I am a proud Zionist

I am a proud Zionist. By Zionist, I mean that I believe the state of Israel has a right to exist.
Not too long ago, that would not have been a controversial statement. Today, “Zionist” has become a dirty word and an insult.

A few months ago, a friend and I were sitting in a coffee shop talking about something unrelated to Israel. A young woman was eavesdropping on our conversation and came over to us. “I heard what you were talking about and I just wanted to clarify something,” she said. Within moments, she uttered the word “Zionism,” which led to a heated 5-minute discussion about the war between Israel and Gaza, at which point she stormed off, yelling at us: “Enjoy your genocide, you assholes!”

Now do I support everything the government of Israel us doing? No. Nor have I ever denied that awful things are going on in Gaza, nor that the people in Gaza are suffering terribly. I wept for an entire day when I saw a small child there shaking as a result of the bombing, crying after being asked by a medical doctor what had happened to him. But genocide? I beg to differ. Delegitimizing the whole Zionist enterprise? Hardly.

Yes, I am a proud Zionist. “Zionism,” to put it in author Dara Horn’s words, is “the national liberation movement of the Jewish people.”[1] It is our belief that we have the right to self-determination in our homeland. My firm stance on Zionism became clear to me right after October 7th. A colleague who was teaching an Introduction to Judaism course told me that he was called a “genocide enabler” during the session on Israel. It got me to think about something that had never occurred to me before: Would I convert someone if they did not believe in Israel’s right to exist? If they were not Zionists? Of course, I would engage in a conversation with such a person, would spend some time studying with them, but if they persisted, I would not do it. I believe the state of Israel is crucial to our identity as Jews. I am a proud Zionist despite the fact that “Zionism” has become a dirty word.

Even more to my dismay was an Op-Ed by two rabbinical students published in The Forward this past May:

 The Reconstructionist Rabbinical College [RRC] will graduate 11 new rabbis this Sunday.     Of them, at least half identify as anti-Zionists or have been participating in anti- Israel       protests and actions. By contrast, when we and other students formed the RRC Students Supporting Israel chapter after October 7, only eight students joined out of the 60 at RRC…

Our time at RRC was marked with sorrow and shock, as we experienced increasingly vociferous anti-Zionism among the student body, the steady erosion of civil discourse and the seminary’s inability to transmit the Jewish narrative to those it will ordain as future spiritual leaders of the Jewish people…Students characterized Israel as committing apartheid, ethnic cleansing, settler colonialism and genocide…Mentions of collective Jewish pain and the Shoah were met with dismissiveness, even eyerolls. Classmates told us to get over our intergenerational trauma, even as we learned to make space for everyone else’s.[2]

Wow. This is the future leadership of the Jewish community? And, just in case you think that it is only Reconstructing Judaism rabbis moving in this direction, similar sentiments have been expressed by Reform rabbinical students. A discussion took place at my seminary, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC). Will we accept anti-Zionist students to Rabbinical School? It is amazing to me that such a question can even be asked. HUC President Dr. Andrew Rehfeld made the decision not to reject these students a priori, but to do as good a job as possible to educate them in the hopes of changing their mind. But what if their minds are not changed? We ordain them anyway?

Now I am not suggesting that anti-Zionists should be ejected from our Jewish tent. Far from it! We have always welcomed disagreement and it is very important for us to continue to engage in dialogue, particularly with the younger, disaffected members of the younger generation.

But I am disheartened at the thought of our leadership adopting an anti-Zionist stance. I trust that most of you, like me, believe that Israel is integral to who we are as Jews. Our connection is not just to the land of our biblical past. We also fervently believe in our right to sovereignty there, in the land of our ancestors. What does it mean when the spiritual leaders of our community no longer share these values? What happens when the fate of Israel is no longer tied to ours? Aren’t we all one people?

Dr. Mijal Bitton, who leads a community in Manhattan, makes a powerful argument for how tied Americans are, or should be, to the State of Israel. She quotes a sermon by Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik who asks “whether the dispersion of Jews across the world …has caused Jews to cease being one people…” To answer this question, the Rav refers to a strange Talmudic discussion[3] in which the rabbis debate the status of a man with two heads. Should he wear one or two pairs of tefillin, receive one share of inheritance, or two? The rabbis…want to know whether this is a single or a multiple being:

So too, the Rav [claims], we should ask about the Jewish people: Are we one or many? He provides a response as profound as it is raw. He suggests that the way to determine whether the man with two heads is a single entity is to pour boiling water on one of the heads. If the other head screams in pain, then the two-headed man is a single being; if not, “then they are two individuals enfolded in one body.”[4]

I affirm that when boiling water is poured on Israel, I feel the pain. Because, after all, Jews are one people, tied to one another through history, through geography, through culture, through religion. Since October 7th, it has become even more clear to me that Israel is one of our two heads. Mijal Bitton continues: “The beating heart of Jewish existence is accepting the pain of peoplehood and the moral obligations that ensue…Caring about the 7 million Jews in Israel is part of what it means to be Jewish.”[5]

In many ways, being part of the Jewish people means we are a people apart. Dr. Elana Stein Hain of the Hartman Institute affirms that: “We cannot be afraid to recognize that we are a people distinct: even if that is an accusation made against us. Embrace it. This is not the time to take Israel out of our mission statement.”[6]

Even Emma Lazarus, the poet made famous by her words on the Statue of Liberty, writes in 1883[7] a powerful statement in defense of our responsibilities towards Jews all over the world even if that makes us tribal:

…I do not hesitate to say that our national defect is that we are not “tribal” enough; we have not sufficient solidarity to perceive that when the life and property of Jews in the uttermost provinces of the Caucuses are attacked, the dignity of a Jew in free America is humiliated…Until we are all free, we are none of us free. But lest we should justify the taunts of our opponents, lest we should become “tribal” and narrow and Judaic rather than humane or cosmopolitan like the anti-Semites and Jew-baiters of Russia, we ignore and repudiate our unhappy brethren as having no part or share in their misfortunes – until the cup of anguish is held also to our own lips.

Well, the anti-Zionist will say, sure I care about Jews around the world, but that doesn’t mean that I need to be a Zionist. So what exactly does it mean to be anti-Zionist? It means different things to different people. For some, it means there should not be a sovereign country called Israel that is a Jewish state. Jews can live in the land of Palestine as citizens of one state from the river to the sea. If Jews end up not being the majority, so be it. For others, it means that there can be a state called Israel, even a state where Jews are the majority, but the fate of that country is not more tied into who we are as Jews than any other country of the world.

These arguments seem to buy into the libelous claims of our enemies. For some, a country cannot be Jewish and democratic – by definition, a Jewish state privileges one ethnicity over another. So the whole enterprise reeks of ethnic superiority and racism. For others, Israel is a “settler-colonial” project, an effort at imposing a European culture and mindset on a native population. There are even claims that we were never in Palestine from the earliest days of history.

Of course, on the face of it, these arguments are dead wrong. There is ample evidence that we have been in the land of Palestine for hundreds of years. And the state of Israel was created as a refuge for Jews who had nowhere else to go, on ancestral land from which most of us had been exiled. We know that Jews who were desperate to get out of Germany and Eastern Europe were denied entry into just about any country – including the US. And this was true even after the war! Jews who attempted to return to Poland and other places where they had lived were told to leave, even attacked physically. And why shouldn’t we as Jews have the right to self-determination just like every other ethnic group in the world?

Now is Israel a perfect country? Of course not. Is there racism and discrimination in Israel? Of course. What country does not suffer from these ills? Is the situation in the West Bank highly problematic? Absolutely. Do I agree with what the current government in Israel stands for? No. Do I take issue with some of their decisions and actions? No doubt. Do we not have problems in our own country? Does that mean we abandon it? Do we not strive to live by the ideals on which American was founded? Should we not do the same with Israel?

Do you know that every week, there are demonstrations in Israel as its citizens try to call its leaders to account? If Israelis have not given up on creating a more democratic country, how can we? I am a proud Zionist and I will always stand up for Israel!

—

[1] From a talk Dara Horn gave to members of the Central Conference of American Rabbis
[2] https://forward.com/opinion/614347/anti-zionism-reconstructionist-rrc-rabbis/
[3] BT Menachot 37a
[4] https://sapirjournal.org/war-in-israel/2023/11/that-pain-youre-feeling-is-peoplehood/
[5] Ibid.
[6] From a lecture given by Elana Stein Hain during the summer of 2024.
[7] “An Epistle to the Hebrews,” in American Hebrew, 1882.