A Day Without the Zionists

I have been watching a lot of Corey Gil-Shuster lately. You may not know his name, but you have probably seen his videos. He stops ordinary Israelis and Arabs and asks them questions about the conflict.

Corey was born and raised in Canada, moved to Israel in the 1990s and became an Israeli citizen. He is Jewish, gay, trained in conflict studies and married to an Israeli. He has lived in Israel for decades. None of that makes him neutral. Nobody is. It tells you something about the person behind the camera.

And most of the time, he stays behind the camera.

He asks a question. Someone answers. Then he asks another question.

That second question is usually the interesting one.

After thousands of interviews, Corey has found that people can use the same political words while meaning completely different things. He has said it took him years to understand that even occupation did not have a shared definition. Some Arabs he interviewed included Jaffa and Haifa.

So two people can agree that “the occupation should end” while imagining entirely different maps.

They haven’t agreed on peace. They’ve agreed on a sentence.

I think about this whenever I hear some version of: “I don’t hate Jews. I just oppose Zionism.”

Okay.

What does that mean?

Instead of another argument about the definition of Zionism, let’s try something different.

You won.

Zionism is over.

Show me Tuesday morning.

I am choosing Tel Aviv because Tel Aviv is a Zionist city. Not because everybody there agrees about politics. Obviously they don’t. I mean something more basic.

In 1909, Jewish families stood on sand dunes outside Jaffa and divided plots using the famous seashell lottery. They were building a modern Hebrew city.

It worked.

Today Tel Aviv is a metropolitan capital. People don’t walk down Rothschild Boulevard contemplating Zionist theory. They get coffee. They take their kids to school. They build companies. They go to the beach. They protest the government. They complain about housing. They sit in traffic.

Zionism became ordinary there.

My own family runs through that history. My great grandfather Solomon Frankel was a Yiddish lecturer and Zionist advocate. His son Yehuda Frankel, later Yehuda Nedivi, was part of the generation that helped build Tel Aviv’s civic institutions and spent decades working in its municipal government.

But you don’t need my family history.

Walk outside.

Remove Zionism from Tel Aviv.

The buildings stay. Hebrew stays. The restaurants stay. The universities stay. The Pride parade stays. The startups stay. The beach stays. The traffic definitely stays.

And presumably the Jews stay.

What goes?

Start at Ben Gurion Airport.

A Jewish family from France gets off a plane and wants to immigrate. Yesterday there was a legal pathway available to them because they were Jews. Zionism is over now.

Does that pathway still exist?

Another family arrives whose grandparents lived in Jaffa before 1948. They claim a right to return.

So who gets through passport control?

The Jewish family? The family claiming descent from Jaffa? Both? Neither?

I’m not asking which family has the better claim. I’m asking what the law says on Tuesday morning.

Now send the kids to school.

What flag is outside? Does Hatikvah remain the anthem? Is the country still called Israel? What does the textbook say about 1948? What does it say about Zionism, Jewish refugees and Arab displacement?

Go to a government office. Does the Law of Return still exist? Do Jews retain collective national rights or only individual rights as citizens? Can Jews organize politically around Jewish national self determination?

Maybe the answer is no.

Fine.

Now we know something that disappeared when Zionism did.

At noon, soldiers are still standing at the borders. What army are they serving in? Who commands it? What is its mission? Is ensuring that Jews have somewhere capable of receiving and defending them still a legitimate purpose of the state?

Or is that Zionism too?

And what happens if somebody with guns rejects the new arrangement entirely?

Israelis don’t have to invent that fear. Israel removed its permanent military presence and Jewish communities from Gaza in 2005. Hamas won the legislative election the following year and violently seized control of Gaza in 2007. 

That history does not tell us that every withdrawal or every alternative political arrangement ends the same way. It does explain why “the Jews can stay” is not, by itself, a security plan.

Who protects them?

This is where “the Jews can stay” stops being an answer for me.

For roughly two thousand years, Jews built communities in places where somebody else ultimately controlled the political conditions under which they lived. Zionism’s political innovation wasn’t that Jews could practice Judaism. We already did that.

It was that “the Jews can stay” would no longer be somebody else’s decision.

Israel obviously needs allies, including the United States. Sovereignty doesn’t mean you don’t need anybody. It means some decisions are yours to make.

Who gets in. Who votes. Who governs. Who commands the army.

By afternoon, Tel Aviv still looks like Tel Aviv. The cafes are open. The beach is crowded. Books are being published in Hebrew. Startups are failing in Hebrew. People are complaining about parking in Hebrew.

The Zionists are gone.

The Jews are still there.

So here is the Corey question:

What is the Jew allowed to do that the Zionist isn’t?

Can Jews speak Hebrew, vote, build synagogues and run universities? Presumably.

Can Jews organize politically as Jews? Advocate Jewish immigration? Maintain Jewish national institutions? Elect a government committed to Jewish self determination? Maintain an army capable of defending those institutions?

Somewhere along that line, if anti Zionism is going to mean anything politically, the answer eventually changes from yes to no.

Where?

There are serious answers to these questions. Equal citizenship. Courts. Constitutional protections. Language rights. Limits on what a majority can do to a minority. Maybe a shared state could be built around those principles.

Show me how it works.

What happens when the majority wants to change the immigration law? What happens when it wants to change the flag? What happens when Jews become politically inconvenient?

And reverse it.

What happens when Arabs become politically inconvenient?

“One democratic state” isn’t a political system any more than “peace” is a peace treaty.

Eventually the slogan has to become a country.

By midnight, the first day without Zionism is over. The Jews are still there. The Arabs are still there. Nobody’s history disappeared. Nobody’s fears disappeared. Tel Aviv is still standing.

That is why I chose it.

An idea became streets and schools, books and businesses, elections and arguments, families and children. It became ordinary life.

You can oppose Zionism. You can argue about its history. You can propose something else.

But eventually you have to tell me what that something else actually is.

Don’t give me another slogan.

Finish the thought.

Show me Tuesday morning.