Zionism in crisis at a moment of rupture:
Zionism is a variegated political ideology underpinning Jewish collective life in Israel across lines of intense political difference.
Rightwing and religious rightwing Zionism dominate politically Israel today, blurring the contours of Zionism and distorting the discourse about Israel.
Theory and Practice (by way of definition):
A variegated ideological formation, the essence of Zionism (qua common denominator) is an ideology (theory) founded upon the principles of Jewish self-determination and cultural autonomy in Israel.
The manifestation of Zionism is (in practice) inherently political and historically contingent.
Zionism in the form of ethnocentrism, messianism, ethnocentric and one-man fascism, and halakhic rule is politically anti-democratic, morally cruel and catastrophic, socially unviable and self-destructive.
Liberal-Left Zionism
In relation to the social contract in Israel, mainline liberal-left Zionism promotes rule of law, social democracy, inclusive secularism.
Liberal-left Zionism is not naïve about the power of the right and religious right in Israel or about widespread Palestinian and Arab-Muslim opposition to the existence of the State of Israel and even hatred for the Jews who live there. On the right and left, the alternatives to the dreamworld of liberal-left Zionism are delusional, if not nightmarish.
In relation to Palestine, left Zionism is based on 2 political and moral foundations: self-determination between two peoples + mutual recognition.
As an autonomous formation in Jewish politics, liberal-left Zionism does not give up on the struggle for democracy Israel in the face of opposition from the radical right and radical left. Israel is a unique global ingathering of the Jewish people that binds the Jewish collective to the people –Jewish and Palestinian– who live there between the river and sea and to the larger Middle East and North Africa.
Doesn’t this ignore that the mass expulsion of Palestinians (ethnic cleansing), in the form of the Nakba—and the continued ethnic cleansing today through settlement expansion—originated with the Labor Zionist movement?
Unlike rightwing Revisionist Zionism and Palestinian/Arab nationalism, mainstream Labor Zionism supported territorial compromise and partition as far back as the 1937 Peel Partition Plan and again in 1947. Support for an actual 2ss starts gradually with Rabin and E. Barak in the 1990s and 2000s, which crashed in wake of Second Intifada
In 1937, the Twentieth Zionist Congress accepted the principle of partition, but not the borders proposed by the UK. In 1947, the Labor Zionists nominally approved the U.N. Partition Plan while conspiring with Jordan on the division of Palestine; for more details, see Collusion Across the Jordan by Avi Shlaim. Ehud Barak expanded settlements throughout the entire Oslo process, and in Rabin’s last speech to the Knesset, he said something to the effect of, “We are giving them (the Palestinians) something less than a state.” We should be honest about the history of the failure of the peace process and the hand your own political orientation has had in creating the conflict.
Rabin moved the needle in the right direction, which Arafat and Hamas blew. Be honest about the price of Palestinian-Arab rejectionism and how it inflected the conflict. Read Anita Shapira’s Land and Power re: violence in the 1930s radicalizing the 2 national communities. Also Hillel Cohen’s 1929
Yes sectarian conflict between Palestinians and the Yishuv intensified following the Balfour declaration, a declaration of the UK’s intention to allow the expropriation of Palestinians to make way for Jewish settlements. Rabin allowed settlements to expand and demolished Palestinian homes, why did Rabin crackdown on Palestinians in Hebron following the cave of the patriarchs massacre rather than force evacuate settlers in Hebron? Why is purported centrist Yair Lapid talking about expulsions of millions of Arabs? Is this the centrist/labor left you chastise left Jews for not allying with? You’re unwilling to engage with the sordid history of the “Zionist left.
https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2026/2/24/israels-opposition-leader-voices-support-for-broad-middle-east-expansion