What does it mean to be a “Liberal / Progressive Zionist”?

Friends ask me this question with the caveat, “I don’t understand exactly what that means”. I was talking to a few Krav Maga friends (some Israeli, some American) and one of my American friends said, “You really are a Zionist – huh?” I answered back with a “Yep, but, I am a Liberal Zionist”. Which followed with the question “Hmmm what does that mean?”. So I gave him my standard answer and then I thought more on what it means to be a “Liberal / Progressive Zionist”.

Here is what I came up with.

As I wrote here the other day, I think that Zionism is the progressive position to take regarding Israel and the Jewish people. It is my opinion that Zionism is a large tent, but, first and foremost it is a simple concept at the root of it. Simply put, I believe Zionism is the belief that the Jewish people have a legitimate right to self determination in a Nation State in part of their ancestral homeland in the Middle East.

And here the Jewish Virtual Library states:

Zionism:

The national movement for the return of the Jewish people to their homeland and the resumption of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel.  Has come to include the development of the State of Israel and the protection of the Jewish nation in Israel.

So in a lot of ways beyond this basic definition the term “Zionism” is a very broad term which includes people from people like Zahava Gal-On (Leader of the Leftist Israeli party – Meretz) to Michael Ben-Ari (Leader of the neo-Kahanist Otzma L’Yisrael), both of whom can legitimately be called “Zionists” (whether we like it or not). Now does this mean that people from Meretz and people from Otzma are the same? Of course it doesn’t mean that. Only a simpleton (and some goofy anti-Zionists) believe something like that.
No, because it’s a “big tent” Zionism allows for a great deal of divergence in its thought. There are Religious Zionists, Secular Zionists, Nationalist Zionists, Conservative Zionists, Centrist Zionists, and Liberal / Progressive Zionists, just to name a few varieties.

So what does it mean to be a “Liberal / Progressive” Zionist? In my mind it means a few things. Most important to me though it means that I support the concept of a National Homeland and State for the Jewish people that is also a Westernized, Democratic Nation State with separation between Synagogue and State. I believe in a State that respects true democracy. A State that respects all of its citizens no matter what race, religion, and or cultural background they may have. I support a State that embraces equality for Women and for its LGBT community. I also support a State that maintains the common cultural aspects of the Jewish community regardless of the level of religious observance. In short I support a State that is the a model of “Jewish Democracy”. I am heartened by the words of the Israeli Declaration of Establishment of Statehood when it states:

THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.

I think that these are noble goals. Now, is it realistic that everything will be met… Of course not, we are after human beings. No one is perfect. At the same time I think it is important that we strive to be better than what we are. Isn’t that a goal of being a person, to always improve oneself?

At the same time, I believe very strongly that becoming like our enemies will destroy who we are as well as the “spirit” of our people. I believe we can be and should be better than our enemies who I believe often times exhibit the worst parts of human behavior. In my mind, if I engage in the same tactics as my enemy what exactly makes me better than him/her, and if I am not better… then what’s the point in the long run. Does this mean I advocate defenseless behavior? In now way, shape, or form do I advocate that. I believe in stoutly defending our safety and principles, I just don’t believe we have eject our values and principles to do so.

So what does this mean for Modern Day Israel and by extension the Modern Day Jewish Community?
It means coming to terms with how and what we support in our own political polities. In the U.S., it means supporting candidates who believe in Progressive / Liberal values for the American People. What are those values? See above. It means that despite Rightwing “hackery” (I just made this word up), it means voting for and supporting those candidates that support social and economic justice for all Americans, not just those in the top 2%. It means not using another nation’s politics as an excuse to not support candidates that support (relatively) social and economic justice in one’s own nation. And by no means does it mean supporting candidates that expressly vote against social and civil rights at home.

What does it mean for Israel and the Jewish Community? It means supporting those organizations that support social justice and democracy in Israel (being consistent after all is important). It means supporting the rights of Israelis no matter what their background (Jewish, Muslim, or Christian) to enjoy equal civil rights. It means supporting democracy in its truest form. It means supporting the rights of all members of the Jewish community with regards to worship and marriage.

What does it mean in terms of Israeli foreign policy and in particular how Israel deals with the issues of the West Bank and the Occupation? It means supporting a defensible State. As a Liberal / Progressive Zionist, I heartily applaud the efforts of President Obama and his agenda of working hand in hand with the Israelis to increase their security and well being. It also means supporting a viable Two State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It means supporting a solution where both Israelis AND Palestinians can realize their legitimate rights to self determination.

What a “liberal” does not support is either side’s version of a “One State Solution”, and the disenfranchisement or ethnic cleansing of citizens and residents of the area.

For me, it is fine to call oneself a Zionist as long as that person believes in the legitimate rights of self determination of the Jewish people. What is wrong is when Rightists try to steal the term “liberal” and instead support parties and groups which are strictly opposed to Democracy, and Civil Rights in any polity, whether it be here (in the U.S.) or abroad.

So, this is how I view what Zionism is and what I believe it should be. I believe that our people after 2,500 + years of oppression by others should reach to our “higher selves” and remember to maintain the humanity and sense of justice that has kept us going as a people for all this time. It by no means, means that we should be weak or allow others to take advantage of us, but, I do believe that we can be both strong as well as hold to our higher ideals as much as is humanely possible.

How I Went From Mostly Disengaged To Ardent Zionist

One thing about me is that I constantly seek out opposing viewpoints and new sources of information, and reevaluate my opinions if warranted.

Profound issues that I have changed my mind on over the course of my life include gun control, affirmative action, the death penalty, and vegetarianism.  Of those, I have moved in what would be considered the more stereotypically "conservative" direction on three, and the more stereotypically "liberal" direction on one of them.  My point here is that I am very open minded about issues.

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Before around 2005 Israel did not occupy a large part of my thought space.  When it did, I was a firm believer in a two state solution based on the 1967 borders, and would have probably, if asked, said that I thought there was plenty of blame to go around on both sides.

Around that time, Israel began to loom much larger in my life because I began to be exposed to virulently anti-Israel rhetoric at the blog Daily Kos.  As I've discussed here many times, this rhetoric was often explicitly antisemitic.

As the Israeli-Arab conflict started to loom larger, I started exploring many of the common anti-Israel resources.  This included popular websites, lectures, and videos.

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What I found back then, and what I have continued to find since then, has been profoundly disappointing.  The anti-Israel side just simply doesn't have much of a worthy case, or if they do, they are certainly not making it.

The main problem is that a huge portion of anti-Israel rhetoric is based on pseudo anthropological nonsense.  Rather than new and interesting perspectives on, say, the Six Day War or the Oslo Accords or somesuch, what I have encountered is mostly ill-informed babble and transparently ridiculous analogies.  If this is what the anti-Israel side has to make their case, then their case is simply not worth making.

The most common of these are appeals to Arabs being "indigenous" and Jews being otherwise, like they are Amish in Bolivia, which completely misunderstands the millennia of Jewish connection and presence in The Land, not to mention the complex patterns of migrations in the Levant with the ebb and flow of empires over the past 200 years.  There is also incessant simplistic and incorrect application of very particular mid 20th century American racial paradigms to places where it doesn't belong.  There are constant - apparently straight faced, self confident, and seriously intended - references to "brown" and "white" people, revealing that those who peddle these notions have never been to Israel or the territories and have no idea who lives there.

I have been shocked at how many times I have seen anti-Israel discussions refer to Arabs as being "the real Semites" or somesuch.  This is conjuring a ridiculous and self-parodying pseudo-anthropological notion out of thin air.  There is no such thing as a "Semite" - Semitic is simply a language family that includes the highland Ethiopian languages, Hebrew, Arabic, and Maltese.  Nobody creates such false categories out of other language families, such as claiming that Hungarians are the "most Ural-Altaic" people, since such things are transparently absurd.  Languages are simply languages, and mean nothing more.

Then there is the constant embrace of anti-scientific garbage such as the Khazar hoax, which continues to stump me.  It is like debating with creationists or climate deniers, no amount of evidence will sway people from their factually indefensible position.  It is a profound truism that if your position depends on disproven nonsense, or even if you perceive that your position is dependent on disproven nonsense, then your position is not valid.

When actual historical events are discussed, they are almost always done so with apparently no understanding of important context.   What I have seen makes me doubt that most anti-Israel people are aware of very important and basic facts such as the UN Partition plan and the Jewish acceptance thereof, or the Peel Commission report, or other important events in the history of the region.

This is all not even mentioning the explicitly and unambiguously antisemitic content, such as the USS Liberty Hoax that is an unavoidable staple of anti-Israel advocacy, and the constant Holocaust revisionism, recently laid bare by the Greta Berlin episode.   

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The bottom line is that while I began my search for opposing viewpoints several years ago with a largely open mind, what I found has shown to me that apparently the anti-Israel position has little of serious value to offer.  If there is a valid case to be made there, they are not making it. 

What began as an exploration of an issue that previously had little sway for me has moved me toward being a very committed pro-Israel partisan.  The case for Israel that I have seen is based on the decades-long quest on the part of the Jewish side to reach a mutually acceptable solution, going back to the Peel Commission report, and the constant moves by the Arab side not to accept anything but complete victory and even genocide.  Nothing I have encountered among anti-Israel viewpoints, in now several years of searching, has made a worthwhile case.  Instead, I have mostly seen transparently silly pseudo-anthropological nonsense and Farrakhan-esque ranting devoid of any relevancy to the actual situation.

In spite of my considerable efforts to find it, there really seems to be no serious there there on the anti-Israel side.  Therefore, I have become a committed pro-Israel partisan.  So much so that I now seek out wine from the Golan Heights, and buy my chick peas from halfway around the world.  And of course I had to finally go there.  It is an irony that this whole path began with my initial online encounters with the anti-Israel side, half a decade ago.

Get Ready For Anti-Zionists To Falsely Claim This One

A letter from famous physicist and Time Magazine's Person of the Century Albert Einstein has come to light, where he shares his negative thoughts toward religious belief.

There is really nothing new here, as the world has long known that Einstein, whose very name serves as a synonym for "genius" all over the world, was not a believer.  However, like clockwork, I can just tell that antisemites / anti-Zionists will seize on one unfortunately worded part of the letter:

For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups … I cannot see anything ‘chosen’ about them.

In that passage I have emphasized it how antisemites / anti-Zionists will read it.  They will see a take-down of the religion of Judaism and of the Jewish people themselves, through the oft-misunderstood concept of being 'chosen'.

Basically, I can see house-Jew David Harris Gershon frantically penning his Daily Kos diary on it right this minute.

However, what dishonest antisemites / anti-Zionists like Gershon will fail to mention is that Einstein was an ardent Zionist.  In fact he spent much of the 1920s fundraising for Zionism.

And, in fact, this passage from the letter is very pro-Zionist.  If you read it the proper way, you see what needs to be emphasized:

For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups … I cannot see anything ‘chosen’ about them.

See that?  The Jews are a distinctive people, just like any other, and in fact Einstein 'gladly belongs' to them.  Like any people, Jews deserve self-determination in a nation-state.  So says a person widely regarded as one of the smartest in human history.

It is not particularly noteworthy that the world's most famous scientist was non-religious.  But this letter drives home that he was a proud member of the Jewish people, and that Jews are a people, not a religion.

Do Zionists Help Restore the Tuba-Zangaria Mosque? Yes, Zionists Do

Cross Posted from Blue Truth by Dr. Mike

As many of you know, last week a mosque in the Arab village of Tuba-Zangaria in the Galilee was attacked by arsonists, presumably extremist Jews (because of the "price tag" graffiti left at the site). One suspect has been arrested.

Not only is this act repulsive on many levels (and was immediately condemned in the strongest terms by both Shimon Peres and Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as by Israel's Chief Rabbis), but it also took place in an Arab village whose residents fought alongside the Palmach during Israel's War of Independence, whose young men commonly enlist in the IDF, whose village leaders decided they would not participate in the Arab riots in October 2000, and whose village sports center is named after Yitzhak Rabin.


And just yesterday, Muslim and Christian cemeteries in Jaffa were vandalized with similar graffiti left at the sites of the desecrations.

And while I don't always agree with Bradley Burston, I think his eloquent column in Haaretz about this is completely on the mark.

Those of us who are Jewish have just completed our prayers on the Day of Atonement.  The centerpieces of that day's prayers are the community confessionals, the Vi'dui and the Al Het, in which we all request forgiveness for the sins that, though we may not have committed them ourselves, fall upon us because members of our community did commit them.  This Yom Kippur, the desecration of the mosque of Tuba Zangaria was prominent in my mind during those prayers. 


The "price tag" phenomenon is a dangerous one for Israel in many ways.  These acts are those of vigiliantes who openly challenge the rule of law and the authority of the state of Israel.  Up until now, these attacks have only taken place on the West Bank.  There, they attack not only their neighbors, but also IDF soldiers (on whom, ironically, they depend for their own safety in their West Bank settlements).  They undermine the authority of the state, and they feed into the mostly false stereotypes created by anti-Israel activists, of violent settlers attacking peaceful Palestinian villagers who want nothing more than to live in peace; that false impression creates more international pressure to force Israel to withdraw from the very land which the settlers want to keep for their own.   When these attacks take place within the state of Israel itself, it challenges one of the fundamentals of Israeli society that we proudly hold up as a response to those who maliciously misrepresent Israel's status as a Jewish state-- that Israel's Arab citizens have full political, civil and religious rights equal to the Jewish citizens, and far better than the rights enjoyed by Arabs anywhere else in the Middle East.  If Israel's Arab citizens, especially those who express friendship and support to their Jewish neighbors, are the subject of acts of terror such as this, then it is not only those Arab Israelis who suffer, but the Jews of Israel as well.   


We also make the argument that Israel acts more morally than the Palestinian leadership that turns terrorists into heroes, and that broadcasts an incessant stream of venal anti-Semitic propaganda . And we correctly point out that the terrorists of Hamas, al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade and Islamic Jihad openly celebrate the slaughter of children in their bedrooms,  because "itbach el-Yahud" ("kill the Jew") has been a rallying cry for Arab rejectionists since the days of the Grand Mufti (and can be heard even on the streets of the San Francisco Bay Area) .


It is therefore vital for those of us who support the existence of a Jewish state of Israel, to stand with what we know is the overwhelming majority of Jews in Israel and in the Diaspora against such vile acts done by an extremist minority in our community; even the leadership of the settler movement condemns these terrorists.  Our enemies routinely distort "Zionism" into a hateful caricature; this is an important opportunity for us to stand up for the Zionism that we know and to reclaim it from those who use it as an epithet.


This is not about settlements, nor about borders, nor about negotiations (or lack thereof) between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.  This is about standing with the Israeli citizens of Tuba-Zangaria and elsewhere, just as we stand with Jewish Israelis who have been the victims of religious and political acts of hatred. 


Israel's Declaration of Independence states: 


"WE APPEAL - in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months - to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions."


The people of Tuba-Zangaria answered that appeal in the affirmative. It is time now for us to honor that.

In the spirit of atoning for the sins of others in our community, the Association of Reform Zionists of America, in partnership with the Israel Religious Action Center, is raising funds for the refurbishing of the Tuba mosque.  It's the Zionist thing to do. Please join me in donating.