A New Liberal Zionism: People Before Paradigms

Response to Shaul Magid’s “The Pivot of Liberal Zionism #2”

This essay is a response to Shaul Magid’s Substack post, “The Pivot of Liberal Zionism #2: A Response to Zachary Braiterman’s ‘Unhinged on the Jewish Anti-Zionist Left’” (published December 19, 2025), which itself responds to Zachary Braiterman’s essay “Unhinged On The Jewish Anti-Zionist Left.”

Shaul does what he usually does at his best: he refuses slogan-thinking, gives the argument a deep historical backstory, and won’t let easy scapegoats do the work. He insists (rightly, in my view) that the core crisis is not “religious supremacy” but ethnic supremacy, and that the Gaza war, after a certain point, became something closer to the destruction of a society than a discrete campaign against Hamas. He’s also right to be allergic to lazy category-words like “centrist” when they’re used as a substitute for analysis.

So yes: I’m with Shaul on a lot of the diagnosis.

But as I read his response to Braiterman, I felt a familiar undertow in the conversation, a gravitational pull toward a conclusion that many people find emotionally satisfying right now: “The problem is Zionism itself.” Shaul says, in principle, he agrees. And he’s not alone. Buber, Hans Kohn, Arendt, Magnes, Bergman and others raised versions of this argument long before 1948, when Zionism was still a proposal, not a state with millions of people living inside it.

Here’s where I want to respond, not by dismissing Jewish anti-Zionism, but by distinguishing it. Because I think we’re in danger of collapsing different critiques into one bucket and then acting like that bucket gives us a usable moral and political map.

Two kinds of Jewish anti-Zionism (and why it matters)

One thing Shaul’s piece (and Braiterman’s provocation) puts on the table is the claim that Jewish anti-Zionism has a real history, and shouldn’t be treated as a post-October 7 invention or a social media fad. That’s absolutely correct.

But we need to name a crucial difference:

1) Pre-state Jewish anti-Zionism
Before 1948, Jewish opposition to Zionism often came from inside Jewish life in serious ways:

• Some feared nationalism itself, especially after World War I.
• Some opposed the idea of a Jewish state on theological grounds (Satmar being the best-known later articulation).
• Some (including liberal currents) worried that Jewish ethical vocation would curdle into power politics, that “like all the nations” would become the betrayal.
• Some were non- or post-statist: binationalism, cultural Zionism, diaspora nationalism, autonomy without sovereignty, etc.

Whether we agree with those positions or not, they were arguing about how Jews should live as a people in modernity. They weren’t performing a purity ritual for outsiders. They were arguing, often painfully, from within the Jewish argument itself.

2) Contemporary anti-Zionism shaped by “settler colonial” theory
This is the piece I think we cannot ignore anymore.

A significant stream of today’s anti-Zionism is not simply “anti-nationalist,” and it’s not simply “anti-ethnostate.” It is a worldview in which Jews are recast as not a people (only a religion, or worse, only “white Europeans”), and Jewish connection to the land is treated as myth, manipulation, or cosplay. In this framing, Jewish self-determination is not merely critiqued. It’s rendered illegible.

That is not a neutral intellectual move. It doesn’t just “oppose Zionism.” It denies Jewish peoplehood in exactly the place where peoplehood becomes politically consequential: history, indigeneity, land, collective identity, and the right to live as a people in safety.

And once you do that, you haven’t created a “more ethical politics.” You’ve locked the conflict into a metaphysical script where only one side can be morally real.

That doesn’t mean every person who uses the language of settler colonialism believes Jews are fake. But it does mean that, in practice, the framework often functions that way in popular discourse, campus activism, and the social media bloodstream.

So: yes, Jewish anti-Zionism has a lineage. But no, not every contemporary anti-Zionism is simply the inheritor of Buber or Tamares or early Reform universalism. Some of it is an import that treats Jewish peoplehood itself as the problem to be solved.

Shaul is right about structure. Here’s what he underestimates.

Shaul’s structural argument is strong: liberal Zionism gets undercut by reactionary Zionism because the ethnocentric fabric of the state pulls it rightward. That’s real. Anyone watching the last decades, and especially the post–Second Intifada hardening, knows what he means.

But here’s the practical problem: you can be correct about structures and still end up with no viable political horizon.

We can say: “States fail. All states fail.”
Fine. Historically true in some broad sense.

But if the conclusion becomes: “Therefore Zionism is doomed and should be abandoned as an ideology,” we still haven’t answered the one question that matters if we’re not writing political theology in a vacuum:

What protects actual human beings who are already there?

There are roughly seven million Jews living in Israel and millions of Palestinians living alongside them. Whatever we call the political form, the moral demand is not abstract: it’s life, safety, dignity, and a future that does not require either people’s disappearance.

This is where I land, and where I think Shaul and I diverge:

• Shaul’s excavation is powerful. He’s digging down to the roots of the crisis.
• I’m trying to draw a boundary around the futures that are guaranteed to produce more mass death.

And here’s the boundary: any “solution” that effectively says one side must lose its collective claim to being a people is not a solution. It’s a fuse.

Why liberal Zionism still matters (even after Gaza)

I don’t say “liberal Zionism still matters” because I’m nostalgic for an old American Jewish consensus. That consensus is cracked, maybe permanently.

I say it because, at the moment, it remains the only widely legible framework in Jewish communal life that insists on two things at once:

1. Jews are a people with a legitimate claim to collective self-determination in the land (not only as a theological idea, but as a historical people).
2. Palestinians are a people with the same claim.

If we drop (1), the vacuum gets filled by the politics of “resistance by any means,” including the romanticization of Hamas as history’s cleansing fire.
If we drop (2), the vacuum gets filled by the politics of Jewish supremacy and messianic ethnocracy, with endless “security” as the eternal alibi.

Either way, the extremists win.

So when Shaul argues that two-states may be a fantasy, or that liberal Zionists are trying to return to something that never existed, I hear him. But I also think the alternative can’t be “post-Zionism” as a gesture of moral cleanliness while offering no concrete architecture that prevents a death spiral.

Because the death spiral isn’t theoretical. It’s what happens when the only remaining political languages are:

• “We own everything.”
• “You don’t belong here.”
• “Only force will decide.”

That’s not politics. That’s doom-liturgy.

A word on Braiterman (and on tone)

Braiterman’s essay is not Shaul’s essay. Braiterman is doing something else. He’s naming pathologies on the Jewish anti-Zionist left as he sees them, including performativity, “unlearning” as identity theater, and a kind of oppositional posture that becomes its own addictive ecosystem.

I’m not here to adjudicate every claim he makes, and Shaul is right to call out when rhetoric substitutes for analysis (including “weird” as a catch-all). But I’ll say this: even if Braiterman’s tone is sharp, the underlying question isn’t trivial:

When critique becomes identity, and identity becomes a stage, does anyone still have to build a future?

That’s a real question. And it applies to all sides, not only the anti-Zionist left.

What I’m actually arguing for

Not a blueprint. A constraint.

Not a utopia. A refusal.

Not “return to the old center.” A demand that we stop treating moral seriousness as identical with political negation.

So here’s my claim, in plain language:

• Jewish anti-Zionism deserves to be treated as a serious Jewish discourse, not dismissed as self-hatred or betrayal.
• But contemporary anti-Zionism that functions to deny Jewish peoplehood and historical connection is not “just another critique.” It’s a recipe for permanent war.
• Liberal Zionism, reimagined and stripped of sentimentality, is still worth fighting for because it refuses erasure on both sides. And refusing erasure is the only starting point that doesn’t hand the microphone to Hamas on one side and supremacist Jewish ethnocracy on the other.

Two peoples exist.
One land is shared.
Neither is going anywhere.

Not a solution. A reality check. And reality checks are underrated in an age of ideological cosplay.

If Shaul is right that we’re watching the obsolescence of a story, then the task isn’t to throw away story altogether. It’s to tell a truer one, with fewer fantasies, less denial, and a harder commitment to keeping actual people alive.