M y grandmother Marianne was born in 1921 in the German town of Heidelberg. As a child, she spent summers in a home garden shaded by black cherry and pear trees. There was a hen house, a kennel of St.
Bernard dogs, and a fountain filled with goldfish, which her father carefully ringed with an iron fence. Charming relatives gathered for Jewish holidays at the 18-person dining table: cousin Else, a nursing student; Uncle Richard, a hero of the First World War. Marianne died in 1996 in Monterrey, Mexico.
Her terrible journey there is a lesson in, among other things, state cruelty toward minorities and stateless people. She and her parents were able to flee Germany before the Final Solution, but she spent over 20 years as a refugee, escaping or being deported from five countries, including the United States. Growing up, I’d visit the small concrete house in Monterrey, where she lived alone, and stare at the yellowed photographs of faces, a mansion, a garden in Germany.
This personal history shaped my belief in Israel. I’ve always been sympathetic to the idea that, especially after the Holocaust, Jews might need national sovereignty to survive — to the claim that Israel can provide safe harbor for Jewish people while integrating Arab and other non-Jewish citizens as well. This is the idea known as Liberal Zionism.
For years, depending on my mood, and despite frustrations with Israeli politics, I felt the label “Zionist” was necessary, even noble. However, in the West today, the term “Zionist” has become an insult, a way to denigrate pro-Israel activists in online discourse and at rallies. Surely some of this is just hateful , an encoded slur: “Zionist” lets the speaker avoid the racism of “Jews” and the imprecision of “Israelis,” a fifth of whom are Arab.
These uglier uses trigger a defensive reflex among those of us who feel threatened or who regard Israel as a bulwark against anti-Jewish racism worldwide. Ideally, we think, Israel aligns with our values. In theory, we assume, Zionism protects us against antisemitism, there and here.
But we must break through these false assumptions. Today, Israel’s government has chosen a form of Zionism that is corrupting the moral ideals of its state and making its own people less secure. Americans, especially American Jews, must reckon with this fact, and decide whether our safety and political principles now conflict with Zionism in practice.
Advertisement Reviewing the history of Zionism and its place in American life would be impossible here. Instead, we can look at two facts to frame our analysis of the present day. First, the story of modern Zionism is really a record of “Zionisms” — incompatible plans for a Jewish homeland, which were imagined by European Jews around the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and which forked and fused in the decades before the Holocaust.
Some of these arguments concerned whether to found a state at all. Political Zionists advocated for Jewish sovereignty through nationhood, but Cultural Zionists sought only to revive Jewish intellectual life, without a state. Other splits related to whom Zionism was for (secular communists, ultra-religious Jews, etc.
) and where it could take root. Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, initially eyed part of current-day Kenya for a Jewish state. Others looked as far away as Australia , Guyana , and Alaska .
Perhaps the only neat summary of modern Zionism is that old line “two Jews, three opinions.” When the state of Israel was founded, in 1948, the dominant ideology among Israeli leadership was Labor Zionism. This term captures the socialist priorities of figures like David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister, whose party, Mapai, embraced kibbutz collectivism and took the hammer and sickle for its insignia.
When it came to Israel’s borders and neighbors, Labor Zionist leaders embraced the “pragmatic” tools of restraint and diplomacy. One key tool was the integration of Arab citizens into Israeli society. Early Labor leaders saw the coexistence of Jewish and Arab citizens in Israel as a way to appease Muslim countries nearby.
“In our state there will be non-Jews as well — and all of them will be equal citizens,” Ben-Gurion had declared to Mapai leaders in 1947. Ben-Gurion also opposed expansion into the West Bank and Gaza because he felt it would erode Israel’s international standing and foment Arab-Israeli tension. “If I could choose between peace and all the territories,” he mused late in life, “I would prefer peace.
” Advertisement The other end of Israel’s political spectrum is usually called Revisionist Zionism. This outlook, which seeks to “revise” Labor’s more measured approach, hungers for maximal territory. Its founder, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, would rage against Israel’s “ savage ” neighbors, and used savage tactics in return, including bombing nonmilitary targets.
(Ben-Gurion liked to compare Jabotinsky to Hitler .) If American Zionists are only vaguely aware of this movement, it may be because Jabotinsky and his acolytes were marginal for many years. It’s also probably due to our desire to have our state and eat it too: Revisionism is a doctrine of Jewish supremacy, the brutal side of Israel’s founding, one that’s just easier to ignore.
Second, for most of the 19th and 20th centuries, American Jews were ambivalent about or hostile to Zionism. In his book “We Are Not One,” Eric Alterman traces the extent to which US Jews bridled at the idea of Israel before the Holocaust. “America is our Zion,” declared the Union of American Hebrew Congregations in 1898, expressing patriotism and preempting charges of dual loyalty.
Even after the state was founded, the bulk of American Jews didn’t see Israel as a major concern. Advertisement This all changed in 1967, during the Six Day War. Then, the young Jewish state fought a mostly defensive conflict against five hostile armies, winning key territory, including East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.
This miracle of defiance and expansion — done in the same time God took to create the earth — consecrated a moment of “ complete Zionization ,” in Norman Podhoretz’s phrase, among the diaspora. Jews around the world coalesced behind an Israel that captured the imagination. New Zionist institutions took root.
The Birthright program sent young Jews on grand tours of the Holy Land, while groups like AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, channeled their parents’ money to pro-Israel causes. This allegiance was widespread among Jews, regardless of party, class, or religious orthodoxy — and it seemed immune to changes in Israeli domestic politics, too. At least on the issue of Israel, we’d entered an age of two Jews, one opinion.
For years, commentators have struggled to understand what Benjamin Netanyahu really believes. He has the slick rhetorical skill of a coalition builder and political survivalist. What he says changes based on who he’s talking to and on which day.
This has led some in the Israeli press to compare him to a “ weather vane .” However, in his 2022 memoir, “Bibi: My Story,” we see that perhaps his most consistent ideological influence is his father, the late historian Benzion Netanyahu, who died in 2012. And perhaps the key ideological fact about Benzion is that he was a devotee and close associate of Ze’ev Jabotinsky.
Advertisement It’s a testament to Israel’s political culture in the late 20th century that Bibi could never quite admit to sharing his father’s strain of Zionism. Leaked tapes now tell a different story, as did Benzion’s frank late-life interviews (“Bibi might aim for the same goals as mine, but he keeps to himself the ways to achieve them”). In public rhetoric, Benjamin Netanyahu has supported the two-state solution — at least a very loose form of it — for most of his 16 years in office, as did Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert .
This record allowed many American liberals to abide Israel’s decades-long slide on the issue. The country boasted formal democratic institutions, gay rights, and a dynamic “Startup Nation” economy. Even with Bibi, if you squinted hard enough, you could see a leader menaced by the lack of a cooperative counterparty among the Palestinians.
Growing up in a Southern conservative enclave, I’d often hear, “Well, they don’t have a partner in peace —” Later, as I moved up the East Coast, I’d get the classic throat-clearing of today’s Liberal Zionist: “Of course I don’t support Netanyahu, but —” The past 30 years have seen the triumph of Revisionist ideology in Israel — first obscure, now overt. When Netanyahu was elected to his initial term in 1996, there were roughly 150,000 Jewish settlers living in the West Bank. Today, there are more than 500,000, not counting those in contested parts of Jerusalem.
This shift reflects an equally seismic change in Jewish Israeli attitudes toward a Palestinian state. In the mid-1990s, Jewish Israelis were basically split on the question. Now, only about a quarter see the two-state solution as viable — and that percentage is falling fast.
Israel’s retrenchment has opened the door to new kinds of political opportunists, like current Cabinet members Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. Smotrich is the finance minister. Once jailed for suspected terrorism (he allegedly planned to blow up a major highway outside Tel Aviv), he’s also known for extremely regressive social views (a “ proud homophobe ,” he has called gay people “ beasts ”).
Ben-Gvir is the national security minister. His long list of stunts and deeply stupid provocations include routine struts around the sensitive Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. (There’s evidence that Oct.
7, which Hamas branded Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, was partly provoked by these acts.) Such moral flippancy begets tactical flippancy. A culture that rewards the provocations of a Ben Gvir — himself barred from military service due to his extreme views — will produce soldiers who expose themselves to irresponsible risk and revel in war crimes like looting.
As Andrew Exum, a former US deputy assistant secretary of defense, observed in the week after Oct. 7, the Israeli Defense Forces’ vaunted reputation may be due for an update. Israel’s conventional line units, he warned, “are neither particularly well trained nor well disciplined by American standards.
” One reason, noted by Exum, is that in recent years, the IDF has increasingly focused on patrolling the West Bank. Using soldiers to protect settlers and police civil affairs has bred a military ill-prepared for high-intensity combat like that in Gaza. National service has been a touchstone of Israeli life since the country’s founding.
But today’s Israel risks becoming an unwelcome contradiction: a militarized society lacking martial virtue. Oct. 7 feels terribly symbolic in light of these facts.
For years, Netanyahu’s government propped up Hamas — in theory, as a way to splinter Palestinian leadership in Gaza and the West Bank. On that day, the IDF’s response was shockingly slow . This was partly because three battalions had been moved from the Gaza border to protect settlers in the occupied West Bank during the Simchat Torah holiday.
And who suffered? Mostly liberal and left-leaning citizens of Israel proper — the kind of people who live on kibbutzim and enjoy secular music festivals. Close observers may not be surprised by Israel’s military response to Oct. 7, but its political nonresponse is stunning.
Bibi is still popular . So is the war . Nine months in, the military has not achieved basic objectives — freeing hostages, holding territory, capturing Hamas leadership — nor has it outlined a plan for Gaza after fighting ends.
Or maybe that’s the point. Maybe the goal is a long campaign that can fold into permanent control of an area Israel did not hold before 1967. “A Jewish Rafah! A Jewish Khan Younis!” cried Rabbi Menachem Novik to a crowd at last month’s Jerusalem Day march, referring to cities in Gaza.
Nothing overrides this now — not securing peace, not saving innocents. Maybe the siren song of a Greater Israel — an Israel that grows to include the West Bank, Gaza, and beyond — has drowned out calls for Jewish safety in liberal statehood. There’s reason to think that a freeze of settlements in the West Bank, a diplomatic pivot, and the creation of some form of a Palestinian state would make the region safer.
Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister who made peace with Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization in the 1990s, understood this. As early as 1976, he called the West Bank settler movement a “ cancer ,” a growth on the body politic that destroys its core functions. Israel has made real diplomatic strides with state actors, including former enemies Egypt, Jordan, and the signatories of the recent Abraham Accords.
As John Mearsheimer points out, this is precisely because these are state actors, with constituencies and diplomatic institutions: the ingredients that can catalyze a “rational” foreign policy. You can’t interact this way with a paramilitary group like Hamas on the frontiers of a Greater Israel. All you can do is double down on force.
This is where an incoherent picture of the national project leads: to a war without objective, in an area without status, against a foe without a clear identity. It leads, in other words, to a great null conclusion — a wall of dust through which there’s always a silver skyline, barely visible. One hopes Israel has only lost its way and may still embrace a Liberal Zionism.
The alternative, which becomes more plausible by the day, is that things are going according to plan — that despite the international isolation and internal discord , Israel is enacting its vision to become a Greater Israel. “Greater,” of course, will always have a narrow meaning here. Ethically and functionally, the state is being diminished, but in terms of what we see on the map, it’s poised to grow.
In the United States today, a majority of Jews who call themselves Zionists do so on conditions that reflect Liberal Zionism. How will this change in the next generation, given the increasingly illiberal Israeli state? Compared with their parents, young American Jews are much more sympathetic to Palestinian statehood (as of this spring, more US Jews under 35 supported humanitarian aid to Gaza than military aid to Israel). Among Israelis, the generational trends are flipped .
This is as much a product of who Israelis are as it is what they believe. Israel’s relatively high birth rate is floated not by secular Tel Avivians, but by the ultra-Orthodox, who have an average of six children, favor racial-religious segregation, and make up a large share of West Bank settlements. (It’s no coincidence that the settlers are sometimes called the “ Hilltop Youth .
”) Any true peace process will involve relocating some number of these people back to Israel proper. But with each new brick laid in settlements like Ariel or Ma’ale Adumim, that process becomes more and more difficult for a population who’d tolerate it less and less. Demography isn’t destiny, but in politics, it does define the realm of the possible.
In some ways, Liberal Zionism is the perfectly absurd position for this moment. Hardline Israel supporters bridle at the “liberal” part, the insistence we accommodate Palestinians who share a claim to the land, while pro-Palestinian segments, mostly on the left, assert Zionism is a settler-colonial project by nature. More directly, I think the emerging contradictions in Israel have driven many would-be Liberal Zionists to a point of choosing: Which half of the term can we live without? The answer for some Americans is that they can dispense with the liberalism bit.
Israel is moving in an authoritarian direction, they may concede, but it still deserves our support. Such reflexive commitment, particularly among American Jews, has become, I think, deeply counterproductive. It binds our identity — and to an extent, our safety — with a government we should instead seek to influence.
It makes us hostages to fortune. Senator Lindsey Graham recently seemed to suggest that Israel would be justified in nuking Gaza, after which, I’m sure, Jared Kushner can build his proposed beachside condos there. When Zionism becomes an expansionist project, this is what “pro-Israel” solidarity looks like: a contest of who can be the most belligerent.
The lengths to which American institutions have gone to impose blank-check Israeli patronage are quite troubling. In practice, they backstop an illiberal Zionism with illiberal policies here. A key recent example is the Antisemitism Awareness Act , which has little to do with curbing anti-Jewish racism and much more to do with stopping campus criticism of Israel.
Approaches like this, which conflate antisemitism with anti-Zionism, let pro-Israel zealots deflect criticism of the state with cries of “That’s racist!” — a shield many on the right mock in other contexts. Jewish Americans become mere pawns in our national debate. Notice, too, that this dynamic never cuts the other way.
Diaspora Jews are supposed to take attacks against Israel personally, but Israel does not, in turn, share our prerogatives abroad. The Netanyahu government has embraced any regime that endorses the occupation, including several with antisemitic records, like Orbán’s Hungary and Duterte’s Philippines . In the United States it’s fused with lobbying groups like AIPAC, which now operates largely as an electoral arm of the GOP (a party that fewer than 3 in 10 American Jews support).
Yet moving rightward might not ensure Israel’s favored status forever. Young conservatives, including young Evangelicals, are falling away from Zionism en masse. The TikTok generation’s formative imprint of Israel is deep and negative, a swirl of unfiltered civilian suffering in Gaza.
A new right vanguard is amplifying this across social platforms; popular influencers like Candace Owens and Jackson Hinkle mix rants about Israeli “ genocide ” with deranged antisemitic tropes , including allegations of blood libel and Jewish control of media and finance. Just as the older generation used support for Israel to brush away charges of antisemitism, their heirs use criticism of Israel to launder it. This won’t end well.
The reason to renounce a morally reckless Zionism is not just that it endangers Palestinians and Israelis; it also endangers us in the diaspora. The Gaza War has increased anti-Jewish violence worldwide. When we hear hostile pro-Palestinian slogans like “From the river to the sea” or “Globalize the intifada,” we should reflect on how these ideas resonate — at least in some measure — because Israel also treats this land as contested territory attainable by force.
(“From the river to the sea” is a core tenet of the Likud party charter.) American Jews should reflect, too, on what our loyalty has bought us — and how it’s been repaid. Our automatic allegiance has helped license Israel’s worst impulses, from the occupation that started in 1967 to the murder-moral suicide pact it now enacts with Hamas.
In return, Israel has come to stand against the liberal institutions whose minority rights, rule of law, and tolerance for immigrants buttressed the only successful Jewish assimilations in history. The most remarkable of these has been our proud 350-year experience here in America. Because the political horizon is now so bleak and so clear, because the cost-benefit math has failed, and because the moral demand is so obvious, American Jews should end our reflexive support for the Israeli government.
We should use our leverage to push Israel toward the higher values of its founding. Much of this leverage will come by disaffiliating from Zionist causes that make no ethical demands of the state. I’ve started this process myself.
If the sun is to set on the age of “two Jews, one opinion,” we shouldn’t mourn the coming split. We can stand confident in our vision for Israel, even if we stand apart. Liberal Zionism — with its promise that Jews, because we are equal, deserve a state, and that others, because they are equal, deserve dignity within it — aligns our needs and our values.
It’s the only Zionism worth supporting, even if it feels impossible now. Today, Marianne’s descendants live either in Israel or in the United States. Perhaps what these places now offer are two different strategies for Jewish survival after the nightmare of the 20th century.
Nowhere is this better embodied than at the countries’ national Holocaust museums. As you leave Yad Vashem, on Jerusalem’s Mount Herzl, you step onto a platform that overlooks a beautiful expanse — sun-bleached valleys dotted with short shrubs. This is the program: Eretz Yisrael, the Promised Land, stretching outward.
At the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., you exit the hall to a view of the National Mall and Capitol.
These, our secular institutions, can, if preserved, ensure minority rights and welcome strangers from around the world. The last, best hope for humanity. And for American Jews, maybe the only one.
John Benjamin is a writer whose work has appeared in Time, The New Republic, and other outlets. He lives in New York City..
