Beyond Zionism and Anti-Zionism

Actions Matter More Than Labels

Prelude to a politics of the future. Source: Wikimedia Commons

According to a 2025 survey of American Jews, nearly nine out of 10 support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish democratic state, and 70% feel emotionally attached to Israel. Yet only 37% identify as Zionists, with 8% identifying as non-Zionists, 7% as anti-Zionists, and 48%—a plurality of American Jews—rejecting all three options or saying they weren’t sure. Mimi Kravetz, chief impact officer for Jewish Federations of North America, attributes this apparent discrepancy to “definition creep.” To wit, only 36% of American Jews said Zionism simply meant “the right of the Jewish people to have a Jewish state.” Almost the same number, 35%, said Zionism meant “believing Israel has a right to the West Bank and Gaza Strip,” while more than one in four said they thought Zionism meant “supporting whatever action Israel takes.” Kravetz writes that the Jewish Federations “continue to proudly call ourselves Zionists, in large part because we adhere to the historic definition,” which she defines as “supporting the State of Israel and the Israeli people and uniting the Jewish people behind this shared commitment.” But the results should make Zionists pause and ask: Do we really need the label Zionist at all?

Before the state of Israel was founded in 1948, the term Zionist (and, by extension, anti-Zionist) had a clear meaning. To be a Zionist meant supporting the establishment of a Jewish national home in the Holy Land. (The Zionist movement only officially adopted statehood as a goal in 1942, in the midst of the Holocaust.) But over 75 years later, Zionism thus defined is a fait accompli. Consider, by analogy, the Pakistan Movement, which sought to establish a South Asian Muslim homeland in what was then the British Raj. Once Pakistan was established in 1947, it no longer made sense to speak of a “Pakistan Movement.” If you lived in Pakistan, you were Pakistani. If you recognized the existence of Pakistan (or “the right of the South Asian Muslim people to have a South Asian Muslim state”), you were simply acknowledging political reality. To acknowledge political reality shouldn’t require a particular term. Yet in Israel's case, it does. An obvious difference here is that many countries (over 25, mostly Muslim) still don’t officially recognize Israel (tellingly, Iran calls it the “Zionist entity”). Moreover, many Muslims and leftists in countries that do recognize Israel delegitimize the Jewish state and openly wish for its destruction.

But what Kravetz calls “definition creep” works in the anti-Zionists’ favor. They can say they oppose “the occupation,” and naive liberals will assume they mean the West Bank and Gaza, not the entirety of Israel. Likewise, when they denounce Israeli settlers, they really mean every Israeli, since they consider Israel as a whole to be a settler-colonial project. Yet the ambiguity of the term Zionism elides the radicalism of anti-Zionism in turn. If Zionism were to be seen as a purely historical movement, then the intentions of anti-Zionists would be more obvious: to undo history by destroying the state of Israel. Better still, the debate could move on from the tired, backwards-looking binary of Zionist versus anti-Zionist. In 1947, should the United Nations have voted to partition British Palestine into Arab and Jewish states? Should the Arabs have then launched a war to destroy Israel that ended up expanding its territory instead? Should Egypt, Syria, and Jordan have gone to war with Israel again in 1967, losing the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula (later given back to Egypt as part of a peace treaty) as a result? Should Israel have returned the West Bank to Jordan and perhaps resolved the Palestinian issue in the 1980s, as per the Peres–Hussein London Agreement?¹ We could ask endless such counterfactuals, going back to the Jewish decision to revolt against Rome and lose Judea in the first place. (My hot take: it was a bad decision.²)

But the more vital question is rather: What is to be done? Insofar as “Zionist” and “anti-Zionist” have such broad salience, it’s because there’s an ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Each term is mapped onto one side or the other. Yet neither is clear about the actual solution being proposed. If you support partitioning the Holy Land, then say you’re pro-partition. If you support mass expulsion, either of Arabs or Jews, then say you’re pro-expulsion. If you support a binational state, then call yourself a binationalist. If you prefer an Israeli–Palestinian confederation, then call yourself a confederalist. If you support Israel annexing the West Bank, but oppose both mass expulsion and a binational state, then come up with your own term, because I don’t know how one or the other wouldn’t inevitably result. Appropriate labels can help start a conversation, but it’s the details that matter. I may not think his solution is very feasible, but I have the utmost respect for Israeli geographer Gideon Biger, who proposed a land swap involving Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and the Palestinians so that each party ends up with the same net territory it had prior to the Six-Day War.³ Now that’s creative thinking. Likewise, the Greater Gaza plan, which would involve Egypt giving up land in the Sinai for Palestinians to form a viable state southwest of Israel, may be unlikely, but at least it’s a plan. Even Hamas held a 2021 conference discussing its strategy for “post-liberation” Palestine. Among the recommendations: forcing highly educated Jews to temporarily stay in the country so the new Islamist theocracy could exploit their expertise. It may be megalomaniacal, but again, at least it’s a plan.

I wish all opinionators on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict showed the same dedication to solutions. If, like many anti-Zionists, you think that Israeli Jews should “Go back to Poland,” then what about the ones from the Arab world? Are Arab countries prepared to welcome back the Jews they expelled, and to compensate them for stolen property? How about the many Israeli Jews with ancestors from different places? Do they get to pick where they’re going?⁴ Is immigration-restrictionist America in the mood to receive over 7 million ex-Israeli Jews (plus Druze and other minorities presumably marked for death as “collaborators”)? Likewise, if you want to expel the Palestinians, then where to? President Donald Trump floated moving Gazans to other countries, but received no takers. Israel’s peace treaty with Jordan explicitly forbids forced population transfers. Are you going to pay them to leave voluntarily? What if most won’t go? Former US ambassador to Israel David Friedman argues that Israel should annex the West Bank and grant its Palestinians permanent resident status. Again, at least that’s a plan, even if it’s also a recipe for eventual civil war. Binationalists need to explain how two populations so divided by historical enmity are going to fare better in a single state than the South Slavs did in Yugoslavia, the Czechs and Slovaks did in Czechoslovakia, or, closer to home, the various sects are doing in broken Lebanon. Partitionists, too, need to account for mutual distrust, religious irredentism, security concerns, the status of holy sites, Palestinian rejectionism, Israeli settlements, and a long history of failure. But better such pragmatic arguments than pissing contests over who is more indigenous to the region or the more righteous historical victim.

Ironically, a focus on solutions would also return us to the original gestalt of intra-Jewish debates over Zionism. Before Israel was founded, Jewish anti-Zionists were defined less by opposition to Zionism than by support for an alternative. Communism, assimilation, diaspora nationalism, territorialism, Bundism, and Orthodox quietism were all coherent and competing (if not equally convincing) answers to Europe’s Jewish question. (In terms of scale, the question centered on what to do with the over 6 million Eastern European Jews who had all the characteristics of a nation except territory, and whom European countries were unwilling or unable to integrate.⁵) From 1881 to 1914, over 2 million Eastern European Jews simply chose migration elsewhere, but that was no longer an option once the US and other Western countries shut their doors after World War I. Zionism, too, encompassed many strands: political and cultural, socialist and nationalist, secular and religious. But the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust brought this ideological conversation to a practical conclusion. The world did not want to take in Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria in the 1930s. Before the British government curtailed Jewish immigration via the 1939 White Paper, Mandatory Palestine was one of the few refuges available.⁶ Likewise, after World War II, no country except the Jewish proto-state wanted to take in all 250,000 Jewish refugees stuck in displaced persons camps. Most survivors wanted to get as far as possible from the lands of their families’ slaughter, but those Jews who did try to return to Poland were subject to pogroms. Thus, regardless of whether you think a Yiddish-speaking canton in Europe⁷ was a better option than Jewish statehood, history has rendered its verdict.

Dropping the Zionist label would further the normalization of Israel, which is itself integral to Zionism. Diaspora Armenians don’t need a term to describe their attachment to Armenia. Diaspora Greeks don’t need a term to describe their attachment to Greece. When Judea was part of the Roman Empire, diaspora Jews would send money to support the Jerusalem Temple. They’d also visit the Holy Land on pilgrimage festivals and remain engaged in Judean affairs, a connection that ran both ways. But it would be anachronistic to call them Zionists. These Jews of antiquity were simply behaving like a normal diaspora population. Likewise, as a modern diaspora Jew, you shouldn’t need to call yourself a Zionist to indicate your attachment to Israel. The Jewish religion presupposes the significance of Zion. The fact that roughly half of all Jews live in Israel dictates that the remainder care about their fate. Likewise, many Muslims and Arabs care about the Palestinians because of religious and/or ethnic ties, and because Jerusalem is also a holy city in Islam. “Zionism” implies a political position, but Jewish attachment to Israel is ultimately pre-political, because it’s rooted in spirituality and sociology. Sociologically, any cohesive people is going to be concerned with half its members. To demand otherwise of Jews, which is the default anti-Zionist position, is to attack the basic concept of human community.

Jewish attachment to Israel doesn’t automatically mean territorial maximalism, partisan loyalty to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or blanket support for every Israeli policy. Nor, per Kravetz, does the “historic definition” of Zionism. While Zionism presupposes support for a Jewish homeland, it doesn’t dictate that homeland’s boundaries or political program. Nevertheless, according to Kravetz’s organization’s own survey, many American Jews believe otherwise. Undoubtedly, the death toll from the war in Gaza and settler violence in the West Bank have had an effect, as has leftist demonization of Israel. Moreover, if Israel were led by a centrist like Yair Lapid instead of a hard-right coalition, then liberal American Jews would likely be more comfortable with the Zionist label. At the very least, if members of the Netanyahu government didn’t openly call for destroying Gaza and expelling its inhabitants, Israel’s reputation would fare better. The fact that Bezalel Smotrich, one of the most extreme members of Israel’s government, heads a party with Zionism in the name surely doesn’t help matters. But why rely on a label that’s susceptible to political headwinds in the first place?

My argument here shouldn’t be confused with the post-Zionist position, which calls for Israel to be a “Hebrew republic” instead of a Jewish state. In principle, Israel should promote a stronger civic identity that includes Arabs and other minorities. But that civic identity will inevitably draw on the Jewish character of its majority. Many countries have a state religion, including England (the Church of England), Cambodia (Buddhism), and Egypt (Islam). Judaism isn’t even Israel’s official religion, though it's obviously entwined with its national identity. Many countries also have a right of return for co-ethnics, including Greece, Armenia, and Germany. Israel’s widespread social solidarity, high fertility rate, and willingness to fight for itself (in contrast with many “post-national” European countries) show that its sense of nationhood is a feature, not a bug. The extent to which Israel should be a Jewish state instead of a “state of the Jews,” the role of the rabbinate in civil affairs, and the openness of the Law of Return are all fair subjects for debate. But again, many countries have internal frictions over religion, citizenship, and identity. We can have these discussions without a polemical framing around Zionism itself. As for Haredi non-Zionists, many see secular Zionism as heretical. Yet, pragmatically (you might say hypocritically), they live in Israel, participate in its political system, and rely on state resources. Retiring the term Zionism wouldn’t end their theological objections to a Jewish state, but it might ease their integration into a society perceived as less ideologically defined.⁸

In the 1950s, Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, declared that “a Zionist is a person who settles in Israel.” In other words, once the state of Israel had been established, a Zionist was simply an Israeli. Diaspora Jews, as well as non-Jews, could support Israel, but they were not, de facto, Zionists. Debates over the meaning of the term are as old as Zionism itself. But today, it’s increasingly unmoored from its original context of building a Jewish homeland. Instead, among the non-Jews who use the term (inevitably, by virtue of demographic weight, the majority), it’s frequently deployed as an empty slur or simply a euphemism for “perfidious Jew.” (The increasingly popular short-form “Zio,” borrowed by leftists from former KKK grand wizard David Duke, makes this abundantly clear.) I’m not so naive as to think that retiring the term would end antisemitism or resolve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. But doing so would introduce greater honesty into a toxic, unproductive discourse. Italians no longer say they support the Risorgimento, the 19th-century movement to unify Italy. That’s not because they want Italy to break up. It’s because the movement’s goals have been achieved. Likewise, in the 21st century, the Zionist dream is a reality. That reality matters more than the word we use to describe it.

1. For a modern take on this solution, see my article making the case for Greater Palestine.

2. I can hardly do better a better job explaining why than King Agrippa II in his speech to the Judean rebels:

Will you not carefully reflect upon the Roman empire? Will you not estimate your own weakness? Hath not your army been often beaten even by your neighboring nations, while the power of the Romans is invincible in all parts of the habitable earth? . . . What therefore do you pretend to? Are you richer than the Gauls, stronger than the Germans, wiser than the Greeks, more numerous than all men upon the habitable earth? What confidence is it that elevates you to oppose the Romans?

He goes on and on like this, and it certainly who’ve convinced me to surrender before the Temple was destroyed.

3. See also Israel General Giora Eiland’s proposed trilateral land swap involving Israel, Egypt, and the Palestinians.

4. Not to mention Israeli Jews with direct ancestors in the Holy Land prior to the modern Zionist movement.

5. At the turn of the 20th century, approximately 70% of European Jews were in Eastern Europe. Most of the Ostjuden spoke their own language (Yiddish), lived in their own traditionally autonomous towns and neighborhoods (what historian Howard Sachar called a “Semitic archipelago in a Slavic sea”), practiced Orthodox Judaism, and, in the Russian Empire, were subject to persecution and pogroms. Western European Jews were legally (if not always socially) equal with the majority, smaller in number, less religious, and more likely to be assimilated into the dominant culture (Zionism’s founder, the German-speaking, Vienna-born Theodor Herzl, being a notable example). Zionists expected migrants to the Holy Land to come from downtrodden Russian (and Romanian) Jewry, and later, from the unwanted Jews of newly independent states like Poland, not the relatively well-off “Germans of the Mosaic faith.” The rise of Nazism—and, later, the Arab world’s expulsion of its Jews—shattered this calculus and made Israel into a universal Jewish refuge.

6. Honorable mention to the Dominican Republic for also taking in Jewish refugees.

7. Or agricultural colonies in America and Argentina.

8. See, for example, the position that Rav Eliyahu Henkin adopted in 1959: “I am not a supporter of the government, and I objected to the entire idea of a state. . . . But now it is our obligation that we all support the state in the face of its external enemies and then go on to guide it in the ways of Torah.” Today, the Haredim who enlist in the IDF often argue they are fighting for the Jewish nation (am Yisrael), not the Jewish state (medinat Yisrael). Regardless, they still fight. It’s actions, not labels, that matter most.