What We Owe Our Children, Not Our Enemies |
A community does not betray itself by asking difficult questions. It betrays itself when it leaves those questions to its enemies.
A movement built to rescue a people becomes dangerous when it can no longer recognize the difference between rescue and permanent mobilization.
This is why the question “Has Zionism completed its role?” is not merely historical. It is diagnostic. It asks whether Zionism still knows what kind of project it is.
On the surface, the answer seems simple. Zionism sought a national home for the Jewish people. The State of Israel exists. It is sovereign, armed, technologically advanced, internationally entangled, culturally productive, and politically unavoidable. If the purpose was to create a Jewish state, then the task has been fulfilled.
But that is exactly where the real problem begins.
A political movement can end when its task is completed. A theological-political movement cannot. It does not treat completion as closure. It treats completion as proof that a deeper, unfinished task has now become possible.
The state did not end Zionism. It gave Zionism a body.
And once an ideology receives a body, the question changes. It is no longer simply: do Jews need a state? It becomes: who is authorized to interpret the unfinished destiny of that state?
That question is far more dangerous.
There is a version of Zionism that can be........