A “Jewish state”?

Posts on this subject are obviously fraught, so first:

• I keep an index of resources
• the moral question is simple:
  Palestinian liberation is right & necessary
• the history is complicated:
  I have a survey which addresses many common misunderstandings
• the praxis is complicated:
  antisemitic entryism into the movement for liberation is subtle, pervasive, and unacceptable

I have a problem with the way many anti-Zionists over-read what Zionists mean by a “Jewish state”, to cast Zionism as a distinctly illegitimate form of nationalism. In this long moment of crisis, as Israel commits genocide in Gaza, I am not invested in defending Zionism, but creeping antisemitism has me very invested in people understanding Zionism clearly.

A state?

Many assume that Zionism has always been defined by pursuit of a Westphalian nation-state: a soveriegn, geographically-bounded polity among the 200+ nation-states which we have divided the world into.

An understandable confusion. We have come to take the Westphalian order as normal, and Zionists did found the state of Israel.

When the 1897 First Zionist Congress founded modern Zionism, Westphalian nation-states were still emerging as a new development. Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire; carving out a nation-state from a structurally different entity was wildly implausible. Many early Zionists saw a nation-state as undesirable, not just hard to achieve. So the Congress released the Basel Program manifesto called for Zionists to build a “homeland” by moving to enclaves within the Empire, not a state.

I bring this up since many assert that every wrong Israel has ever committed was baked in to Zionist ideology from the beginning, which is absurd since Israel was not the original Zionist vision and emerged through astonishing historical contingency.

That said, after the founding of Israel Zionism transformed from pursuing a Jewish homeland to supporting the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish state in some form. So what does a ‘Jewish state’ require?

Theocracy?

Many assume that Zionism means theocracy. An understandable confusion: Judaism is a religion.

But Jews can also be understood as an ethnic people, like Turks or Arabs or Aleuts or Kurds or countless other peoples. Many Jews do not practice the religion but understand themselves as members of the Jewish ethnic community; I am one of them.

While Zionists often embrace Jewish religious poetics, Zionism has always very explicitly framed itself as a secular movement which addresses all Jews as a single ethnic people. Israel neither obeys nor exerts religious authority. Israeli society includes many with vigorous religious practice, including a few who want a turn toward a theocratic Israel, but there are far more Israeli Jews who are not very observant, even not observant at all.

Zionism opposes theocracy.

Genocide?

Many assume that Zionism aspires to a society of only Jews, requiring a genocidal purge of gentiles.

Another understandable confusion. As I write this, Israel is deep into a genocidal effort to annex Gaza which has already killed about 86,000 people. Before the founding of Israel, Zionist militias killed and displaced many Arab Palestinians; in the 1948 Nakba that escalated to killing over 10,000 Palestinians and driving 80% of the Arab population of the newly-formed state of Israel from their homes. The West Bank is still subject to de facto occupation, seizing more territory for Jewish settlers. There have always been hardliner Zionists who do want a nation composed only of Jews through what is euphemistically called “ethnic cleansing”.

It does not excuse these horrors to say they do not define Zionism. When Israel was founded, the Palestinians who remained became citizens of the new state. Today, one in four citizens of Israel is a gentile, most of them Arab Palestinians. There have always been many Zionists who have vigorously opposed the murder and disenfranchisement of Palestinians. Israel has not only expanded the occupation of Gaza & the West Bank; at times they have rolled back settlements and other claims.

We must recognize that Zionists have done genocide. But Zionism does not mean genocide.

Apartheid?

Many assume that Zionism requires an apartheid state in which gentiles are denied equal legal rights & protections.

This is the most defensible confusion. Israel is now and always has been an apartheid state. Israel hardliners deny this by pointing to the big population of gentiles holding Israeli citizenship, but this is disingenous. Gentiles have always been second-class citizens in countless ways, both in explicit legal inequities and in many rights which are only equal on paper. Palestinians in Gaza & the West Bank are not Israeli citizens and have been even more disenfranchised under the shadow of Israeli guns.

But again it does not excuse the real horrors to say that they do not define Zionism. In the time of Zionist enclaves within the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire, apartheid was not even conceivable. Since the founding of Israel, liberal Zionists have always fought hard for equality for gentiles. Hardliners have always held the upper hand, but they do not deny that liberals are Zionists.

We must recognize that Zionists have done apartheid. But Zionism does not mean apartheid.

Minimum viable Zionism

If a “Jewish state” of Israel does not require theocracy, genocide, or apartheid, what does define it?

Zionists differ greatly about what Zionism should involve, but there is a core vision which all Zionists agree on which I like to call “minimum viable Zionism”:

1. The continued existence of the Westphalian nation-state of Israel …
2. … governed as a secular liberal democracy …
3. … where Jewish culture is ordinary rather than exceptional as it is everywhere else …
4. … inviting Jews from all backgrounds to become new citizens.

Any reasonable observer should feel skeptical about Point 2. Actual Israel and all too many Actual Zionists betray it. One cannot claim to have a “liberal democracy” while maintaining a de facto apartheid society. Too many Zionists square that circle by denying the injustices of Israel’s history & present, and by pursuing ugly measures to ensure a perpetual Jewish demographic majority in Israel.

But those disingenous Zionists would not work so hard at the lie that Israel is a true liberal democracy if Zionism did not say that it should be one. (They parallel bigots in the US denying how we fall short of our own creed of equality.) Hardliners consider liberal Zionists wrong and dangerously naïve, but do not deny that they are Zionists because Zionism does not refuse equality for gentiles.

Point 3 articulates what Zionism means by a “Jewish state”. All states have some shared culture without any authoritarian imposition by the government. Shinto shrines abound in Japan. Spain all but shuts down during seista time. Sugared avocado smoothies are readily available in Brazil. Such cultural norms are not authoritarian impositions on people who do not share those inclinations. Readily available kosher food and workplaces closed for Yom Kippur do not constitute injustices.

Point 4 reflects the purpose inscribed in the Zionist project, a Jewish state as a haven for Jews around the world facing oppression and worse. This is consistent with how we accept all states choosing whom they allow to easily claim citizenship. Many states make it much easier to become a citizen if one has ancestors from that country. Such rules can be a bit weird: Liechtenstein has a path to citizenship through winning a public municipal vote, and many countries open the door to people with particular skills. Israel’s invitation to diaspora Jews is no more peculiar or unjust.

Yes, Israel as it exists now exercises what we might call “Jewish supremacism”, and there are strains of Zionism which want even worse. But that is not inherent in Zionism, as many Zionists stand against it. The modest ethnic preferences of MVZ which all Zionists agree on are compatible with respecting a truly sovereign Gaza & West Bank, with a gentile majority in Israel, with return & reparations for Palestinians displaced by the Nakba, with true equality for everyone in Israel — in short, MVZ is compatible with a more egalitarian state than any realworld nation today.

Zionism is an ordinary Westphalian nationalism

Anti-Zionists often fault Zionism as distinct from most other founding national principles in seeking an “ethnostate”, evoking an image of something comparable to a Klansman’s dreams of white nationalism. But MVZ is nothing like that.

Ideas like “the Spanish people” were invented to justify the Westphalian order, claiming that countries have sovereignty over their citizens and territory because the citizenry constitue A People with that territory as their homeland. Casting “Spain” as the nation-state of the “Spanish people” — asserting a primacy of that over Catalans and a distinction from “the Portuguese people” — asserts a relationship between ethnicity and nation. There is no bright line between those kinds of national foundations and minimum viable Zionism.

Early Zionists were fearful of the implications of the Westphalian world animated by these logics which was emerging in the late 19^th century. As a diaspora ethnic minority with a long history of suffering genocidal pogroms, they predicted that if Jews did not find a chair before the music stopped — a homeland — we would end up disenfranchised forever … at best. The events of the early 20^th century proved that Westphalian myths of unified national peoples were a terrible threat to diaspora ethnic minorities. Not only did that Westphalian sensibility animate the Nazi genocide of Jews (and another diaspora ethnic group, the Roma, as well as many others) that sensibility led other countries to close their doors to refugees from that genocide. Zionists rescued hundreds of thousands of Jews from being murdered together with half the world’s Jewish population while other movements failed to save Jewish lives.

In that context, I find it impossible to fault Zionism as an exceptionally poisoned nationalist project. The vision of a Jewish state I call “minimum viable Zionism” is no less legitimate than that of any other state … or of any other ethnic nationalist project like, say, Catalan independence.

The point

I do not count myself a Zionist. The past does not preclude the potential for a more just alternative to Israel. But the history which produced Zionism and then the state of Israel helps animate the respect I have for many Zionists. I respect Israelis whose Zionism consists simply of loving the only home they have ever known. I respect Zionists who say that Zionists rescued hundreds of thousands of Jews from genocide in Eastern Europe by Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and other countries while other movements failed. I deeply respect liberal Zionists who have fought hard for a truly egalitarian Israel.

Nor do I count myself an anti-Zionist. The past does not preclude the potential for an Israel both more just and more supportive of Jewish survival. But the history of Israel — the horrors of the Nakba, the occupation of Gaza & the West Bank, the oppression of Arab citizens of Israel, the current genocide in Gaza — helps animate the respect I have for many anti-Zionists. I respect those whose anti-Zionism is just an extension of their opposition to the entire Westphalian order. (If they have a compelling alternative to offer, I am interested.) I respect Palestinians who use “anti-Zionism” to mean nothing more than resistence to the injustices they have suffered under the flag of the state of Israel; I wish they would frame their position as “Palestinian liberation” instead, but it is best to honor how they describe themselves.

I wrote this post because I do not respect anti-Zionism which misrepresents the Zionist project of a “Jewish state” as a distinctly illegitimate form of nationalism. There are many reasonable objections one may make to Zionism as an ideology and a movement, but misrepresenting what a “Jewish state” means to cast Zionism as an inherently unjust foundation for a nation is ultimately antisemitic.