Reclaiming Zionism

If a minister of any government anywhere in the world had said that they would consider the murder of any number of Jews — let alone millions — morally justifiable for any reason whatsoever, one would have heard screams of outrage from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his toady minions. But when such a reprehensible utterance comes out of the mouth of a member of their own club, dead silence.

By now, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s obscenity that “it might be justified and moral” for Israel to “cause two million civilians to die of hunger” has been condemned by the U.S,, the U.K., the E.U., France, Germany . . . the list goes on and on. The American Jewish Committee, the ADL, J Street, and the Council of Jews in Germany, among others, have done so as well. But Netanyahu is so petrified that Smotrich and other ultraright political hacks in his coalition such as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir might blow up his extremist government that he is giving an Oscar-worthy performance as an ostrich. Or perhaps, just as likely, at heart he agrees with Smotrich.

I do not know Benny Gantz, and have only met Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett in passing, but I want to believe that as prime minister, any of them would have reacted with horror to Smotrich’s obscenity, perhaps even fired him outright. But — tragically for Israel for a whole host of reasons — none of them sits in the chair occupied by the iagoesque Netanyahu, and he is oblivious to anything that might threaten his increasingly precarious hold on power.

Why does any of this matter? Why should we who identify as Zionists – those of us, that is, who are not reactionary zealots or knee-jerk apologists for anything and everything Netanyahu says or does – not only care but be deeply, deeply concerned? Because at a moment in history when Israel’s enemies and antisemites worldwide have worked overtime to turn the term “Zionist” into a pejorative, Smotrich and his enablers, Netanyahu perhaps foremost among them, are giving these enemies and antisemites potentially lethal ammunition.

And it doesn’t help that the political party Smotrich heads calls itself the Religious Zionist Party – in Hebrew, HaTzionut Hadatit.

Simply put, we must not allow either Smotrich in his West Bank settlement of Kedumim or the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran to define Zionism.

In my classes at Cornell University on the law of genocide and on antisemitism in the courts and in jurisprudence, I explain to my students that there are multiple, diverse, sometimes even contradictory kinds of Zionism. While the jingoistic Zionism of Netanyahu and his late father, the historian Benzion Netanyahu, is rooted in the militant nationalist ideology of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who demonstrate passionately against Netanyahu and his government represent far different versions of Zionism.

David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Rabin, and Shimon Peres were products of the labor Zionist movement who adamantly believed in the importance of maintaining Israel’s democratic identity. There are erstwhile members of Netanyahu’s Likud Party such as former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and former ministers Tzipi Livni, Limor Livnat, and Dan Meridor for whom Smotrich’s xenophobia and racist Jewish supremacist views are anathema to their conception of Zionism.

The philosopher Martin Buber and Rabbi Judah Magnes, the founder and first chancellor of the Hebrew University, were Zionists who wanted to see a binational state for Jews and Arabs in what was then British Mandatory Palestine. The Zionism of former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, the founder of the Likud Party and its Gahal and Herut predecessors, and of former President Reuven Rivlin, also a Likud stalwart for decades, was predicated on a respect for the rule of law and an adherence to a legal system that protected minorities in Israel, including first and foremost its Arab minority.

The early communist theoretician Moses Hess, a friend and collaborator of Karl Marx, was a Zionist, as was Nahum Goldmann, simultaneously president of both the World Zionist Organization and the World Jewish Congress between 1956 and 1968, who was sharply critical of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. “Israel cannot prevail as the Sparta of the Middle East,” Goldmann said in my presence shortly after the June 1967 Six Day War. His profound disagreement with Israeli leaders who advocated for Israel’s permanent retention of these territories did not make him any less of a Zionist.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis whose Zionism was founded on Jeffersonian values, would not only have been repelled by every vile, bigoted utterance that comes out of Smotrich’s mouth but would have said so publicly, emphatically, and unambiguously. So, for that matter, should we all.

I write as a past national president of the Labor Zionist Alliance in the U.S. who, in December 1988, was one of five American Jews who met with Yaser Arafat and other senior leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Stockholm, resulting in the P.L.O.’s first public acceptance of Israel as a state in the Middle East. I believed then and believe now that Zionism as the Jewish people’s national liberation movement must not be antithetical to the national aspirations of another people.

In a letter to Mahatma Gandhi in February of 1939, Buber wrote that he belonged to a group of people whose goal was “the concluding of genuine peace between Jew and Arab. . . . We considered it a fundamental point that in this case two vital claims are opposed to each other, two claims of a different nature and a different origin, which cannot be pitted one against the other and between which no objective decision can be made as to which is just or unjust. We considered and still consider it our duty to understand and to honor the claim which is opposed to ours and to endeavor to reconcile both claims.”

Buber’s words remain true more than 85 years later.

What the likes of Smotrich are doing, intentionally or subconsciously, with the help of both Netanyahu and the radical anti-Israel demonstrators who have turned “Zionist” and “Zionism” into curse words, is to try to appropriate Zionism as such the exclusive ideological property of the hardcore ultranationalist right. They must not be allowed to get away with it.

The task for those of us who believe otherwise is to make it clear — even if Netanyahu and others in his government, not to mention fascisti of the caliber of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, refuse to do so — that Zionism, far from being a supremacist, xenophobic, or racist ideology, is in fact very much compatible with Buber’s vision of “genuine peace between Jew and Arab,” or, to use the more relevant contemporary geopolitical term, with a “two-state solution.”

Menachem Z. Rosensaft is adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School and lecturer-in-law at Columbia Law School. He is the author of the forthcoming Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz (Ben Yehuda Press, 2025).