Where Are the Liberal Zionists?

Many Zionists in Western countries consider themselves to be good liberals in their overall worldview. This never made much sense. There’s an obvious philosophical mismatch between a general belief in democracy and liberal pluralism on the one hand and support for an exclusionary ethnostate that rules over millions of permanent noncitizens on the other. And the idea that the occupation of the Palestinian territories was ever seriously intended to be temporary is hard to reconcile with Israel’s long-standing policy of building settlements populated by its own citizens on the West Bank.

Nevertheless, the story liberal Western Zionists tell themselves goes something like this:

Of course I don’t like the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. I wish there weren’t all those settlements, and in the long term I’d like there to be a two-state solution. But Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state, and it has a right to defend itself. The problem is that the Israeli right is in charge right now. They don’t want a two-state solution, and they’re fighting the war in Gaza in an unrestrained, disproportionate way. But that doesn’t mean I’ll stop supporting Israel. I’ll just keep the liberal Zionist faith while I wait for the Israeli opposition, who are surely sensible two-state liberals like me, to take power.

There are bits and pieces of truth in this story. It’s certainly true, for example, that Netanyahu has lost elections before (although he’s always found his way back to power after his sojourns in opposition). It’s also true that he was an increasingly unpopular figure before the October 7th attacks caused a “rally around the flag” effect that saved his premiership. And it’s even true that he might lose power again soon.

Still, the basic premise that there’s a sensible liberal opposition waiting in the wings that will stop the mass murder and displacement of Palestinian civilians and move toward a two-state solution is completely disconnected from observable reality.

Last year, the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) voted by a margin of sixty-eight to nine for a resolution explicitly opposing the creation of a Palestinian state “on any piece of land west of the Jordan River,” i.e., anywhere in Israel-Palestine. All nine of the members of the Knesset (MKs) who voted against it were from majority Arab parties. The only Israeli-Jewish no vote was from Ofer Cassif, a heroic figure so far out on the far-left fringe of Israeli politics that he’s been physically beaten by police at protests. Last year, he narrowly avoided being expelled from the Knesset and earlier this week he was physically removed from the chamber for using the word “genocide” to describe the atrocities in Gaza. A good number of more mainstream opposition MKs simply skipped the vote to avoid having to go on record one way or the other, but none had the guts to show up and vote no.

Does anyone think Ofer Cassif, whose PhD thesis at the London School of Economics was titled “On Nationalism and Democracy: A Marxist Examination,” will replace Netanyahu as Israel’s Prime Minister? Or perhaps that one of the Arab MKs will take that office? If not, the idea that Netanyahu is the whole problem, and that this problem is likely to be corrected by the normal ebbs and flows of Israeli politics, makes very little sense.

Normal Politics Don’t Arise Under Apartheid Conditions

Israel’s political spectrum tilts so far to the right not because of some recent or contingent development but because of its core identity as an exclusionary ethnostate.

It’s true that there’s been a considerable rightward swing in the last several years, and particularly since the October 7th attacks. Unmistakably, the country has descended into a very dark place even relative to where it was ten or twenty years ago. But the resting position of Israel’s political pendulum, at even the best of times, is far removed from what would be normal in a liberal democracy. That’s because, as much as Israel has many of the trappings of a pluralistic democracy, like contentious multi-party elections (for the part of the population that’s allowed to vote), there’s a deep sense in which it isn’t a democracy and never has been. Its fundamental national project has never been fully compatible with democratic norms.

Israel was founded as a “Jewish state.” That doesn’t just mean a state where the majority of the population happens to be Jewish — that would be, for example, the sense in which Canada is a “white state.” It means a state established for the benefit of a particular ethnic subset of the people who live there. As the “nation state law” Israel adopted in 2018 states in black and white, the “State of Israel is the nation state of the Jewish People in which it realizes its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination,” and this “self-determination” is “exclusive to the Jewish people.”

While the passing of a law starkly stating all of this was part of a rightward swing at the time, this understanding has always been foundational to the way the entire mainstream political spectrum understands the essence of the nation.

That’s why, for example, the Palestinian families ethnically cleansed from the country during Israel’s “War of Independence” in 1948 have never been allowed to come back to the towns from which they were expelled, and why no politician in the country’s mainstream, at any point in the entire history of the state, has ever advocated that they be allowed to come home. It’s also why, in the fifty-eight years since Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza, no mainstream Israeli politician has ever for a moment considered giving the millions of Palestinians who live in these territories citizenship.

In both cases, the fact that doing these things would change the demographic character of the state is universally considered a decisive reason not only not to do these things but to exile them from the sphere of permissible debate. If the state is going to be “for” a particular subset of the population, expressing its “self-determination” as an ethnic collectivity, then it’s imperative that Israel always be guaranteed a Jewish majority no matter what — even if that means that “self”-determination requires a heavy-handed determination of the destinies of many millions of others consigned to live in refugee camps in other countries or to spend their entire lives as permanent noncitizen subjects in the West Bank and Gaza.

Over the course of the last fifty-eight years, Israel has moved to incorporate the West Bank into the country for every legal and practical purpose except for granting citizenship rights to the people who live there. It’s systematically built up West Bank settlements, i.e., cities full of Israeli citizens who vote in Israeli elections and are subject to the normal Israeli legal system (while their non-voting Palestinian neighbors are subjected to a system of military courts).

During the early decades of the occupation, much the same policy was applied to Gaza, although the territory is less culturally central to Israeli nationalist narratives, and Israeli settlement there was always far thinner. In 2005–6, Israel initiated a process of “disengagement” whereby they retained tight control over Gaza’s airspace and its land and sea borders, and controlled everything legally allowed to come in and out, while regularly carrying out military operations there. This arrangement essentially turned the territory into a twenty-five-mile-wide open-air prison camp far more hellish than the West Bank.

All of this falls under any reasonable definition of apartheid. Those who deny that the shoe fits are generally reduced to one or both of two standard strategies of evasion. One is to insist that apartheid is about the denial of rights to a “racial” group, and so systematic denial of rights based on ethnicity doesn’t count if those ethnic distinctions aren’t correlated to skin color. The other, only slightly less absurd and desperate strategy, is to argue that the denial of rights to millions of other Palestinians isn’t apartheid because the population of “Israeli Arabs” (i.e., Palestinian families who ended up on the Israeli side of the lines after the initial ethnic cleansing in 1948) aren’t denied citizenship rights. After all, they get to vote — hence those Arab majority parties who supplied the nine votes against the resolution foreclosing any hope of a two-state partition for the foreseeable future.

One problem is that there’s a long and ongoing history of discrimination against this population. They were denied citizenship and kept under martial law for the first nineteen years after independence. And even now, for example, many forms of housing discrimination that would be against the law in any normal liberal democracy are practiced out in the open in Israel. Thirteen percent of land in the country is owned by the Jewish National Fund, which explicitly aims to lease land to Jews rather than non-Jews, and any town with less than seven hundred permanent homes is legally allowed to operate an “admissions committee” that can screen potential residents for “sociocultural compatibility.” In an American context, we’d call that Jim Crow.

But even if none of that were true, and pristine equality reigned between Israeli Jews and those Palestinians who are allowed Israeli citizenship, there’s a far more glaring problem with the argument that the existence of Arab citizens of Israel means that there’s no apartheid to see here. There’s a giant logical leap from the premise that those Palestinians haven’t been denied citizenship on the basis of their ethnicity to the conclusion that no Palestinians have been denied citizenship on the basis of their ethnicity. The only reason refugees have never been allowed to return, and the only reason West Bank and Gazan Palestinians have never been given citizenship rights (even as the Knesset decrees that there will be no two-state partition), is that this would mean too many Arab citizens when the West Bank and Gazan Palestinians are added to the existing Arab citizens, and that this would endanger Israel’s status as a Jewish state.

If anything, the analogy to apartheid South Africa understates the grimness of the situation. White elites in South Africa relied on exploiting the labor of the black working class. But the Zionist strategy has always been, to the greatest possible degree, to displace the Palestinian working class, instead relying on a predominantly Israeli labor force (supplemented in a limited way by guest workers brought in from other countries).

An ethnostate that doesn’t need its subjugated population as a labor source has a far freer hand to engage in extreme solutions to the demographic “problem” posed by that population. As the late Marxist sociologist Erik Olin Wright pointed out in his book Class Counts, “It is no accident” that American culture historically included “the abhorrent saying, ‘The only good Indian is a dead Indian’ but not ‘the only good worker is a dead worker’ or ‘the only good slave is a dead slave.’”

In other words, as bad as the injustices inherent in capitalist exploitation may be, there are far worse outcomes than being exploited — such as being expelled or even exterminated. We’ve been seeing that play out in dramatic fashion in Gaza, and to a lesser extent in the West Bank, where settler pogroms against the Palestinian population have become more frequent and violent, causing many Palestinians to flee their homes. And while Israel’s mainstream political spectrum includes shades of extremism and moderation about how far to take this process, the general direction in which it’s all headed is unmistakable.

When an ethnonationalist project turns whole populations into “problems” to be solved, horrors ensue. A recent poll found that not only would 82 percent of Israeli Jews be in favor of the “transfer (expulsion) of residents of the Gaza Strip to other countries” but 56 percent of them would be in favor of “transfer (forced expulsion) of Arab citizens of Israel to other countries.” The idea that the momentum behind Israel’s current genocidal course begins and ends with the flawed character of a single elderly prime minister is a bad joke.

Morally, the best outcome would be a one-state solution, which is another way of saying that the best outcome would be for Israel to stop being an exclusionary ethnostate and start being a normal liberal democracy with equal rights for Jews, Arabs, and everyone else. It’s currently hard to see how such a transition could happen. But it’s also hard to see a scenario by which Israel would be forced to agree to evacuate the seven hundred thousand Israeli settlers who live in the West Bank, allow Gazans to resume some semblance of normal existence, and permit Palestinians to secede from Israel to form their own state. Something dramatic would have to change to force either of those outcomes.

One thing is certain, though. The problem is not Benjamin Netanyahu. He’s a particular grotesque symptom of processes with deep roots in the Zionist project. Regardless of who sits in the prime minister’s office, the first step toward sanity would be a permanent end to all US support for this state.