Is Zionism the Crucible of History?

Let’s begin with a slight provocation: Is Zionism the zero point of history?
Not in the self-centered sense of the historian who imagines his subject as the axis of the universe, but in a more urgent one – that every age, every way of thinking about history, has its own defining moment. It’s a test case.

For social historians, the Industrial Revolution served as the great case study – the event through which questions of economy and class could be understood. For the later cultural historians, it was the French Revolution – the moment that crystallized the relationship between symbols, imagination, and meaning. Yet somewhere in the early 2000s, these once-foundational stories began to lose their grip. The frameworks that had shaped a century of historical thinking no longer seemed to explain the world we inhabit. As leading historian Lynn Hunt wrote in 2009: “The debates on the French Revolution have reached an interpretive cul-de-sac. […] It is time for a new paradigm, not only for understanding the French Revolution but for humanistic studies more generally.”

And so began a restless search for new ways to narrate the past. The emotional turn, the environmental turn, the global turn – each promised a fresh lens through which to see the world. Yet one by one they faded, leaving the sense that the real revolution had not yet come. Until, quietly but decisively, it arrived – the colonial turn.

Its advocates might not want to call it a turn, because they see it as foundational.
But unlike its predecessors, the colonial turn did not seek to illuminate a particular past but to reinterpret all of it. In this view, colonialism is no longer just a historical event. It becomes a universal grammar – a way of thinking that reduces every story to power and oppression, to victims and aggressors. Its appeal, thus, lies in its supposed moral clarity, its emotional symmetry. And yet, paradoxically, it achieves precisely what every turn longs for: it rewrites not only history, but the present itself.

Soon, colonial became the adjective of choice – attached to everything from the body and the gaze to the archive itself – followed by a chorus of calls to decolonize art, culture, the museum, and even the university. Its real politics may be strikingly resistant to definition, yet a new interpretive order had emerged – one that no longer asked how to understand the world, but whom to accuse.

This worldview, illiberal at its core, has little patience for the old questions of capitalism, modernity, or the Enlightenment. As the historian Sophie Wahnich once wrote of the French Revolution: “We are no longer in an age in which different standpoints argue over an event that resists interpretation, but rather one of unquestioned detestation of the event.” However, once condemnation hardens into consensus, history begins to crave new meaning. The moral imagination must find another stage – a living case on which to replay the struggle between good and evil.

Zionism was cast in that role – not by destiny, but by ideological design. Maybe that’s why the fit feels so seamless: it is visible to anyone with a smartphone, recent enough to feel urgent, vivid enough to project onto, and unresolved enough to keep the argument alive. The history is still open, still inviting judgment and debate.

For postcolonial thought, that openness is a virtue, as it stretches the comprehensiveness of colonialism to its limit: a “colonial” project without a metropole, without an empire to report to. Most provocatively, it inverts the moral hierarchy of the West by transforming the Jewish people – for centuries its perpetual Other – into the figure of the oppressor. Thus, with this inversion, the colonial turn fulfills its ultimate wish: to undo the moral architecture of Western civilization itself.

Over the past decade, this framework has produced an entire ecosystem of essays, books, and manifestos treating Zionism as the world’s original sin. The emotional charge of that scholarship eventually spilled into the streets after October 7. Since then, Jewish and Zionist historians – and many simply decent people – have been trying to articulate a coherent response, to defend the legitimacy of the Zionist story without surrendering to its enemies’ vocabulary.

Yet reaction alone cannot suffice. Historians cannot simply redraw the boundaries of the debate or quibble with the colonial lexicon while, inadvertently confirming, its language. To counter a story that has captured the moral imagination, we must tell a better story – one not built on endless rebuttal, but on human reconstruction. As astute historian Hayden White wrote: “The best counter to a narrative that has misused historical memory is a better narrative – not one with more historical facts, but one with greater artistic integrity and poetic force of meaning.”

That is the challenge that now falls to historians of Zionism – one extending far beyond their field, as it may well reflect the future of the humanities themselves.

As Arieh Saposnik wrote in the aftermath of October 7: “The time has come for a new historiography, and perhaps for a new generation of historians who will write it – one that will restore our commitment to methodological rigor, to honesty, and to the humanistic ethics that are their foundation.”

At present, Israeli and Jewish Studies are not yet ready for that reckoning. Too many scholars remain anchored in the colonial framework, reluctant to imagine a different paradigm. And still, as I argue elsewhere, the path forward is clear: toward everything the colonial turn is not – toward history as a human story.

Not only for Zionism and Zionists – whose story, for all its particularity, is human before it is anything else – but for all of us: a renewed encounter with the past, grounded in curiosity and receptiveness, where the human story contains no saints or monsters, no eternal innocence or eternal guilt – only people: flawed, searching, courageous.

It reminds us that history is never only about power, but always about humanity.
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