Opinion | Zionism Is Still Alive—Here’s Why

No, dear and esteemed Nadine Epstein, my sister in so many values and beliefs and insights into Jewish identity, you cannot change reality by killing a word. 

Zionism, the now-notorious “Z-word” to many commentators across the whole spectrum from the well-educated to the poorly informed, cannot be laid to rest alongside a batch of taboo words removed or “canceled” by the U.S. liberal and progressive left. This may have worked for a while, mostly in American public and academic discourse. But the textual techniques of erasing racism out of reality have had very dubious success in American politics, even less so elsewhere. 

Between the 1970s and the 1990s, in much calmer times for Israeli existence, I shared your view. In our kibbutz high school, tzionut (Zionism) was a synonym for boredom: yawn-worthy curricula, musty ceremonies, old-timers’ repetitive tales of yore. Why, we asked, should we, Israeli-born citizens of the world, tuned to Pink Floyd and Kurt Vonnegut and the rising magic of downtown Tel Aviv, pay attention to the ancient discourse of pre-State heroism, Bialik’s poetry of longing to his ancestral land, Alterman’s brilliant poetics of epic national triumph? Even the Holocaust was a sad but faraway burden of memory, like the destruction of the two Temples, narrowed down to its annual commemorative day. We were normal kids in a normal country, we thought, entangled in a real estate dispute with the Palestinians but walking toward negotiation and compromise. In our final high school year Egypt’s Anwar Sadat paid Israel a surprise visit and made peace with us. This seemed to be the direction things were going. Yes, Sadat was tragically murdered during our military service a couple of years later, but hey, so was John Lennon. 

By the time Yitzhak Rabin launched a peace process with the Palestinians and, almost by sleight of hand, signed a peace agreement with King Hussein of Jordan, I was at Oxford witnessing the rise of the anti-Israel wavelet, soon to become a tsunami, led by Palestinian intellectuals alongside Israelis such as Ilan Pappé and Avi Shlaim. I remember my spouse, Eli, discussing with Pappé that freshly coined term, “post-Zionist”—which in fact might have originated during that same Oxford conversation. Eli rightly said that it was not Pappé who was the post-Zionist but we Israelis working for peace and yet wholly certain of the existence of our country. No longer needing to fight for its very legitimacy, but freed to struggle for its morality, its capacity to compromise, its obedience to our Declaration of Independence commitment to “hold out our hand in peace.” On the other hand, Pappé and Shlaim were anti-Zionists of a new type, eager to keep the term alive in order to deny Israel’s right to exist, retrospectively but with all the practical repercussions: Send Israeli Jews back to exile or subdue them.

In those years, as a young academic, I refused any dialogue with people who thought  Israel could and should vanish from the face of the earth. Their view was equivalent to that of Israeli extremists, some members of the settler movement, some of the Kahanist groups digging their way up from their nasty holes far to the right of Likud, who thought it was the Palestinians who should vanish from the face of the earth. Both polarities were equally unsavory and, more importantly, undoable. 

Had Nadine Epstein suggested then, in the early 1990s, that we relegate the word Zionism to history, where she says it belongs, I could not have agreed more. 

Unfortunately, the then-small group of Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian academics opposing Israel’s existence chose history as their preferred sandbox. Delving into the intricate annals of the Middle East, the Ottoman Empire and British Mandate Palestine, they posited every Jewish migrant as a colonialist and land thief. They effectively erased my four grandparents and all other last-minute arrivals fleeing penniless from Europe, for whom it was either Palestine/Eretz Yisrael or genocide by Nazis. The “new historians of Palestine” also conveniently erased a million Jewish refugees from Muslim countries, before and after 1948. While revealing the truly important and deeply disturbing narrative of the Palestinian Naqba, they vilified, denied and buried the Jewish story, my family’s story, my life story. 

In other words, they were busy setting the stage for today’s sweeping retrospective moral indictment, to the point of Nazification, of the whole Zionist movement, regardless of era and context.

Along the way, the humanist streak of core Zionism was forgotten, and not only by Israel’s enemies. It was forgotten even by many Israelis who are now embracing Itamar Ben-Gvir’s abuse of the term and think that Zionism is inherently anti-Arab. It is not. To the end of my life, I will keep telling the story of my grandparents, the founders of my kibbutz, a majority of the currents of Labor Zionism and Liberal Zionism who believed in a pragmatic road to Jewish independence through diplomacy, international legitimacy and compromise with the Palestinians. Yes, anti-Zionists can come up with a handful of unsavory quotes from Vladimir Jabotinsky, David Ben-Gurion and even Theodor Herzl (a single line in an unpublished diary entry on “encouraging emigration” of Arab farmers). By contrast, I have at my disposal a whole bookshelf to support the legacy of humanist Zionism, from Herzl’s Altneuland to the Declaration of Independence, from Rabin’s last speech to my late father’s last lecture. More than enough material to make a future two-state solution a quintessentially Zionist option, rooted in the historical heartland of the Zionist movement.

Our best shot is to wrestle our national identity from the Netanyahus, Smotriches and Ben-Gvirs. Not by leaving Zionism to be further tormented and disfigured in their unholy clutch, but to repossess it for the future Israel. 

Was Zionism the only game in the shtetl? Of course not. There’s a long and mostly respectable line of Jewish non-Zionists and anti-Zionists. Think of the daughters of Tevye the Milkman, the Sholem Aleichem character, as imagined by the historian Yuri Slezkine in his masterly book The Jewish Century. One of the daughters turns out to be a Zionist, Slezkine conjectures, but three are not. Every option at that time was morally legitimate, except that two types of anti-Zionism proved in retrospect either deadly or Jewish-soul-crushing: staying in the shtetl to be killed by the Nazis and accepting the bear’s hug of Bolshevik Russia. 

But the anti-Zionist Jews who chose the United States or Australia (like many members of the rather admirable stream of secular socialist Yiddishists, the Bund) were not in the business of demolishing Israel. They may have thought it was wrongly conceived, unjustly wrestling its meagre territory from the Palestinians, falsely charming the postwar Western leaders and the UN into endorsing a national home for the Jews. Some of them felt deeply for the post-1948 Palestinian refugees. But none of that anti-Zionism amounted to an active plan to dismantle the state of the Jews, let alone ethnically cleanse its Jewish citizens. 

All this has changed. There are still old-fashioned anti-Zionists in Jewish communities, notably ultra-Orthodox ones, who consider Israel a historical mistake and a theological travesty: You should have waited for the Messiah, you hasty, worldly, unimaginative Zionists! Yet very few of these Jewish anti-Zionists wish practical harm upon the existing state. 

My heart goes especially to Jewish Australians, a community I am slightly acquainted with. Many of the Bundists’ grandchildren are self-defined Zionists. Others, like the admirable philosopher Peter Singer, who has publicly renounced his right to move to Israel, are not Zionists but are hardly would-be destroyers of Tel Aviv. But the general community, for its sin of support of Israel—and in most cases of a territorial compromise with the Palestinians—was hit by the Bondi Beach massacre. And still, on a daily basis, they and many other Jews worldwide are forced to hear a ubiquitous virtue-signaling choir of “I don’t hate Jews, only Zionists.”

Neither your good intentions, Nadine, nor the ugly intentions of the nouveaux anti-Zionists, would suffice to detach present-day Jews from Zionism. While poll results can be shifty and haphazard, it is generally accepted that well over half of the world’s Jews define themselves as Zionists—including a vast majority of Israeli and non-Israeli Jews, both right-nationalist and left-liberal. So do many non-Jews and a small but significant number of Israeli Druze and Arabs.

So, what is one to do? Conduct an open-heart surgery to remove Zionism from present-day Judaism? How? By telling Israelis and other Zionists to abandon terminology?

You propose, dear Nadine, to historicize Zionism, to let go of the past and stick with the simple existence of Israel as a given fact. But a great number of people who are historicizing Zionism these days, in academia and in the broader media conversations, are doing it with the declared purpose of undermining Israel’s legal standing as a member of the family of nations. They are not Bundists but, often enough, more like the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini, bent on the physical destruction of my country. This can mean only three things: our subjugation to a Palestinian-ruled new state, our forceful eviction (the “go back to Poland” drumroll), or worse.

It was precisely the return to early Zionist history that has fueled the Palestinian case for annihilating Israel so dramatically in recent decades. This pole of extremism was considerably aided by Israel’s own fanatics, who abducted Zionist vocabulary for their own purposes of conquest and ethnic cleansing. Let there be no misunderstanding: The settlers-turned-terrorists in the West Bank and the Israelis who wish to punish innocent Gazan civilians are not, in this stance, heirs of Zionism. They are either trapped or consciously participating in a hostile takeover of Zionism. Their convictions are also, horrifically, a hostile takeover of Judaism itself—the complex, multivocal and deeply humane legacy of your forebears and mine.

Dear Nadine, against my own wishes and yours, we are unable, at the time being and for iron-clad practical reasons, to kill off the term “Zionism.” About 7 million Israeli Jews—including many ultra-Orthodox, by the way—are clinging to this term for dear life. This is why young soldiers and young Nova Festival massacre survivors are mouthing the word tzionut like a new, throat-choking prayer. Not because they are so assured of the survival of Israel but precisely because they fear for it, for their country, their life story, their loved ones and their very lives.

I am trying to speak for Israeli liberals and moderates, by which I mean the significant pro-democracy camp and the small but adamant and growing pro-compromise camp. I cannot yet return to the vocabulary of “pro-peace.” These words have been in intensive care since October 7, but they have at least regained consciousness. On behalf of a few hundreds of thousands of like-minded Israelis, I can tell you that we are fighting to reclaim Zionism, alongside the other symbols of state hijacked by the ultra-nationalists. We have reclaimed our blue and white flag, our gentle national anthem (which may yet require an added verse to include and embrace non-Jewish citizens) and our exemplary democratic and civil rights-oriented Declaration of Independence. Our best shot, these bloody days, is to wrestle our national identity from the Netanyahus, Smotriches and Ben-Gvirs. Not by leaving Zionism, word and ideology, to be further tormented and disfigured in their unholy clutch, but to repossess it for the future Israel. 

Far more carefully, we need to listen and hug the survivors of Be’eri, Nir Oz and Sderot as they reassert their Zionism in trembling, shell-shocked voices, too blinded by tears and trauma to understand why wonderful fellow-Jews, thousands of miles away, want them to drop the word and embrace the normality of Israel’s existence. What normality is that?

Fast-forward to a future era when “the State of Israel’s right to exist and flourish was and is equal to that of any other country.” When most of the world, not only Nadine Epstein and a small group of like-minded and well-meaning people, would “strongly believe in Israel’s right to exist, just as any other imperfect modern state has a right to exist.” 

This will be an Israel deeply scarred but sufficiently healed, its democracy restored, living and flourishing alongside a secure and hopefully democratic Palestine, and, like most decent countries, looking at its past with the mingled pride and shame that human history affords us all.

Then, at last, Zionism might be laid to rest. 

Fania Oz-Salzberger is a writer, historian and professor emerita of history at the Faculty of Law, University of Haifa.