Are you joining your anti-Zionist kids or your Zionist parents for Thanksgiving and worrying about a tough conversation? I have plan for you: talk about non-binaries! Sure, talk about gender (or sex) to distract from Israel/Gaza. But then draw the same logic to Zionism/Anti-Zionism and a third way: Post-Zionism.
My main goal as I’ve been identifying as a Post-Zionist and writing to revive Post-Zionism is to find a middle ground. I had thought of it as a middle ground for pro-peace Americans (Jews and non-Jews) and also for Israeli Jews, Israeli non-Jews, and Palestinians. But now I see it as a middle ground for pro-democracy/pro-peace Zionist parents (or grandparents) and a generation of skeptical teens and 20-somethings who are anti-Zionist-curious. We might call them JVP+ (Jewish Voices for Peace Plus)
Kids these days are questioning gender binaries and other false dichotomies, and that’s been helpful and beneficial. But somehow, we’ve all been stuck in the Zionism/Anti-Zionism binary. I’ve talked to my 40-something and 50-something Left Zionist friends about Post-Zionism, and I’ve posted some of their representative reactions. Their general theme is: “Don’t surrender Zionism to the anti-Zionists. Zionism is legitimate and needs to be defended as such.”
That may be true for the Zionism that we grew up with, from 1948 through Oslo. But our children have not grown up in that era. The only Israel they have known is Bibi Netanyahu’s Likud pro-settler expansionist era, and that is their frame of reference for modern Zionism.
The Zionism we grew up with was Israel-as-underdog and then Israel-of-Oslo. Our narrative is that Israel took the biggest risks for peace and found no partner (“Ein Partneyr”).
That isn’t what Zionism means anymore — not in modern practice, anyway. If you ask a new generation that has known only Bibi’s Israel and Likudnik Zionism to choose between Zionism and anti-Zionism, and only these two options, I’ve seen many of them on my campuses or in my family recoil and either opt out or opt for anti-Zionism.
And I get it.
My Gen-X middle aged friends say “Zionism is a big tent. There’s room for Peace Zionists and Democracy Zionists.”
Yes, and it is also such a big tent that it includes Netanyahu and Smotrich and Ben-Gvir and worse, the West Bank settlers engaging in violence and racist murders like the Pogram burning down Huwara last year.
I oppose the use of the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s response since Oct. 7, but my defense is a lot harder after Netanyahu’s invocation of “Amalek” and biblical genocide (see 1 Samuel 15:2-3). Now imagine our online kids having to grapple with that.
We need to understand why the Zionist/Anti-Zionist binary is backfiring. Zionism as a Jewish state meant one thing in 1897 and in 1948 and in 1993. But since 2000, “a Jewish state” has been associated with settler expansionism, ethno-nationalism, and racist violence. We need an alternative framing that moves forward with a message of pluralism, dialogue, democracy and peace.
I’ve said that Zionism is to Israel as the Founding Era is to America. Let it live robustly as a legitimate historical founding vision, but not tainted or de-legitimized by Netanyahu and his coalition with Jewish fascists.
Post-Zionism is more truly pro-democracy and pro-equality than Zionism is, circa 2023. It doesn’t mean a one-state solution. It means being more open to the compromises necessary for rebuilding Israeli pluralistic civic society and for peace, whenever that becomes realistic over the long-term.
Post-Zionism may not sound as appealing as a kind of retreat from our romantic Zionism, the nostalgic Zionism of the 1940s and 1990s. But if Post-Zionism might be more amenable to our kids if they would only keep an open mind, maybe we should show open-mindedness ourselves.
Peace never happens when we expect the other side to take the first step. I’m suggesting that we parents might take a big step towards dialogue this Thanksgiving by putting Post -Zionism on the table, along with the Turkey and tofurkey.
Ezra Klein describes better than I can this generational divide over lived experience. Here is a long introduction from Ezra Klein’s podcast (which I generally recommend and especially for its Israel/Gaza coverage), before a powerful conversation with Rabbi Sharon Brous:
Everything I’m about to talk about is hard to talk about. It is hard to talk about because it’s personal to me. It’s hard to talk about because it’s happening in the midst of an active hellacious war. And it’s hard to talk about because even when there is not a war, this is just hard to talk about.
Maybe I’ll start here. I think something we’re seeing in the politics in America around Israel right now, I think it reflects three generations with very different lived experiences of what Israel is. You have older Americans, say, Joe Biden, who saw Israel as the haven for the Jews and who also saw Israel when it was weak and small, when it really could have been wiped off the map by its neighbors.
They have a lived sense of Israel’s impossibility and its vulnerability and the dangers of the neighborhood in which it is in. Their views of Israel formed around the Israel of the Six-Day War in 1967, when its neighbors massed to try and strangle Israel when it was young, or the Yom Kippur War in 1973, when they surprise attacked Israel 50 years ago.
Then there is the next generation, my generation, I think. And I think of us as this straddle generation. We only ever knew a strong Israel, an Israel that was undoubtedly the strongest country in the region, a nuclear Israel, an Israel backed by America’s unwavering military and political support. That wasn’t always true, at least not to the extent now. In his great book, “The Much Too Promised Land,” Aaron David Miller points out that before the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Israel ranked 24th in foreign aid from the US, 24th.
Within a few years of that war, it ranked first, as it typically has since.
We also knew an Israel that was an occupying force, a country that could and did impose its will on Palestinians, and I don’t want to be euphemistic about this, an Israel in which Palestinians were an oppressed class, where their lives and their security and their freedom were worth less. But we also knew an Israel that had a strong peace movement, where the moral horror of that occupation was widely recognized. We knew an Israel where the leaders were trying imperfectly, but seriously and continuously, to become something better, to become something different, to become in the eyes of the world what Israel was in its own eyes, a Jewish state, but a humane and moral one.
And then, as Yossi Klein Halevi described on the show recently, that peace movement collapsed. The why of this is no mystery. The Second Intifada, the endless suicide bombings were a trauma Israel still has not recovered from. And they posed a horrible question, to which the left, both in Israel and in America, had no real answer then or now. If your story of all this is simplistic, if it is just that Israel wanted this, it is wrong.
But what happened then is Israel moved right and further right and further right. Extremists once on the margin of Israeli politics and society became cabinet ministers and coalition members. The settlers in the West Bank ran wild, functionally annexing more and more territory, sometimes violently, territory that was meant to be returned to Palestinians, and doing so with the backing of the Israeli state, doing so in a way that made a two-state solution look less and less possible.
Israel withdrew from Gaza, and when Hamas took control, they blockaded Gaza, leaving Gazans to misery, to poverty. Israel stopped trying to become something other than an occupier nation. It became deeply illiberal. It settled into a strategy of security through subjugation. And many in its government openly desired expansion through expulsion. And so now you have this generation, the one coming of age now, the one that has only known this Israel, Netanyahu’s Israel, Ben-Gvir’s Israel.
…There is this Pew survey in 2022 that I find really telling. It found that 69 percent of Americans over age 65 had a favorable view of Israel, but among Americans between ages 18 and 29, young Americans, 56 percent had an unfavorable view. As it happens, American politics right now is dominated by people over 65, but it won’t be forever.
If we care about Israel and America’s crucial support for it over the long haul, we need to take this generational divide seriously. Post -Zionism can be that bridge to a new generation here and in the Middle East.
B’shalom, happy Thanksgiving.
Shugerblog 