How to talk about Zionism

I recently met an elderly Israeli man, who left his homeland, "because of the genocide", as he put it. Now, he described himself as an anti-Zionist. When I asked him whether it wasn't enough to be a post- or non-Zionist, he explained that these had indeed been stages in his life, part of a process spanning decades. 

Raised in a Jewish-Zionist family in Argentina, he had emigrated to Israel as a young man. His decision, after a years-long process, to identify as an anti-Zionist was bound up with a deep sense of sorrow about the path Israel has taken.

Zionism has become Israel's state ideology. Though that is not a complete definition of the idea, discussing Zionism in the abstract—129 years after the First Zionist Congress in Basel—is impossible without also addressing current Israeli state and military policies.

There are some, including members of Germany's leftist political party, "Die Linke", who choose the term "real existing Zionism", a linguistic allusion to the old critique of degenerate state socialism. Yet even in this cautious formulation, debate on the subject remains difficult in Germany.

Criticism of Zionism reflexively triggers the suspicion that one is denying Jews their right to self-determination, harbouring hatred towards Israel, or even relativising the Holocaust. 

To make the discussion more balanced, I advocate for historical nuance coupled with political and moral clarity as regards the present.

During Zionism's early phase, the movement encompassed a plurality of goals and values. The binational perspective sought peaceful coexistence with Arabs in Palestine; supporters included prominent universalist intellectuals, such as Martin Buber. In practice, however, they were a small minority with little real-world influence.

Among German Zionists ran another, somewhat amorphous current, one apparently intent on avoiding conflict and known as "reconciliation Zionism". In a recently published study, the historian and director of the Berlin Centrum Judaicum, Anja Siegesmund, posits that, even as late as the 1920s, the demand for a Jewish state in the formal sense was not a mainstream position within Zionism.

According to Siegesmund, some dreamed of a religious-cultural renaissance, others of personal self-liberation or emotional belonging, creating what she describes as "a thicket of motives".

Yet to this sympathetic perspective should be added other historical facts. In all pre-state conceptions of Zionism, two ideological elements were present to a greater or lesser degree from the start: the idea of Jewish superiority over the indigenous Arab population, and the vision of a "Greater Israel" encompassing, at the very least, the whole of historic Palestine.

In the United States, for example, Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish judge on the Supreme Court of the United States, who died in 1941, wanted to claim parts of Jordan for the future Israel. The closeness between American Zionism and the White House can be traced back to Brandeis and to his personal reputation. There is still a university named after him.

Dotted lines of continuity connect early Zionism to today's radicalised and territorially expansive ethno-nationalism, which has cast off Zionism's more liberal elements. This is what German-Israeli historian Tamar Amar-Dahl describes as "neo-Zionism".

Colonialism and Zionism

In Germany, though, people tend to ignore this elephant in the room. Grave crimes have been committed in the name of Zionism, yet non-Jewish Germans happily declare themselves Zionists. Jewish anti-Zionists are accused of extremism or antisemitism. Criticism of, or opposition to, Zionism is even more contentious today than it was at a time when Israel was itself more liberal.

Put differently: the more actually existing Zionism has radicalised, the harder it has become to criticise. This can only be understood in terms of German psychodynamics: as if loving Zionism offered absolution from historical guilt.

The ability to also view "Zionism from the standpoint of its victims", as the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said called for four decades ago, remains a rare intellectual exercise within official German discourse. This, despite the fact that, in other contexts, incorporating the victims’ perspective is considered a fundamental principle of historical judgement. In this regard, Palestinians remain unseen.

While German debate may be morally deficient and politically distorted, pro-Palestinian voices in the public sphere would be well advised to avoid false simplifications of their own. There is little doubt that Europe's colonial policies helped give birth to Zionism, but the founding of the State of Israel cannot be explained solely through the conceptual framework of settler-colonialism.

Without the Holocaust, it is arguable that the Zionist enterprise would not have survived. At the beginning of the 20th century, most Jews viewed Theodor Herzl's project with scepticism or outright opposition. As historian Michael Brenner has pointed out: without the rise of European antisemitism, Zionism may well have faded into insignificance.

The Palestinian philosopher Raef Zreik once expressed this historical complexity as follows: "Zionism is a settler-colonial project, but not only that. It combines the image of the refugee with the image of the soldier, the powerless with the powerful, the victim with the victimiser." Acknowledging this duality justifies neither the Nakba nor the occupation, nor the recent genocide in Gaza.

Omer Bartov's core arguments

In his new book, "Israel: What Went Wrong?", historian Omer Bartov speaks of a "tragic transformation" of Zionism into an ideology of militarism and, ultimately, genocide. Anyone who still supports Zionism today, he argues, is an accomplice to its crimes.

"Zionism is not reformable," he writes, arguing that, similar to other ideologies that have led to genocides throughout history, Zionism is no longer tenable.

This is not a sentiment that is welcomed in Germany: although Bartov's book is currently being released in numerous translations including Polish, French, Spanish, Portuguese, even Taiwanese Chinese, in Germany, as in Israel, no publisher could be found.

And yet Bartov, who grew up in a prominent liberal-Zionist family in Israel, does not describe himself as an anti-Zionist, meaning that his position on this issue is not even the most radical.

Zionism, Bartov contends, emerged as a response to the ethnonationalism taking root in Eastern and Central Europe, because Jews were excluded from belonging to those nations. "Zionism then did what all ethnonationalisms do: claimed a place for itself and removed others from it."

For Bartov, it is important that the reasons for the emergence of Zionism are understood; viewing it as genocidal from its very inception doesn't align with historical truth. In his view, Israel's political and moral decline was by no means inevitable.

The fact that no long-term democratic containment of ethnonationalism took place after the founding of the Israeli state and the Nakba, Bartov attributes, at least in part, to the absence of a state constitution. 

This absence, he points out, meant that the promise enshrined in the Declaration of Independence of May 1948—that the new state would grant "complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex"—remained hollow and legally unenforceable. But was this, as Bartov suggests, an oversight, or was it intentional?

It is not Zionism, but rather Israel itself that is "reformable", argues Bartov, but only provided it disengages from Zionism. Otherwise, in his assessment, Israel risks becoming, at least in the medium term, an imploding "pariah state" which will lose its most vital supporters, including Jewish communities worldwide, for whom Israel increasingly represents, not a source of protection, but a danger.

One-state solution as a vision of peace

In the context of the United States, where Bartov teaches, these arguments do not appear nearly as marginal as they might in Germany. A negative perception of Israel is increasingly widespread among the American public, already reaching 80 per cent of the Democratic electorate, according to a survey by the Pew Research Centre.

Moreover, a sense of estrangement from Israel is growing among American Jews, and in particular among the younger generation. In The New Yorker magazine, a recent article subtitled "Disagreements about Gaza and Zionism have divided congregations" described in detail the tense atmosphere within Jewish communities.

In the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of the American journal Jewish Currents, speaks of an "epochal shift". This, she suggests, manifests as a search for a Judaism centred on Jewish traditions of justice, rather than on Israel and Zionism, as evidenced by the non-Zionist prayer groups and reading circles springing up across the United States.

According to an analysis by Shaul Magid, a professor of Jewish Studies at Harvard University, the Zionist consensus among American Jews—which had prevailed since 1967—has now shattered. "The atrocities in Gaza [are] the scalpel that has pierced the heart of Judaism," Magid writes.

The task now, he suggests, is to explore "a post-consensus reality". For Magid, Zionism is not at an end, but its survival depends on it "creating space for its opposite."

Such a transformation in the United States could have far-reaching consequences, and deserves our attention. A growing political divide between the two main groups of global Jewry—in the United States and Israel—would fundamentally redefine the framework of an Israeli-Palestinian future.

A model of equal civil rights for all, within a one-state solution (of whatever form), is not as marginal a concept in the United States as it is in Israel and Germany. In this model, the Zionist principle—that Jews must constitute a clear demographic majority in the state—would be abandoned.

Yet although this represents an inspiring, democratic vision of peace, this approach finds no resonance whatsoever in official Germany. Those who don't adhere to the notion of Jewish supremacy are viewed with suspicion here—a misunderstood lesson from the Holocaust. What would Martin Buber have to say about that?