6 THESES ON ZIONISM 5784

Our stance towards Israel is perhaps the biggest issue facing the North American Jewish community as a community. What was once a unifying force has become significantly more problematic. Here are some main points that guide my thinking.

Jews are a people who possess a variety of religious traditions that get lumped in together as “Judaism.” We aren’t just a religion, and that religion isn’t monolithic.   Anyone who claims there is one true way to be Jewish religiously isn’t for me. Anyone who wants to practice some version of the religion of Judaism without acknowledgement of the peoplehood of the Jews seems to be preceding in a way that isn’t for me.  This puts me in the Zionist camp.

The state of Israel is a center of Jewish peoplehood and culture. About half of the world’s Jews live there.  It’s the only place that lives by a Jewish calendar and there’s all sorts of learning and culture emerging from there.  The destruction of the state would be a disaster because half of our population would be displaced or killed, akin to what happened during the Holocaust.  This puts me in the Zionist camp.

Israel is not the only locus of Jewish people.  There’s a lot going on Jewishly in the diaspora from my point of view. There’s a tremendous burst of creativity in Jewish music. There’s a movement to reclaim the earth based indigenous heritage that is rightly ours.  There’s a revitalization of our mystical and meditative traditions.  There’s an explosion of ritual creativity. Whenever I hear Israeli Zionists implicitly or explicitly claim that Jewish life in the diaspora is some kind of watered down version of the real thing that can only happen in Israel, I think they are full of it.  Does that put me in the non Zionist camp?

The land of Israel is central to the Jewish imagination, but the state of Israel need not be. The land of Israel is the holy land, a magical place infused with sacrality.  The state of Israel is a state with the usual range of strengths and weaknesses characteristic of states in the 21st century. There’s terrible leadership, corruption, virulent prejudice towards the other, incredible cultural, intellectual and economic creativity etc.  I don’t worship at the altar of the United States, why should I worship at the altar of the State of Israel?  If that puts me into the non Zionist camp, it also puts Ahad Ha’am there.

The state of Israel both is and is not a safe haven for Jews. Should another Hitler arise, it’s really important to know that I could go to Israel.  Only Donald Trump and the MAGA movement isn’t Adolf Hitler as much as I fear and hate them.  It also isn’t exactly safe to live in Israel as we are reminded daily.  I knew one of the people who was murdered on October 7nth and the Kibbutz I lived on in the North has been evacuated. On a long term basis, is it safer as a Jew in the United States or in Israel?  No idea. Will we as Jews eventually be pushed out of the United States as we’ve had to flee so many countries in our history?  Maybe.  But we also might be forced out of the land of Israel.  That’s not inconceivable.

The state of Israel is no guarantee against the vicissitudes of history.   Is there a rise in Anti-semitism on the right and left in the United States and elsewhere? You bet. Is it bad news that the JCC needs extra security while the YMCA literally a minute away doesn’t have any of it?  Of course.  Do the goyim hate us?  Some of them do, but so do some of the Arabs hate us and want to kill us.  And they have more guns than my antisemitic neighbor and more permission to use them.

People my age (I was born in 1958) grew up at a time when there was almost universal agreement in the Jewish community about the centrality of Israel.  But that agreement was rather more the exception than the rule. The Judaism with which I grew up had at least three main, connected pillars.  Memory of the Holocaust, identification with Israel and a belief in social justice. They all went together seamlessly—until they didn’t. There’s a long history of opposition within Judaism to Zionism

Zionism began life as the movement of national aspiration of the Jewish people in the 1800’s when there were other nationalist movements popping up.  The centrality of the land of Israel had never been in question for Judaism from the time of the destruction of the second temple in 70 CE and the subsequent exile of our ancestors from the land.  But the idea of taking action to form a political state of our own was new.

There were at least three main kinds of opposition. 

There was an orthodox opposition that basically thought that the state was supposed to be established by the Messiah, and not be some non observant, secularly educated Jews from Europe. This opposition now manifests itself within the haredi (ultra orthodox) segments of population in both Israel and the diaspora.  While these segments are mostly not anti-Zionist the way say the Neturei Karta group of haredi Jews are, they are certainly non Zionist.

There was an opposition from the left that favored a focus on universal liberation, rather than Jewish specific liberation.  Some Jews in this camp, such as Leon Trotsky, worked within radical organizations that weren’t Jewish, while others, the founder of the Bund, for instance, worked within a Jewish context but with the goal of a more universal liberation.  Jewish Voices for Peace is a good example of a successor organization.

The third kind of opposition was one based on viewing Judaism as a religion and not wanting to upset our neighbors.  It’s hard to believe, but the Reform movement in the United States was actively opposed to Zionism and even as late as the 1940’s one of the leading Rabbis was afraid that the controversy over whether to embrace Zionism would split the movement (this according to a review of a book on it published on the Reform Movements website https://urj.org/blog/odd-couple-reform-judaism-and-zionism).  I think some of the non Zionism that we see in organizations like Truah might be seen as contemporary successors to the non Zionism of the Reform movement because they aren’t as radical as say Jewish Voices for Peace and their non Zionism is based on their deep belief in what counts in Jewish religious consciousness.

We Jews are used to being persecuted underdogs.  To this day we still show maps where Israel is this tiny dot surrounded by this vast sea of Arab countries.  But what happens when the persecuted underdog turns around and kicks the bleep out of somebody smaller than they are?  That was the Lebanese war helmed by the bully Sharon and the massacre at the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla.  All of a sudden David has become Goliath.  David’s much easier to root for.

And if you thought Sabra and Shatilla were bad, the pictures coming out of Gaza day after day after Hamas committed the largest attack on Jews since the Holocaust—well those images are even worse.  I’m not going to go into any kind of debate about the extent to which any of the wars are justified or any arguments about strategy. What I want instead is for you to take away these points

·        Jewish division about political Zionism and/or the Jewish state of Israel has been more the norm than the exception.

·        Non Zionism does not make you not a Jew.

·        The state of Israel is rightly a central focus of Jewish life, but it need not be the only or primary focus.

·        The question of the state of Israel as a physical safe haven for Jews is murky.