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.