Too Zionist for the Left, Too Left for Israel

There is a peculiar experience that comes with being a left-wing Israeli today: discovering that, in certain circles, your politics are considered contradictory before you have even opened your mouth.

If you oppose the occupation, support Palestinian statehood, protest the government, defend liberal democracy, believe in equal rights and civil liberties — you may still find yourself asked a kind of ideological litmus test.

Yes, but are you a Zionist?

Increasingly, the question is not descriptive but disqualifying.

For some parts of the global left, “Zionist” has ceased to mean belief in Jewish self-determination in some form and instead has become shorthand for militarism, ethnonationalism, settler expansion, occupation, or support for the current Israeli government. The word has become more of an accusation than anything.

But for many Israelis — including deeply left-wing ones like myself — Zionism means something much smaller and much less sinister.

It means believing that Jews, like other peoples, have a right to collective self-determination and safety in their ancestral homeland.

That should not be a radical position.

And yet lately it can really feel like one.

Being a liberal Israeli often means existing in a political category that both sides insist cannot exist.

To the Israeli right, if you criticize government policy, oppose judicial overhaul, march against corruption, advocate for Palestinian rights, or object to the expansion of settlements, you are portrayed as naïve or disloyal. As someone who does not understand the region they live in.

To parts of the international left, meanwhile, being Israeli at all puts you under immediate suspicion. Being a Zionist can become automatic proof that your politics are insufficiently progressive.

Somewhere in the middle exists a large, quieter group of Israelis who reject both premises.

People who protested against Bibi not because they hate Israel but because they care about what kind of country it becomes.

People who believe occupation is corrosive to both Palestinians and Israelis.

People who believe Palestinian suffering is real and urgent.

People who believe settlement expansion should be illegal.

People who also believe that Jewish self-determination is not uniquely illegitimate.

These positions are not contradictory.

They are, in many ways, historically continuous with the Israeli left.

There is a strange irony in watching Zionism become internationally viewed as inherently right-wing when many of Israel’s foundational left-wing movements were Zionist, like labor organizers, secular socialists, kibbutzniks (including my ultra-progressive, leftist, Pro-Palestinian parents), peace activists, civil-rights lawyers, academics, and generations of people who genuinely imagined Israel as both Jewish and democratic.

You can argue they failed. You can argue that those visions were incomplete or compromised.

But pretending they never existed leaves little room for understanding Israel as it actually is.

And that absence of nuance matters.

Because if Zionism becomes defined so broadly that it includes everyone from a Tel Aviv liberal protesting in Kaplan to the most expansionist extremists of the Israeli right, then the word stops being analytically useful.

Likewise, if support for Palestinian dignity and sovereignty becomes treated domestically as inherently anti-Israel, we lose the ability to imagine any future except one of permanent conflict.

Many Israelis carry contradictions that outsiders underestimate and fail to understand.

We grew up with Holocaust stories and suicide bombings and rocket sirens while also witnessing checkpoints, military control, and the moral cost of ruling over another people.

We know fear is real.

We also know fear cannot be a governing philosophy.

Being left-wing in Israel is not rejecting your country.

For many people, it is refusing to give up on it.

It is believing that patriotism should include accountability.

That loving a place sometimes means demanding more from it.

That Palestinian freedom and Israeli security are not competing forces but conditions for one another.

And that Zionism, understood not as supremacy but as self-determination alongside self-determination, should not be a word that disqualifies someone from empathy, liberalism, or peace.

If anything, it should deepen our obligation to them.