A recent op-ed in The New York Times by Jewish intellectual Bernard Avishai presents a challenge to us Zionists. The piece is both a plea and a kind of rejection, albeit a soft one. In being soft, however, it is perhaps more important than the fear and loathing we have become used to hearing from Israel’s enemies.
The plea is essentially a political one, as shown by the title: “There Is a Zionism That Needs the Support of Progressives.” In effect, Avishai acknowledges that progressives are in the process of embracing outright anti-Zionism, though he doesn’t take the critique as far as I would and call this progressive anti-Zionism outright antisemitism.
Avishai is no hater and rejects the anti-Zionism of the haters. His article is a critique, not a scorched-earth assault. He simply calls Zionism “anachronistic” and supports not anti-Zionism, but “post-Zionism.”
He asserts that Israel has “graduated into a diverse, established country, with culture wars of its own,” making Zionism largely irrelevant. “If what one means by Zionism is being pro-Israel, well, I’m pro some Israelis, anti others,” he states. In effect, Avishai believes that Zionism has been superseded by a kind of Israeliness.
“Which brings us to the real issue at hand,” Avishai states, and at this point, his piece contends with the relationship between Zionism and “democratic liberalism.” He asks: “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?”
Avishai notes that “prominent critics,” which is a generous description, assert that “Zionism seems to presuppose some sort of Jewish supremacy.”
He views this critique as only partially accurate. To prove it, he formulates a tripartite paradigm. He posits that there are three very different Zionisms at work. “The first Zionism, political, is arguably inconsistent with democratic life; the second, religious Zionism, inarguably so,” he says. Nonetheless, “The third, the cultural kind, is consistent with democracy.”
Historically, Avishai claims, this cultural Zionism, which “built the country” and “morphed into the Labor Zionist settlement project from 1905 on,” was “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.”
Avishai states that these cultural Zionists “sought to allay … 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.”
Ultimately, he asserts, “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.” A glance at France today might suggest that this is somewhat undesirable, but his point is well taken and not inaccurate.
Today, Avishai says, cultural Zionists are involved in a struggle against political and religious Zionists. In this struggle, 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 Zionist argument is that liberalism and democracy are fine things, but they are not enough.
On a certain level, Avishai’s remarks are a brief for the Israeli Zionist left, which is perfectly legitimate, but there are several essential problems with it.
First, his paradigm is simply wrong.
In fact, the Labor Zionism that “built the country” was not cultural Zionism. It was, unquestionably, political Zionism. This is proved by the fact that, as Avishai acknowledges, it founded the Jewish state. This had always been its ambition, and it was everything it had worked for over the course of many decades.
Certainly, Labor Zionists wanted a secular and democratic state, but also very much a Jewish state—however they defined it—and did not view these ambitions as incompatible.
In fact, from Herzl on, the argument of the political Zionists was not anti-liberal or anti-democratic. It was simply that liberalism and democracy are fine things, but they are not enough. The political Zionists believed that, due to the hostility of the non-Jewish world and the impossibility of assimilation, true liberalism and democracy for the Jews could only be realized in a Jewish state.
It seems to me that, contrary to Avishai’s assertions, this Zionism remains extremely relevant, and perhaps more relevant than ever.
In Israel, for example, most secular and liberal Israelis are still believers in political Zionism. Their Zionism has simply become what a former professor of mine once called “banal Zionism”—that is, simple Israeli patriotism. This patriotism, given the immense post-Oct. 7 mobilization of Israeli society, strikes me as very much alive and well. It is, in fact, essential to the defense of the Jewish state, which is, of course, very much a political phenomenon.
More to the point, however, and perhaps more ominously, is that Zionism is more relevant than ever to the Diaspora.
It is quite possible that, given the tidal wave of antisemitism now sweeping the West, the verdict of history is coming down again, and true assimilation is yet again proving to be impossible. Jews could eventually take this as further proof that liberalism and democracy are not enough. That is, in a non-Jewish society, they cannot guarantee genuine Jewish security and even survival.
If this is the case, then it must be acknowledged that it is political Zionism that will once again step into the breach. It is entirely possible, though not inevitable, that many Diaspora Jews will reach the same conclusion as the old political Zionists and decamp for a Jewish state in which liberalism and democracy for the Jews remain possible and honored in more than the breach.
If not, they may nonetheless embrace a kind of “Zionism of the spirit” in which the principles of Zionism—Jewish identity, Jewish strength, the secular rejection of assimilation and so on—become the foundation of their lives.
All of this, contra Avishai, is political, as all forms of Zionism are political. For good or ill, Zionism remains a question of the Jews’ place in a non-Jewish liberal, democratic and, indeed, progressive society. It critiques the inevitable inadequacies of such a society and seeks a viable response to them.
In this sense, Zionism today is very much not “post.” It is an ideology and a project of immediate moment, because it indicts progressivism, not the other way round. This indictment, I believe, is the great question before progressivism today, and sadly, at the moment, progressivism is failing to give us any answer other than hate.
