Reframing the Zionist Narrative in Recognition of Palestinian Experience
Joshua Levisohn
Credit: Alamy, Palestinian women and children driven from their homes by Israeli forces, 1948
Joshua Levisohn is Director of Boston and Washington, DC at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.
In 1979, I joined the entirety of my K-12 Jewish day school in the auditorium to witness the signing of the historic peace treaty between Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin on television. It was an exhilarating time to be a Zionist—having weathered the trauma of the Yom Kippur War, we were still basking in the afterglow of the Six-Day War, and we could imagine peace between Israel and its neighbors developing over the next generation. At the time, the story we told ourselves about Israel inspired awe and admiration.
It was a story of:
a people escaping from persecution to a place of their own, miraculously defeating their far more numerous enemies who were bent on their destruction;
pioneers with uncommon courage, drive, and inner strength, building a great country based on inspiring and revolutionary ideas, and cultivating the land to make it flourish like never before;
a nation welcoming immigrants from all over the globe, expanding its population by an astounding 500% over its first thirty years; and
a founding document declaring the state to be exceptional and a beacon to the world.
I vividly recall celebrating the miracle of Israel on Israeli Independence Day throughout my childhood, learning to read Hebrew with short stories touting the exploits of teenagers defending their settlements in the years before the state, and hearing the exhortations of our teachers and rabbis in support of the young state. All of this affirmed the compelling Zionist narrative.
Many of you, both older and younger than I, may continue to recognize this version of the Zionist narrative as the dominant one in Jewish educational, religious, and political institutions.
However, as I got older, learned more, and expanded my circle of interlocutors, I came to recognize that the story I had been taught obscures the full extent of the consequences that resulted from the establishment of Israel and downplays the sins that accompanied its triumphs. The conventional Zionist narrative depends upon keeping the Palestinian story nearly totally hidden in the shadows and highlighting only the heroic and inspiring parts of the Zionist story. However, for reasons both practical and principled, I no longer believe it is acceptable for us to silence the Palestinian perspective on the developments of the last century in the Middle East. And once we begin to hear the Palestinian voices and to interrogate the details of the history of Israel, we must also reexamine and reframe the Zionist narrative to account for the full extent of the history of the last century: its successes and its failures, its benefits and its costs, its moments of pride and its embarrassments. Far from undermining Zionism, the project of reframing the Zionist narrative seeks to support the righteousness of the Jewish national project while also acknowledging some of its uglier realities.
I am not the first, and I am hardly the only person to recognize that there is much more going on in the history of Zionism than the stories told to me when I was a child. Indeed, this type of maturation and recognition that the world is more complex than I had realized as a youngster is fairly routine. However, the story that much of the Jewish world tells itself about Zionism continues to be infused with the early mythology even as the realities of Zionism have been well acknowledged. More and more, this is leading many Jews either to lean even further into the mythology and reject or ignore the complexities or to accept the complexities and reject the classical Zionist story, and sometimes Zionism itself. This false choice is damaging to the truth and to Zionism, creating a need for an alternative, more expansive Zionist story.
Opening ourselves up to the Palestinian narrative and to an honest assessment of the history of Zionism feels like a risk, but it is compelling on many levels. As Jews, integrity, honesty, and the pursuit of truth has always been central to our intellectual endeavors, and the same must apply to our understanding of Zionism. Similarly, listening to the impact of Zionism on Palestinians is the right and just thing to do. This kind of receptive and resilient listening need not require us to accept at face value the Palestinian take on the last century, but it does ask of us to hear their perception of the recent history of the region and to understand that it played out very differently for them than it has for the Jews: the Nakba (the Palestinian term for Israel’s War of Independence that means “the catastrophe”) and its ongoing consequences, Israel’s continued expansion, crimes committed against civilian populations at different times, constant discrimination, and the overall deterioration of their private and national lives during this period. There is also a pragmatic consideration for addressing the Palestinian narrative: younger Jews, especially in North America, are exposed to the Palestinian story through social and conventional media, teachers, and friends. While some of what they learn is false and distorted, there is enough truth that for many of them, a Zionist narrative that hides the Palestinians in the shadows is no longer tenable or compelling.
What do I mean by a Zionist narrative?
For almost forty years, Israeli historians have been studying the history of Israel, particularly its founding, with a much more critical eye, and they have incorporated the Palestinian experience into their writing. However, when I talk about adding nuance and perspective to the Israeli narrative, I am not talking about this kind of careful historical research. What I have in mind is, instead, the story that we tell ourselves about Zionism: shorter and less detailed than an academic history but more compelling, more accessible, more memorable, and more impactful on who we are as Zionists. This sort of narrative conveys the broad sweep of Israel’s history, and it seeks to define the country, its ideals, and its purpose.
Despite the claims of its worst critics, Israel is far from unique in its need to reevaluate its internal story. Most countries have a founding narrative, and in recent years, throughout the world, people have been reexamining and reframing these narratives in light of a better understanding of and sensitivity to the impact of the country’s founding on others. Scholars in the United States and in Canada have rethought their stories given the cost of their country’s founding on the native populations and, particularly in the US, its sordid history of slavery. This is an ongoing and controversial project that demonstrates just how much the story we tell about ourselves affects our contemporary reality.
And yet, in many ways, rethinking the founding narrative is even more fraught for Israel than it is for other country. There is a real and reasonable fear that any acknowledgement of Zionism’s consequences on other people will inflame passions against Israel around the world, leading to further attacks against its legitimacy as a state and in favor of radical solutions that may damage its future. There is also a real and reasonable desire among Israelis for some reciprocity, some acknowledgement from Palestinians that their own history has included some very violent sins against Jews and Israelis. Why should Israelis consider the Palestinian perspective and their suffering if Palestinians rarely do the same in turn?
These concerns notwithstanding, I believe that as Zionists, as Jews, as leaders, and as parents to the next generation, we have a responsibility to own up to the consequences of Zionism for Palestinians and to tell a Zionist narrative that is not only inspiring and relevant but also true in a more complete sense. I also believe that it is particularly incumbent upon us, as American Jews with a deep commitment to Israel, to undertake this project in a way that Israelis have been increasingly reluctant to do.
In the rest of this essay, I want to outline three areas that the Zionist story of my youth did not adequately address and to suggest framing for a narrative that can tell the story of Zionism and the State of Israel while also bringing the Palestinian experience out of the shadows. The narrative I am envisioning reckons with the past but remains focused on what Zionism means for the present and for the future.
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The 1948 Israeli Declaration of Independence is arguably the most well-known version of the conventional Zionist narrative, and it offers us a good starting point. Premised on the portrayal of the Jews as a people in exile that longed for a return to its homeland, the document describes the Jewish people’s historical legacy in the land of Israel; their return to the land, and the cities, language, culture, and economy they built there; the tragedy of the Holocaust, and the urgency that it generated to establish a Jewish homeland and refuge; and the commitment of the Jewish people in Israel to create a vibrant liberal democracy.
This document still gives me chills when I read it, particularly when I remember the terrible legacy of European antisemitism that preceded its composition and proclamation. But today I can also see its shortcomings: the righteousness of the cause is taken for granted, and the Palestinians as a people are invisible, with the existence of any potential non-Jewish citizens mentioned only obliquely. Nowhere does the document recognize the people inhabiting the land of Palestine to which the Jews were returning, nor does it state a plan for them once the State of Israel has been established. Some might say that explicit reference to the Palestinians and their destiny did not belong directly in the Israeli Declaration of Independence, but in light of the influence this document has had on shaping and reinforcing the Zionist narrative, its absence is glaring and notable.
The Zionist narrative enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, the one that defined my childhood and continues to inform many Jewish institutions, demands a reckoning in three primary areas:
The consequences of the Jewish return to their ancestral homeland for the population already living there, irrespective of how one apportions guilt and blame;
Actions by Jews leading up to and following the establishment of the State that may have crossed the line from self-defense to indefensible atrocities; and
Past and current state policies at odds with the original conception of Zionism and/or with Israel’s stated principles and values.
1. The consequences of the Jewish return to their ancestral homeland for the population already living there
At the same time as Jews have argued for and believed in the legitimacy of the Jewish national project, the Palestinians have understandably viewed Zionism as a wholly unjust enterprise. Whether or not the Jews deserve their own state, Palestinians did not believe that they specifically should hand over territory—and later, sovereignty—to the Jews. After the Holocaust, when the need for a Jewish state seemed more acute than ever, Palestinians did not feel they should bear the burden of solving (or absolving) the rest of the world’s guilt.
After Israel’s War of Independence, and as the twentieth century continued to unfold, the reality of the State of Israel made life even worse for the Palestinians; many of them became permanent refugees, continuing to lose control over land that they believed was theirs, and suffering further indignity and tragedy with each new skirmish.
We can debate and dispute who exactly is responsible and to what degree for all of these realities; even Palestinians divide blame among many actors, including Great Britain, the US, Russia, the other Arab nations, and, of course, the Jews. Some argue that the Palestinian refusal to accept the initial partition, the reality of the Israeli state, and the subsequent compromise proposals have increased the misery of their plight over the course of the last century. Regardless, it is undeniable that the cost of Zionism’s success fell disproportionately and unfairly on the Palestinians. In Defining Neighbors: Religion, Race, and the Early Zionist-Arab Encounter (2014), historian Jonathan Gribetz describes how, even in the very early stages of Zionism, there were some prescient Palestinians who were sympathetic to the theory of Zionism and the Jewish connection to their ancestral homeland who also recognized that their arrival would cause conflict and spell disaster for the Palestinians living there.
The need to understand the impact of Zionist triumphs on Palestinians begins with the onset of the Nakba. The combination of forced expulsions and encouraged exile of Palestinians during 1947 and 1948 has been well documented by Israeli and Palestinian historians utilizing archival records. Again, blame and responsibility may be shared for these end results—even the Palestinians argue that the blame does not begin and end with the Zionists—but it is hard to argue against the claim that Zionism has led to exile and considerable suffering among the Palestinians. Reading stories set during the Nakba such as “The Land of Sad Oranges” by Ghassan Kanafani or “Bread of Our Sacrifice” by Samira Azzam, or the sweeping histories written by representative voices like Rashid Khalidi in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, provide us an insight into their thinking and perspective. The Side-by-Side textbook, which presents parallel accounts of the history by Israeli and Palestinian educators, is another excellent source for understanding what Zionist triumphs have meant to the Palestinians. (It’s available in Arabic, Hebrew, and English editions.)
What should we do when the Zionist and Palestinian narratives conflict? I believe that we can uphold the righteousness of the Zionist cause without negating Palestinian claims to their own righteousness. Take, for example, keys to Palestinian homes vacated in 1947-48, which many families continue to hold onto. For Palestinians, these keys hold a special place in their consciousness as a symbol of everything they lost in the Nakba and of their dream to return to their homes one day, even when those homes may no longer exist. The keys, understandably sacred to many Palestinians, are also reasonably understood by Zionists as a symbol of the Palestinian refusal to recognize the Jewish right to self-determination and as a continuing threat to displace Israel in the future. These competing interpretations of the keys can both be simultaneously true—much like a family with an old lien on an estate might well deserve part or all of that estate while the family currently living on the estate does not deserve to lose any of it. Two claims to the land may both be just even though they directly oppose one another.
More broadly, the Jewish ancestral claim to the land of Israel runs headlong into the indigenous population’s claim to the same land. Though Palestinians lacked sovereignty before and under the British Mandate, the 1947 UN Partition Plan required them to cede any kind of control over approximately half of the land to a new Jewish-governed state. The portion of the land under Jewish control increased to more than 75% following the War of Independence in 1948 and to the entirety of the land following the Six Day War in 1967. With regard to the land itself, here, too, it is fair and just to acknowledge that the success of Zionism, a historic miracle for the Jewish people, cost the Palestinians dearly. And, if we accept that two diverging, even conflicting narratives can both represent the truth, we can acknowledge and validate Palestinian claims of loss in 1948 without relinquishing either the Jewish ancestral claim to the land or support for Zionism.
A new Zionist narrative, especially one crafted with the advantage of power and success, should explicitly recognize that the creation of the state doomed Palestinians to generations of refugee status away from the land they call home; challenged their own notion of peoplehood; and left them without a state or any other decent prospects for their collective future. We can revel in the accomplishments of Zionism and also empathize with the plight of the Palestinians that came about as a result of these accomplishments. Indeed, the Zionist narrative must accept the dignity of Palestinian peoplehood and the right of the Palestinians to a state of their own. This is consistent with the original spirit of the goals of Zionism that supported a homeland, and later espoused statehood, for a people without a home.
To be sure, as we sit here in 2025, no one (including me) espousing a Zionist narrative would suggest that a Palestinian state is or should be around the corner—there are so many current political and security concerns that make it impossible to imagine right now. Nonetheless, it should remain the end goal. The Jews’ return to national dignity in the form of statehood must lead us to respect the restoration of the national dignity of the Palestinians as well. Making this an explicit part of the Zionist narrative may not create a solution tomorrow, but it clarifies that for Zionism to fulfill its vision, it must entwine its aspirations with Palestinian aspirations. We owe this much to our Palestinian neighbors.
2. Crimes committed in the name of Zionism
In the Declaration of Independence, the State commits itself to “precepts of liberty, justice, and peace taught by the Hebrew prophets” and promises to “uphold the full social and political equality of all of its citizens... and [to] guarantee full freedom of conscience, worship, education, and culture.” This makes moral boundaries at least as weighty for Zionism as for any other movement of national liberation, and supporters of Israel should hold themselves to a similarly higher standard than supporters of other countries. This standard should include a forthright acknowledgment when Israel’s fighters and adherents have committed crimes and atrocities, whether in the leadup to the establishment of Israel or during the nearly 80 years since. Unfortunately, for various reasons, supporters of the traditional Zionist narrative have most often denied these allegations or excused them away.
The traditional narrative and subsequent rhetoric have made it feel as if acknowledging such sins would call the legitimacy and sustainability of the Israeli state into question. This is not true for any other state, nor should it be true for Israel. In order for us to reckon properly with the past, we must break the perception that there is a direct relationship between acknowledging mistakes and undermining the legitimacy of the State. With a reframed Zionist narrative that acknowledges the impact of Zionism on Palestinians, our faith in Zionism will not feel threatened by new historical discoveries, and we will no longer feel that we must defend Israel’s every action, including those actions that we don’t fully understand but are afraid to interrogate.
Reckoning with the allegations made against Zionism and Israel is complicated for a variety of reasons. To begin with, it requires as accurate an understanding as possible of the history behind the allegations. The alleged massacre at Deir Yassin and the mass expulsion from Lydda in 1948; the indiscriminate retaliation against civilians in Qbiyah in 1953; and the enabling of the massacre of Palestinians by Christian Lebanese forces in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982 are all examples of events seared into the minds of Palestinians. With each of these events, there are ambiguities regarding both the facts and the surrounding context that make it more challenging to acknowledge the atrocities that did occur. Indeed, there are some historians who dispute Israeli or Jewish culpability for each one of these events; their disputations appear in the conventional Zionist narrative as the claim that Israel has done little that cannot be excused or explained. However, in the long run, this approach to dealing with the sins of Israel’s past is a fool’s errand.
While it may be true that the Palestinian account of one tragedy or another may be exaggerated or distorted, preserving a pristine Zionist narrative requires a leap of faith that strains credulity and, perhaps even worse, requires a continued insistence on finding Israel blameless for whatever new event or new policy might challenge this record. The evidence of some measure of Israeli culpability for immoral actions is too clear to uphold this approach.
Some historians and supporters of Israel concede that ugly incidents occurred throughout Israeli history, but they insist that there is always a context that can explain away the ugliness: within the framework of a war, against a deadly enemy, or for the sake of the survival of the Jewish state, they say, some amount of immoral behavior is inevitable. This is what happens in war, and while it might not make us proud, they say, it is also entirely understandable, and, by extension, excusable. We see this in historian Benny Morris’s belief that the expulsion of the Arabs from their homes in 1948 was necessary because Israel could not realistically have survived with a large number of Palestinians living within its borders. He has gone so far as to say that, if anything, the expulsions should have been more complete so that the future of Israel would have been more secure and peaceful.
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Journalist Ari Shavit provides a milder version of Morris’s claim: while the expulsions in Lydda and elsewhere were immoral, he writes, they were also necessary for Zionism to survive. Politician and historian Abba Eban contextualized all problematic behavior in the earliest stages of the State by claiming that because the Arab nations rejected the Partition Plan and went to war in 1948, blame for Israel’s subsequent actions rests on them and not on Israel. A gentler version of these claims might be that it is better to ask for forgiveness than to risk the future of the State. In this respect, Israelis are no worse than Americans or Australians or any civilized nation with skeletons in its closet.
It is a fantasy to believe that one can undo history, and, even more so, to believe that one can isolate one or two incidents and determine how history should have evolved instead. This is important to remember especially when addressing those who wish to use history to delegitimize the State. At the same time, we should note that arguments excusing unfortunate aspects of the Israeli past do not work well with an audience that is not already partisan. To see this, we need only think about how Israelis and Jews typically react to efforts to contextualize Palestinian terrorism. They reject such claims vociferously; argue that moral atrocities cannot be excused by context; demand punishment, apologies, and compensation; and use Palestinian terrorism to denounce and delegitimize the entire Palestinian national movement.
Earnest Zionists must begin by recognizing that context is helpful for understanding but insufficient for excusing. We must examine history with an open mind, knowing that it is likely (or more than likely) that Israeli Jews committed crimes against Palestinians, and we can be forthright about those transgressions without denying—and even while insisting on —Israel’s continuing right to exist.
A revised standard Zionist narrative would change our approach in these ways:
We must recognize that crimes and atrocities should be investigated to the fullest extent possible. Not every accusation can be corroborated, nor should every accusation demand an apology, but we need to be open to the very real, almost inevitable, possibility that certain actions over the course of the history of Zionism may have crossed a moral boundary.
We should acknowledge the crimes, apologize for their having been committed in the name and purpose of Zionism and—this is key—commit to living up to the ideals of Zionism which include the seeking of peace, the taking of responsibility, and the cultivating of a better life for everyone “from the River to the Sea.” The Kahan Commission, established to determine Israeli culpability in the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, serves as a model for this. The Israeli response to the massacre in Qbiya in 1953—calling it outrageous but blaming it on rogue civilians—does not.
We should be prepared to compensate victims of these atrocities, where they are proven, as a matter of principle. Now, this willingness may be more theoretical than fully actual; given the atrocities on both sides, the need to negotiate many issues at once, and the vastness of the claims, it may indeed be the case that the victims may never receive direct compensation in the way that a single individual would expect after being harmed by a single other person. Nonetheless, the recognition of rights to reparations represents a critical step in the conception of Zionism irrespective of the reality and status of these reparations after all negotiations are completed.
Acknowledgment of transgressions, assertion of Palestinian rights to peoplehood and sovereignty, apologies for crimes, willingness to compensate, commitment to doing better—these all should be appended to the story expressed in the Declaration of Independence if we want an honest narrative of the Zionist project.
Israelis as well as other Zionists I know and respect have suggested that we need not do this until we see Palestinians reckon with their engagement with Zionism in an equally open-minded way. This is not likely to happen anytime soon for various reasons, some understandable and some frustrating. Nonetheless, this lack of reciprocity should not affect the need for and the compelling nature of Zionists reenvisioning their narrative, which is a righteous enterprise regardless of whether Palestinians reciprocate.
3. Current state policies at odds with Zionism and with Israel’s stated principles and values
Current Israeli policies with regard to Palestinians in Israel proper and in the West Bank and Gaza are perhaps both the most difficult and the easiest matter to fit into a Zionist narrative. The story of the Jewish return to national sovereignty codified in the Declaration of Independence does not and should not excuse debasement of the Palestinians as a people or as individuals. Israel is justly proud of the opportunities it provides Palestinian citizens of Israel. Israel is also right to be proud of the accomplishments and contributions of Palestinian citizens of Israel, particularly in the medical field. But in terms of governmental authority, budgets, and other aspects of governance, Israel continues to treat Palestinians and their concerns with little care or attention. The Occupation—and the provocative settlement project in the West Bank and the lax protection of Palestinians against settler violence even more so—betray a systematic dismissal of Palestinian peoplehood and dignity that began before the State was created and that continues unabated today.
The Zionist narrative has always been, at least in part, aspirational, and it should continue to be so. Most nations have enshrined values that they have failed to live up to at various times. We might even argue that, at any given time, every nation is failing to live up to at least some of its values to their fullest. For reasons that can partially be explained by real and exaggerated security concerns, along with reasons that have to do with illiberal trends in Israel and elsewhere, today’s Israel does not always manifest itself as the country inspired by the biblical prophets and by notions of justice, righteousness, and kindness. The aspirations of Zionism help us to recognize this failure and should motivate us to argue for a different approach to our Palestinian neighbors. While the reality of the present may be disappointing, the vision of Zionism can and should be energizing, invigorating, and catalyzing.
The Israeli Declaration of Independence presents a Zionist narrative that is grand, inspiring, and compelling. It is often used by supporters of Israel, perhaps not even consciously, to describe the fulfillment of a dream, the miraculous achievement of a vision, rather than an Israel which we aspire to bring into being. This approach treats the Declaration as descriptive more than prescriptive, and its conceit is that Zionism has already succeeded and is prevented from demonstrating its fullest self only by lingering security concerns. Such a vision leaves little room for admitting mistakes along the way.
This vision—what one could call a vision of the greatest country in the world—falters when we recognize all of the circumstances of its founding and the sins that helped to establish it. However, the Zionist narrative should never have been understood or interpreted as a celebratory story of what was accomplished. Rather, as Yehuda Kurtzer argued on the pages of this journal in 2022, Zionism was a product of the Jewish people’s imagination of what could be, an aspiration to create an ideal society. It was not accomplished in 1948, in 1967, or today. To be sure, there have been many aspects of the history of Zionism that have demonstrated concrete achievements towards this end: the establishment of the State; the ingathering of exiles; the rescue of Jews throughout the world; the flourishing of a Hebrew, Israeli, and Jewish culture, etc. And there have been aspects of the history of Zionism that have failed towards this end. These failures, once authenticated, must be recognized and acknowledged and used as a spur to recommit to Zionist aspirations. To do this, the articulation of those aspirations in the Declaration of Independence should be supplemented with an accompanying recognition of the national aspirations of the Palestinians who lived in this land for many hundreds of years.
For at least the last generation, we have been stunted in our thinking by the intensifying conflict on the ground with Palestinians and by the fear that our honesty about the past may have real consequences for a Zionist future. Indeed, I believe that the opposite is true. Our Zionist future can only be strengthened by our continued imagination about the dreams of an ideal society as well as a recognition that the self-perception of Israel and Zionism as a light unto the nations may not always have been true and actualized, but that it can and must be the guiding vision into the future. Making the Palestinian narrative visible and reckoning with the (sometimes unintended, sometimes intended) costs of Zionism should provide the impetus for the creation of this new, ongoing, aspirational narrative and the invigoration of our own activism on behalf of a future and more perfect Israel. We owe this to ourselves.
