What Is a Zionism For the Palestinians?

A response to Alana Newhouse

Alana Newhouse, editor-in-chief of Tablet magazine, is apparently getting three cheers for her new piece, “Zionism For Everyone” from the usual voices o’ th’ right-hand file. I understand why; it’s playing their song. She begins by asking why anti-Zionism should be burgeoning at a time when the world is facing so many compelling challenges—some promising, some terrifying, some both—any of which will do far more to transform our lives than whatever happens in a small slice of the Middle East. Her answer, encapsulated in a single phrase from the piece: “Expressions of disgust are often evidence of envy.” This is an era, she avers, when most of the West has given up on the privilege of self-determination as a necessary consequence of surrendering its responsibilities, and so much of the West has come to hate Israel for refusing to surrender, and for thriving in their refusal. But the envious don’t actually need to surrender. Instead of spitefully laboring to undermine Israel, Western countries could instead try to emulate it. European nationalism originated in emulation of ancient Israel as described in the Bible, a people set apart with its own distinct identity, called to be more than a mere tribe yet never seeking to be an empire. Similarly, the West can recover its sense of self by emulating modern Israel, each nation embracing its distinctiveness, but in a future-oriented way, not out of mere nostalgia.

I’m not going to pretend that there’s nothing to this argument, which Yoram Hazony has been running around making a version of for years (and I do wonder how she managed not to credit him). Yet there are obvious rejoinders and responses to be made. To begin with, “why are you so obsessed with me?” is never a very compelling form of response to criticism. That doesn’t mean Newhouse is entirely wrong that there is a kind of obsession in play, nor about the nature of the obsession, though one could also invert its valence. I myself have argued, at least as long ago as 2012, that the American right’s fondness for Israel is largely due to the fact that Israel is a country that is willing to “just do things,” to take history into its own hands on its own terms, something these types think of America as having once done before it got too soft and decadent or too burdened by a web of hegemonic obligation. As philosemitism and antisemitism have a lot in common in that both are rooted in a simplifying caricature of Jewish “difference,” so do philo-Zionism and anti-Zionism.

The notion that the ancient Israelites were a kind of prototype for a modern nation is more a creative misreading than solid history—which is not really a knock, since most novel ideas start as creative misreadings of old ones, but which does suggest that plain old nationalism is all we’re talking about here, with the use of the word “Zionism” being just a kind of rhetorical trapping. And the most obvious problem with advocating a nationalist revival is that the first round of nationalism was incredibly bloody, and continues to be so today; pay a visit to the Donbas if you doubt it. Contrary to the theory that the often violent birth of nations was a mere transition, nationalists have not generally been happy to tend their own gardens but often take a keen interest in those of their neighbors. Liah Greenfield begins her book, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity with Oliver Cromwell’s purported line, “We are Englishmen; that is one good fact,” an appreciation of English distinctiveness from which a confident nation would ultimately be forged (one that, at least in his time, was somewhat inclined to look back to the ancient Israelites for inspiration just as Newhouse suggests today’s nations should). But ask someone Irish what they think about the Lord Protector and his legacy. In actual history, as opposed to just-so storytelling, the line between nation-building and empire-building is easily and repeatedly crossed.

Newhouse tries to distinguish between “good” nationalism and “bad” nationalism by saying the former, like Zionism, are future-oriented and outward-looking even if anchored in the past and the particular, while the latter are exclusively past-oriented, inward-looking and reactionary. But this will not work; Garibaldi (good, I assume) and Mussolini (bad, I hope) were both determined modernizers. She also asserts that a Zionism-like future-oriented nationalism will result in high birth rates and happy citizens—like Israel has—and other signs of a renewed sense of national purpose. In our own time, though, China, Japan and South Korea are all examples of countries with strong national identities that are extremely future-oriented. They nonetheless have some of the lowest fertility rates in the world and are not ranked as notably happy either. What are they doing wrong—and, again, how might that relate to her thesis about Zionism?

The most peculiar part of her essay is when Newhouse rails against President Obama for undermining America’s own national identity by denying both “American exceptionalism,” a notion derived from our Puritan forebears who sought to build a “city on a hill,” and our pioneering frontier spirit of venturesomeness, which is what I think she means by “capital,” the counterpoint to “covenant” that together form her American ethos. These, she avers, are the reasons for our extraordinary success as a nation, and so undermining them (as she sees Obama as having done) has left us in the angry and divided state that we find ourselves in, because we have nothing else to hold us together. Our actual cultural patrimony is thin, being an amalgam of so many peoples, and the land was ours before we were the land’s. What, then, I wonder, holds Brazil together? Or Canada? Or Argentina? What might be their versions of Zionism? Late in the essay, Newhouse lauds Javier Milei for breaking longtime shibboleths, shaking up Argentina and showing that change is possible, and thereby restoring his country’s belief in the future. I believe there was a recent American president who, in a moment of economic crisis, ran on change we can believe in. Why is he Newhouse’s bête noir while Milei is her hero? And once again, what does any of this have to do with Zionism?

Finally, I could critique the piece by pointing out just what has been happening under the Zionist banner over the past few years. After its last election, Israel looked ready to tear itself to bits, or, better, into tribes that barely even recognized themselves as parts of a single nation. That furious division has been partly suppressed since the atrocities of October 7th as Israel has fought a series of wars in response, but it doesn’t speak well of Newhouse’s premise if Zionism depends on such a threat to keep the nation together. Meanwhile, Israel inflicted massive destruction on Gaza, is engaged in slow-motion ethnic-cleansing in the West Bank, engaged in a massive war of choice alongside the United States in Iran with no obvious endgame, and has just launched a large-scale invasion of Lebanon to root out Hezbollah, a terrorist group brought into being as a consequence of Israel’s previous invasion of Lebanon in 1982 to root out the PLO. As Israel’s Persian Gulf allies, battered by Iran’s missiles and drones and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, begin thinking about distancing themselves from the United States and Israel and building a new security architecture for themselves anchored on Turkey and Pakistan, Israeli leaders have started muttering about what they might have to do to combat this new threat. This is certainly a country that is not afraid to do things. Are those things most countries on earth want to emulate? Or might it be that Zionism itself needs some tinkering with if this is where it is leading?

I could go on. But I don’t actually think any of the above are the most important rejoinders to make. The whole point of the essay is that Newhouse thinks Zionism is a “technology” that is available to anyone. “Anyone” presumably would include the Palestinians. What might their version of Zionism—focused, necessarily, on the same land that Israeli Jews call home and that Jews around the world have prayed and yearned toward for millennia—be? And how might it be distinguished from the Palestinian nationalism that actually exists and that has motivated over sixty years of struggle against actually-existing Zionism?

I can hypothesize various possible answers, various ways the Newhouse might argue that actually-existing Palestinian nationalism is not sufficiently future-oriented or positively-inspiring, that it is too much about resistance and not enough about a willing a dream into being. But any positive “Palestinian dream” is going to be about building a future of their own design in their own land for their own people. That’s a given, isn’t it? And if that is the case, then that dream necessarily is going to necessitate either displacing, limiting or transforming Zionism as actually manifested in the State of Israel. If it perfectly mimicked the Jewish version, a Palestinian “Zionism” would call for an ingathering of people of Palestinian descent to join their brothers and sisters to build their own state—a state where they would be fully sovereign, responsible for their security, and engaged in defending the well-being of their co-ethnics beyond its borders. The most hopeful versions of such a movement would recognize the Zionism that birthed and grew the State of Israel as kin, and partner with Israelis in building two sovereign states on the basis of true equality, or, alternatively, a shared state that would fulfill the national aspirations of both peoples. Such a hopeful turn would represent a considerable departure from Israel’s own trajectory, or from the trajectory of any other nationalist movement I am aware of, yet it would still require a profound transformation of Israeli Zionism to bring to fruition.

So, as a Zionist herself and an apostle of Zionism for everyone, would Newhouse welcome such development, even seek to foster it? If not, then wouldn’t she have to acknowledge that the Palestinians are one people for whom Zionism is not available as a “technology?” And why might that be? It can’t be because Palestinians are inconveniently in the way of actually-existing Zionism’s self-assertion, can it? Perhaps it’s because, according to her lights, the Palestinians aren’t a “real” people at all, one with potential for true nationhood. Israel, after all, has various distinct non-Jewish native minorities—Druze, Bedouins, Armenians, Circassians—that have been more or less integrated into Israel’s national life without acquiring distinct national aspirations of their own on Israeli territory. Perhaps she expects Palestinians either to do similarly despite their vastly greater numbers, or to go away and join some other state, some other people elsewhere. But if that is the case, then what is left of her brief? Isn’t she confirming what Zionism’s critics have been saying about Zionism all along?

It is, to be clear, completely normal for a nationalist ideology (like any ideology) to pay no attention whatsoever to inconveniently embodied facts like groups of human beings that don’t fit their ideological requirements. But that’s precisely why ideologies need to not be carried to their logical conclusions, why you can’t just say “why not have everyone be nationalist?” and why any extant nationalism needs to find some principle that will limit the drive for collective self-assertion from which it springs and which it fosters, a principle that can only come from outside of itself. A brief for nationalism that doesn’t even reckon with that truth, at a time when it is so vividly on display, is hard for me to take seriously as anything but an emotional appeal to the already convinced, and designed to affirm as far-sightedness what is actually their convenient and selective blindness.