Why, as a progressive Jew, I firmly identify as a Zionist

I am a progressive Jew. I believe in human rights, equality, and justice. I believe racism deforms a society from within. I believe occupation corrodes. I believe ultranationalism is dangerous whether it speaks Hebrew, English, Spanish, or Arabic. I also believe that Palestinians are a people with rights, dignity, and a full claim to self-determination. And I recognize that Israeli governments have, in many cases, pursued policies that are discriminatory, brutal, self-destructive, and morally indefensible.

I also identify firmly as a Zionist.

For some people, that sounds like a contradiction. To me, it is the opposite. It is because I believe in human rights, take justice seriously, and because I take Jewish history seriously, that I place myself unapologetically in the Zionist camp.

Part of the confusion comes from the way the term itself has been flattened. Zionism is often described as if it were identical to the worst actions of the Israeli state, as if it meant settlement expansion, permanent occupation, messianic nationalism, or indifference to Palestinian suffering. I reject that definition entirely. Those are political programs, some of them ugly and dangerous ones. They are not the core of Zionism.

At its most basic, Zionism means one thing: the belief that the Jewish people are a nation, and that like other nation they have the right to self-determination in their ancestral land. That is the common denominator. The only common denominator. Everything else, borders, constitutions, governments, economic models, relations between religion and state, the treatment of minorities, the terms of peace, belongs to the realm of politics, where Zionists have disagreed with one another from the beginning.

And self-determination is a core collective human right, one routinely recognized for other peoples, including Palestinians. If I begin from a commitment to human rights, I cannot treat Jewish self-determination as the one exception, because denying a fundamental right to the Jewish people while recognizing it to all others, is, in fact, discrimination.

This matters because anti-Zionism is often presented as though it were merely moral outrage at Israeli policy. It is not. One can oppose settlements, denounce racism, condemn the occupation, fight for Palestinian statehood, and still fully identify as a Zionist. In fact, many of us do. Anti-Zionism begins where criticism of policy ends. It means either denying that Jews are a people or accepting that they are a people while denying them the same right of collective self-determination routinely granted to others. That is not a minor distinction. It is the distinction.

For me, this is not an abstract debate. I am a secular Jew. My Jewish identity was never built primarily around religious observance. It was built around peoplehood, memory, history, and belonging. As a Mexican Jew, I learned very early that identity is shaped not only by what one feels inwardly, but by what the surrounding world insists on seeing. I am a proud second-generation Mexican. Yet I also grew up with the persistent reminder that, for many (perhaps for most), I was somehow not fully Mexican. I was treated, subtly or openly, as if I were foreign, conditional, not quite of the place.

That experience is difficult for many American Jews to fully grasp, especially those who came of age in periods and places of greater security and acceptance. But outside the American frame, Jewish peoplehood is often not a matter of ideology. It is a matter of lived experience. You learn, sometimes quietly and sometimes harshly, that emancipation is real but fragile, belonging is real but conditional, and acceptance can narrow overnight.

When I went to Israel at eighteen, I felt something simple and profound: for the first time, I was in a place where my Jewishness was not an exception, not a footnote, not something that had to be translated or defended. It was simply there, part of the landscape, part of the national rhythm, part of ordinary life. That experience did not erase my Mexican identity. It did not make me less universalist. It made clear to me that Jewish peoplehood was real, and that the longing behind Zionism was not colonial fantasy or theological delusion. It was the political expression of a people with memory, vulnerability, continuity, and nowhere else in the world where they were fully at home as Jews.

That does not require blindness. Quite the opposite. Because I identify as a Zionist, I feel obligated to judge Israel seriously. Love without judgment is idolatry. Solidarity without criticism is moral laziness. If the Jewish state acts in ways that betray the ethical core of Jewish historical experience, then Jews have the right, and the duty, to say so. I do not need to leave Zionism in order to oppose what is being done in its name. I oppose many Israeli policies precisely because I do not believe Jewish self-determination should be built on the humiliation, permanent subjugation, or dispossession of another people.

This is where I part company with anti-Zionists who imagine they have transcended tribalism while, in fact, collapsing an entire national movement into its worst expressions. Zionism has never been one thing. It has contained religious and secular currents, socialist and liberal currents, cultural and political currents, democratic visions and chauvinist distortions. A.B. Yehoshua once described Zionism as a big boat with many currents. That seems right to me. There are currents within that boat I have opposed for years and will continue to oppose. But fighting over the soul and direction of the boat is not the same thing as wanting to sink the boat.

That difference matters morally and politically.

The twentieth century did not teach Jews that sovereignty makes them innocent. No serious person should claim that. But it did teach that statelessness, dependency, and the goodwill of others are not a sufficient answer to Jewish history. It also taught something else that progressives sometimes prefer not to confront: universalism is a noble language, but it has often failed Jews precisely when they most needed concrete protection. That does not justify oppression. It does explain why so many Jews, especially those whose families came from the Middle East, North Africa, Eastern Europe, or societies where they lived as tolerated outsiders, do not experience Zionism as a luxury belief. They experience it as the political form of collective survival.

And yes, Palestinians deserve that same seriousness. Their national identity is real. Their dispossession is real. Their suffering is real. Their right to self-determination should not be contingent on Jewish approval. For me, the answer has never been Jewish sovereignty or Palestinian sovereignty. It has always been that both peoples exist, both peoples belong, and any serious future must reckon with both. Progressive Zionism, at its best, insists on precisely that. It refuses the fantasy that one people’s liberation requires the negation of the other.

What I cannot accept is the argument that because Israel has committed grave injustices, the conclusion must be that Jewish national self-determination itself was always illegitimate. That does not follow. If every national movement were judged solely by its crimes, hypocrisies, and exclusions, very few would survive intact. Yet somehow Jews are often told that the only moral position is not to reform, restrain, democratize, or reconcile their national project, but to abolish it. That demand is presented as enlightened. In practice, it asks Jews to surrender a right taken for granted for others.

I am not prepared to do that.

I remain a Zionist not because I deny Palestinian suffering, but because I refuse to solve one tragedy by demanding that Jews abandon the legitimacy of their own collective existence. I remain a Zionist not because I support everything Israel does, but because I believe the Jewish people are a people, and peoples have rights. I remain a Zionist because I know what it means to live as a minority whose belonging is questioned. I remain a Zionist because Jewish history did not begin in 1948, and because Jewish vulnerability did not end there either.

Most of all, I identify as a Zionist precisely because I am a progressive. And to me, being progressive means applying moral principles consistently, not selectively. If self-determination is a right, then it is a right for Jews too. If dignity is universal, then it belongs to Jews and Palestinians alike. If nationalism becomes poisonous when it denies the humanity of others, then the answer is not to deny Jewish peoplehood, but to insist that Jewish self-determination be worthy of its own ideals.

That is why I remain firmly in the Zionist camp. Not uncritically. Not comfortably. But deliberately.