The Gaza genocide has killed liberal Zionism

The Gaza genocide has destroyed the remnants of liberal Zionism.

The obliteration practised by Israel in Gaza, the anti-Palestinian pogroms in the West Bank, and the war to ethnically cleanse southern Lebanon – all overseen by overtly fanatical Israeli leaders, several of whom have been indicted by the International Criminal Court – have left liberal Zionists with nowhere to hide.

For decades, liberal Zionists were the confident public face of Israel in the West.

They encapsulated an attitude that attempted to reconcile a professed commitment to liberal values such as equality of citizenship, freedom of speech and assembly, and democratic and constitutional rule with a commitment to an explicitly nationalist project that seeks to build, uphold and defend the idea of a Jewish state in a multi-religious land, despite what such a state has meant over decades for millions of native Muslim and Christian Palestinians facing discrimination and subjugation.

For decades, liberal Zionists have declared that Israel was a tolerant state committed to both being Jewish and democratic.

They were provided enormous rhetorical, moral and political support from liberal western luminaries such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and from major liberal western states led by the United States, Great Britain, France and Germany.

But the gap between what Israel is said to have represented as a model of post-Holocaust western redemption and the brutal reality of what it has always entailed for its principal Palestinian victims has become impossible to paper over.

Two ends of the spectrum

At one end of the spectrum, there is now some belated awareness, and even a dim grudging recognition, that after Gaza, something is quite clearly not right with the Zionist project.

The British actress Helen Mirren, who has long championed Israel, acknowledged as much when she admitted that she “grew up in Europe, post Second World War, and the realisation in my parents’ generation of what had happened in the Holocaust was so profound, so important.

But while the Democratic party figures stridently condemned Smotrich’s Islamophobia, they said nothing about his anti-Palestinianism

“Therefore,” she explained, “the creation of Israel was a very important moment, although maybe it was done in completely the wrong way, in the wrong place, I don’t know. But something had to happen after the horror.”

At the other end of the spectrum, however, the hoary shibboleths of Zionism, and its associated anti-Palestinian rhetorical buttresses such as “Israel’s right to exist”, still do not even pretend to consider Palestinians, or express any doubt about the creation of the state of Israel in Palestine at the expense of the Palestinians.

Take Democratic party establishment figures – Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, New York Attorney General Letitia James and New York Governor Kathy Hochul among others – who spoke or marched in the so-called “Israel Day” parade in New York City this May.

It is an annual spectacle of Zionist enthusiasm billed as an “apolitical” expression of positive Jewish national and communal affiliation and identification.

Thousands of marchers were festooned in the flag of a foreign state that has carried out a genocide in Gaza, tolerates pogroms in the West Bank, sexually abuses and rapes Palestinian captives, actively kills journalists and paramedics and destroys entire villages and towns in southern Lebanon.

Schumer, Hochul and James are all nominally liberal and raised at a time in American politics when being Zionist was taken for granted and when the Palestine exception was largely unchallenged.

Seasoned politicians, they subsequently claimed to be, or suggested that they were, shocked that none other than Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s openly racist finance minister, marched at the front of the tawdry parade.

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But while the Democratic party figures stridently condemned Smotrich’s Islamophobia, they said nothing about his anti-Palestinian racism.

Whereas Smotrich openly embraces Jewish supremacy over non-Jewish Palestinians, they act as if Palestinians are invisible and irrelevant to their identification with Israel – much like a white Southerner during the height of Jim Crow segregation and lynching might have insisted that their celebration of “Dixie” had nothing to do with Black Americans at all.

Then along comes the odious Smotrich, like some supercharged Bull Connor, and says out loud and arrogantly what is not meant to be said openly in the metropolitan western centres upon which Israel depends for its subjugation of millions of stateless Palestinian people.

Elegiac Zionism

Not all liberal Zionists are totally oblivious to Palestinian pain and suffering.

Few, in fact, callously revel in expressions of Jewish supremacy and Palestinian suffering as overtly as does Smotrich and his colleague, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who proudly wears an anti-Palestinian lynching noose on his lapel and who recently said that all Lebanon must burn.

A noticeable aspect of late liberal Zionism is its performative claim to recognise Palestinian suffering, and to acknowledge the injustice that Palestinians have endured at the hands of Israel, but nevertheless to insist that the Zionist project in Palestine is still redeemable no matter how many Palestinians are harmed by Israel. Liberal Zionism has become elegiac Zionism.

The founder of the liberal Zionist lobbying organisation J Street, Jeremy Ben-Ami, embodies the prevarication of elegiac Zionism, the idea that things were once ideal and have since been corrupted.

In a recent interview on the popular show Breaking Points, Ben-Ami tried to update the myths of liberal Zionism by saying that Israel has strayed from its founding principles.

He insisted that Israel was a great and necessary project, and attempted to justify Zionism by pointing to the long history of persecution experienced by Jews in Europe, and by suggesting that Israel’s early history was filled with promise betrayed by the advent of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Ben-Ami does not discuss the violent, coercive and undemocratic nature of the British Mandate in Palestine that allowed for Zionist colonisation of Palestine.

Whatever the original motives to create a Jewish state – to combat European antisemitism, for example, or to emulate other European racial nationalisms – from its outset in Ottoman Palestine, the Zionist project collided with the reality of history, geography and the presence of the Palestinian people.

The early leaders of the Zionist movement, and their European imperial backers, were open about their conviction in the supremacy of European Jews over non-Jewish Palestinians, and over Arab and Eastern Jews. They were also convinced of the superiority of European civilisation over all others.

A century before Netanyahu, in 1896, the leader of the Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl, famously described a Jewish state in Palestine as “a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism”.

Chaim Weizmann told his British imperial patron, Arthur Balfour, in 1918 that there could be no democracy in Palestine so long as there was a native Palestinian majority. After describing Palestinians as screaming, duplicitous and back-stabbing, Weizmann insisted that the British occupiers of Palestine must not be guided by the “democratic principle”.

The brutal numbers operate against us, for there are five Arabs to one Jew. The influence of the Arab must in fairness be five times greater than the Jewish… The result is that the Jews are practically handed over to the Arabs. This system does not take into account the fact that there is fundamental qualitative difference between Jew and Arab.

In 1923, another Zionist colonist by the name of Vladimir Jabotinsky wrote a revealing essay titled “The Iron Wall”, in which he insisted that though the Palestinian natives were culturally “500 years behind us”, they would defend their own land.

He therefore advocated crushing Palestinians physically and psychologically.

A century of supremacy

Despite Ben-Ami’s suggestion of an antediluvian Zionist moment of innocence, the founders of the new state of Israel ruthlessly expelled hundreds of thousands of indigenous Palestinians and expropriated their lands and properties during and after 1948.

While they encouraged Jewish refugees, settlers and immigrants from around the world to become citizens, they methodically prevented now stateless non-Jewish Palestinian refugees from returning to their own homes.

As historian Shira Robinson has documented in her book Citizen Strangers, they made the surviving and unwanted Palestinian minority second-class citizens, whom they also placed under military rule until 1966.

More than a century after Weizmann’s expression of Jewish supremacy over Arabs, and 78 years after the Nakba, Ben-Ami is at pains to appear reasonable before a global public that no longer accepts Zionist expressions of supremacy and racism.

Liberal Zionism has lost ground to more overtly racist Zionists because the latter champion the ugly, cruel reality of what the Zionist project … has always been for Palestinians

Ben-Ami admits, to be sure, that he is horrified by Israel’s carnage in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank. He still wants an ethnostate but refuses to be candid about its nature.

He demurs from describing Israel as an “ethnostate”, and instead favours describing it as a “homeland of the Jewish people”. This verbiage suggests that such a state is reconcilable with Palestinian rights if only a “border” could be created somewhere.

In short, he holds tight to the separatist fantasy that would allow Jews worldwide to continue to emigrate to Israel by virtue of being Jewish, and to enjoy inherently superior rights to most of the land of historic Palestine, which are, by definition, denied to non-Jewish Palestinians exiled from their actual homeland.

Ben-Ami concedes that Palestinians should be granted their own right to return, but not to their original homes or lands or villages as is stipulated by international law and UN resolutions.

Instead, exiled Palestinians should be directed to wherever a lesser, mini-Palestinian state might be created. The “two-state” solution thus becomes not really about providing a Palestinian future as much as functioning as an exculpatory mantra for liberal Zionists to keep holding on to their Zionism, no matter what Israel does.

Liberal Zionism has lost ground to more overtly racist Zionists because the latter champion the ugly, cruel reality of what the Zionist project in Palestine has always been for Palestinians, something liberal Zionists have sought to deny, wish away and deflect.

At the same time, however, global public opinion is horrified by what Israel has done to the Palestinian people. History has caught up with Zionism. Try as its adherents might, there is no putting the liberal Zionist Humpty Dumpty back together again.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.