What the Heck Does It Mean to Be A “Zionist” In the 2020s?

The Jewish people - like any other people - have a collective right to self-determination and the historic Jewish connection to the land of Israel makes that the right place for our nation-state.

Last week, I began a daunting task: fleshing out ten principles to define what it means to be “pro-Israel” for center-left Jewish Americans who support the state and people of Israel and oppose the policies and actions of its current extreme-right government.

Each week for the next couple of months, I’ll flesh out one principle in more depth. When I’m done, I hope the package as a whole speaks to and for large numbers of Jewish Americans at a challenging time in our relationship with Israel.

Principle Number One: Israel is the National Homeland of the Jewish People

Prior to 1948, the year the state of Israel was born, defining “Zionism” was pretty straightforward. It was a movement to create a state that the Jewish people could call home – a country where Jews, oppressed and persecuted for centuries in the lands of others, could feel safe and control their own destiny.

So you might think that – with the state of Israel established in 1948 – using the word Zionism, a term defined as calling for the state’s creation, might be a bit out of date.

Yet today, around the globe, anger over Israeli government policy is morphing into ahistorical critiques of the legitimacy of the country itself and denial that the Jewish people have a valid claim to statehood at all. From college campuses to the streets of major cities, Jews are labeled “colonizers” in their own land, and Israeli Jews are told they should “go back to where they came from.”

Though not all criticism of Israel and its actions is by any means antisemitic, some of the most virulent critiques being leveled do feature deeply antisemitic overtones. And, when all Jews – even those with no connection to Israel – are excluded from spaces because “Zionists are not welcome,” it is just one troubling example of how anti-Israel sentiment can morph into antisemitism.

Center-left pro-Israel Jews need to meet this challenge head on, engaging those critics of Israeli policy willing to hear what Zionism really is and that history firmly roots the claim to statehood for the Jewish people in the land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea.

Zionism is rooted in the epic history of the Jewish people which starts nearly 4000 years ago in the land where Abraham and Sarah and the generations that followed lived and died. In fact, it’s a history through which not just the Jewish people, but all three monotheistic faiths, trace their roots to this particular land.

This history is long, well-known and well-documented. It includes the return of the Jewish people to Israel from Egyptian slavery over 3000 years ago and from exile in Babylonia in the 6^th century BCE. It encompasses the rooting of a Jewish capital in Jerusalem by Kings David and Solomon and the building and subsequent destruction of the First and Second Temples.

And that history includes 1800 years of exile after devastation by the Romans in 70 C.E., during which the Jewish people yearned to return to the land of Israel, ending Passover seders for centuries with the refrain, “Next year in Jerusalem.”

As nationalism began to stir around the globe in the middle of the 19^th century, the Jewish people too began to desire a state where they could control their own destiny and be free of oppression in the lands of others.

So - like my great-grandparents in the 1880s and 1890s - they began to make their way back to Israel and ultimately fought for and built a state. No one ‘sent the Jews’ to Israel as part of some great colonial plot, they returned of their own volition.

We’ll need to help people understand that the desire for a state and a national home in Israel preceded the horrors of the Holocaust by decades. Those who frame Israel’s founding as somehow ‘compensation’ for the sins of Europeans in World War II are distorting history. And they fail to acknowledge that more than half of the Jews in modern Israel trace their roots to the Middle East and North Africa, not Europe.

Ultimately, it was with the blessing of the international community as a whole that the United Nations in 1947 established a “Jewish State” in the land of Israel. Even then, the world knew there also needed to be a national homeland for the Palestinian people alongside Israel, and that’s why the UN voted to create two states not one – one Jewish and one Arab.

For me, as for the overwhelming majority of Jewish Americans, the return of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is a source of pride and wonder. In the words of Israel’s national anthem, Hatikvah (“The Hope”), it is the realization of a 2000-year aspiration “to be a free people in our own land.”

Though the country recently celebrated its 75^th birthday, I believe the dream Theodore Herzl articulated over a century ago will actually only be fulfilled when the other people with a legitimate claim to the same land – the Palestinians – fulfill their right to national self-determination in a state of their own next to Israel. (I’ll be digging into that more in Part Two of this series next week).

I – like most of Israel’s supporters around the world – not only want it to be safe and secure. We want it to be democratic in nature, living up to the vision articulated by its founders in the Declaration of Independence – to foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants. And we want it to be grounded in Jewish values, “freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel.”

My ”pro-Israel” recognizes the enormous and ever-widening gap between those aspirations and today’s reality.

My “pro-Israel” aims to help Israel get back on the path to being secure, democratic and Jewish, a path that resolves its conflicts, establishes its borders and lives up to the values of the Jewish people.

My “pro-Israel” recognizes the importance of working with those who are deeply upset by Israel’s present path to understand that it’s the policies and actions of the country’s extremist leaders we need to question, not the existence of the country itself.

That’s to me what it means to be a Zionist in the 2020s.