What Is a ‘Zionist Government,’ Really?
On November 10, 1975, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination”. In Israel, that resolution was met with shock and outrage. Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Chaim Herzog, tore the text of the resolution apart from the podium, in a gesture that became one of the most recognizable symbols of Israel’s struggle against the delegitimization of Zionism. More than fifty years later, it seems worth returning to the question of what remains of the Zionism for which Herzog tore up that resolution.
At first glance, there was considerable justification for Israel’s anger over the UN resolution. Zionism was not born of a racial doctrine, nor did it seek to ground the rights of Jews in the supposed inferiority of another people. Quite the opposite. The origins of Zionism lie in the European humanism and liberalism of the nineteenth century. Zionism emerged from the experience of Jewish powerlessness, antisemitism, and discrimination, and from the recognition that a person belonging to a national minority, even if formally granted rights, is not truly free if his freedom ultimately depends upon the goodwill of the majority among whom he lives. In this sense, the original demand for Jewish sovereignty was not a demand for privilege, but a claim to liberty.
Herzl did not imagine a Jewish state merely in terms of territory, borders, and power. In his novel Altneuland, Herzl presented his vision of a Jewish state as a modern, liberal, and tolerant society. Herzl saw the threat to the humanistic society he imagined precisely in the rise of nationalist and racist forces.
In the elections held in the “New Society” Herzl describes in the novel, Dr. Geyer, a religious fanatic and racist nationalist, seeks to incite the public and exploit its fears. Opposing him is Professor Steineck, who warns the citizens of the “New Society” against the rise of a racist and reminds them of the values upon which the new Jewish society must be built: freedom of thought and expression, tolerance, and respect for human beings. And indeed, Rashid Bey, an Arab native of Haifa who recognizes the Jewish and liberal character of the “New Society”, participates in its leadership.
The participation of members of minorities in the leadership of the “New Society” is not a marginal literary detail that Herzl added merely to embellish his vision. It reveals something fundamental about how the father of the Jewish state understood the meaning of Zionism. The Jewish state was not intended merely to be a place where Jews would attain freedom and autonomy; it was intended to be a society that embodied an alternative to the chauvinistic and exclusionary forms of nationalism from which Jews themselves had suffered.
Over time, two central conceptions of Zionism emerged. One understood the fulfillment of Zionism primarily in terms of settlement, borders, a Jewish majority, sovereignty, and power. The other, which remained in significant measure faithful to the original Zionist vision, saw the establishment of the national home not merely as a solution to the “Jewish Question”, but as the creation of a moral society, in which the way society treats human beings and minorities, and its commitment to liberty and equality, are no less important than the question of where its borders will run.
The two approaches thus offered fundamentally different interpretations of Zionism. If the purpose of Zionism is to secure the political liberty of the Jewish people, then that demand for liberty necessarily entails recognition that the non-Jewish person is entitled to that same liberty, that same dignity, and that same equality. But if national identity is defined primarily in terms of power, control, territorial expansion, and the preservation of Jewish political power, then the principle of equality becomes a threat to the very power relations upon which that identity rests. Here lies one of the great tragedies of Zionism: a movement born from the aspiration of a people to be free began to measure its success in terms of power the moment it acquired it. At that point, Zionism began to move further and further away from its original moral and humanistic vision. It is no coincidence that the principle of equality is not explicitly enshrined in Israel’s Basic Laws.
The nationalist tendency grew increasingly strong, particularly after the conquest of the West Bank in 1967. Since then, Israel has been living with a deepening contradiction: on the one hand, a state seeking to guarantee the liberty and security of the Jewish people; on the other, a state exercising prolonged control over another people and denying it political freedom. Yet the same outlook has also permeated Israeli society and is clearly reflected in its treatment of Israel’s Arab citizens, who constitute roughly one-fifth of the population.
Discrimination against Israel’s Arab citizens is evident across virtually every sphere, from the allocation of budgets to infrastructure, education, and public services. Yet all of these reflect a broader political consensus in Israel against including Arab parties in governing coalitions.
Right-wing parties promise to establish a “broad national government”, while centrist and left-wing parties, which long ago surrendered to nationalist discourse, promise a government based exclusively on the “Zionist majority”. It is clear that the words “national” and “Zionist” are being used here, in practice, as synonyms for “Jewish”. Of course, one can oppose extremist parties on ideological or political grounds. Yet in Israeli political discourse, opposition to including an Arab party in government is treated as an act of betrayal, and, by extension, so are its voters. It is enough to recall Benjamin Netanyahu’s warning to his supporters on election day in 2015 that “Arabs are heading to the polls”, in order to understand how Arab political participation was presented as something to be feared; or to recall Likud’s attacks on the previous government for relying on an Arab party; and, certainly, the repeated attempts during election campaigns to prevent Arab parties from participating in elections, together with demands that every candidate for prime minister pledge not to rely on Arab support, let alone include an Arab party in any government.
To understand how Israel appears from the outside, one need only reverse the perspective. One can imagine the reaction of the Israeli government if, in another country, election projections singled out a Jewish party in a separate column, or if candidates in another country pledged never to include a Jewish party in a governing coalition. There would surely be an outcry from one end of the world to the other, and that country would immediately become an international pariah and be widely condemned.
The Israeli right has long claimed ownership of Zionism and regards itself as the ultimate embodiment of its values, while portraying the left as post-Zionist, if not outright post-Jewish. But if we apply the test of proximity to the Zionist vision as Herzl himself conceived it, the answer becomes clear: who is closer to the Zionist vision of Herzl – Bezalel Smotrich, who openly declared his opposition to his wife sharing a hospital room with an Arab woman, or Mansour Abbas, who recognizes Israel as a Jewish state, seeks to participate in its political life, and has pledged equality for Israel’s Arab citizens? Who, then, reflects Herzl’s Zionist vision: the person who declares his commitment to a “national government” or a “Zionist government” as another expression of excluding the Arab minority from political power; the person who regards the political participation of Arab citizens in government itself as a threat; the person who turns Arab identity into a justification for separating groups of citizens – or the Arab citizen who seeks to participate and to enjoy equal civil rights?
Therefore, anyone who opposes the political integration of an Arab party is declaring, in effect, not only that he himself is post-Zionist, but that he is also moving away from the Jewish foundation upon which Zionism sought to ground the liberty of the Jewish people: the recognition of the dignity and freedom of the human being – every human being.
