Liberal Zionism & the Idea of the Idea
WHY ISRAEL NOW?Yehuda Kurtzer
Yehuda Kurtzer is president of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.
There was a time not that long ago—in the half-century or so preceding the creation of the State of Israel in 1948—when Zionism was widely understood to be audacious, taking on the project of no less than repairing the condition of the Jewish people; it was plural, encompassing a variety of competing ideas, and aspirational, dreaming of a different and often utopian future. The annual Zionist congresses were not, as they often are today, pep rallies; they were contests between different visions for the future of the Jewish people. The only thing that bound these Zionisms together was that they were rooted in dreaming and imagining that future as dramatically different from and better than the Jewish present.
Zionism’s audacity and its diversity were not only valuable in bringing about the State of Israel; they also served a valuable organizing function for the Jewish people as a whole. Zionism represented a wide set of answers, among many others, to “the Jewish problem”; and what was true historically creates a powerful precedent for a normative claim: I want to argue that the very act of trying to provide constructive and even radical responses to our existential fears has powerful psychological and spiritual effects in mobilizing a people into the project of remedying its condition, rather than languishing in its limitations.
Since that time, the political strand of Zionism has become wildly successful by prioritizing self-determination and, ultimately, building a nation-state. At the same time, many of the other strands of Zionism have suffered; as a whole, Zionism seems to have lost or abandoned the complexity that initially fueled its growth from a marginal set of ideas into a mainstream movement. In other words, Zionism’s transformation from an ideological movement into a political reality came at the cost of the core aspirational idea that motivated Zionism to begin with, and increasingly comes at the cost of its own accountability to some important moral aspects of its original vision for itself. Its primary success, self-determination and sovereignty, should have been treated as prerequisite for realizing its moral aspirations—and not the end goal. The Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz claimed that Zionism was rooted in the need to not “be ruled by goyim.” But this should be the floor, never the ceiling.
For Zionism to reclaim its capacity to collectively mobilize the Jewish people and to rebuild its currency as a compelling movement for the next generation of Jews, it must now address two fundamental challenges: its continued failure to hold itself accountable to its own morally and politically coherent vision; and its failure to continue dreaming.
And what was that original dream? At the outset of the founding of the state, the triumphant Zionists understood what they were doing as building a liberal political movement. Liberalism was baked into the political Zionism that ultimately led to the building of the state. Liberalism was not a loose or discrete set of ideas meant to live alongside the project of Jewish self-determination; it was part of a theory—shared by other liberal nationalists in other parts of the world—that it was only through national self-determination that a state could guarantee the values and ends of liberal society. The state was an expression of political liberalism, and thus, should continue to be guided by the tenets of liberalism.
The evidence of the Zionist commitment to this idea is easily found in the preamble of Israel’s Declaration of Independence:
THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.
This incredible list of commitments could be read as exhausting and contradictory, but I believe its authors understood them as together constituting a coherent ideology. In more pithy form, this preamble states that Israel seeks to be both a Jewish state and a state of all its citizens. The authors imagine that the state can fulfill the need for Jewish sovereignty and self-determination in the land of Israel, while holding itself responsible to organize its political system as a liberal democracy that serves all its citizens and inhabitants equally.
The critics of liberal Zionism on the left (those who insist Israel is irredeemably illiberal already) and on the right (those who want it to be an illiberal and non-democratic Jewish state) tend to argue that Israel’s liberal democratic vision is too contradictory to enact. I insist, on the contrary, that tensions are not inherently contradictions, and that the Declaration of Independence’s list of commitments reflects a coherent and constructive outline for the state to play out its version of liberal nationalism. In its core ambition, the state imagines that the liberal ideas of equality, human rights, and religious pluralism are meant to characterize the ideal version of the state. This document is sufficient evidence that many of Israel’s founders understood the interplay between these commitments as essential to one another, and therefore endemic to their own interests.
Because political Zionism’s vision of a state was originally liberal in nature, Israel’s rightward lilt represents a problem that is threatening the state’s idea of itself. Here, too, Israel has company: the careful calculus that underlies liberal nationalism is eroding around the world, under threat of global polarization. Right-wing nationalists, who want to redefine nationalism as a kind of self-interest and to untether it from liberal values, are on the rise: they portray liberal values as foreign to the national identity of the dominant group, and therefore as expressions of cultural, national, or religious disloyalty. Liberal nationalism is also threatened by anti-nationalists on the left, who view liberal nationalism as no better than ultra-nationalism or ethnic nationalism—and maybe even worse, like lipstick on a pig.
In Israel’s particular case, this happens when the ideas of “liberalism” and “Zionism,” or “democracy” and “Judaism,” get pulled apart by their critics and presented as opposing values systems that are at best in tension with one another. For such critics, there is a clear hierarchy between the ideas of liberalism and Zionism. I’ve even argued this point with colleagues inside the Shalom Hartman Institute, which is a liberal Zionist institution. For some of my colleagues, Zionism is the sine qua non, and “liberal” is but an adjective; for others, liberalism is the core commitment, and any “Jewishness” of the state must subordinate itself to that ideal. Both arguments implicitly reject the idea that liberal Zionism—political Zionism’s founding vision, in which Zionism and liberalism are understood as essential to one another—is plausible.
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If we treat democracy and Judaism as irreconcilable value systems, there are surely plenty of Jews in the world who would choose one over the other. But what if, instead, we understood our Judaism as requiring an interlacing with our democratic commitments—if we refused to accept that a “clash” was inevitable or could not be overcome? In his book, Maimonides: Torah and Philosophical Quest, David Hartman argues that this was precisely what Maimonides sought to do in reconciling Torah and philosophy: not merely to accommodate the one to the other, not to default to a hierarchy nor engage in apologetics, but to weave the two discourses into one coherent hermeneutic in the pursuit of truth.
So, too, liberal Zionism is not just an ideology of imperfect compromise between two competing values systems. It is a coherent aspirational political program for a Jewish nation-state.
It is easy to point fingers at the people and processes that have failed Israel’s liberal democratic vision for itself. The Ashkenazi establishment failed to sustain a commitment to liberalism in the early years of the state, and instead tried to force-feed liberal ideas to immigrants from illiberal countries through illiberal methods. Other competing political ideals emerged in Israel, their plausibility increasing before an exhausted electorate. The opponents of liberal Zionism, which now includes most Israeli politicians, thrived in the growing perception of a dichotomy between liberalism and Zionism, painting the ideas of liberalism, justice, and equality as expressions of weakness and disloyalty to Judaism and Jewish interests. Israel pursued occupation and some other anti-democratic policies that are at odds with its vision for itself. There are endless sources that drive this skepticism.
But we liberal Zionists deserve a share of the blame as well. Most of us— and our liberal Zionist institutions—have spent the last 30 years talking about hoped-for political outcomes that would, in theory, guarantee our commitments, without advocating for those commitments themselves, or the ideology undergirding them. The best example of this is the two-state solution. Even as many of us believe in the two-state solution, our single-minded advocacy for this political approach implied a concession that Israel was not a liberal democracy now but could become one later, only after the conflict ended. This is not a recipe to advance an idea. And the failure of the two-state solution to come to pass makes it difficult, now, for liberal Zionists who once hinged their relationship to Israel on it to stay connected to the state as it is. Disbelief in the viability of liberal Zionism by both its critics and its adherents becomes self-fulfilling, even before either of them has interrogated its claims.
In other words, liberal Zionism stopped fighting for itself. The defeat of an ideal should take a lot longer than this to become a certainty! And this, to me, is the second major challenge that Zionism faces as it confronts its future, which is that Zionism has stopped dreaming of a better future. There is a blessing and a curse in a dream fulfilled: as much as it is a gift to see your dreams become real, there is loss in reaching the finish line. Implausible, improbable, impossible dreams fuel our imagination. As the dream of the messianic age has motivated Jewish endurance for centuries, as it created a vision for the world that could sustain optimism in dark times and could motivate perseverance through untold challenges, the dream of Zion went from reckless to plausible in less than a century, becoming the dominant political and ideological movement in Jewish life. It is incredible to think about, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that the dreaming itself was an essential contribution of Zionism to the Jewish people. If dreaming fuels imagination, what happens to all that energy once the state is founded?
In 1948, overnight, Zionism was transformed from a project of the Jewish people’s imagination of what could be to a discourse of loyalty to what is. This is consistent with an observation I like to offer about organizational life more generally, what I call “the tragedy of institutions.” All institutions come into being to respond to pressing needs, and to provide infrastructure to care for those needs. Instantly and inevitably, as soon as any institution is created, its mission changes to ensure the survival of the institution itself.
This is true about ideas as well. Before any idea is realized, it can tolerate endless brainstorming, tinkering, and experimenting; a lot of what once passed as Zionism was utterly strange. Many of its thinkers and visioners detested one another because they rightly saw each other as competitors for the soul and substance of the same shared project. Once the Zionist idea manifested into an actual state, Zionists had to transact with the realities of survival, enlisting support and resources to ensure its continued existence. This was a blessing, but it came at the cost of the wildness and excitement of the earlier phase.
Even so, as Zionism has acted in its own pragmatic interests, it has made a breathtakingly shortsighted compromise about maintaining passion towards its future among its adherents. If we understand the creative process that led to the formation of Zionism as an essential piece of the project, then to sublimate that discourse of imagination and creativity is to lose one of the most compelling aspects of Zionism. It shuts off a tap of enlistment for those who are yet to come.
For many liberal Zionists, especially those of us outside the State of Israel, participating in a shared, unfinished, and deeply imperfect collective project already is and can continue to be deeply compelling. We feel connected to Israel and understand the ways that its shortcomings already implicate us, and therefore, impel our involvement. But when our educational and political systems tell us that the work of Zionism is done—that we are merely meant to support the State of Israel as it is and not as its founding literature, and the whole history of Jewish civilization, suggest it could and should be—well, that is a different story altogether. It is no surprise that this is a profound turnoff to young people. What a turnabout! Zionism was once a project dominated by young people. Now it fears them.
Such a message is also deeply un-Jewish. How can a people that has lived most of its history obsessed with continuity—because it dreams of eternity—be so adamantly passionate about preserving its imperfect present? Isn’t it astonishingly sad that after the very first generation of Jews who saw their dreams of political transformation come true—following millennia of disappointment and failure—the current generation would become so hostile and skeptical towards the motivations of Jews who would insist that the work is not done, who would try to imagine alternatives to the present reality, who would insist on holding Zionism accountable for falling short of what it intended to do.
These two challenges—liberal Zionism’s chronic defeats on the political playing field, and Zionism’s abandonment of the language of imagination—attest to a deeper ideological vacuum, borne of the current moment: Why are ideas—big, bold visions for society—struggling to hold our attention and to mobilize our convictions?
In thinking about the power inherent in embracing the idea of liberal Zionism, I am defending the very idea of the idea. I believe that every society possesses, or should possess, an essential and aspirational principle that articulates a vision for itself and that helps organize its members towards shared action. It is a way of expressing what a society should be. I like to think that our relationship to these sorts of ideas—whatever they are—must be asymptotic, in that we strive towards the limit but never reach it. This is not because we are always failing, but because this sort of collective moral improvement is inexhaustible.
Our job as citizens and stakeholders is to hold our societies accountable for the implementation in practice of our best ideas. Possessing a vision of the good or expressing one’s ethos as a goal does not mean that a society has accomplished its vision. In fact, it can lead the opposite way, towards passionate criticism of the society for not doing what it should do to achieve its goal, or towards anger at the hypocrisy of a society that thinks of itself as motivated by a vision it falls short of realizing. But an idea can also inspire and strengthen the bonds of loyalty: it invites its members to stay committed to something bigger than the failings of the present. It cultivates constructive engagement.
Religions are good sites to explore the idea of the idea. While the members of any religious community might not spend a lot of time in their day-to-day lives meditating on the larger organizing principle of their religion, religious literature is filled with attempts to articulate essential ideas, to distill complex traditions down to core principles. In this literature, we see that the need for such distillation becomes more urgent when we perceive that we are failing or falling short of what we should be doing, or when we compare our traditions with others and do not like what we see. God’s message to Abraham in chapter 18 of Genesis is the Hebrew Bible’s first expression of such a principle as oriented towards a particular society, declaring that Abraham is meant to be an ambassador of justice and righteousness in a way that should exemplify the character of his descendants; in Exodus, Moses is the essentialist lawgiver, reducing revelation to ten key commandments that serve as an abstract for others yet to come; and later, the prophets use concise expressions of essential principles, amplified with emotion, to try to hold societies accountable.
“What does God want of you?” asks the prophet Micah. An astute Bible reader might answer, “Quite a bit.” The Bible is constituted of many books cataloguing commandments and instructions. Nevertheless, Micah responds with only half a sentence: “To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” (6:8). That may indeed encompass quite a bit, but it is also quite simple. Jews have as our template a set of simple commitments that organize our lives and are never fulfilled.
Organizing principles like these articulate core commitments and make demands upon us; they do not describe societies as they are but give them concrete moral visions toward which they should aspire; they are actionable though not easily achieved; they can grow and change as needed, particularly in moments of crisis. It is the confused and contested moments that are most ripe for the articulation or rearticulation of a big idea, and to do so is a radical act of strategic optimism.
There are countless such moments in Jewish history—the rabbis in the wake of the destruction of the Temple, for instance—but my favorite example of an organizing principle that helps us think about this moment we are in is the emergence of “the American idea” right before the Civil War. Writing in the Atlantic, Yoni Appelbaum cites the abolitionist Theodore Parker arguing, 74 years after the founding of the United States, that the American idea consists of three elements: “that all people are created equal, that all possess unalienable rights, and that all should have the opportunity to develop and enjoy those rights.”[i] Parker’s words were later echoed in speeches by President Lincoln, reinforcing this core and essential message of what America was meant to be about. As Appelbaum notes, this commitment to the idea of the American idea mobilized the very creation of the Atlantic magazine and fueled the development of a particular American political ideology and activism.
Now let’s consider the alternative. Parker did not invent the components of his American ideal. His genius was in re-formulating them as a defining principle of his society. By 1850, with the country on the verge of the Civil War, the motivation behind earlier phases of American political solidarity was collapsing quickly and violently. The pessimistic option of giving up on that vision would have been easier. Parker could well have claimed that America was founded on a lie and argued for a new vision of what America should be. But his choice to claim that the American idea was the same as it had always been constituted a re-commitment to the same American project, even as he implicitly called attention to its failings. His words unified patriotism and criticism, solidarity, and a change strategy, in a single rhetorical gesture.
Similarly, I think even those of us who believe in the power of ideas know that it was not merely Zionist ideas that impelled the creation of the State of Israel. Zionist ideas were impelled into reality by powerful global forces and a set of extraordinary historical circumstances in the middle of the 20th century: violent antisemitism, the Shoah, the global popularity of ethnonationalism, and the carving up of the imperial world into nation-states. Even the best of ideas—and I think the core premise of liberal Zionism is one of them—needs the help of larger events and trends to become real. And yet without ideas, nothing would happen.
As America in 1860 was at a crossroads, so, too, is the ideological project of Zionism today; and Zionism’s political success misleads us to think that because the existential crisis of the mid-20th century helped create the state, the ideological aims of the movement have been fulfilled. Israel constitutes a capable and competent means for the Jewish people to at least attempt a fair fight against those who hate us; more optimistically, it constitutes the high-water mark of the Jewish people’s sense of belonging in the family of nations. And now, perhaps, at this inflection point, ideological work becomes newly necessary.
Politics often resists the very idea of the idea—because the idea of the idea rejects the comfort of the status quo, and it pushes beyond the present. In America, progressives increasingly organize around the demythologization and dismantling of the American idea. They often object that America never was what its patriots intended for it to be, and that this failure betrays not a project in progress, but a deceitful enterprise. Conservatives, in turn, are becoming apologists for the American idea, but they misunderstand it as an empirical description of American goodness, rather than as an ideal meant to constantly motivate its citizens towards the aspiration for change.
On a parallel track, both status quo Zionists and anti-Zionists are skeptical about a morally aspirational Zionist idea as an organizing principle for the future. Status quo Zionists want to cultivate support for Israel “as is,” and they fear that even moral aspiration, and the inevitable social criticism that follows, will quickly become disloyalty. Anti-Zionists tend to believe that Israel’s vision for itself has either failed or could never become true. In both cases, these populations replace a moral vision for Israel’s future with their own alternative interpretations of Israel’s present: either Start-Up Nation, in which economic and technological advancement replace moral aspiration; or apartheid, claiming that Israel is irredeemable and must be replaced, not repaired. These, too, are essentialisms; they make Zionism into either a vision fulfilled, or an unfulfillable pipe dream.
As a liberal Zionist, I want to insist now on the importance of the idea; to insist, against political odds and against the rhetorical climate, that there is a Zionist idea that animates us and obligates us, and to use that idea to hold us together and accountable to its fulfilment.
I think that today, we must return to three key elements in the liberal Zionist idea. The first is political viability. Neither fatigue about the endurance of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, nor a decades-long history of failure in implementing peace plans, is a persuasive argument against an aspirational vision—especially when the liberal Zionist vision still represents the most morally serious position for securing freedom, dignity, and safety for Israelis and Palestinians between the river and the sea, without requiring either Israelis or Palestinians to betray their national aspirations, and without hinging itself on the dismantling of the state. Within the state of Israel proper, the combination of a Jewish state, and a state for its citizens articulated by liberal Zionism, remains the best option from among available political systems. And the Jewish people today—the first generation of Jews to have lived after a previous generation of Jews saw its impossible dreams come to fruition—should be most circumspect about arguments insisting that because the ideal structure of reconciliation has not come about quickly, it should be abandoned. Shame on us, if the lesson of Zionism was that our dreams can be fulfilled quickly, rather than that the dreams worth working toward should feel impossible.
The second component of a renewed Zionist idea must involve reasserting the value of dreaming of a better future. Early Zionist literature was obsessed with dreaming. This echoes Psalm 126, where those who return to Zion from Babylon after the first exile characterize themselves as being “like dreamers,” witnessing the fulfilment of a promise that they could not have imagined coming true. Israel’s national anthem, “Hatikvah,” the poem of a bohemian wanderer, also describes the return to modern Israel as a dream, and does so in the grammar of the subjunctive—so long as we long for it, the dream is not forgotten. I like listening to the ways that America’s national anthem recalls a moment of glory from the past, and Israel’s continues to long for glory in the future.
And third, programs that seek to educate young people about Zionism, and to engage them with the State of Israel, must open more pathways for those who want to work towards the real-life implementation of the movement’s ideals. In earlier eras, Zionism transformed what it could mean to be Jewish, and simultaneously gave Jews concrete ways to bring about a new reality for the Jewish people. For Diaspora Jews, this was often expressed through donating vast sums of money to a state they would never live in and would only visit infrequently. They did this not because they thought Zionism was perfect, but because philanthropy offered them a means through which they could invest in imagination and possibility.
In short, throughout the middle and towards the end of the 20th century, Israel was a project of the Jewish people’s pragmatic optimism, and it invited participation. At the time, its challenges were infrastructure, security, and plausibility. Today, its challenges are democracy, religious pluralism, and human rights. They are no more impossible to achieve than their predecessors.
The current generation of Jewish would-be Zionists are on the fence not only because of what they perceive as Israel’s shortcomings, but because Zionism rarely offers them ways to help Israel address those shortcomings. Left-wing philanthropy to Israel is accused of trying to change the status quo from “the outside,” even as right-wing philanthropy, which has succeeded in changing the status quo—also from the outside—is never subjected to the same critique. In Jewish educational settings, educators often feel and report anxiety about getting the story of Israel “right,” because they correctly understand that the cultural climate is hostile to Israel. This then means that the only imaginable activist lane we are offering our children is defending Israel against accusations of its imperfections, which in turn makes the same educational settings less likely to talk honestly about those very imperfections. Meanwhile, what about all the intellectual, moral, financial, and relational capital that American Jews might bring to help our fellow Jews in Israel as they wrestle with those challenges? If we believe that the forces of extremism in Israel are in the minority, and that many Israelis want to defeat those forces, isn’t the work of aspirational Zionism to support Israelis in that fight—rather than merely trying to talk about the good parts of Israel from the sidelines?
As a parent, and as an educator, I believe that our children have the capacity to understand far more deeply the challenges that Israel faces, particularly those that emerge from the breach between what Israel is and what it could be. I want them to see those challenges because I want them to feel responsible, like their Zionist ancestors before them. Our failures and our imperfections should not be a source of embarrassment for the Jewish people; they should be catalysts that move us to fulfill our obligations and responsibilities, and instruments through which we nurture attachment to our people. Jewish education should be a multi-generational process, wherein we gift our people’s problems to our children and help them take over fixing the world where we fell short.
Israel is great and broken in many ways. This is not a statement of disloyalty; it is the statement of a person who feels responsible.
The gaps abound between Israel’s liberal democratic ideal for itself and the present reality. These are most evident in the continued structural inequalities that Israel’s Palestinian citizens face; in the enduring occupation, which leaves Palestinians in limbo about their own right to self-determination and breeds human rights abuses; in Israel’s inconsistent policies on immigration and asylum; in the plodding process through which different denominations of Jews acquire and maintain their rights of religious expression; in the rising tide of neo-fascist and other extreme ideologies on the Israeli right, that not only threaten the ideals of liberalism but seek to redefine Israel’s identity. To address all these challenges is precisely the agenda of liberal Zionism, as a continuation of the project of dreaming that formed the State of Israel to begin with. To treat these challenges as evidence of liberal Zionism’s failure is not just to admit defeat now; it is to treat Zionism as though it were a mere political program, and not the ideology of the Jewish people that brought us to this moment.
The urgencies of political state-building took priority in the 1940s and 1950s over the other aspects of the Zionist dream. When you are seeking to survive, everything else—morality, spirituality, culture—moves to the back seat. But for a people that has dreamed for so long in moral and cultural technicolor, survival can never remain the goal indefinitely. At some point, the Jewish people’s responsibility to work towards its betterment becomes paramount.
If liberal Zionism is in the DNA of the original political Zionism, and if Zionism is premised on the idea of the idea, then it is time to reclaim our imagination of what Zionism can do to remedy its future. If this is not forthcoming in the political systems, it is attainable in our educational systems. And it is not just for the benefit of the State of Israel and all its inhabitants; it is for the benefit of the entire Jewish people, who were once mobilized and dignified by the power of an idea to change the world and bring it about. For I fear the alternative: if Zionism is not allowed to dream and to imagine—about justice, equality, freedom, and others of the most noble ideas of our tradition and our history—well, I am certain that the Jewish people will continue to dream; but they will use their dreams, in the language of justice and hope and freedom, against that prosaic, static, status-quo Zionism that chooses to remain soberly awake.
This article appears in Sources, Fall 2022.
Notes
[i] Yoni Appelbaum, “Is the American Idea Doomed?” The Atlantic (November 2017).
