{"id":3050,"date":"2016-02-26T17:14:26","date_gmt":"2016-02-26T22:14:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/theatheistrabbi\/?p=3050"},"modified":"2016-08-15T10:21:28","modified_gmt":"2016-08-15T15:21:28","slug":"why-im-still-a-zionist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/theatheistrabbi\/2016\/02\/why-im-still-a-zionist.html","title":{"rendered":"Why I’m Still a Zionist"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"Satellite_image_of_Israel\"<\/a><\/p>\n

(Update:\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>Since the original publication of this post, it has been repeatedly pointed out to me that what I\u2019ve said here does not qualify me as a Zionist. I think I\u00a0constructed a good argument for why I am a kind of Zionist, but those who disagree have told me\u2014some of them in no uncertain terms\u2014that what I\u2019ve described here is better described as post-Zionism. I actually don\u2019t care what it\u2019s called. I stand by what I wrote.)<\/em><\/p>\n

With the publication of my previous post (My Crisis of Zionism<\/a>), I have had the pleasure of being called an idiot by Rabbi Daniel Gordis and many other names by many other people. This is what happens when we touch the third rail of Israel in the Jewish world today.<\/p>\n

One\u00a0intelligent question I\u2019ve been asked is whether I am a Zionist any more or not?<\/p>\n

I believe that I am. I\u2019ll begin with a little history.<\/p>\n

The core idea behind Zionism was that the Jews needed a refuge. Given the horrors of antisemitism, Zionists believed that relief for the Jews could only be achieved by the creation of their own homeland. Suggestions for a location\u00a0abounded, but the vast consensus was that it should be where it is now. So Zionism focused its aspirations on that land.<\/p>\n

Early Zionism, however, was not a movement that provided any kind of a\u00a0unitary statist vision. In its early days many Zionists promoted a Jewish homeland that was nothing like the one that developed. Rabbi Judah Magnes, Martin Buber and Ahad Ha\u2019am were among those who saw no way to justly establish an exclusively Jewish state. Theodor Herzl is considered the founder of political Zionism. Many criticized him for his lack of understanding of Jewish history or culture. The utopian nature of his novel, Altneuland<\/em>, was probably a result of that. Nevertheless, it provides some insight into what the man whose picture hangs in every official Israeli building had in mind. And what he had in mind was a state that displayed the highest form of liberal universalism. He imagined it housing a celebrated international \u201cPeace Palace\u201d dedicated to the unity of all humanity.<\/p>\n

His novel also reminds us that he recognized the dangers inherent in building an ethnocracy. In one passage, he describes a hard-fought political battle between those who desired Jewish exclusivity and those who sought a more inclusive nation.<\/p>\n

Shlomo Avineri summed it up in a 2009 Haaretz column<\/a>:<\/p>\n

One of the most fascinating aspects of the book is the description of the election campaign that was to have taken place in 1923. The campaign focused on the rights of the country\u2019s non-Jewish inhabitants. Contrary to what is sometimes said of Zionism\u2014that it ignored the existence of Arabs in the country\u2014the book reveals not only an awareness of the existence of the Arab population; the Jewish state is predicated on the concept that all its inhabitants, regardless of religion, race or gender, enjoy equal rights and the right to vote. These rights are extended not only to Arabs, but to women, though at the time the book was written no Western democracy had given women the vote.<\/p>\n

In the book, not only do the country\u2019s Arabs have the right to vote, some of them serve in key posts. Among them is one of the novel\u2019s heroes, an Arab engineer from Haifa named Rashid Bey. To use a term from our day, Herzl envisioned a state that would be both Jewish and democratic, both a Jewish nation state and a state of all its citizens.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Herzl\u2019s ideas did not come to fruition. Utopias never do. But wars are real and bloodshed defined\u2014and continues to define\u2014much of Israel\u2019s psyche. We can argue all day about who should be blamed for these wars (would it surprise you to learn that I place most of the responsibility on the Arab world?) but the wars happened and continue to occur and, moreover, much of my disappointment in Israel has absolutely nothing<\/em> to do with the conduct of these wars. I am not na\u00efve about the dangers facing Israel.<\/p>\n

No, my disappointments about Israel are grounded in the kinds of things that are either not related (or only tangentially so) to what its enemies have wrought. I\u2019m talking about things like the way it treats its own citizens and those who have come under its control. No threat to Israel justifies this. Most have little\u00a0to do with the actual Arab-Israeli or Palestinian-Israeli conflict.<\/p>\n

The list is long. Each of these items can and have filled up entire books.<\/p>\n

It includes policies of discrimination in all of these areas:<\/p>\n