins to function as a slogan. And slogans, unlike definitions, do not clarify. They mobilize, they divide, and they obscure. If those on the left, Zionist and non-Zionist alike, wish to have an honest conversation about the future of Israel and the Palestinians, they would do well to place themselves clearly on either side of this definition. Doing so would make it far easier to distinguish between critics, even the harshest ones, of Israel’s conduct, and those who oppose the very premise of Jewish self-determination and should therefore have no say in Israeli public debate and policy-making.