There is no time in my conscious, remembered life when I was unaware of Israel. My parents, moderate in all things, were moderate Zionists, like many American Jews of their generation. In 1971, when I was one, they spent a year in Israel; my father had a fellowship to support his research while he was an assistant professor, and my mother was working on her PhD. From their account, it seems like they might have been vaguely considering a permanent move to Israel. In any case, when the year was up, they came back home to Cambridge, Massachusetts. One of my brothers was born while we were in Israel, and my parents always spoke warmly of their experiences there.
Shortly afterward, my father joined an organization called Professors for Peace in the Middle East. The organization hoped to “elicit new ideas and approaches for the solution of the Israeli-Arab conflict, and to work for a just and lasting peace in the region.” The mission sounds just about right as a description of my parents’ Israel-related politics when I was growing up. They cared about Israel, they had Israeli friends, and they hoped for a two-state solution that would enable Israelis and Arabs (they did not then say “Palestinians”) to live alongside each other. The 1978 Camp David Accords, in which Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat laid the groundwork for an Israel-Egypt peace treaty, were treated as a world-historical event in our household, by which I mean that the eight-year-old me was given his own subscription to Time magazine.
My parents didn’t speak much modern Hebrew, but they sent me and my brothers to a Modern Orthodox day school that made Israeli Hebrew language an important part of the curriculum alongside traditional Jewish study. To be a bit more precise, the school didn’t formally distinguish the modern Israeli language from the ancient Hebrew of the Bible or the rabbinic Hebrew of the Talmud and its later commentators. Hebrew was just Hebrew. The technical name for the technique of making us translate ancient Hebrew, which we kids didn’t speak, into modern Israeli Hebrew, which we also didn’t speak, is ‘Ivrit be-‘Ivrit, literally, “Hebrew in Hebrew.” The description, like the curriculum, had an ideological point: The modern Hebrew language spoken in Israel wasn’t a newly invented language, an Esperanto for Israel. It was the same language as the ancient Hebrew of the Jewish past, self-consciously revived and updated for the purposes of modern use.1
The analogy to Israel itself was so obvious that no one needed to explain it to us. The modern country of Israel was the same land as the ancient Land of Israel described in the Bible. The state of Israel was self-consciously revived and updated, but it was still, spiritually, the same state. In my school, in the dozen years I attended, we had no separate course in the history of modern Israel. The word “Zionism” was rarely used, even by the excellent Israeli teachers who taught us to love the Hebrew language and the land of Israel. But there was no doubt that the creation of the modern state of Israel was a signal moment in Jewish history. On Israel’s Independence Day, we sang the Hallel prayer, a specific set of Psalms designated for festivals, albeit without the formal blessing that ordinarily accompanies the prayer.
As an adolescent, I followed the lead of my school and my parents in thinking about Israel—at first. We took a family trip to Israel when I was eleven, and it made a big impression on me, stronger even than the impression made by occasional family trips to Europe. (We were, somehow, extremely culturally privileged but not rich.) Soon after, I asked my parents if I could use my bar mitzvah money to spend the summer in Israel. They agreed, only to discover that there was no organized program taking thirteen-year-old children halfway across the world for a summer abroad experience. I convinced them to let me buy a plane ticket and go on my own. By then I could speak modern Israeli Hebrew fairly well. I would stay with three or four sets of family friends who would in principle keep an eye on me. I would set my own tourist itinerary and travel across the country by public bus and by hitchhiking.
That my parents agreed to this scheme says a lot about their implicit idealization of Israel circa 1983. There’s no conceivable way they would have allowed me to take a Greyhound bus across the United States at thirteen, much less hitch. They weren’t naïve, at least not about America. But in Israel, they must have imagined, there were no people who might have designs on a kid traveling around on his own. Or maybe they figured I was clever enough to stay out of trouble.
Anyway, they seem to have been right. I had a great time. The adults didn’t always know exactly where I was, but I checked in weekly by phone. I was lonely, which I somehow hadn’t imagined in advance. Maybe I thought just being in Israel would be socially fulfilling. But I learned more in that concentrated six-week period than almost any other time in my life, except perhaps freshman year of college. By the end of the summer, I could speak Hebrew fluently and I had amassed what you might call a professional tour guide’s knowledge of Israel. It was broad, it was detailed, it was superficial, and it reflected the official histories that I found in Israeli books and guides to archaeological sites, which I found particularly fascinating.2
I knew no Palestinians. I spent a lot of time in the market of the Old City of Jerusalem, and I was intrigued by the Middle Eastern qualities of the primarily Arab space. I formed a plan to start studying Arabic, because I believed it was one of the national languages of Israel and because I now knew Hebrew, the other one. I had a vague notion that achieving “peace in the Middle East” would require bringing together Hebrew and Arabic speakers. But I don’t think it really occurred to me, at the age of thirteen, that Palestinians might have a sharply different perspective on the Israeli culture I was trying to absorb. Back at home, in school, I grew to love the music of the early Zionist pioneer-settlers, taught by Israelis who loved it too. I can still sing the Hebrew songs of Palestine in the 1920s and of Israel in the 1950s and 1960s. I know most of the lyrics by heart.
Learning Arabic as a teenager expanded my perspective. I began to realize that there were actual Palestinian people who understood the creation of Israel in 1948 not as a miracle but as a nightmare. But it was the first intifada, which began in December 1987 and lasted until 1991, that really awakened me to the complexities of the Israel-Palestine situation.
The intifada was a transformative moment in Palestinian history, a spontaneous uprising led mostly by young people who were protesting the very fact of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Like most American Jews at the time, I had been brought up on the narrative that embattled Israel had won a great victory in the Six-Day War of 1967, had ended up governing several million Palestinians, and had been unable (not unwilling) to reach an agreement with the governments of Jordan and Egypt to return those territories in exchange for peace. The Palestine Liberation Organization featured in the story as a terrorist organization committed to destroying Israel and spoiling the prospect of coexistence.
The moment of the intifada that shocked me most came in January 1988. I was seventeen. The New York Times reported that in response to stone throwing by Palestinian teenagers—people my age—the Israel Defense Forces had adopted a policy of having its own soldiers—also roughly my age—intentionally beat the protesters with clubs to the point of breaking their bones.3
If something was reported in The New York Times, I had no doubt it was true. That was why the story gave me cognitive dissonance. Breaking bones felt like such an obvious and outrageous human rights violation, so crude in its brutality. It was at odds with my received image of the IDF as a disciplined, modern fighting force that strove to reduce civilian casualties and maintain what it called “the purity of arms.” I was aware of the 1982 massacres of Palestinian refugees that had taken place in the Sabra neighborhood and the Shatila camp in Lebanon. But those massacres had been carried out by Lebanese Christian Maronite militias allied with the IDF, not by the IDF itself. Perhaps Israeli generals, particularly Ariel Sharon, had let the massacres happen and so bore moral responsibility. That was, it seemed to me at the time, a far cry from a “liberal” general like Yitzhak Rabin, then Israel’s defense minister, directly ordering his teenaged soldiers to break teenagers’ bones.
I vividly remember calling one of my closest friends on the phone to discuss the Times article. We couldn’t really get our heads around it. In retrospect, I think we understood that we shouldn’t or maybe couldn’t discuss it at school. She was weeping. Of course it was partly our age, which was a good one for discovering that not everything you’ve been taught your whole life is, strictly speaking, true. But it was also the loss of the innocence that characterized our idealized picture of Israel. Or at least it was innocence when seen from our point of view. From a more critical standpoint, whether left or right wing, it was a kind of privileged self-delusion: the self-delusion of imagining that a nation-state could be rebuilt after two thousand years of exile without sometimes breaking the bones of the people who happened to be living there already.
THE ZION OPTION
In this part of the book, I am going to argue that the idea of Israel has become something the state’s founders did not precisely intend it to be: a transformative, defining factor within Jewishness, both in and outside the actual country. To make this case, I need to begin with Zionism, the idea that lies behind the contemporary idea of Israel.
Classical Zionism† began as a response to the Jewish question, mentioned in the last chapter: What should become of the Jews of Europe once they were formally emancipated and allowed to become citizens of European nation-states? The question itself was a product of the climactic era of European nationalism, when it seemed natural that to be a citizen of a European state was to be a member of the nation that went with that state. Seen in nationalist terms, the Zionist answer seems inevitable. If the Jews were not part of the German nation or the Italian nation or the French nation, as many (though by no means all) Germans and Italians and French people seemed to believe, then Jews must be a nation of their own.
Being a nation required having a state. A state needed a location. And although a few Zionists were open to accepting land wherever it could be gotten, such as Uganda in east Africa (proposed at the World Zionist Congress in 1903), most concluded that the Jewish nation should have its Jewish state in its ancestral homeland, known since late antiquity as Palestine.
If the Zionists’ classical answer to the Jewish question emerged from nationalism, the particular qualities of Zionism reflected secularism, another major social force of the nineteenth century. Secular modernity was emerging as a response to disillusionment with religious faith and religious institutions. Many classical Zionists held genuinely radical views about the Jewish religious tradition.
In its most stylized, extreme form, secular Zionism maintained that Jewish religion had reached a dead end, historically speaking. Religious belief had played a key role in keeping Jewish national consciousness alive for two millennia, but it had no inherent worth beyond that. The path to national self-expression therefore lay in rejecting the religious aspects of Jewishness altogether. For Zion to live, Judaism had to die.
The paradoxical logic of the secular Zionist rejection of religion can be understood through a Zionist slogan: “the negation of the Diaspora.” The word “Diaspora” refers to the dispersion of Jews throughout the world. To nationalists, the background assumption is typically that people of a given nation live in a fixed place, from which they originated. In the nationalist-Zionist narrative, the Jews began as a nation, with a national home and a national language and a national culture, then lost those things when they entered the Diaspora. So Diaspora, from the nationalist point of view, reflected an unnatural state, one of exile and loss of state power. Never mind whether the narrative was historically exact.‡ What mattered to Zionists was that the status of nationhood must be restored. Negation of the Diaspora meant eliminating the distinctive features of Diasporic Jewish life and replacing them with a renewed language and culture that would match the status of modern nationhood.
For classical secular Zionists, the religious and spiritual practices of Jews that had existed for two thousand years of Diaspora thus came to be associated with oppressed, exilic status. They had to be negated. Secular Zionists depicted Jewish religious beliefs and practices as intertwined with Jewish weakness. Belief in God, they maintained, had held Jews back from asserting sovereignty and nationhood. In a sense, the secular Zionists argued, Jews had come to focus on God rather than the nation. Now they must reverse course and focus on the nation instead of God.
In retrospect, the secularism of much Zionist nationalism looks like a manifestation of the generally antireligious sentiment of disillusioned modernity. To modern thinkers, religion was a kind of enchantment, and a modern attitude required rational disenchantment.4 The difficulty for Jewish nationalism was that religious practice and sentiment had to be recognized as having kept the Jewish nation in existence during the lengthy historical era in which Jews had no state, no language, and no national culture. To negate Jewish religious experience as Diasporic was to negate the very thing that had constituted Jewishness.
The Zionist solution to this puzzle was, first, to turn God into the nation. Israel’s Declaration of Independence referred to God as “the Rock of Israel.” That was a rare biblical name for God, sometimes used in later Jewish liturgy. Israel’s founders used it because they didn’t want to employ one of God’s more familiar names, which would have sounded too religious,§ and because that name defined God precisely as the sustainer of Israel. To secular Zionists, God did not exist. Yet God was a projective name that could be used to remind Jews of what did exist—or could be made to exist—in the real world, namely the Jewish nation.
Second, Zionism proposed to take the most usable elements of Jewish religious-spiritual tradition and repurpose them for the project of nationalism. The most important of these was the traditional Jewish yearning for the coming of the messiah and the return to the land of Israel—to Zion. In fact, the main reason that Jewish nationalism came to be called Zionism (rather than, say, “Israelism”) was that in the Bible and in subsequent Jewish liturgy, the idea of “return” was closely associated with “Zion,” a poetic name for the city of Jerusalem. To yearn for Zion was to yearn for messianic return. Secular Zionism was therefore a dream of return that built itself on the idea of messianic redemption.
To secular Zionists, the messiah was not a man, much less a divinely appointed messenger. The messiah was a metaphor for the nation acting collectively to restore itself to full national status and sovereignty. The metaphor of messianic return was what could be salvaged from Diasporic Jewish religious belief. The rest of the belief structure could and must be negated, denied, erased.
The result would be a healthy, normal modern nation, one in which religion would play no role except as a national symbol. Judaism and Jewishness, conceived in religious terms, would be replaced by Zionism and Israeliness, conceived in national terms. Jewishness had outlived its historical usefulness. The solution to the Jewish question was that Jews would no longer be Jews. They would be Israelis, members of a Jewish nation.
The comparison to Marx’s solution for the Jewish question is worth noting. To Marx, Jewishness was essentially the status of being bourgeois. The solution was to wipe away the bourgeoisie, thereby solving the Jewish question. To secular Zionists, Jewishness was the status of being Diasporic and disempowered. The solution was to wipe away the Diaspora and its disempowerment, thereby solving the Jewish question. In both solutions, Jewishness was treated as an anomaly. In the normal or proper state of affairs, Jews would be people like anyone else, either members of a newly constituted, postclass communist society or citizens of a nation-state like other ordinary Europeans. For both Marxists and Zionists, the ideal end-state was a secular utopia that displaced and replaced messianism.5
The key point is that from the standpoint of classical, secular Zionism, the Jewish state was meant to transcend and replace Jewishness. Israel was not supposed to be an event in Jewish history. It was supposed to be the end of Jewish history and the re-creation of a new national era, the era of Israel. The secularization of the idea of the messiah would then be exact. The coming of the messiah was not understood in (most of) the Jewish messianic tradition as an event in history but as an event that would represent the end of history. The utopian messianic age would put an end to the vicissitudes of Jewish survival and suffering that marked God’s intermittent reward and punishment of the Jewish people.
I am emphasizing the Zionist plan that Israel should not be just another event in Jewish history because of what eventually happened when the Jewish state did come into existence. For some decades, the creation of Israel was certainly an important event in Jewish history. It was a significant event, no doubt, but not immediately the transformative event that was hoped for by those who conceived and accomplished it.
Israel did not put an end to the Diaspora. (Even the Holocaust did not do that.) The Diaspora continued to exist alongside the state of Israel. Most Jews who lived outside Israel did not flock to the country, at least not willingly. In fact, notwithstanding its nuclear weapons, Israel did not fully achieve the nationalists’ maximal aspiration of being independently capable of protecting the Jews who lived there, much less all Jews everywhere. Israel remained (and, as the two U.S. carrier groups that were moved to the eastern Mediterranean in October 2023 show, still remains) partly dependent for its security on a close relationship with the United States, a relationship that itself relies in no small part on the support of the American Jewish community. This outcome was not unique to Israel. The early twentieth-century nationalist fantasy that small countries could be self-sustaining without the protection of large neo-imperial powers turned out to be just that, a fantasy.
Over time, however, the relationship between Israel and Jewishness changed. Now, three-quarters of a century after the state’s creation, Israel has become a defining component of Jewishness itself, or so I am about to argue. Israel did not end Jewish history. But it is, today, essential to Jewishness itself. In the process, Israel has transformed Jewishness into something significantly new and different. The Jewish question of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has become the Israel question in the twenty-first.¶
IDENTITY, SELF-DEFINITION, AND ANTI-ZIONISM
If Israel were simply a country like any other, the way many classical Zionists hoped it would be, it would not exercise anything like the transformational power that it currently has on the Jewish experience of people who live outside the country—or in it. If Israel were an ordinary country, Jews who chose not to live there would not have to spend all that much time thinking about it.
I do not want to suggest that Israel’s effects on Jewishness worldwide are utterly unique. They are, rather, distinctive and noteworthy. Compare Irish Americans or Korean Americans or Indian Americans, who today often feel pride and connection to the country where they or their ancestors originated. They visit, especially if they still have relatives in the old country. They might lobby their elected officials in the United States to support their country of origin in its regional political struggles. In some cases, their religious and spiritual worldviews will be shaped and framed primarily in relation to where they or their parents or grandparents or great-grandparents once lived. In general, however, there will be substantial attenuation of the religious centrality of the country from which they derive ethnic identity relative to their distance from immigration. As a general rule, the more generations you are from the old country, the less it defines your inner spiritual life.
Similarly, people who live in Ireland or South Korea or India certainly think about and reflect on their own national identities. They argue with each other about what it means to be Irish or Korean or Indian. In some cases, their debates are intense, even existential. Ireland has traditionally had to define itself in relation to Great Britain, its longtime colonial occupier. The Catholic-Protestant divide in Northern Ireland still shapes politics in that part of the island. The Korean Peninsula remains split between North and South, two countries implacably opposed but whose populations are ethnically identical and linguistically extremely close despite more than seventy years of enforced separation. India must grapple with philosophical differences between the inclusive idea of India developed and promulgated by Gandhi and Nehru and the type of Hindu nationalism propagated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his party, the BJP. And to be sure, Modi’s version of Hindu nationalism has complex religious dimensions. Yet these complicated, difficult, engrossing intranational questions do not today inevitably permeate the inner spiritual (as opposed to political) lives of the citizens of these countries, whatever may have been the case in earlier generations. To put it another way, nationalism today does not usually exercise definitive power over religious belief and experience.
Zionism is a bit different, or seems to be. True, in Israel’s first decades of existence, many Jews who lived outside the country did not define or experience their Jewishness in relation to Israel. Indeed, a large number of Jews outside Israel were not then Zionists at all. To be a Zionist in eastern Europe before World War II typically meant aspiring to move to Palestine. Many classical Zionists believed that all Jews should move to the land of Israel. So at the time, Jews who remained in Europe or who emigrated to the United States (or South America or wherever) rather than Israel were, by some strict definition, not full Zionists. Sympathy to the existence of a Jewish homeland was understood as different from dedicating oneself to participating actively in the creation of the Jewish national home.
Now, however, Jews outside Israel, wherever they live, find themselves necessarily self-defining in relation to Israel—religiously, spiritually, and politically—whether by support or criticism or some complicated combination of the two. If they attend a synagogue or temple, Israel finds its way there, as I will discuss in the next couple of chapters. If they are unaffiliated with Jewish religious institutions, they still find themselves working to figure out what they think about Israel in relation to their own sense of Jewishness. The Hamas-Israel war brought home the inevitability of this process at this moment in historical time.
For some Jews who feel little connection to the religious aspects of Judaism, whether because they don’t believe in God or for other reasons, Israel can function as the chosen focal point of their Jewish identity and connection. Caring about and supporting Israel can be constitutive of what makes them actively Jewish. Feeling commonality with others who support Israel can be their Jewish communal identity. There are a range of nonreligious pro-Israel organizations they can join, corresponding to different political orientations. Reading about Israel in the media can be their Jewish study and reflection, and there is a steady stream of material about Israel they can consume, again ranging across a continuum of different pro-Israel positions. For pro-Israel, religiously unaffiliated Jews like these, support for Israel comes close to being what classical Zionists hoped their movement would be for everyone: a replacement of religious Jewishness with nationalist affiliation and fellow feeling.
I have noticed—you may have too—that a number of American Jews seem to adopt this kind of pro-Israel focus as they begin to get older, even when Israel is not under attack and at war.** It’s not that they didn’t support Israel earlier in their lives so much as that they often did not previously make pro-Israel sentiment so central to their identities. Perhaps the explanation is that older Jews have stronger memories of the aftermath of the Holocaust or Israel’s past wars. But another factor could be that as people age, their religious-spiritual inclinations emerge. (Impending mortality will do that to you.) Because they think of themselves as secular rationalists and have never felt all that positively about Jewish religion, these aging Jews cannot comfortably turn to Jewish spirituality or faith to address their existential concerns. So they focus instead on the aspect of Jewishness that seems most compatible with their rationalist-agnostic worldview: Israel. On this interpretation, older Jews who become especially impassioned about supporting Israel are transmuting their religious longings into Zionism, unconsciously repeating the Zionists’ conscious, intentional plan for all modern Jews.
More surprising is the situation of those Jews who do not embrace the support of Israel as their sole or primary Jewish expression, yet still find, whether they like it or not, that Israel lies at the core of their Jewish identity, because they are enmeshed in a struggle about what to think of Israel and what to do about what they think. This kind of internal struggle happens especially on college campuses, where so much of the work of politics and self-definition happens in the United States. It can also happen to postcollege Jews who want to think about U.S. national politics from a Jewish perspective. Some Jews may even find themselves disinclined to affiliate with organized Jewish communal institutions precisely because they feel uncomfortable with the way Israel is discussed or engaged in those spaces. In that case, their Jewishness is still being shaped by Israel, albeit negatively.
Within Israel, too, the meaning of Zionism and the character of the state permeates Jewish life and thought. It does so for secular Israelis who derive meaning from their Zionist or post-Zionist beliefs. It does so for Religious Zionists, whose whole Jewish self-conception is inextricably bound up in the Zionist project. And it has turned out to do so even for nominally non-Zionist Traditionalists. Once, Traditionalists espoused a policy of formal indifference toward the state of Israel. Increasingly, however, Traditionalists find themselves identifying with the state and driving its politics, as I will discuss later in this part of the book. Some are actually prepared to conceptualize their Torah study in relation to the spiritual sustenance of the state.
The upshot is that most Jews today find they have little choice but to self-define in some relation to Israel whether they want to or not. This is what I mean when I say that Israel has become a defining part of Jewishness. Some Jews, perhaps a growing number, may find this reality undesirable. They might prefer to go back to a time where many Jews outside Israel, from secular to Reform to Traditionalist, chose not to define their Jewishness in any relation to Israel. Turning back the clock, however, is not so easy. The reason is that Jewishness is a collective identity or identities, defined and shaped by what groups of people think. So if most groups of Jews self-define in relation to Israel, it is challenging for any Jews to choose not to do so.
This reality in turn raises complicated questions about antisemitism. Consider the reaction Donald Trump encountered in October 2022 when he said that “U.S. Jews have to get their act together and appreciate what they have in Israel—Before it is too late!” Trump was saying that because, in his opinion, “No President has done more for Israel than I have,” American Jews should support him. Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League, the closest thing to an institutional arbiter of antisemitism in the United States, responded on Twitter that “when the President says ‘before it’s too late,’ it sounds like a threat in an environment where Jews already feel threatened.” Greenblatt went on:
We don’t need the former president, who curries favor with extremists and antisemites, to lecture us about the US-Israel relationship. It is not about a quid pro quo; it rests on shared values and security interests. This “Jewsplaining” is insulting and disgusting.
If Trump’s argument that American Jews should appreciate Israel was antisemitic, as Joe Biden’s White House was quick to assert, it would have to be because Trump was telling Jews how they should support Israel. That is, Trump was assuming or arguing that American Jews should affirmatively self-define in relation to the Jewish state. By implication, if a non-Jew tells that to Jews, he is being antisemitic by virtue of not allowing Jews to decide for themselves what their relationship to Israel, if any, should be.
But of course (some) Jews say this sort of thing to other Jews all the time without being called antisemites. Jews tell other Jews they ought to support Israel or criticize it or whatever they happen to believe is right. That fact might lead you to conclude that Trump was in fact not being antisemitic. But what feels potentially antisemitic about Trump’s argument is that he was presuming to define good Jewishness in a particular way—namely as Zionist commitment.
Now consider a different but related charge: the argument that anti-Zionism either is itself antisemitism or is tantamount to it. Of course, anti-Zionists themselves almost invariably insist they are not antisemites. They say they have nothing against Jews, but rather oppose Israel and its policies and sometimes even its existence. Jewishness and Zionism have no necessary connection, they claim. And some of these anti-Zionists are themselves Jews.
Why does anti-Zionism nevertheless seem like antisemitism to many Jews? The answer is not only that Jews should have the same right to self-determination as other peoples. Nor is it only that some anti-Zionists knowingly or unknowingly draw on antisemitic tropes. The deeper explanation is that for many Jews, Israel is central and essential to Jewishness. If you feel that Jewishness is or should be fundamentally linked to Israel, then when someone says Israel should not exist, the criticism impugns the core of your Jewish identity and belief. It rejects who you are as a Jew. It rejects both the content of your Jewish commitment and the identity you have based on it.
In essence, Jews who say that anti-Zionism is antisemitism are objecting to other people telling them that they as Jews are wrong to treat Israel as fundamental to Jewish life and experience. The anti-Zionists are saying the opposite of what Trump said. Yet they have in common with Trump that they are implicitly telling Jews how to self-define in relation to Israel. Trump told Jews they should support and identify with Israel. Anti-Zionists tell Jews they should not support and identify with Israel. Either way, some Jews experience the argument as negating their own capacity for self-definition.
Who is right? Your answer must depend on your answer to the question of what it means (to you) to be a Jew and who has the right to suggest answers. Regardless, the debates about Zionism and antisemitism become much clearer when you see them in the light of who gets to define Jewishness in relation to Israel.
ISRAEL AS NARRATIVE
Why is Israel so omnipresent in the thought-world of Jews (and others), outside Israel and inside? The answer is that Israel is not only a place but a narrative: a rich, complex set of different stories that we tell ourselves and that are meant to instruct us about what Israel means and why it is good or bad.
The reason Israel has such power as a narrative is that Jewishness itself has long possessed extraordinary story-making power, and Zionism has assumed, incorporated, and transformed key aspects of the Jewish story. The narrative of Jewishness has not only dominated the consciousness of Jews for two thousand years. It is interwoven with the basic stories and structures of Christianity, and has been since the lifetime of Jesus himself. The Jewish story is also intertwined with the story of Islam, and has been since the life of the Prophet Muhammad, who received a Qur’an that retold biblical stories and himself interacted extensively with Arabian Jews. A version of the Jewish story, in a displaced form, is baked into modernity through Marx and Freud. And a part of the Jewish story is also, in a different way, enmeshed in today’s consciousness through the phenomenon of modern antisemitism, exemplified by Nazism and Adolf Hitler, who figure centrally in the stories we tell ourselves about war, peace, and human rights.
The narrative of Israel derives its special power from its capacity to take on board all the power of the Jewish story while constantly adding to it a range of other, contemporary sets of stories and ideas that matter globally. Those include the narratives of nationalism, national self-determination, constitutional democracy, modernization, secularization, religious fundamentalism, economic development, European colonialism, European imperialism, racism, sex, sexual orientation, gender equality, the clash of civilizations, technological utopianism, and many more. In an astonishing, protean way, the narrative of Israel manages to intersect and be intersected by many of the most contentious and generative ideas that permeate contemporary political and spiritual consciousness. The narrative of Israel is a can’t stop/won’t stop maelstrom of stories, beliefs, arguments, and claims on our thought and attention. In this sense, the narrative of Israel is utterly religious and spiritual and political and moral, all at the same time.
What’s more, this nexus of stories is, to a degree that is rare in most other domains of human discussion, constantly oppositional, binary, argumentative, dialectic, and psycho-emotionally generative. For everything you can say about Israel, you can say the opposite. For every argument that Israel is good, there is an opposite argument that Israel is bad. For every argument that Israel is bad, there is a corresponding argument that it is good. None of these arguments has any ending place. The result is that the very idea of Israel conjures up a field of ongoing argument that extends in all directions, as far as the eye can see. The word “Israel” conjures energy—mostly the energy to argue. You can get exhausted by talking about Israel, but that somehow doesn’t seem to make the conversation stop. It keeps going. Not everyone wants or needs to be in the conversation all the time. But the people who keep talking about it seem to care infinitely, whether they are for Israel or against it, whether violent conflict is active or not.
All this is what makes Israel, or rather the narrative of Israel, distinct from most other nation-states’ narratives. In terms of practical reality, Israel is just another country. The people who live there are just people, like people anywhere else. But the idea of Israel, its narratives and its counternarratives, stands apart from normality. Israel’s narrative stands apart from normal national narratives as much as (maybe more than) the narrative of the Jews stood apart from other religious-spiritual-communal narratives before the state of Israel came into existence. The Israel narrative is the Jewish narrative, plus many other ideas of modernity and postmodernity that never made their way into the old Jewish narrative. And it is sustained by people, supporters and critics, Jews and non-Jews alike, who are transmuting and transforming the ancient narrative of the Jews’ uniqueness into the idea of Israel.
ONE LAND, TWO PEOPLES
The narrative of Israel has a crux in it that cannot be ignored. It derives from a reality that Zionism has struggled with since its inception: the reality that the land to which the Zionists sought return was peopled. The people who lived in the Ottoman imperial provinces that became British mandatory Palestine after World War I were mostly Muslims and Christians, with some Jews and some members of other miscellaneous religious groups, such as the syncretistic Druze. Their ethnicities were mixed and complicated, as were ethnicities throughout the cultural area covering Palestine and what would become the countries of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and parts of Turkey. Their lingua franca was Arabic. They belonged to several social classes, ranging from aristocratic landholders to urban merchants to religious scholars and peasants and seminomadic herders. Some of the people who lived in what would become mandatory Palestine began to think of themselves as Palestinians at just about the same time that they began to encounter Jews who thought of themselves as members of a Jewish nation, which was also around the same time that Turkish nationalism, Arab nationalism, and Armenian nationalism began to enter consciousness in the crumbling Ottoman Empire.6
From early in the history of Zionism, aspirants to a Jewish national homeland had to consider how to encounter this population. One approach was to deny that the people who lived in Palestine constituted a distinct group capable of making claims of national self-determination. The most famous slogan capturing this viewpoint is that Palestine was “a land without a people for a people without a land,” namely, the Jews. The phrase, or something like it, first appeared in Christian Restorationist publications in the 1840s.†† Some Jewish Zionists adopted the idea thereafter. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir (1898–1978), who was born in Kyiv, raised in Milwaukee, and moved to Palestine in 1921, famously expressed a version of it in an interview with the London Sunday Times in 1969.7 Her statement that “there was no such thing as Palestinians” was intended to deny that a Palestinian national identity had existed before the creation of Israel.
Many Zionists realized from an early period that Palestine was a land that had people in it, whether they should be defined as “a people” or not. The most famous example is the Zionist writer Ahad Ha‘am (the pen name of Asher Tzvi Hirsch Ginsberg, 1856–1927), who in 1891 wrote a series of articles that appeared as a pamphlet titled “Truth from the Land of Israel.” Speaking to a European Jewish audience, Ahad Ha‘am (the name means, literally, “one of the people”) asserted, “We who live abroad are accustomed to believe that almost all the land of Israel is now uninhabited desert and whoever wishes can buy land there as he pleases. But this is not true. It is very difficult to find in the land cultivated fields that are not used for planting.”8 The writer was not addressing the question of Palestinian national identity. He was acknowledging the reality that Palestine was densely populated by actual residents.
As Zionists began to buy land and settle in Palestine, the reality of the Palestinian population became their most significant obstacle. In 1929, riots broke out in which more than a hundred Jews and roughly as many Palestinian Arabs died. The nominal flashpoint was access to the Western Wall in Jerusalem, but the deeper cause was growing Palestinian concern about the rising number of Jewish immigrants and the emerging realization that those Jews were serious about constructing a state of their own.9 From 1936 to 1939, Palestinians rose in open revolt against the British government. They expressly demanded a stop to Jewish immigration and settlement. Although Palestine was technically not a British imperial possession but a mandate to govern temporarily conferred by the League of Nations, the British responded the way they were accustomed to doing in their colonies: they suppressed the uprising violently.10 Somewhere between two thousand and five thousand Palestinians died and perhaps three times as many were wounded. More than 300 Jews were killed, as well as some 260 British soldiers.
In May 1939, having tried and failed to facilitate negotiations between Palestinian Arabs and Jews, the British government adopted a “White Paper” intended as a blueprint for governing Palestine. It recommended that an independent binational state for Arabs and Jews eventually be established. The White Paper also sharply limited Jewish immigration. As it would turn out, 1939 was a disastrous moment for Jews’ opportunities to leave Europe to be so restricted. Germany invaded Poland in September of that year, and the destruction of European Jewry began its awful, tragic trajectory.
After World War II, as the British Empire crumbled, the newly formed United Nations proposed the creation of two countries in historic Palestine, one Jewish and one Arab. Fatefully, the Zionist leadership accepted the proposal and in May 1948 declared the establishment of the state of Israel. Equally fatefully, the Palestinian leadership took the opposite path. The Arab League, purporting to speak on behalf of Palestinians, rejected partition as inconsistent with the rights of Palestinian Arabs to national self-determination. Beginning in late 1947, Palestinian Arabs and the almost-Israelis began what was effectively a civil war. Once Israel declared independence, Arab states formally joined the fight, with significant numbers of troops from Jordan, Syria, and Egypt entering the war.
The 1948 war had multiple phases, and a detailed analysis is so far beyond the purposes of this chapter that I wish I could avoid the subject altogether. (Indeed, this truncated, incomplete history of the Israel-Palestine conflict is pretty much guaranteed to satisfy nobody.) What matters for our purposes is that Israel survived—and Palestinian Arabs suffered a catastrophe (in Arabic, the nakba). Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes and became permanent refugees. Most of the territory that the United Nations had proposed as a Palestinian Arab state instead was seized by Jordan and Egypt.
The events of 1947–1948 are the subject of the kind of unending, ideologically driven historical debate that leaves committed advocates on both sides certain they are correct. Roughly speaking, supporters of Israel maintain that the Jewish state faced the possibility of destruction, as directly threatened by the Arab League and its members. They depict the losses suffered by Palestinians as the consequence of their failure to accept partition and their fantasy of destroying Zionism and driving the Jews into the sea. Supporters of the Palestinian cause argue that the nascent Israeli military, following Zionist leadership, knowingly and intentionally planned to create majority-Jewish territory by forcing Palestinian civilians out of their homes. They view the outcome as fundamentally unjust, especially insofar as it left Palestinians as a stateless people, without the opportunity for the self-determination achieved by Zionists on land that was historically Palestinian.
When people ask me what to read to get an objective view of the history, I first tell them that historical objectivity is a moving target. Then I tell them the story of the Israeli historian Benny Morris. In 1987, Morris published a book called The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949. He used Israeli archives to trace what was known as “Plan D,” a military plan for (in its own words) “operations against enemy settlements which are in the rear of, within or near our defence lines, with the aim of preventing their use as bases for an active armed force.” This plan, according to Morris, “provided for the conquest and permanent occupation, or levelling, of Arab villages and towns.”11
Morris’s book established him as one of a group known then in Israel as the “new historians,” associated with a left-wing critique of how Israeli military conduct in 1947–1948 had shaped the Palestinian experience. In 1988, Morris refused to report for reserve duty in the IDF because he did not want to participate in suppressing the first intifada and because he favored withdrawal from the West Bank; the refusal earned him three weeks in a military prison.12 Other new historians, like Avi Shlaim (who wrote about Israel’s “collusion” with the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan) and Ilan Pappé (who went on to write a book called The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine), have remained staunch critics of Israel.13
Morris, however, underwent a political transformation in reaction to the second intifada that began in 2000. In 2004, as he was publishing a revised and updated version of his book, he told a newspaper interviewer that without the “transfer” of Palestinians out of what would become Israel, “a state would not have come into being. That has to be clear. It is impossible to evade it. Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here.” David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Zionist establishment, shaped the undertaking of transfer, according to Morris. But he did not go far enough. “The non-completion of transfer was a mistake,” Morris said:
I know that this stuns the Arabs and the liberals and the politically correct types. But my feeling is that this place would be quieter and know less suffering if the matter had been resolved once and for all. If Ben-Gurion had carried out a large expulsion and cleansed the whole country—the whole Land of Israel, as far as the Jordan River. It may yet turn out that this was his fatal mistake. If he had carried out a full expulsion—rather than a partial one—he would have stabilized the State of Israel for generations.14
What is fascinating about Morris is that despite flipping his political perspective on its head, he did not change his view of the facts. In the revised edition of his book on the birth of the refugee crisis, he noted new evidence that Israeli forces had massacred roughly eight hundred Palestinians and committed a dozen rapes. He told the interviewer that in April and May 1948, units of the Israeli military “were given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, expel them and destroy the villages themselves.” But Morris also noted that “at the same time, it turns out that there was a series of orders issued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinian intermediate levels to remove children, women and the elderly from the villages.” He concluded: “On the one hand, the book reinforces the accusation against the Zionist side, but on the other hand it also proves that many of those who left the villages did so with the encouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself.”15
The fact that Morris drew two radically different political lessons from his research at two different points in his life (and in Israeli history) does not prove he is objective, of course. He could have been biased at every moment. Critics of Morris have complained, for example, that he relied on Israeli sources, not Palestinian ones. All historians carry biases. That’s because all humans do. Even historical sources are biased, because they are limited, human-made, and human-interpreted. Yet Morris’s arc does say something about how we should read the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict: we should try to glean the facts as best we can, recognizing that even the same facts can be understood radically differently depending on context.
Historians with no stake in the politics of Israel-Palestine—not that anyone can really be described that way in the real world—might notice that the whole conflict bore more than a passing resemblance to the conflict between Indian Hindus and Muslims that emerged after Britain partitioned India and Pakistan in 1947. What had been ruled as a single British Raj became two countries with newly created borders. In that process, mass violence broke out, more than 14 million people ended up crossing the borders, and somewhere between a few hundred thousand and two million people died in the process. The India-Pakistan conflict that emerged has never been resolved. The status of Indian Kashmir (population 12.5 million) remains disputed by the two sides, eliciting ongoing ideological disagreement alongside geopolitical confrontation. In Israel-Palestine, as in India-Pakistan, the British Empire has a lot to answer for. In both contexts, too, the actors on the ground all sought military and ideological victory. No one came away satisfied.16
There are, I’m sorry to say, more chapters in the historical story. It will have to suffice, however, to remind the reader that in 1967, Israel defeated Syria, Jordan, and Egypt in a brief war that left the Golan Heights, the West Bank of the Jordan River including all of Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip and Sinai under its control. More Palestinians went into exile, and others found themselves living under Israeli military occupation. Since then, Israel formally annexed East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. It returned the Sinai to Egypt as part of the Anwar Sadat–Menachem Begin peace deal that cost Sadat his life. Gaza remained under direct Israeli military control until 2005, when Israel “disengaged,” leaving approximately two million Palestinians to self-govern. Hamas came to control Gaza, at least until the Hamas-Israel 2023 war. The West Bank of the Jordan, which the government of Israel calls Judea and Samaria, remains occupied according to both Israeli and international law. Under the Oslo Accords signed in 1995, the territory is divided into three areas, known as A, B, and C. A is officially administered by the Palestinian Authority; B is administered jointly by the authority and the Israeli military; and C is controlled solely by Israel and contains Israeli settlements that international law considers illegal but Israeli courts consider lawful.
THE MEANING OF CONFLICT IS CONFLICT
I have tried here to describe the emergence of the Israel-Palestine conflict as neutrally as possible. Yet I know perfectly well that every word I’ve written could be hotly contested by people on both sides. That’s the last thing I want, not because I don’t care—I care a lot—but because, in this book, I am not trying to address the question of what is fair or just in the context of this conflict. The reason I needed to lay out the history, however minimally, is to begin to explain to readers today and in the future why and how Israel has become such a contentious part of the contemporary thought world, Jewish and otherwise.
To put it in the simplest way possible: Israel exists. But the nature of Israel’s existence is mired—inextricably mired—in its conflict with the Palestinian national cause and in the particular way that conflict has developed.
Today, some critics of Israel maintain that the state’s whole existence is illegitimate and would like to see a Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine. Others question the legitimacy of Israel as a specifically Jewish state, preferring to imagine a “one-state solution” in which all the people living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea are citizens of a single democratic entity. Still other critics concede (at least rhetorically) the legitimacy of Israel’s existence as a Jewish state, then go on to criticize what they see as the injustice of the situation in which Palestinians do not have a state of their own while Israeli Jews do. That version of the critique typically leaves supporters of Israel exasperatedly trying to point out that the reason Palestinians do not have a state is surely in part that they did not want the Zionists to have one. Having tried and failed to eliminate Israel militarily, Palestinians turned to the argument that their rights to self-determination and their basic human rights to live as equal citizens are being denied by Israel.
You can see why there’s an impasse. You can see why it’s not going away.
Now recall, if you would, my main hypothesis in this part of the book: that the idea of Israel has become central to Jewish life and thought. That idea also finds itself in constant, dynamic, global conflict. To say that Israel is a central preoccupation for Jews is to say that conflict and conflicting ideas about Israel have become foundational to Jewish life and thought. For Jews today, whether they like it or not, Israel is often at the center. That means conflict over Israel is at the center of Jewish spiritual life and identity. That central conflict has consequences.