Yakov Rabkin Assesses “The Agony Of Liberal Zionism”

Writing in Pressenza (Feb. 17, 2023), Yakov Rabkin, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Montreal and author of “What Is Modern Israel?” assesses what he calls the “agony of liberal Zionism.”

He writes: “The new (Israeli) government may destroy the last of the two illusions dear to liberal Zionists and instrumental in maintaining Western support for Israel. Over half a million settlers on the territories Israel conquered in 1967 killed the prospect of a two-state solution. It has been confirmed dead and buried, even though Western governments continue to pay it lip service. The current Israeli government is casting a death blow to the second one, that of a ‘Jewish democratic state.’ These two illusions have long been hiding the reality of Zionist supremacy over the Palestinians. Unlike the Tel Aviv protestors who decry the dangers to democracy, the Palestinians have long known that Israel’s democracy is, in fact, an ethnocracy to oppress them.”

Rabkin, an Orthodox Jew, points out that, “Ethnic supremacy is basic to the Zionist project. It was enshrined legislatively in 2018 when the Knesset adopted a basic law proclaiming that Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people, rather than a state belonging to the people who inhabit it. This law offers legal protection to the well-established practice of discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel, who constitute about one fifth of the country’s population. Respectable human rights organizations in Israel and elsewhere have concluded that Israel practices a form of apartheid.”

Throughout the history of Zionism, Rabkin points out, “Anti-Semites have favored Zionism…The founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, remarked that anti- Semites would be the Zionist’s ‘friends and allies.’ Zionist organizations in Germany welcomed the ascent of Hitler to power. In 1934 Rabbi Joachim Prinz, a prominent Zionist in Germany (and later in the U.S.) extolled ‘the end of liberalism’ in his book ‘Wir Juden’ (We Jews). SS officials were guests of the Zionist leadership in Palestine and returned to Germany with admiration. A commemorative medal with the swastika on one side and the Zionist Star of David was minted in honor of that visit. This episode is now widely known thanks to the Israeli documentary ‘The Flat.’” Anti-Semites in Western countries welcomed Zionism, Rabkin notes, as diverting Jewish immigrants to Palestine—-and away from their own countries.

Prof. Rabkin concludes that, “Calls to expel all Palestinians from Israel and the territories it occupied in 1967 have become commonplace; these calls are now made conventionally by government ministers…What most of today’s critics ignore is the incompatibility of such institutions with exclusive ethnic nationalism. The extreme right now in power reflects the constitutive values of Zionism and is not shy to assert them…The current government undercuts the Illusion of liberal Zionism, a political oxymoron.” **