Liberal Zionism in Theory and Practice

If you talk to someone who describes themselves as a liberal Zionist, they’ll typically say something like, “I support Israel, but that doesn’t mean I like Benjamin Netanyahu or the West Bank settlements. I support a two-state solution so both Jews and Palestinians can have democratic rights.”

Does this position bridge the gap between liberal universalism about human rights and restricting nationhood to a particular ethnic community?

Not really. Even self-identified liberal Zionists don’t tend to support the right of return of Palestinian refugees driven from the country in the mass ethnic cleansing in 1948, because allowing the generations of Palestinians who’ve grown up in refugee camps to come back would mean that the wrong ethnic subset of the Israeli population would grow too large, which would threaten Israel’s status as a Jewish state.

In theory, liberal Zionists who were serious about their position could be valuable allies for anti-Zionists in present-day political struggles. No matter how deeply we disagree about whether it’s acceptable for a nation-state to be “for” a particular ethnic subset of its citizens, and no matter how much we might clash further down the road on more ambitious demands like the right of return, anyone who was serious about ending the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and allowing a separate Palestinian state to be formed there would be on the same side as principled anti-Zionists on many present-day issues. These liberal Zionists would be resolutely opposed to Israel’s systematic destruction of Palestinian civilian infrastructure in Gaza and the Israeli military’s displacement of most of the Gazan population. And they would absolutely revile the settlements in the West Bank, since they’d know that each new Israeli settler who moves there makes a two-state partition more difficult.

In practice, however, liberal Zionists seem to be in awfully short supply. Last year, the Knesset passed a resolution opposing the creation of a Palestinian state “on any piece of land west of the Jordan River,” i.e., anywhere in Israel–Palestine. It passed by a margin of sixty-nine to nine. The only one of the nine dissenting votes cast by an Israeli Jewish Knesset member was from Ofer Cassif, who’s no one’s idea of a “liberal Zionist.” (Cassif’s PhD thesis at the London School of Economics was titled “On Nationalism and Democracy: A Marxist Examination.”) Some center-left Israeli politicians simply skipped the vote, unwilling to take the political risk of going on record one way or the other. But what vote could be more ideologically crucial to what liberal Zionists say they believe in?

Israel is, in some ways, a democracy. It has contentious multiparty elections for the subset of the population that’s allowed to vote (that is, the Jewish population plus those Palestinians who live within the pre-1967 borders). But it’s also a hypermilitarized garrison state that has disenfranchised millions of people within its territory since it started occupying and settling the West Bank in 1967. Naturally, this arrangement does not give rise to a healthy spectrum of political debate. The resting position of the country’s political pendulum is far removed from what would be normal in a liberal democracy, and things have gotten much worse in the two years since October 7.

As wonderful as it would be if Israel had enough serious two-staters to meaningfully oppose the genocide in Gaza and the continuing settlement of the West Bank, right now that’s just not the reality. If Israel is going to stop doing what it’s doing, most of the pressure will need to be applied from outside.

Shouldn’t Liberal Zionists Protest Nefesh B’Nefesh?

When it comes to applying that pressure, however, Western liberal Zionists are mostly AWOL as well. Liberal Zionists like to say that a two-state partition is important since, in their view, it’s the only way for Israel to be both Jewish and democratic. If this goal is really central to their political identity, though, where have they been? Any Zionist who was serious about ending Israeli control over the West Bank and Gaza should have been marching at the front of every protest in the last two years, demanding an immediate cutoff of US weapons for Netanyahu’s assault on Gaza. And they ought to be the fiercest opponents of the settlements that undermine any two-state resolution. When events are held in the United States that promote American Jews moving to West Bank settlements, you’d expect sincere liberal Zionists to be the loudest protesters. In truth, however, they’re usually nowhere to be found.

Last Wednesday, for example, the organization Nefesh B’Nefesh rented space at Park East Synagogue in Manhattan to hold an event to promote immigration to Israel. No one would protest if they were merely encouraging American Jews to move to Tel Aviv, but Nefesh B’Nefesh explicitly promotes migration to the settlements. According to the New York Times:

The organization’s website . . . contains pages of detailed recommendations about life in Israeli towns as well as in some of the largest settlement blocs in the West Bank. Those include the 22 settlements in Gush Etzion, an area south of Jerusalem, and Ma’ale Adumim, a large settlement located between the northern and southern West Bank that many Palestinians see as a threat to the territorial integrity of any future Palestinian state.

Nefesh B’Nefesh encourages Americans to move to smaller settlements, too, which it portrays as integral parts of Israel. It describes the settlement of Elkana, in the occupied West Bank, for example, as “a beautiful, comfortable and well-situated community in the center of Israel. Location! Location! Location!”

Predictably, this event inspired an angry protest. Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani condemned some of the more extreme slogans chanted by some of the protesters but also said through a spokesman that “these sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.” Mamdani’s statement, in turn, sparked outrage from critics who twisted his words, pretending that instead of talking about the illegal settlements on the West Bank, the mayor-elect was talking about moving to Israel in general.

What was really striking, though, was the absence of the two-state liberal Zionists from the right side of this controversy. Where were all the liberal Zionists stepping up to say, “As someone who wants a two-state solution and hates the settlements, I absolutely agree with Mamdani that it’s shameful for a synagogue to be used for an event that promotes moving to the settlements”?

Journalist Jasper Nathaniel put it well when he wrote:

I believe that “liberal Zionism” is an oxymoron. Nobody has been able to explain to me how a state that must forcefully maintain a Jewish majority in an Arab region can also uphold basic liberal values. But for the purposes of this argument, I am accepting its premise that “liberal Zionism” is fundamentally different from the messianic vision of Greater Israel promoted by the Smotriches and Ben Gvirs of the world. So my next question is: Why are you so bad at maintaining this distinction?

I suspect that the answer to that question is fairly simple. To really prioritize opposition to what Israel is doing in the West Bank and Gaza, you need to take the equal humanity of Palestinians seriously. And this is exactly the line of thought which has led so many young Jews in the West to reject Zionism altogether in favor of the belief articulated by Zohran Mamdani that “equal rights” should be “enshrined in every single country, whether we’re speaking about Israel or we’re speaking about Saudi Arabia.”

Looking at the present-day struggles, one gets the sense that perhaps liberal Zionists don’t really exist — because, as Nathaniel put it, the term is an oxymoron, and in particular is a way to make Zionists feel better about supporting Israel. If sincere liberal Zionists do exist in the real world, it’s long past time for them to speak up.