The ‘Z’ word: Reclaiming Zionism

Zionism was a movement to create a Jewish state. Logically speaking, it should have disappeared in 1948, the way scaffolding is dismantled after the building is complete. So why is it still needed in 2025? The answer has to do with Israel’s central strategic failure, which threatens to undo all its tactical victories: its inability to reconcile the Palestinian Arabs to its existence.

When David Ben-Gurion and other leaders issued Israel’s Declaration of Independence, on 15 May 1948, they included two appeals, “in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months”. One was addressed “to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State”, the other to “all neighbouring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighbourliness”. These appeals were ignored in favour of war, which Israel won, at the cost of some 6000 lives – about 1 per cent of the new nation’s Jewish population.

After several decades and several more wars, Israel’s neighbouring states abandoned the effort to destroy it. The Arab citizens of Israel, too, are for the most part peaceful participants in the life of the country.

But for the majority of Palestinian Arabs displaced in 1948 and brought under Israeli occupation in 1967, the existence of a Jewish state remains at best an insult to tolerate, at worst an injury to avenge.

Between 2014 and 2020, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy conducted a series of public opinion polls in the West Bank and Gaza, asking whether “to end the occupation, the Palestinians should accept the principle of ‘two states for two peoples – the Palestinian people and the Jewish people’”, or reject it, “because we should not accept a state for the Jewish people”. In every year but one, the majority of Palestinians rejected it – in 2020, by a margin of 68 per cent to 32 per cent.

That enduring consensus explains why Palestinian leaders have refused every offer to partition the land “between the river and sea”, from the Peel Commission in 1937 to Camp David in 2000. It is why UNRWA continues to designate as refugees the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Palestinians who left Israel more than seventy years ago. It is one reason why Egypt refused to open its border to allow Palestinian civilians to flee Israel’s campaign against Hamas, the way Turkey welcomed millions of Syrians during that country’s civil war.

It is also why Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 and held civilian hostages, despite knowing what kind of retaliation would ensue. “Today, the enemy has had a political, military, intelligence, security and moral defeat inflicted upon it, and we shall crown it, with the grace of God, with a crushing defeat that will expel it from our lands,” said Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on October 7. To expel the Jews, any price was worth paying. (Haniyeh himself was killed by Israel in Iran in July 2024.

Despite the dreams of the left in the 1990s, Israelis have not been able to end the Palestinian conflict with territorial concessions. Despite the dreams of the far right today, they have never been brutal enough to end it with expulsion. Instead, under the leadership of Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu, for two decades Israel dominated the Palestinians so thoroughly that it could afford to keep deferring the primary, existential question: is the Jewish state an accomplished fact? Or is it still a proposition, one that must be defended physically, politically and morally, day after day, year after year?

October 7 and its aftermath left no doubt of the answer. Much of the world has taken the Israel–Hamas conflict as an occasion to renew the case against Israel’s existence – and young people in the West are increasingly receptive. In Britain, a June 2024 poll found that 54 per cent of people aged eighteen to twenty-four agreed with the statement, “Israel should not exist.” In Canada, support for Hamas in its war with Israel was almost non-existent among people over fifty-five, but those aged eighteen to twenty-four supported Hamas over Israel by a two-to-one margin.

Political ideologies often find themselves in the position of winning in theory but losing in practice. In the twentieth century, much of the world embraced the belief that communism was the best way to organise society, even as actual communist societies turned into famine-stricken dictatorships. Zionism is the rare exception: an idea that succeeded in practice while remaining fiercely contested in theory.

It created a Jewish state but has not convinced the world of the state’s legitimacy and permanence – what Israel’s Declaration of Independence called “the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State”.

Zionism isn’t the only long-established political idea under attack today. Over the last decade, the Western liberal order has been challenged from within and without. Most of its defenders have responded by insisting that criticism of things like free speech and free trade, the European Union and NATO, is simply impermissible, out of bounds.

This strategy has failed to halt the rise of populism, nativism and isolationism, and it cannot halt the rise of anti-Zionism either. Rather, when an idea is challenged, those who believe in it must be able to mount a substantive defence – to show why it is as worthy and necessary today as it was a generation or a century ago.

For Zionists, that means reclaiming the definition of the word from its opponents. Zionism has nothing to do with “creating a racist hierarchy with European Jews at the top”, as Jewish Voice for Peace says, or a “chronic addiction to territorial expansion”, in the words of Patrick Wolfe. Today, as when it began, Zionism is simply the belief that a Jewish state is necessary for the survival and well-being of the Jewish people.

This article is excerpted from the essay The Z word: Reclaiming Zionism published by the Jewish Quarterly.