What is Zionism, and who is a Zionist? - opinion

Left-wingers and liberals in Israel who object – absolutely or partially – to Jewish settlement in territories occupied by Israel in the course of the 1967 Six Day War, or during the recent war in the Gaza Strip and southern Lebanon, are frequently accused by the Israeli Right of no longer being Zionists, or – worse still – of being anti-Zionists.

At the time Golan was fiercely attacked, especially by right-wingers who, inter alia, accused him of antisemitism and anti-Zionism.

Last Tuesday, in an interview on 103FM, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich (Religious Zionism) declared that introducing the Arab party Ra’am and its leader Mansour Abbas into the “Government of Change” under Naftali Bennett’s leadership in June 2021 was a greater catastrophe than what happened on October 7, 2023.

“The October 7 massacre is a horrible failure, but it is a tactical failure. Those who knowingly sold the State of Israel to its enemies and the Islamic Movement did something that is a thousand times worse than the worst possible failure, because [the latter] was not a malicious act.”

Incidentally, large sections of the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) community in Israel – especially the Ashkenazi ones – declare themselves to be anti-Zionist and opposed in principle to the secular state.

In his most recent book, Israel: What Went Wrong, Prof. Omer Bartov (an expert on the Holocaust and genocide at Brown University) concludes that Israel must give up being a Zionist state to avoid turning into a violent, pariah state, though it is not clear what this means in practice.

All these various claims do not accept a single definition of what Zionism and being a Zionist mean. In fact, Zionism is the modern national movement of the Jewish people, which claims that Zion is their national home. When the Zionist movement was established in 1897, the Jewish people were scattered across the four corners of the Earth, following their dispersion 3,000 years earlier from the Holy Land.

In the course of WWII, just under a third of the Jews in the world (around 16.7 million) were killed/exterminated by Nazi Germany. One of the strongest arguments in favor of Zionism after the war, which convinced a majority of the members of the UN to vote in favor of establishing a Jewish state, was that had such a state existed in 1939-1945, most of the six million Jews who perished would have survived.

Today, around 7.2 million of the world’s 15.7 million Jews live in the State of Israel, Judea, and Samaria, and constitute just over 73% of the state’s citizens. It is not at all clear what the dezionization of the state would entail. I would argue that the Zionism of the state has much less to do with the fate of the Jews and of the Jewish state than the wisdom and judiciousness of its leaders.

As in the case of any national movement that represents the predominant nation of a particular state, Zionism does not necessarily represent any particular ideology, even though the predominant ideologies in modern Zionism have shifted over the years from liberal/social democratic to right-wing. Whether or not the current Right/religious predominance will remain following the next election is yet to be seen.

According to the law, relating to the Law of Return (which law allows all Jews to receive citizenship), a Jew is defined as a person born to a Jewish parent, or who converted to Judaism.

What distinguishes Zionist Jews from non-Zionist or anti-Zionist Jews is that the former believe that Jews ought to move to the State of Israel, or support their movement to it, while the latter do not, though they might support moving to Israel as the Holy Land for religious rather than nationalist reasons.

Though it was taken for granted, when the Zionist movement was established, and then after the State of Israel was founded, that both would be based on democratic principles, including the treatment of minorities (especially the Palestinian minority) in the state.

The vast majority of parties, both in the Zionist movement and the State of Israel, have always advocated more or less democratic principles for running these two entities.

As to these democratic principles, nowhere does it say that the principles implemented must be based on liberal democracy (both majoritarianism and minority rights) or can be based on illiberal democracy – i.e., on majoritarianism alone.

I believe that the question is not whether Zionism, or divergences from Zionism, are to blame. In this context, Zionism is a red herring. The problem is that Benjamin Netanyahu is not focused on resolving these two major issues, but on his own political survival.

What is needed is a responsible and judicious leadership, truly intent on resolving problems and ending superfluous schisms, for the sake of the Jewish people and all the citizens of the State of Israel.