What We Owe Our Children, Not Our Enemies

A community does not betray itself by asking difficult questions. It betrays itself when it leaves those questions to its enemies.

A movement built to rescue a people becomes dangerous when it can no longer recognize the difference between rescue and permanent mobilization.

This is why the question “Has Zionism completed its role?” is not merely historical. It is diagnostic. It asks whether Zionism still knows what kind of project it is.

On the surface, the answer seems simple. Zionism sought a national home for the Jewish people. The State of Israel exists. It is sovereign, armed, technologically advanced, internationally entangled, culturally productive, and politically unavoidable. If the purpose was to create a Jewish state, then the task has been fulfilled.

But that is exactly where the real problem begins.

A political movement can end when its task is completed. A theological-political movement cannot. It does not treat completion as closure. It treats completion as proof that a deeper, unfinished task has now become possible.

The state did not end Zionism. It gave Zionism a body.

And once an ideology receives a body, the question changes. It is no longer simply: do Jews need a state? It becomes: who is authorized to interpret the unfinished destiny of that state?

That question is far more dangerous.

There is a version of Zionism that can be measured politically. It arose from Jewish vulnerability, homelessness, dependence, persecution, and the obscene historical fact that Jewish life so often required permission from others. In that sense, Zionism was a project of rescue, concentration, sovereignty, and political normalization.

One may argue about how fully it succeeded. But at least the criteria were visible. Did Jews have a place of refuge? Did Jews acquire political agency? Did Jewish life cease to depend entirely on the mercy, tolerance, or convenience of others?

But another version of Zionism cannot be measured so cleanly. For it, the state is not the conclusion of the story. It is only a threshold. The state exists, but redemption is incomplete. The army exists, but the people are not whole. Jerusalem exists, but holiness is not settled. Sovereignty exists, but the divine promise remains unfinished.

In such a structure, almost nothing can falsify the project.

Success proves that the next stage has begun. Failure proves that the task remains urgent. Criticism proves that enemies are still active. Isolation proves that the world has not changed. Power proves responsibility. Violence proves necessity. Moral crisis proves that the project has not yet reached its true form.

This is not simply politics. It is a machine for renewing necessity.

That machine should worry us.

Not because Zionism is illegitimate. Not because Jewish sovereignty is a mistake. Not because Jews should return to dependency, gratitude, and polite helplessness before the nations. That fantasy should be left to people who enjoy Jewish ethics only when Jews are powerless.

The problem is different. A political project that has no criterion of completion, no visible condition of correction, and no serious way to recognize failure becomes dangerous precisely when it succeeds.

It begins as a response to vulnerability. It can become an apparatus that converts every event into further authorization.

This matters especially now, because Israel is no longer a fragile petition before history. It is a state. It governs. It holds territory. It legislates. It protects. It uses force. It rescues. It fails. It remembers. It forgets. It builds. It humiliates. It speaks in the name of Jews who did not authorize it, and it is judged by enemies who would deny Jews any right to speak at all.

That is the unbearable difficulty. Israel is not innocent. But neither is the world that judges it.

We owe ourselves difficult questions. Not because our enemies deserve satisfaction, but because our children deserve clarity. Only difficult questions allow us to define our problems ethically and honestly. Easy questions protect camps. Difficult questions expose conditions. They force us to distinguish rescue from mobilization, memory from immunity, statehood from redemption, and loyalty from silence.

If we ask only the questions that protect our existing answers, we are not thinking. We are guarding a script.

So the question cannot be whether Zionism has ended. That question is too easy, and therefore almost useless.

The harder question is this: can Zionism accept limits after achieving power?

Can it distinguish rescue from permanent mobilization? Can it distinguish memory from immunity? Can it distinguish Jewish continuity from territorial appetite? Can it distinguish criticism from betrayal? Can it distinguish statehood from redemption?

A state that cannot make these distinctions becomes trapped inside its own founding wound. It continues to speak as if it were still begging for admission into history, even while it commands borders, armies, courts, prisons, budgets, and lives.

There is dignity in the Jewish refusal to disappear. There is no dignity in turning that refusal into a license without end.

The future of Zionism will not be decided by slogans about whether it has succeeded or failed. It will be decided by whether Jewish sovereignty can learn the discipline every mature sovereignty must learn: the discipline of limits.

Without that, Zionism will not conclude.

It will harden.

And a hardened Zionism may preserve the state while losing the Jewish intelligence that made the state necessary.

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig