Answering Ezra Klein’s Challenge: Can Zionism and Liberalism Be Reconciled?

Yes. But only if the forces of liberal democracy defeat those of far right nationalism - a challenge not just in Israel, but in the US and around the world.

Jewish and Israel-related group chats and family text chains lit up this week, digesting and debating New York Times columnist Ezra Klein’s take on the searing divides in the Jewish community over Israel.

Not long ago, Israel served as a source of communal unity. Jews around the world came together a few decades back to support and defend the Jewish national rebirth in their ancient home after 1800 years.

Today, Israel is a source of painful arguments - splitting families and friendships, communities and institutions.

Some may look to refute the existence of this tension. But the divide is real, raising fundamental questions of Jewish identity, the hierarchy of Jewish values and whether any of this is “good for the Jews.”

These tensions did not suddenly erupt in light of the humanitarian catastrophe brought about by Israel’s response to Hamas’ October 7 terror attack.

Neither I personally nor J Street organizationally should take our eyes off Gaza, where suffering continues unabated.

Join us in calling on Jewish leaders to speak out. Silence is not an option.

End the war, free the hostages, surge aid.

Decades of corrosive occupation post-1967, not to mention the treatment of Palestinians within Israel proper and the too-oft-denied history of 1948 set the table for growing disaffection from Israel of some younger (and older) Jewish liberals.

For some in the American Jewish community, support for and connection to Israel became ever more central to their Jewish identity. October 7 moved some even closer to Israel – in part in reaction to real and perceived antisemitism seen in critiques of Israel’s behavior and in the lack of empathy for Jewish pain in the wake of the horror.

For others, Jewish identity is rooted in a set of liberal values that resonate particularly with Jewish Americans whose families were minorities in the lands of others.

The divide is in part generational. One generation, whose parents and grandparents lived through the Holocaust and Israel’s early, existential wars, experiences Israel as a vulnerable state at risk of destruction.

The other has grown up knowing Israel as a first-world economic powerhouse and a militarily dominant nuclear superpower with a track record of mistreating weaker people under its control.

Klein captures these dynamics well, but it’s the challenge he poses in the final paragraph that needs to be our focus: “For decades, American Judaism, built on the liberalism of the diaspora, has been interwoven with Zionism. What happens when the ideals of one become incompatible with the other.”

That challenge is aimed squarely at those, like me, who believe it is possible for Jewish Americans to both hold true to their liberal democratic values and remain a Zionist.

In an era when Israel has elected Netanyahu, Smotrich, Ben Gvir and the most extreme, anti-democratic, messianic government in its history, is there such a thing as as Liberal Zionism any more?

Have we reached the point where liberal values are simply incompatible with belief in Israel as the national home of the Jewish people?

Ezra walks up to the line and poses the question. He never explicitly concludes the line has been crossed.

In that, he differs from his fellow Times writer, Peter Beinart, who has concluded that a state built around one people’s identify is inherently incompatible with liberal democracy.

I disagree.

Peter and I had a great discussion about all of this on Word on the Street LIVE this week, and I invite you to watch or listen if you missed it.

I have always believed – and still do – that a state with a Jewish character and identity can simultaneously ensure full equality for all, regardless of race, religion, gender and more. Many liberal democracies around the world successfully maintain a national identity rooted in a shared peoplehood, history, language, and tradition.

Answering Ezra’s challenge will require hard work on two fronts.

Job one is supporting resolution of the conflict with the Palestinian people – not within the boundaries of one state, but in two separate states, one of which will provide the Palestinian people with their own ‘national home’ next to Israel. We at J Street envision this as part of a 23-state solution.

Job two is continually working to make an imperfect democracy more just. The United States is the world’s oldest democracy, but, 250 years on, we have yet to either provide full equality to all or to fully live up to our democratic ideals. So, too, in Israel the work is far from done.

What this government of Israel stands for and is doing is not my Zionism.

Those in power are pursuing a path that bears no resemblance to what I understand to be in the best interests of the Jewish people or the values on which I was raised.

I reject the argument that implementing the right of the Jewish people to self-determination leads of necessity to the immoral and inhumane treatment of another people.

Jews all over the world – in Israel, the US and globally – will determine whether liberalism and Zionism are ultimately reconcilable. It’s on us to ensure that Bibi-ism, Ben Gvir-ism and Smotrich-ism do not define Zionism or – god forbid - 21^st century Jewish identity.

The challenge I leave you with is not an intellectual, “what happens when or if….?”

The challenge I leave you with is the imperative of action.

Are we willing to stand up for our belief both in the right of the Jewish people to a national home and in liberal democracy?

Are we willing to fight those taking Israel to dark places, disconnected from the values on which we were raised?

And for those of us who don’t live in Israel, are we willing to support the millions who do live there and share our values as they work to reject the politics of fear, division and racism.