Lamenting the Decline of “Liberal Zionism” Is a Futile Enterprise Because It Never Really Existed

In Israel at the present time, almost no one any longer speaks of a “two- state” solution. Land that would constitute a Palestinian state is being settled by Israel. Palestinian officials say that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has refused to outline the borders of a Palestinian state or the size of areas Israel intends to keep or to commit publicly to land swaps to compensate the Palestinians for any adjustment to the 1967 boundary.

Israel seems to feel that it has been given a blank check by the U.S. to continue its occupation policies and to abandon any need to pretend to support a two-state solution. Gadi Wolfsfeld, a professor of political communication at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzlya, Israel said of Mr. Netanyahu: “The truth is that he is not really nervous about America or the world anymore because until now, nobody has done anything.”

At the same time, racism and religious extremism are growing in Israel. A best-selling book, “The King’s Torah,” by Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur states that, “The prohibition ‘Thou shalt not murder’ applies only to a Jew who kills a Jew.” They write that non-Jews are “uncompassionate by nature” and that attacks on them “curb their evil inclinations,” while babies and children of Israel’s enemies may be killed since “it is clear that they will grow up to harm us.”

Less Tolerant Than in the Past

Professor Emanuel Gutmann of Hebrew University says that, “Overall, Israeli society has turned to the right. Israeli society in general is less tolerant, less interested in compromise, and more accepting of force than it was in the past.”

David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker (Nov. 17, 2014) writes that, “Israeli politicians often speak of the country’s singularity as ‘the sole democracy in the Middle East,’ ‘the villa in the jungle.’ They engage far less often with the challenges to democratic practice in Israel: the resurgence of hate speech; attacks by settlers on Palestinians and their property in the West Bank; the Knesset’s attempt to rein in left-wing human rights organizations; and, most of all, the unequal status of Israeli Palestinians and the utter lack of civil rights for the Palestinians in the West Bank. A recent poll revealed that a third of Israelis think that Arab citizens of Israel — the nearly two million Arabs living in Israel proper, not the West Bank — should not have the right to vote — More explicitly jingoistic and racist elements now operate closer to the center of Israeli political life. Some well-known figures in the religious world speak openly in an anti-democratic rhetoric of Jewish supremacy.”

These trends have caused many to lament what Antony Lerman, a former director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research in London and author of “The Making and Unmaking of a Zionist,” called “The End of Liberal Zionism,” in an article in The New York Times (Aug. 24, 2014). He states that, “Liberal Zionists are at a crossroads. The original tradition of combining Zionism and liberalism — which meant ending the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, supporting a Palestinian state as well as a Jewish state with a permanent Jewish majority, and standing behind Israel when it was threatened — was well intentioned. But everything liberal Zionism stands for is now in doubt.”

Romantic Ideal Is Tarnished

Lerman laments that, “The romantic Zionist ideal, to which Jewish liberals — and I was one, once — subscribed for so many decades has been tarnished by the reality of modern Israel. The attacks on freedom of speech and human rights organizations in Israel, the land-grabbing settler movement, a growing strain of anti-Arab and anti-immigrant racism, extremist politics, and a powerful, intolerant religious right — this mixture has pushed liberal Zionism to the brink.”

Author Peter Beinart, in his book The Crisis of Zionism, refers to himself as a “liberal Zionist,” and expresses concern about what he sees as Israel’s retreat from its traditional “liberal” values. According to Beinart, “When Israel’s founders wrote the country’s Declaration of Independence, which calls for a Jewish state that ‘ensures complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants, irrespective of religion, race or sex,’ they understood that Zionism and democracy was not only compatible, the two were inseparable.”

Those who believe that Israel is now in the process of abandoning its founding philosophy of “liberal Zionism” are engaged in a futile enterprise, for that “liberal” Zionism never really existed — it is a convenient myth. They have not confronted a contrary thesis, which is supported by history, that Zionism was flawed from the beginning, not only by ignoring the indigenous Palestinian population, but rejecting the dominant spiritual history and essence of Judaism.

Injustice to Palestinians

To understand the injustice which history has inflicted upon the Palestinians, it is essential to consider the indifference on the part of the early Zionists as well as the British government which issued the Balfour Declaration, to transfer ownership of a piece of land it had gained through war.

In his book Israel: A Colonial-Settler State, the French Jewish historian Maxime Rodinson notes that, “Wanting to create a purely Jewish or predominantly Jewish state in Arab Palestine in the 20th century could not help but lead to a colonial-type situation and the development of a racist state of mind, and in the final analysis, to a military confrontation.”

Rodinson writes that the colonization by the Zionists seemed “perfectly natural” given the atmosphere of the time: “Herzl’s plan unquestionably fit into the great movement of utopian expansion of the 19th and 20th centuries, the great European imperialist groundswell.”

The immediate issue for the Zionists in the late 19th century was what they called “the Arab problem” in Palestine, an indigenous population 92 per cent Arab. The early Zionists, declares Israeli historian Benny Morris in Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001, saw that the establishment of a Jewish state would require the removal of these Palestinian Arabs. The idea of removal, he notes, “goes back to the fathers of modern Zionism … one of the main currents of Zionist ideology from the movement’s inception.” Herzl accepted the removal (“transfer”) of the Palestinians, though he emphasized the need for diplomatic caution in the face of Ottoman, British and larger Arab vested interests.

Removal of Arab Population

In his diaries in 1895, Herzl wrote of the need to “spirit the penniless (Arab) population” across the border to Arab countries while being mindful that “both the process of expropriation (of property and land) and that of the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”

According to Morris, the Zionist settlers referred to Palestinians as “mules” and behaved “like lords and masters, some apparently resorting to the whip at the slightest provocation … a major source of Arab animosity.”

The only “liberal” Zionism to be found in these early years was that of a handful of “cultural Zionists,” who sought to establish a Jewish cultural center in Palestine, not a sovereign and exclusively Jewish state. The most important of these was the Russian Jewish writer and philosopher Ahad Ha’am. He wrote in 1891 that the Jewish settlers arriving in Palestine from Europe “behaved toward the (Palestinian) Arabs with hostility and cruelty, trespass uniquely upon their boundaries, beat them shamefully without reason and even brag about it.”

He reported in 1893 that, “The attitude of the colonists to their tenants and their families is exactly the same as toward their animals … We are accustomed to believing, outside Israel, that the Arabs are all desert savages, a people like donkeys, and they neither see nor understand what is happening around them. But that is a great mistake.”

Another People in the Land

Ha’am surmised that aggressive settler attitudes stemmed from anger “toward those who reminded them that there is still another people in the land of Israel that have been living there and does not intend to leave.”

The early Zionists used the slogan, “A land without people, for a people without land.” In 1891, the Lovers of Zion sent Ahad Ha’am from Russia to observe conditions in Palestine. He wrote: “From abroad we are accustomed to believe that Eretz Israel is presently almost totally desolate, an uncultivated desert, and that anyone wishing to buy land there can come and buy all he wants. But, in truth, it is not so. In the entire land, it is hard to find tillable land that is not already tilled … If the time comes when the life of our people in Eretz Israel develops to the point of encroaching upon the native population, they will not easily yield their place.”

There were always a few who questioned the prevailing view of Jewish-Arab relations. At a meeting in Basel, Switzerland during the 7th Zionist Congress in 1905, Yitzhak Epstein, a teacher who had migrated to Palestine, raised what he called the “hidden question.” He declared: “Among the difficult problems associated with the idea of the renewal of the life of our people in its land, there is one question that outweighs all the others, namely the question of our attitude to the Arabs. We have overlooked a rather ‘marginal’ fact — that in our beloved land lived an entire people that has been dwelling there for many centuries and has never considered leaving it.”

Palestine Is Totally Settled

At the same time, another early Zionist, Hillel Zeitlin, who wrote in Hebrew and Yiddish, charged that Zionists “forget, mistakenly of maliciously, that Palestine belongs to others, and it is totally settled.”

These few dissident voices constitute the essence of the alleged “liberal Zionism” which existed as the expropriation of the land proceeded. Moshe Sharett, a future prime minister, acknowledged that, “We have come to conquer a country from a people inhabiting it … the land must be ours alone.”

In the mid-19th century, the area corresponding to Palestine had about 340,000 people, of whom 300,000 or 88 per cent were Muslim or Druze, 27,000 or 8 per cent Christian, and 13,000 or 4 per cent Jews. By 1922, after the Balfour Declaration, the population had grown to 752,048, of which Jews constituted only 83,900, or 11 per cent. The increase in the Jewish population had been spurred by the development of the Zionist movement in Europe, particularly in the Russian Pale of Settlement.

Theodor Herzl promised that the new state “should there form a part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism.” Herzl, an atheist, fit Zionism into the prevailing framework of European imperialist policies. The writer Max Nordau, who became Herzl’s second in command, agreed: “We will endeavor to do in the Near East what the English did in India. It is our intention to come to Palestine as the representatives of culture and to take the moral borders of Europe to the Euphrates.”

Opposition to the Balfour Declaration

In England, Lord Curzon, the representative of the House of Lords in the War Cabinet, who would succeed Balfour as Foreign Secretary in 1919, opposed the Balfour Declaration. He charged that the term “national home” was dangerously ambiguous and would commit Britain to creating a Jewish state in a land that “already has an indigenous population of its own of a different race.” The Arabs who lived there, Curzon warned, “would not be content either to be expropriated for Jewish immigration or to act as mere hewers of wood or drawers of water for the latter.”

According to George Kidton, who served in the Middle East Division of the Foreign Office, Balfour promised Palestine to the Zionists “irrespective of the wishes of the great bulk of the population, because it is historically right and politically expedient that Balfour should do so. The idea that carrying out these programs will entail bloodshed and military repression never seems to have occurred to him.”

Balfour recognized very well that by embracing Zionism he was rejecting the principle of self-determination for the people of Palestine. In 1919, Balfour wrote to Lloyd George: “The weak point of our position, of course, is that in the case of Palestine, we deliberately and rightly decline to accept the principle of self-determination. If the present inhabitants were consulted they would unquestionably give an anti-Jewish verdict.”

Support for Bi-National State

Another example of what we might call “liberal Zionism” manifested itself in 1925, when several prominent intellectuals, most of them natives of Central Europe who were teaching at Hebrew University, formed Brit Shalom (Covenant of Peace) which backed a bi-national state of Arabs and Jews. The group’s members looked to Ahad Ha’am rather than Herzl as their mentor. They rejected the attempt to impose a Jewish state on Palestine’s Arabs as politically impossible without the use of force, and they saw doing this as contrary to the ethical principles of Judaism. Their objective, the sociologist Arthur Ruppin, the chairman of the group, said was “to settle the Jews, as a second people, in a country already inhabited by another people, and accomplish this peacefully.” This group enjoyed the support of Albert Einstein, Martin Buber and Judah Magnes, the first president of Hebrew University. It was small, attracted few members and soon faded away.

Mainstream Zionism proceeded with indifference, and often contempt for the Palestinians, an overwhelming majority of the population. The publication of the Zionist Organization of America, “The New Palestine,” declared in Sept. 1928, when the British had won Arab agreement to a legislative council, that Arabs “are illiterate and live under indescribably primitive conditions. The march of these illiterates to the polls can easily be pictured.” This publication, the voice of American Zionism, repeatedly published articles urging the transfer of Arab Palestinians to Jordan.

David Ben Gurion, then chairman of the Jewish Agency, acknowledged that frustrated Palestinian national aspirations lay behind the 1936 rebellion, as well as fears that a Jewish state was being thrust upon them. He knew that the Palestinians had “legitimate fears and grievances.” He stated: “Were I an Arab … I would rise up against immigration for Arabs are fighting dispossession … the fear is not of losing land, but of losing the homeland of the Arab people, which others (we) want to turn into the homeland of the Jewish people. When we say the Arabs are the aggressors and we defend ourselves — that is only half the truth … politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves.”

The Whole of Biblical Palestine

Ben Gurion revealed his strategy clearly. He declared: “After the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we will abolish partition and expand to the whole of Biblical Palestine. I do not see partition as the final solution of the Palestine question … We will expel the Arabs and take their places … with the force at our disposal. The acceptance of partition does not commit us to renounce (acquisition of) Transjordan … We shall accept a state in the boundaries fixed today, but the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factor will limit them.”

In Nov. 1947 the U.N. recommended partition of Palestine: 56 per cent for a Jewish state, 44 per cent for a Palestinian state. There was a clear inequity: the Jews, with 31 per cent of the population, were being allocated 56 per cent of the land. Moreover, Jews owned only 6 per cent of Palestine. Palestinians asked what would happen to Muslims and Christians who constituted nearly half of the population in the territory allocated to the Jews? Now, with so-called “liberal Zionists” in control, we know what fate befell them.

Israeli historian Avi Shlaim sums up what happened this way: “The Arab case was clear and compelling. Palestine belonged to the people living in it, and the overwhelming majority was Arab. In language and culture, as well as land ownership, the country had been Arab for centuries. Geographical proximity, historical ties, and religious affinity made Palestine an integral part of the Arab world. It was entitled to immediate independence. Jewish immigration and settlement could not take place without the consent of the country’s Arab owners, and this consent was emphatically denied. Neither Britain nor the League of Nations had the right to promise a land that was not theirs to promise, the promise was null and void.”

Israel’s Turn to the Right

More recently, Israel has turned away even from the Zionism which many have found it possible to mistakenly characterize as “liberal” in the past. In Nov. 2014, a proposal for a basic law titled “Israel, the Nation-State of the Jewish People” passed in the Israeli Cabinet by a vote of 14-6, with two centrist coalition parties opposing it. Parliament has to approve the bill for it to become law.

Opponents of the law argue that it would make Israel’s non-Jewish citizens — 20 per cent of the population — less than equal. In fact, of course, Israel’s Palestinians already suffer under less than equal status. Ahmed Tibi, a veteran Arab member of the Israeli Parliament said that there has long been tension between the halves of the term “Jewish democracy,” as Israel likes to define itself. He said that the proposed legislation simply “confirms that the Jewish and democratic state is fiction.” He described Israel instead as a “Judocracy,” that would “never recognize the collective rights of a minority that has long suffered discrimination.”

The claim that Israel is the “nation-state” of “the Jewish people” is, on its face, simply not true. The “nation-state” of American Jews is the United States, just as the “nation state” of British Jews is the United Kingdom, the “nation state” of French Jews is France, et.al.

Judaism Is a Religion, Not a Nationality

The Zionist notion that Israel is the Jewish “homeland,” and that all Jews living outside of Israel are in “exile,” is an ideological construct which has no relationship to reality. Most American Jews have always believed that Judaism was a religion of universal values, not a nationality, and that rather than being in “exile” in America, they were fully at home. This view has been expressed repeatedly in our history. In 1841, at the dedication ceremony of Temple Beth Elohim in Charleston, South Carolina, Rabbi Gustav Poznanski declared, “This country is our Palestine, this city our Jerusalem, this house of God our temple.”

The Israeli government, sadly, has never recognized that Jewish Americans were not “Israelis in exile.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly called upon American Jews to make a “mass aliyah” (emigration) to Israel. No other foreign government argues that millions of Americans — because of their religion — are in “exile” in the United States and that their real “homeland” — or “nation state” — is that foreign country.

Consider Prime Minister Netanyahu’s response to the terrorist attack in Paris in January. He went to France and declared, “I wish to tell to all French and European Jews — Israel is your home.” Netanyahu said that he would convene a special committee to promote emigration “from France and other countries in Europe that are suffering from terrible anti-Semitism.” Yair Lapid, Netanyahu’s former finance minister and head of a centrist party, said: “European Jewry must understand that there is just one place for Jews, and that is the state of Israel.” Exploiting every development in the world which seems to promote the Zionist narrative, Israel’s leaders tell Jews in the U.S. and every other country that Israel is their real “homeland.”

Horrors of Terrorism

The horrors of terrorism which have been inflicted upon Paris and elsewhere are being confronted by the governments involved. French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said, “If 100,000 Jews leave, France will no longer be France. The French Republic will be judged a failure.” Rabbi Menachem Margolin, director of the European Jewish Association, said that far better than emigration to Israel, would be the preservation and protection of Jewish life in the many countries Jews call home. He regretted that “after every anti-Semitic act in Europe, the Israeli government issues the same statement about the importance of aliyah rather than employ every diplomatic and informational means at its disposal to strengthen the safety of Jewish life in Europe.” He said: “The Israeli government must stop this Pavlovian response every time there is an attack against Jews in Europe.”

Yonathan Arfi, Vice President of CRIF, an umbrella group of Jewish institutions in France, says that he believes Jews should remain in France, which is their home. “We have had a Jewish community living here for more than a thousand years,” he said. “We went through bombing attacks, the Holocaust, acts of terrorism, and we are not about to leave now. We just want to be safe.”

Writing from Paris in The Forward (Jan. 16, 2015), Laurent-David Samama notes that while some French Jews might be considering emigration, “Others — including young Jews like me — feel that making aliyah is a too-easy escape; it’s simply not the answer. Those of us who remain in Paris, Marseille or Lyon are determined not to let the terrorists win. Throughout French history, Jews have experienced many periods of crisis. We’ve always overcome them, and we will overcome them again. Now more than ever … there is another significant communal faction that believes France needs us to stay here, to play the role of social whistleblower …”

Claude Lanzmann, the widely respected French Jewish filmmaker, best known for his Holocaust documentry film Shoah, said that following Benjamin Netanyahu’s advice would have only one result, giving Hitler, who did his best to rid France and all of Europe of Jews, “a posthumous victory.”

Limited Democracy Is Threatened

When it comes to Israel itself, the proposed Nationality Law makes clear that even the limited democracy which Israel now enjoys, is under serious threat. In an editorial entitled “Israel Narrows Its Democracy,” The New York Times (Nov. 25, 2014) declares: “Since its founding in 1948, Israel’s very existence and promise … has been based on the ideal of democracy for all its people. Its Declaration of Independence, which provides the guiding principles for the state, makes clear that the country was established as a homeland for the Jews and guarantees ‘complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.’ That is why it is heartbreaking to see the Israeli cabinet approve a contentious bill that would officially define Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, reserving ‘national rights’ only for Jews … To go back and emphasize nationality and religion in defining the country … runs counter to the long-term movement among liberal democracies toward a more inclusive vision of a state … Having experienced the grievous legacies created when a government diminishes the rights of its people, we know this is not the path that Israel should take.”

Professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan argues that, “Saying Israel is a ‘Jewish’ state in the sense of race would be analogous to insisting that the U.S. is a ‘white’ state and defining Latinos as ‘brown.’ And saying it is a Jewish state in the sense of observant believers would be like asserting that the U.S. is a Christian state even though about 22 per cent of the population does not identify as Christian (roughly the same proportion as non-Jews in Israel) … Netanyahu’s demand is either racist or fundamentalist and is objectionable from an American point of view on human rights grounds either way.”

Among other things, the initial drafts of the legislation by right-wing lawmakers, and approved by the Cabinet, would relegate Arabic from an official language to one with a “special status.” Israeli legal experts said that this legislation, in its more radical form, is clearly undemocratic. Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute and a former member of parliament, said that, “It’s an unnecessary piece of legislation because Israel’s Jewish and democratic nature is established in judgments and parliamentary legislation and in the Declaration of Independence.”

May Stain Israel

Avinoam Bar-Yosef, president of the Jewish People Policy Institute, said that any distortion of the balance between Israel’s Jewish and democratic character “may stain Israel in the eyes of the free world and distance diaspora Jews who are counted as supporters of the Zionist project.”

Israel has no constitution. Instead, its constitutional character consists of basic laws, judgments and the Declaration of Independence of 1948, which enshrines the right of the Jewish people to their own sovereign state and also pledges to “uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens.”

Yair Lapid, leader of the Yesh Atid party, which opposed the bill, said he had spoken shortly before its passage with the family of Zidan Seif, a Druze police officer who was killed while protecting Jewish worshipers from two Palestinians who attacked a Jerusalem synagogue with butcher knives and a gun in November. “What will we say to him? What will we say to them?” Lapid asked. “That the deceased is a second-class citizen in the state of Israel …?”

Mahmoud Seif, Zidan Seif’s great uncle, said that, “The Jewish people have suffered as a people more than most. They know what it means to be a minority, therefore they need to protect the minorities among them.” Zidan’s brother spoke out harshly against the proposed nationality legislation, telling Israel Radio that it would differentiate between Druze and Jewish blood. He said he would actively encourage Druze teens not to enlist in the army.

Druze Are Continually Disappointed

Most Druze, who follow a monotheistic religion that incorporates elements of all Abrahamic religions, are citizens, holding Israeli passports, speaking fluent Hebrew and fulfilling compulsory military service. Many later join the police force or security services. But Druze leaders complain that their towns are underdeveloped and they are forced to build illegally, and therefore face government demolitions, because they are often unable to obtain construction permits. Rabah Halabi, a lecturer at Hebrew University and an expert on Druze in Israel, says: “The Druze community continually feels disappointed by the state. They do everything that is asked of them, but they never feel full equality.”

The nationality bill, which contributed to the collapse of Israel’s coalition government, was called “a slap in the face” to non-Jewish Israelis by Dr. Halabi. Many Israelis agree. Journalist Sarabeth Lukin, writing in Washington Jewish Week (Nov. 27, 2014) declares that, “The bill upends the concept of Israel as ‘a Jewish and democratic state’ and downgrades democracy to a secondary status. It declares that Israel is, first and foremost, ‘the nation-state of the Jewish people,’ providing all of Israel’s 8 million citizens with the vague promise that they will be afforded ‘personal rights in accordance with every law.’ The proposed law also declares that only the Jewish people enjoy the right to national self- determination and that housing can be determined by religion or nationality. And if Jewish law, Halacha, takes precedence over civil law in both legal and legislative proceedings, as some scholars interpret the bill, Israel will find itself in the company of other theocratic Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran.”

According to Lukin, “Israel has no constitution, no bill of rights. Its national identity is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, which refers to the country as a Jewish state and stipulates that Israel ‘will uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of race, creed of sex’ … But Israel’s political character has changed since those words were written in 1948, slowly but inexorably acquiring a religious and nationalistic outlook.”

Retreat from Democracy

Many American Jewish supporters of Israel are dismayed about its retreat from democracy. Editorially, The Forward (Dec. 5, 2014) stated: “The test of a genuine democracy, or at least a nation that aspires to be one, is how it protects the rights of those with a skin color, faith tradition, cultural background, political party or language preference different from the majority. Are those in the minority to be full citizens? Are they treated equally by the laws and its enforcers? Is their difference considered a welcome attribute or an obstacle to inclusion? … The absence of constitutionally protected rights for minorities in Israel doesn’t only endanger Muslims or Christians or Druze. It also oppresses secular or non- orthodox Jews forced to comply with the enshrined religious monopoly of the Orthodox — who, while the minority in terms of population, exercise majority power in matters of conversion, marriage and, thanks to the Law of Return, citizenship … Israel can act in far more productive ways to ensure its eternal Jewish character than by enacting this law.”

Even groups that are usually hesitant to criticize Israel in any way have expressed misgivings. The American Jewish Committee said that, “The proposed Jewish state bill is ill-conceived and ill-timed.” The Anti-Defamation League said, “It is troubling that some have sought to use the political process to promote an extreme agenda.”

Israelis seem to recognize something which many American Jews fail to see — liberalism and Zionism cannot really be reconciled. In an article, “The Crisis Of Liberal American Jews” in The Jerusalem Post (International edition, Jan. 2-8, 2015) Ashley Rindsberg writes: “Trying to reconcile American liberalism, which at its heart is a doctrine of universal integration, with a Jewish Zionism that holds separateness as a defining principle … is like trying to mix oil and water. It’s an endlessly frustrating endeavor, the attempt at which can only give rise to question of hopelessness.”

It is time to come to grips with the reality that while Israel repeatedly says it is “Jewish and democratic,” the reality is far different. For Jews who are not Orthodox, Israel is a theocracy in which Reform and Conservative rabbis have no right to perform weddings, funerals or conversions. Israel is far more similar in this regard to Saudi Arabia and Iran than to Denmark or Switzerland.

For non-Jews, the idea of Israel as a “democracy” contradicts reality. Omar Barghouti, the Palestinian human rights activist, reports that, “Not even theoretically are Palestinian citizens of Israel given full rights, with or without this new law. Israel already has more than 50 laws that discriminate against its Palestinian Arab citizens in every domain, according to the human rights organization Adalah. The U.S. Department of State has criticized Israel for its system of ‘institutional, legal and societal discrimination’ against them … Israel does not recognize a civic Israeli nationality, lest that avail equal rights, at least theoretically, to all its citizens, and undermine its ‘ethnocratic’ identity.”

The State of Its Citizens

If Israel has any hope for a peaceful future, it must content itself with being the state of all its citizens and abandon the myth that it is the “nation-state” of Jews who are citizens of other countries. In fact, making a false god of a sovereign state is not Judaism, but idolatry. Thus, Israel is not only not a genuine democracy, but it is in contradiction to the basic principles of Judaism itself.

Prior to the mid-20th century, the vast majority of Jews rejected Zionism. In 1929, Orthodox Rabbi Aaron Samuel Tamarat wrote that the very idea of a sovereign Jewish state as a spiritual center was “a contradiction to Judaism’s ultimate purpose.” He wrote: “Judaism at root is not some religious concentration which can be localized or situated in a single territory. Neither is Judaism a ‘nationality,’ in the sense of modern nationalism … No, Judaism is Torah, ethics and exaltation of spirit … It cannot be reduced to the confines of any particular territory. For as Scripture said of Torah, ‘Its measure is greater than the earth.’”

Those who look at Israel’s current policies, such as continued construction and settlement of the occupied territories, are wrong to blame the right- wing. Israeli governments, whether Labor of Likud, have continued the occupation. Both right and left wing Israelis, apparently, are comfortable with the status quo. Those who lament what they think is the decline — or end — of “liberal Zionism” must seriously consider the possibility that Zionism, from the start, not only turned its back on the Jewish universal spiritual tradition but, by ignoring the rights of the indigenous population of Palestine, on Western principles of democracy and self-determination as well.

“Liberal Zionism” is not dead or dying. The truth is that it never existed at all, except in the minds of those who could not confront what was happening at the hands of an enterprise they eagerly embraced from afar, ignoring its harsh reality. That reality has now become clear to all, hence the current shock and dismay. Many continue to turn away from what is now taking place, but this will not be able to continue very much longer. •

Allan C. Brownfeld is a nationally syndicated columnist and serves as Associate Editor of The Lincoln Review and Editor of Issues. The author of five books, he has served on the staff of the U.S. Senate, House of Representatives, and the Office of the Vice President.