Harmonic Zionism: A New Ethic for a Broken People
On October 7, 2023, I woke up on my friend’s couch with a hangover. I looked over to see him staring intensely at his phone. He turned to me and said, “Israel is getting bombed.” I told him that they’re always getting bombed and went back to sleep.
The night before, my friend and I had celebrated his birthday by getting our hands on some beer and taking a long walk down to the beach. I have a vivid memory of drinking while looking out at the ocean and feeling the sand on my bare feet. I can’t know this for sure, but some kid my age was probably at the Nova festival in Israel, bare feet in the sand and dirt, also drinking a beer. Moments later, he’d watch armed Hamas militants paraglide down and begin the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
When I learned the next day about the full extent of the horrors that had been committed, I felt something that I had never experienced before. It was the shock of realizing that, as a Jew, I was not safe in this world. That shock would crystallize into something much worse, as I saw kids not much older than me celebrate the deaths of my people. They called us colonizers and oppressors. They branded our murderers freedom fighters and glorified their actions as legitimate and righteous resistance.
I didn’t know anything about the Middle East conflict at this time. Hell, I don’t think I even knew what Zionism was. I’d had a bar mitzvah, but I wasn’t very connected to Judaism. I started doing a bit of research and read articles from the UN and Amnesty International about Israel’s crimes in Gaza and the West Bank. Of course, the obsessive-compulsive conspiracy theorist that lives rent-free in my head latched onto this and started asking me, “What if we deserved it? What if we actually are evil?” I couldn’t bear it. But it led me down a rabbit hole.
Over the course of the next two years, I became fixated on the history of Israel and Palestine. I debated with friends who hold Pro-Palestinian views. I read Rashid Khalidi and Edward Said. I learned about the Nakba, the occupation, the daily humiliation and suffering that Palestinians face in the West Bank, and the disgusting eliminationist rhetoric of Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.
I also read Israelis like Benny Morris and Haviv Rettig Gur and studied the War of Independence, The Six Day War, the Yom Kippur War, and the terror of the Second Intifada. I learned about the death-worshipping ideology behind Hamas and their use of civilian Palestinians as human shields to maximize casualties for media sympathy.
I became drawn to Jewish philosophers like Martin Buber, who grappled with the realities of dual indigeneity. He argued for a binational state, which I personally disagree with (realistically would end in a bloodbath), but I respect his reasoning. He believed that Jewish ethics demand that we see Palestinians not as obstacles, but as humans and partners. Emmanuel Levinas said that truly seeing the faces of the Other creates an infinite ethical obligation. This is a spiritual call to justice, a call to help the suffering people we’re supposed to hate.
The study of this conflict led me to an internal metamorphosis. Constantly trying to hold the pain and histories of two peoples develops your mind and heart more than trying to figure out who the good and bad guys are. I’m not wise. I’m a scared college kid with mental problems. But I’m wiser than I used to be. And I’d like to offer a framework for understanding the path forward.
One of the most contentious issues in the debates around this conflict is Zionism. Instagram posts will have you convinced that it is irredeemable and the epitome of racism and colonialism. Yes, many early Zionist thinkers were problematic and used colonial-esque language. But at its very core, all Zionism says is that the Jewish people, like any other people, deserve the right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland.
This “racist and colonialist” idea emerged from millennia of persecution, expulsion, torture, pogroms, culminating in the Holocaust. Everywhere we’ve ever lived, we’ve been promised safety and protection, only for history to repeat its most predictable pattern of us getting blamed for society’s ills and being hunted down. Very few places took us in during the Holocaust. My great grandfather got out of Germany right after the Nazis took away his dry goods store. The rest of his family wasn’t so lucky, and almost all of them died at Auschwitz after being denied safe haven everywhere else.
As a people, we had had enough. No more leaving our fate to the majority. We would return to the place that we had collectively yearned for thousands of years to return to, and in the process of building that land we would be reborn. Before the Holocaust, Jews had already begun to move to Mandatory Palestine (some had never left as well), but the cruel reality was that there were other people living there. We were told that Zion was “a land without a people for a people without a land,” when the land had actually given birth to two peoples. Tensions between Jews and Palestinians rose. From the Arab perspective, it’s understandable why Zionism might look like colonialism. But people like the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem amplified this sentiment, allied with Hitler, and wove antisemitism even deeper into the Arab world.
The framework that I’m proposing is called Harmonic Zionism. I am not under the illusion that this will solve anything. All I want to offer is moral clarity that doesn’t erase historical complexity. The heart of it is this: Jewish self-determination in the land of Israel isn’t merely compatible with Palestinian self-determination; it is dependent on it. An ecosystem that births two species cannot survive an imbalance between the species. This can be summed up in one statement:
Peace for Just One is Peace for None.
If Jews have self-determination and security at the cost of Palestinian freedom and dignity, it violates our own ethics and will lead to eternal conflict. If Palestinians get freedom and dignity at the cost of Jewish self-determination and security, it will corrupt their society and most likely lead to mass violence against us.
This idea draws on the work of the Jewish philosophers I mentioned before–Buber and Levinas. Buber argued that there were two ways of relating to others: I-It and I-Thou. I-It occurs when we treat the Other as an entity, a construct. I-Thou happens when we recognize someone’s full, irreducible humanity. In an analysis of Buber’s writings, Steven M. Katz wrote, “What emerges from I-Thou relation, and only from I-Thou relation, is not objective knowledge but rather an ontological certainty about the foundations of one’s life and a surety about the unbreakable umbilical cord which runs from man’s spiritual navel to the centre of Being itself.” The spiritual connection from one’s self to whatever we name as God must be recognized in those from “the other side”.
As horrifyingly disgusting as Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was or as Israeli Minister Itamar Ben Gvir is, there is a fundamental humanity to them. Jews too often see Palestinians as I-It constructs–security threats and obstacles to peace rather than people yearning for a home and for freedom. Palestinians too often see Jews as nothing more than colonizers rather than a traumatized people who wish for safety and rebirth in their ancestral homeland.
Levinas’s philosophy is centered around the moment one truly sees another human and recognizes their suffering; what he calls ‘seeing the face of the Other’. When I see footage of Palestinian children starving and being pulled from rubble, I see the face of the Other. I hope, too, that people who see footage of the burned corpses of October 7th victims, the hostages who died in captivity and the babies murdered in their cribs will recognize our full humanity.
This is what separates Harmonic Zionism from traditional Zionism and Anti-Zionism. Traditional Zionism is not evil. It is a national liberation movement. But it is incomplete, as it fails to adequately account for Palestinian self-determination. It fails to see the Palestinian face, hardened by decades of occupation, war, displacement, denial of people-hood, and injustice. Anti-Zionism, which says that Israel is an illegitimate project and that Jews should not have self-determination there, should be rejected completely. Israel is our homeland too, and we’re not going anywhere. Anti-Zionism fails to see the Jewish face—hardened by thousands of years of diasporic persecution, the Holocaust, decades of suicide bombings and rocket attacks, and the trauma of October 7th.
Harmonic Zionism requires that both faces must see each other, must look each other in the eyes, and find mutual humanity. Palestinians and Jews are both children of the Levant, and both must recognize this. This could be seen as post-Zionism, but it’s really about the transition from survival to coexistence.
The leadership on both sides are a disaster, though the nature of their failures are different. Netanyahu’s government is brutal, militaristic, increasingly authoritarian and seemingly has a complete disregard for Palestinian life. It is run by extremists who want to stay in power at any cost. Hamas is a death cult that wraps genocidal antisemitism in anti-colonial rhetoric and uses the deaths of Palestinian children for PR purposes. It is the responsibility of the Israeli and Palestinian peoples to root out maximalism and hatred. To reject these dishonorable perspectives. To see the face of the Other.
The solution to this conflict will not be found in inflammatory arguments or social media vitriol. It will be found in what Buber called the narrow ridge — the path between false certainties. The place where multiple things can be true. The place where Palestinian dignity and Jewish safety are prerequisites for each other.
The place where peace for just one is peace for none.
