Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism

When I was a suburban Jewish child in the sixties, Zionism was a simple, attractive construct. It was my Uncle Shlomo, my grandmother’s brother, redeeming the land near the Sea of Galilee. He was among the founders of Degania Bet, the second kibbutz in the Land of Israel, an agricultural paradise and visionary experiment in communal living and Jewish collectivism. He married Chaika Shainvexler, my favorite great-aunt, who was everything that my own grandmother was not: kind, soft-spoken, generous, and enfolding. She seemed to live entirely without grievance.

Zionism was what the both of them represented: the national Jewish “project” of reclamation, a bid for historical agency and independence in a land that no one else seemed to want, or least to want as much as they did. They were urgently committed to hard work and self-sacrifice, draining swamps during the day and folk-dancing at night. Degania was, for me, a kind of Brigadoon with a communal dining room, stables, and hen houses. The Barkai children were sturdy and self-reliant, endowed with a measure of thrilling physicality. My cousin Nadav looked like Theodor Herzl.

Shlomo and Chaika were my childhood heroes. I’m not a braggy guy, but I bragged about them, feeling that they conferred status on our family. It took me a long time to understand that Zionism was more complicated. There was the political Zionism of Herzl, himself, that saw normal nationhood as the highest ideal. There was the cultural Zionism of Ahad ha-Am, less fixated on the tasks of national ingathering. It saw Israel as a kind of kind of hovering Mother Ship, where literature and art and spirituality would effloresce. There were political parties and projects and identifying regalia. For a while I wore the shirt of a secular Socialist youth group at every family seder in Kansas City. It would take a week to explain the idiocy of that gesture, which ended only when I lost the shirt in the laundry.

But now Zionism is still more complicated. It is the ethno-nationalism of messianist settlers who are uprooting Arabs all over the West Bank and dreaming of a Gaza that has been cleansed of Palestinians. For Netanyahu it is the same as Judaism. He wants to conflate anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism so that they are merely two halves of the same satanic whole: the modern iteration of an ancient blood libel that inescapably entangles every Jew, and requires that we respond with ferocious self-protectiveness. There can be no retreat, no distinguishing nuance, that allows us to distance ourselves from the State’s behavior.

Perhaps most problematically, most dangerous to Jews, Zionism is also the bugbear of the Left and the sworn enemy of the murderous actors of Hamas. Whatever you may think about the tragedy of Gaza, it is time to read the foundational texts of jihadism. Political Islam, as formulated by its radicals, is bent irrevocably on the extermination of Israel. It sees it as an offense against the tenets of the Qur’an, and an intolerable contaminant to the ethnic purity of the Mideast. No compromise is possible, and the only answer is slaughter. Israelis are right to see it as a threat and are willing to pay the price of the world’s opprobrium.

I do not have a solution to this problem. It would be arrogant and delusional to suggest one course or another. I have not lived through a nighttime bombardment of Tel Aviv, and Israelis reactively dismiss the advice of Americans. It is exhausting and fruitless to think any thoughts and to have my Israeli cousins dismiss them out of hand. “If you want your say, move to Israel. Serve in our army and vote in our elections.” It’s a handy soundbite that has destroyed real communication and made dialogue impossible between Jewish Americans and Israelis, at least when it involves critical judgements.

But I do want to deal with the issue of nomenclature, and disentangle the phenomena of Judaism and Zionism. I believe that will help us with the corresponding negatives: anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in the current debates.

At the most fundamental level, I am an American Jew, living unapologetically in the United States. I love the literature of my people and its moral commitments, and the remarkable civilization we have shaped over time. That cultural achievement is an international phenomenon. I’ve had numberless opportunities to live in Israel and consciously chosen a different life. I believe in the value of a world Jewish community and refuse to use the word “Diaspora.” It implies the less-than status of a second-class minority, dispersed against its will and punished by God. If I wanted, I could move to Israel next week, but I am committed to living my life where I am. Those are the contours of my Jewish life.

I am also a steadfast, lifelong Zionist, committed to the legitimacy of the State of Israel and involved emotionally with the Israeli people—their security, cultural genius, and national achievements. I believe that nation-building is a confounding enterprise that will inevitably involve the genuine suffering of many. That is exactly what happened with the founding of Israel. Many Palestinians fled. Others were threatened or exiled, carrying legitimate grievance into the communities of their dispersion. Both partition and independence are the solutions to this problem, offered and refused in the period of the British Mandate. The prospect of partition is now vanishingly small, but is still a worthy and achievable goal.

What modern Israel is not is a colonialist “project” tainted by its founders and their European origins. They sought reconnection with an ancestral land and made enormous sacrifices to bring their nation to life. Israel is an expression of romantic nationalism, shaped in the furnace of the nineteenth century and part of the emergence of the modern world. Italy was stitched together at the same time. Same with Germany and its miniature kingdoms. The unification of Spain took many centuries, leaving eternal scars and political fault lines. The perennial bid for Basque independence is much like the Palestinian complaint against Israel. It will crest and subside until the end of time, but does not invalidate the national status of Spain.

Exactly the same is true of Israel. My Zionism is self-critical, complicated, and aspirational. It is no longer the hero-worship of my Uncle Shlomo and my spiritual reverence for Chaika Shainvexler, but it is still a fundamental part of my psyche. I will not be associated with an anti-Zionist entity, be it the freakish Jews of Neturei Carta or my leftist friends in the Jewish Voice for Peace. They may be my friends, but I am not their ally. What they advocate for in the anti-Zionism of this moment offends against a part of my soul. The State may err, but it is not illegitimate. That is not always the same as anti-Semitism, even if it might aggress against the same Jewish persons. As much as I detest the notion of anti-Zionism, you can be a partisan of that view and not hate the Judaism of the Jews.

What I share with those friends is a very strong antipathy to the current government of the State of Israel. It has bastardized the democratic Zionism that I personally hold dear, acted immorally toward the civilians of Gaza, and invited its new status as a pariah regime. It is opposed by the majority of sane Israelis, who hate the fact that it has betrayed the hostages and turned them into political pawns. It is also in the midst of an authoritarian coup, fueled by the personal scandals of its leader, who frantically placates both the settlers and haredim in an effort to secure his political well-being. In the words of Thomas Friedman, imperfect prophet, he is the very worst leader in Jewish history.

And in addition to these sins, he conflates Judaism with Zionism, representing both as single cluster of ideals. They happen to live co-jointly in my soul, but they are not always balanced in the same way in others. I will not abide a political game in which legitimate criticism of the current government becomes, for Netanyahu, an assault on Judaism—an assault which requires automatic defense. I cannot defend the policies of his government, from destroying the judiciary, capitulating to the Orthodox, and turning the neighborhoods of Gaza into a stinking ruin. His response to October 7 is immoral and disproportionate, driven by the sick self-interest of his situation. It has nothing to do with the well-being of the State of Israel.

I say that not as a self-hating Jew. I say that not as an anti-Zionist. It is the statement of someone who abhors the party called Likud and the coalition it has built with the help of messianists and zealots. We need to establish a new set of categories, with anti-Likud assuming its proper place. We should also challenge the Left to honor this distinction. I am comfortable in the same room with anti-Likudniks. The same is not true for anti-Zionists.

That party does not represent my deepest commitments and I believe that it endangers the State of Israel. Wherever you stand, I ask that you think this through. The clock of history is ticking loudly, the alarms are sounding, and Netanyahu is deaf. We haven’t been in as much danger since the invasion of Poland.