Liberal, Zionist, Both, or Neither?

It Depends How You Define the Terms

Sweet Ladies Liberty. Source: The Palestine Poster Project Archives

Most American Jews are liberal at home while supporting Israel abroad. According to an increasingly popular narrative, sympathetically outlined by Ezra Klein in the New York Times, this combination is ideologically inconsistent and morally untenable. Daniel May, a leftist Jewish publisher quoted by Klein, summarizes the supposed contradiction: “American Jews tend to think that our success in the United States is a product of the fact that the country does not define belonging according to ethnicity or religion. And Israel is, of course, based on the idea of a state representing a particular ethnic religious group.” The argument here is not that American Jews are hypocrites because they’re Democrats who back Likud (most don’t). Rather, it’s that Israel’s very existence is in tension with liberal principles. To borrow Marxist language, the right-wing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the interminable war in Gaza have only “sharpened the contradictions” inherent in liberal Zionism. In this narrative, now that they’ve been forced to choose between liberalism and Zionism, many young American Jews are choosing liberalism.¹

But the supposed incompatibility between liberalism and Zionism rests on selective definitions of both. Classical liberals appealed to the nation—as opposed to the divine right of kings—as the source of political legitimacy. They viewed the nation-state as the guarantor of liberal principles like individual rights, the rule of law, and representative government. For example, the great liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote: “Where the sentiment of nationality exists in any force, there is a prima facie case for uniting all the members of the nationality under the same government, and a government to themselves apart. This is merely saying that the question of government ought to be decided by the governed.” After World War I, this liberal principle of self-determination—as championed by US President Woodrow Wilson—inspired the creation of new nation-states from the wreckage of multinational empires. Idealist though he was, Wilson did not propose a United States of Eastern Europe.² Instead, the victorious Allies sought—with mixed results—to align European borders with existing nationalities, as defined by ethnic, linguistic, historic, and religious ties.

Liberal Majority Rule

At its foundation, political Zionism was a nationalist movement in the spirit of classical liberalism.³ Theodor Herzl’s imagined Jewish commonwealth guaranteed universal suffrage, equal rights for its Arab citizens, and separation of religion and state (“while we respect our rabbis, we will keep them to their synagogues, just as the army will be kept to its barracks”). Even the now-maligned Ze’ev Jabotinsky, leader of the right-wing Revisionists and forefather of Likud, was a cosmopolitan liberal who championed co-existence with Arabs and official secularism.⁴ Like any nationalist movement, Zionism also included more radical strains, including once-influential socialists on the left and even a small self-declared fascist faction on the right. But Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence enshrined the classical liberal (or prophetic) ideals of the Zionist mainstream. Per its founders, the new state “will be based on freedom, justice, and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel” and “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race, or sex.”

The Declaration also refers to “the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State.” Here is where modern liberal (ie, progressive) discomfort sets in. When Klein quotes David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, as saying, “Only a state with at least 80 percent Jews is a viable and stable state,” the Times reader is supposed to shudder. Nationalism—especially concern over a nation’s demographic makeup—is now coded as conservative. But Mill, like most classical liberals, would agree with Ben-Gurion’s basic premise. Mill wrote that “Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities” because “the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist.”⁵ The fracturing of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, two Wilsonian attempts to combine multiple nations into single states, supports Mill’s case. In Israel’s own neighborhood, so does Lebanon, which descended into civil war after it lost its Christian majority.

In the particular case of Israel, concerns about demography cannot be divorced from two basic facts. First, Zionism was founded in reaction to the plight of Jews as a persecuted minority. Given the historical record, it’s no surprise that Jews would fear being a minority in a state established to escape that fate. Second, Israel has been historically attacked and threatened by Arabs who seek its destruction. Therefore, were Israel to become majority Arab, it’s reasonable to fear that the result would rival the collapse of Yugoslavia in bloodshed. As it stands, Israel is only 71% Jewish, and its minorities (mostly Arab) are full Israeli citizens. By contrast, the Jewish minorities of Arab states were expelled or forced to flee; while, outside of Israel, minority Middle Eastern Christians have suffered a precipitous demographic decline, often driven by Muslim persecution. Israel could certainly do more to foster non-Jewish civic nationalism, such as making Arabic an official language again and addressing unrecognized Bedouin villages. Still, Israeli Arabs have more individual rights in Israel than they do in most Arab countries.

One Ethnostate or Two?

The obvious rejoinder is that stateless Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have been denied the liberal right to self-determination. But that’s not for lack of trying. Previous attempts at a two-state solution have failed primarily because of what historian

Benny Morris

calls “the essential rejectionism of the Palestinian national movement.” Palestinian rejectionists deny any Jewish right to self-determination in the Holy Land and insist on the “right of return,” which would be the demographic destruction of Israel for reasons recognizable by Mill. This Palestinian rejectionism, the genocidal implications of which were demonstrated on October 7, has also fueled the growth of Israeli rejectionism. To put it mildly, prominent members of the current Israeli government don’t speak the classical liberal language of Herzl or Jabotinsky. But at the same time, a little perspective is in order. Far-right parties received 11% of the vote in the 2022 Israeli election. They are disproportionately influential because of the Netanyahu coalition’s slim parliamentary margin. Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian election with 44% of the vote. There haven’t been any Palestinian elections since.

Klein summarizes the supposed contrast between liberalism and Zionism as follows: “For Jews of the diaspora, multiethnic democracy — in which the rights and security of political minorities are protected — is the bedrock on which our safety is built. For Jews of Israel, a Jewish majority is the bedrock upon which their state is built.”⁶ But if the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” were ever realized, the result wouldn’t be an American-style democracy.⁷ The preamble to the 2017 Hamas Charter states that “Palestine is the land of the Arab Palestinian people” and its “status has been elevated by Islam.” The first article of the Palestinian Authority’s 2003 Constitution affirms that “Palestine is part of the larger Arab world, and the Palestinian people are part of the Arab nation,” while the fourth proclaims Islam its official religion. An independent Palestine would, to use the buzzword Klein employs, be a Muslim Arab “ethnostate.” Why then, no leftist handwringing over the inherent contradiction between liberalism and Palestinian nationalism?

As Goes Liberalism, So Goes the Nation

Liberal democracy is perfectly compatible with a core ethnoreligious identity, as is illiberalism. According to Freedom House, the freest country in the world is Finland, which is 90% ethnically Finnish and has a cross in its flag. On the other hand, the Gaza Strip is an authoritarian theocracy with a nearly 100% Muslim Arab population. Klein is correct that insofar as Israel adopts illiberal policies, it alienates liberal American Jews. But it’s anti-Zionism, not Zionism, that is a fundamentally illiberal ideology. By definition, anti-Zionism denies an existing nation the right to self-determination. Prior to the establishment of the state of Israel, that denial could be a matter of theoretical debate. But over 75 years later, it necessarily implies disenfranchisement and likely mass murder. By contrast, Zionism is not predicated on the denial of another people’s right to self-determination. Zionists accepted the partition of the Holy Land into Arab and Jewish states as proposed by the British in 1937 and the UN in 1947. And while mainstream Zionist politics have mostly been liberal in a broad sense (ie, ranging from social democratic to conservative), anti-Zionism has largely been driven by Communists, Islamists, authoritarian pan-Arabists, and far-left radicals who view all of Western civilization as a “settler-colonial project.”

There is no inherent contradiction between liberalism and Zionism. Instead, there is a contradiction between liberalism and Kahanism on the one hand, and illiberal leftism and Zionism on the other. Klein’s narrative is flawed because it equates Kahanism—which rejects the classical liberal principles embedded in Israel’s Declaration of Independence—with Zionism itself. It also ignores the illiberalism that dominates the Palestinian movement and much of the far left. Klein says that “the power” of New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s anti-Zionism is that “it is thoroughly, even banally, liberal.” He omits that Mamdani co-founded a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, a group that endorsed the October 7 massacre and once posted that the goal of divestment from Israel is "the total collapse of the university structure and the American empire itself.” Nor does Klein mention Mamdani’s shoutout to the “Holy Land Five,” who were convicted of aiding Hamas.⁸ It would be easier to accept anti-Zionists as “banally liberal” if they weren’t constantly praising, excusing, or refusing to condemn a jihadist death cult. If Kahanism comes to wholly define Zionism, then many American Jews will abandon Israel. But equally, if radical illiberalism comes to wholly define the left, then many American Jews will abandon so-called “liberalism.”

1. Klein overstates the extent of the divide. Michael Koplow notes that “American Jews are divided into two camps on Israel, but the one that remains broadly supportive of Israel is three times larger than the one that does not. . . . American Jewish views of Israel are becoming more complicated and conflicted, which is not the same as those views creating two hardened camps.”

It’s also fair to wonder if Klein’s left-wing sample group (“Many younger Jews I know”) includes any Orthodox, Mizrahi, or Russian-speaking Jews. I strongly suspect they are disproportionately (or entirely) the secular, Ashkenazi, multigenerational Americans often falsely equated with American Jews tout court.

2. Though interestingly, a plan to federalize the Austro-Hungarian Empire into a “United States of Greater Austria” was proposed before the war. But even this model envisioned dividing the empire mostly along ethnic lines.

3. Zionism differed from other nationalisms because the nationality in question was geographically dispersed. Even so, the Jewish situation was not wholly unique. Armenians, too, were once a minority in their country. And Armenia, like Israel, has a “right of return” for its diaspora. Notably though, there is no left-wing movement calling for the elimination of Armenia. Nor is there an Armenian

Peter Beinart

(Peter Beinartian?) advocating for an Azeri-Armenian binational state.

4. Jabotinsky is often remembered for demanding a Jewish state encompassing the original borders of British Palestine (ie, including present-day Jordan). However, he said in 1937 that there is “no question of ousting the Arabs. On the contrary, the idea is that Palestine on both sides of the Jordan could hold the Arabs, their progeny, and many millions of Jews.” Unlike most of his contemporaries, Jabotinsky anticipated a Holocaust-like disaster, and sought land to facilitate the mass evacuation of European Jews.

In response to Rabbi Abraham Kook’s opposition to women’s suffrage, Jabotinsky said that the chief rabbi “came out of a hole in the wall . . . and never heard the name of John Stuart Mill.” Jabotinsky later moderated his attitude toward religion while retaining a classical liberal sensibility. As scholar Avi Shilon writes: “While many of his contemporaries saw religion as encouraging nationalistic chauvinism, Jabotinsky believed that it provided a necessary check on nationalism’s darker impulses.” Although otherwise prescient, Jabotinsky clearly didn’t anticipate Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.

5. For Mill, nationality “may have been generated by various causes,” including shared descent, language, religion, geography, and history. Thus while “Switzerland has a strong sentiment of nationality, though the cantons are of different races, different languages, and different religions,” the general rule is that “national feeling is proportionally weakened by the failure of any of the causes which contribute to it.” Accordingly, functional nations that are as diverse as Switzerland are rare.

6. European Jews might not agree with Klein’s rosy depiction of “multiethnic democracy” as the bedrock of diaspora safety.

7. Tellingly, the Arabic version of the slogan is “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab.”

8. Aside from his position on Israel, Mamdani’s call to shift the tax burden to “richer and whiter neighborhoods” is hardly just “banal liberalism.”