As Israel's destruction of Gaza fills global public opinion with horror, liberal Zionists struggle to reconcile their professed democratic values with a state based on Jewish supremacy in Palestine.
Israel's destruction in Gaza, anti-Palestinian pogroms in the West Bank, and war to ethnically cleanse southern Lebanon—all overseen by openly fanatic Israeli leaders, several of whom have been indicted by the International Criminal Court—have left no place for liberal Zionists to hide.
For decades, liberal Zionists were the confident, public face of Israel in the West.
They represented an attitude that attempted to reconcile a commitment to liberal values such as civil equality, freedom of expression and assembly, and democratic and constitutional rule with an explicitly nationalist project that sought to build, maintain, and defend the idea of a Jewish state in a multi-religious land, despite what such a state had meant for decades to millions of indigenous Muslim and Christian Palestinians who had faced discrimination and subjugation.
For decades, liberal Zionists have proclaimed that Israel is a tolerant state committed to being both Jewish and democratic.
They received enormous rhetorical, moral, and political support from liberal Western luminaries such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr., Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, as well as from major liberal Western states led by the United States, Britain, France, and Germany.
But the gap between what Israel purported to represent as a model of Western redemption after the Holocaust and the brutal reality it has always represented for its main Palestinian victims has become impossible to cover up.
The two ends of the spectrum
At one end of the spectrum, there is some belated awakening, and even some faint, reluctant recognition, that after Gaza, something is quite obviously wrong with the Zionist project.
British actress Helen Mirren, a longtime champion of Israel, acknowledged this when she confessed, „I grew up in Europe, after World War II, and the recognition of what happened in the Holocaust in my parents” generation was so profound, so important.”
„That’s why,” he explained, „the creation of Israel was a very important moment, although maybe it was done completely wrong, in the wrong place, I don’t know. But something had to happen after the horror.”
At the other end of the spectrum, however, the ancient slogans of Zionism, and the anti-Palestinian rhetorical props associated with them, such as „Israel’s right to exist,” still do not pretend to have regard for the Palestinians or to express any qualms about the establishment of the state of Israel in Palestine at the expense of the Palestinians.
Take the leading figures in the Democratic Party—Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and New York Governor Kathy Hochul, among others—who spoke or marched in the so-called „Israel Day” parade in New York City this May.
This is an annual spectacle of Zionist enthusiasm, advertised as an „apolitical” expression of positive Jewish national and communal belonging.
Thousands of marchers were adorned with the flag of a foreign state that has committed genocide in Gaza, tolerated pogroms in the West Bank, sexually abused and raped Palestinian prisoners, actively killed journalists and paramedics, and destroyed entire villages and towns in southern Lebanon.
Schumer, Hochul, and James are all nominally liberal and grew up in an era of American politics when being a Zionist was taken for granted and when Palestinian exceptionalism was largely unquestioned.
As seasoned politicians, they later claimed, or implied, that they were shocked that none other than Bezalel Smotrich, Israel's openly racist finance minister, was marching at the head of the kitsch parade.
But while Democratic Party figures sharply condemned Smotrich's Islamophobia, they said nothing about his anti-Palestinianism.
While Smotrich openly proclaims Jewish superiority over non-Jewish Palestinians, they pretend that Palestinians are invisible and irrelevant in their identification with Israel—much like a white Southerner at the height of Jim Crow segregation and lynchings might have insisted that celebrating „Dixie” had nothing to do with black Americans.
Then comes the repulsive Smotrich, like some over-excited Bull Connor, loudly and arrogantly saying what should not be said openly in the Western metropolitan centers on which Israel depends in its subjugation of millions of stateless Palestinian people.
Elegiac Zionism
Not all liberal Zionists are completely insensitive to Palestinian pain and suffering.
Indeed, few revel in expressions of Jewish supremacy and Palestinian suffering as callously as Smotrich and his colleague, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who proudly wears an anti-Palestinian lynchpin on his lapel and who recently said that all of Lebanon should burn.
One of the striking features of late liberal Zionism is the performative claim of recognition of Palestinian suffering and acknowledgement of the injustice that Palestinians have suffered at the hands of Israel, while insisting that the Zionist project in Palestine can still be saved, no matter how many Palestinians Israel harms. Liberal Zionism has become elegiac Zionism.
Jeremy Ben-Amí, founder of the liberal Zionist lobby group J Street, embodies the side-talk of elegiac Zionism, the idea that things were once ideal and have since deteriorated.
A Breaking Points In a recent interview on the popular show "The Daily Show," Ben-Amí attempted to update the myths of liberal Zionism by saying that Israel has deviated from its founding principles.
He insisted that Israel was a great and necessary project, and tried to justify Zionism by pointing to the long history of persecution of Jews in Europe and suggesting that Israel's early history was full of promise that was betrayed by the rise to power of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Ben-Amí does not speak about the violent, coercive, and antidemocratic nature of the British Mandate in Palestine, which enabled the Zionist colonization of Palestine.
Whatever the original motivations for creating a Jewish state—such as combating European anti-Semitism or emulating other European racial nationalisms—from its beginnings in Ottoman Palestine, the Zionist project clashed with the realities of history, geography, and the presence of the Palestinian people.
The early leaders of the Zionist movement and their European imperialist supporters openly believed in the superiority of European Jews over non-Jewish Palestinians and Arab and Oriental Jews. They were also convinced of the superiority of European civilization over all others.
A century before Netanyahu, in 1896, the leader of the Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl, famously described the Jewish state in Palestine as „part of the bulwark of Europe against Asia, the outpost of civilization against barbarism.”.
Chaim Weizmann told his British imperialist patron, Arthur Balfour, in 1918 that there could be no democracy in Palestine as long as there was a native Palestinian majority. After describing them as shrieking, duplicitous, and backstabbing Palestinians, Weizmann insisted that the British occupiers of Palestine were not guided by the „democratic principle.”.
„The brutal numbers work against us, because there are five Arabs for every Jew. The influence of the Arab should, in fairness, be five times greater than that of the Jew… The result is that the Jews are practically handed over to the Arabs. This system does not take into account the fact that there is a fundamental qualitative difference between Jew and Arab.”
In 1923, another Zionist colonizer, Vladimir Jabotinsky, wrote a telltale essay titled „The Iron Fence,” in which he insisted that although the natives of Palestine were culturally „500 years behind us,” they would defend their own land.
That is why he called for the physical and psychological breaking of the Palestinians.
A century of superiority
Despite Ben-Amí's suggestion of innocence from an antediluvian Zionist moment, the founders of the new state of Israel ruthlessly expelled hundreds of thousands of indigenous Palestinians and expropriated their lands and properties during and after 1948.
While encouraging Jewish refugees, settlers, and immigrants from around the world to become citizens, they systematically prevented now stateless non-Jewish Palestinian refugees from returning to their own homes.
As documented by historian Shira Robinson Citizen Strangers In his book Citizen Aliens, the remaining and undesirable Palestinian minority was made second-class citizens, who were kept under military rule until 1966.
More than a century after Weizmann's expression of Jewish superiority over Arabs, and 78 years after the Nakba, Ben-Amí struggles to appear reasonable to a global public that no longer accepts expressions of Zionist superiority and racism.
Liberal Zionism has lost ground to more openly racist Zionists because the latter proclaim the ugly, cruel reality of the Zionist project… which it has always been for Palestinians.
Ben-Ami admits, of course, that he is appalled by Israel's massacres in Gaza, Lebanon, and the West Bank. He still wants an ethno-state, but he refuses to be honest about its nature.
He refrains from describing Israel as an „ethnostate,” preferring instead to describe it as „the homeland of the Jewish people.” This use of language suggests that such a state could be compatible with Palestinian rights if only a „border” could be established somewhere.
In short, it clings to a separatist fantasy that would allow Jews worldwide to continue to immigrate to Israel by virtue of their Jewishness and enjoy inherently superior rights over much of the land of historic Palestine, which are by definition denied to non-Jewish Palestinians exiled from their actual homeland.
Ben-Amí acknowledges that Palestinians should be granted their own right of return, but not to their original homes or lands or villages, as required by international law and UN resolutions.
Instead, the exiled Palestinians should be directed to where a smaller, mini-Palestinian state could be created. The „two-state” solution is no longer really about securing a Palestinian future, but rather acts as a salutary mantra for liberal Zionists to continue to cling to their Zionism no matter what Israel does.
Liberal Zionism has lost ground to more openly racist Zionists because the latter proclaim the ugly, cruel reality of the Zionist project in Palestine to Palestinians – something that liberal Zionists have sought to deny, wish away, and dismiss.
At the same time, however, global public opinion is horrified by what Israel has done to the Palestinian people. History has caught up with Zionism. No matter how hard its supporters try, the liberal Zionist „Tobias the Egg” cannot be put back together.
Written by: Usama Makdisi
