The failures of Zionism and anti-Zionism

And a banal case for compromise

Years ago, back when Barack Obama was pressuring Israel to freeze settlement activity on the West Bank and pro-Israel groups were giving him shit about it, I found myself on the phone with Marty Peretz, the longtime owner and editor of The New Republic.

At the time, I was giving shit to the people who were giving Obama shit, making the case that it would be much better for the United States if Israel stopped building east of the Green Line and re-engaged in good faith negotiations with the Palestinian Authority. Peretz and other folks on the pro-Israel side were flinging lots of accusations around, and I’d successfully prevailed on someone I knew who worked for him to communicate that it was really quite offensive to me, as a Jewish person with lots of Jewish relatives who I love and who themselves have a range of views about Israel,¹ to be called antisemitic. It was an awkward call, but he was prepared to concede the point that I was not an antisemite.

But then he wrong-footed me by asking “are you a Zionist?”

I was not comfortable adopting that label, in part because I think there’s something fundamentally odd about Zionism as an ethos among residents of the diaspora in the 21st century. Nothing is stopping us from moving to Israel. If you choose not to, then whatever you may say, that lack of action indicates something about your actual feelings. I did not feel — and have never felt — any desire to move to Israel or that it would be a good idea for American Jews to move en masse to Israel. My ancestors are from Eastern Europe, not Israel. My family’s culinary traditions are not Israeli. And I have no particular desire to shed my Jewish American identity in favor of an Israeli identity.

That said, I also wanted to get him off my back, so I said something about supporting the continued existence of a Jewish state with secure borders inside the historic Land of Israel.

And it’s something that I’ve thought about a lot over the past six months, because I knew, even at the time, that my response was sort of a cop-out — you don’t have to be a firm ideological believer in Bangladeshi nationalism to think that trying to dissolve Bangladesh would be a bad idea. But as part of the post-10/7 discourse, some on the left have been attempting to normalize the deflationary account of Zionism that I gave to Peretz. Unless you think that Israel is so fundamentally flawed that it needs to be dissolved, you are a “Zionist,” which is understood to be a sharply derogatory term.

In the debate over whether anti-Zionism is per se antisemitic (per the IHRA definition), sensible people are supposed to say that it is not. And I agree. But I also think anti-Zionism is an unsound ideological program that’s gotten tons of people killed.

There were many pre-war nationalist projects

A key piece of mischief here is that anti-Zionists of 2024 steal a lot of valor from anti-Zionists of the early 20th century, when the whole situation was different.