I often wonder what the early Zionist leaders, Theodor Herzl, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Chaim Weizmann, and David Ben-Gurion would think of today’s Israel.
I wonder if they would feel that their dreams and visions are being met by the often chaotic but equally successful modern state of Israel.
Many contemporary Zionists enjoy cherry-picking from the writings and speeches of Israel’s founders to support a political agenda they advocate for in a 21st-century Jewish state. Irrespective of the accuracy of the selection, it’s impossible to know with certainty if Israel’s early founders would have maintained the same positions they advocated for decades ago when today’s scenarios could not have been envisioned.
At the same time, a little skepticism about early Zionist thought never hurt anyone.
A political monopoly
For its first few decades, Israel was ruled by left-wing parties. Versions of today’s weakened Labor party, with Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir leading the way, had an almost political monopoly on the state. Menachem Begin’s victory changed the political picture in the late 1970s – and with it began the Israeli people’s move to the Right on many issues dealing with security and Palestinians.
Excepting a few years in the mid-1990s and the Oslo Accords period, Israelis have been moving away from believing that a political settlement can be achieved with the Palestinians. The move away from a political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has accelerated over the past 15 years.
For most Israelis, any chance of a diplomatic solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that included Israeli compromise on land, ceasing settlement growth, and an establishment of a Palestinian state came to a definitive end on October 7.
Israelis were confronted with a Palestinian people who celebrated and encouraged the murder, rape, and kidnapping of innocent Israelis in one of the most brutal attacks against the Jewish people in history.
Any trust or faith the Israelis had, that would have been the foundation of a peace deal, disappeared in the aftermath of the attacks, with the realization that the Palestinian people supported and aimed to perpetuate more of the same.
While the Israelis have always been suspicious that the Palestinian leadership was two-faced in its purported willingness to make peace with Israel, that suspicion has now spread to the Palestinian people, too.
In the greatest demonstration of the Israeli frustration with Palestinians and their lost hope in a peace deal, the Knesset voted overwhelmingly to pass a resolution rejecting the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Unlike previous resolutions that opposed the unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state, this latest resolution opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state even as part of a negotiated settlement with the Palestinian people.
The resolution states, “The Knesset of Israel firmly opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state west of Jordan. The establishment of a Palestinian state in the heart of the Land of Israel will pose an existential danger to the State of Israel and its citizens, perpetuate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and destabilize the region.”
The purpose of Zionism was to create the State of Israel as the country for the rejuvenation of the Jewish people in their homeland.
Israel’s first and fundamental role is to be a place of refuge for the Jewish people when antisemitic persecution strikes them around the world. Zionism’s success depended on Jews returning to the Land of Israel, settling throughout the land, and forming a functioning government. Over the last 75 plus years it has achieved all of that and more. Today, the State of Israel is a thriving success.
Early Zionists didn’t differentiate between different parts of the Land of Israel. They spread out and established cities, towns, and farms in the East, West, North, and South. There were no imaginary lines that Zionists wouldn’t cross. This was especially true of areas in the heartland of the Jewish homeland, Judea and Samaria (the area much of the world calls by its Jordanian occupation name - The West Bank).
In 1947, as a compromise, the Zionists agreed temporarily to only establish their state on half the land, a compromise the Arabs, today’s Palestinians, flatly rejected.
All or nothing
The Arabs demanded all of the land, making the partition plan null and void, and giving the Jewish people the right to establish towns and govern wherever they wanted within historic Eretz Yisrael. It is more bias than honest legal precedent that has led international bodies to maintain that a Jewish governance in its own homeland is illegal – most recently the International Court of Justice non-binding declaration.
ONE OF the dreams of Zionism was to live peacefully with the Arabs in the region. Thankfully, that dream has partially come true. Israel has signed peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, two of its bordering Arab countries; and normalization agreements with four other Arab nations. In addition to foreign Arab states, Israel grants equal rights and citizenship to the Arabs who live within Israel’s borders. Today over two million Arab-Israelis make up 23% of Israel’s population.
There are those who err, claiming that part of the essential Zionist mission -- and not a non-essential Zionist dream -- was to find an accommodation with their Arab neighbors in the Land of Israel. They claim that as long as no accommodation has been made with Palestinians who violently reject the idea of a Jewish state, let alone recognize its existence, Israel has corrupted the Zionist dream.
They claim that today’s Israel contradicts Zionism by placing more importance on an attachment to territories of historic significance to Jews, than on peace with Palestinians. They see Israel as establishing towns solely to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, rather than as fulfilling the actual Zionist dream of settling Eretz Yisrael as a Jewish state.
These same critics claim that Israel commits genocide as an act of ethnic cleansing. They maintain that Israel is a state that requires constant violence to sustain itself.
Instead of recognizing the many threats Israel faces, they attribute the centrality of the military in Israeli society to an addiction to violent suppression of Palestinians. This is the dark side of what Zionism has become they teach, besmirching the movement and philosophy that has produced the most productive and successful Jewish state in history.
Israel promised the Jewish people security, rejuvenation, and a return to its national destiny and it has delivered on all its promises.
Arab states openly offer Israel peace, no longer demanding as a prerequisite, any compromise on Israel’s position with the Palestinians.
No mainstream Israeli political party feels the need to even utter the words “Palestinian state.” Israel’s sovereignty is becoming permanent. I have no doubt that if the early Zionist dreamers saw today’s Israel, they’d be ecstatic at how events have worked out for the benefit of the Jewish people.
The writer is a certified interfaith hospice chaplain in Jerusalem and the mayor of Mitzpe Yeriho, Israel. She lives with her husband and six children.