Beyond Liberal Zionism: How I became a non-Zionist

A Jewish settler attaches an Israeli flag to a tree in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah

Danel J. Solomon writes in +972, “The past decade has not been kind to Liberal Zionists. Israel’s far-right government has undermined democratic norms at every turn, entrenched occupation via continued settlement building, and sought to snuff out the national aspirations of Palestinians. Meanwhile, the American left has taken a harder line on Israel that shades into questioning the Jewish state’s right to exist.

“Being a Liberal Zionist today means inhabiting a political no man’s land. And there is something to admire in the tenacity of its proponents. Jewish nationalism is a complex historical phenomenon that should not be reduced to the closed, exclusionary ideology which both far-right and far-left would make of it. But political labels must eventually correspond to political realities. Just as there are no more American Federalists, French Radicals, or English Whigs, changes in Israeli society are rendering the Liberal Zionist program impracticable and irrelevant. The available evidence suggests that Liberal Zionism is destined for the same fate as those bygone parties.”

“The left in Israel has been on the back-foot for the better part of two decades. Israel’s Labor Party has not won a national election since 1999, and seems poised to suffer dramatic losses in the upcoming Knesset contest. The country’s rising generation is more religious and right wing than its elders, polling indicates. And racist rhetoric increasingly finds an echo in the political mainstream, from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s notorious warning about “Arab droves” heading to the polls to Yair Lapid’s more recent denunciationof an interfaith marriage.”…

“As a recovering Liberal Zionist, I have found non-Zionism to be the most congenial self-descriptor. Political labels are amorphous, and it can be difficult to tease out the difference between non-Zionism and its more radical cousin, anti-Zionism. I would argue that anti-Zionists and non-Zionists part company in their diagnosis of Zionism’s sins.” (more…)