We talked about Zionism, because hey, what else would three Jews talk about on a Sunday evening? Specifically, we were talking about where liberal Zionism goes now, given the — to put it euphemistically — “political situation” in Israel.
An aerial shot of the Tel Aviv protests (Flash 90)
Jewish Chronicle readers won’t be wildly surprised to learn that optimism was not to be found in abundance among the three of us. We had spent most of our lives working in left-leaning milieus, occasionally having to defend Israel specifically and Zionism generally against the usual criticisms.
I had my usual arguments for the defence, so well-honed I could recite them in Hebrew backwards: Jews have the right to self-determination, we need a safe haven, why are people obsessed with Israel when other (non-democratic!) countries are so much worse? Yadda, yadda, yadda.
But the news, the news. Of course one can point to the number of terrorist attacks on Israelis, but Huwara, the weakening of Israel’s Supreme Court… let’s be honest, for a liberal Zionist, it’s pretty upsetting.
Not entirely coincidentally, Julius has edited a pamphlet, titled Whither Liberal Zionism?, just published by the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, in which he addresses this question alongside other commentators.
I should probably add that I am one of those commentators, but there are other people, too, such as Freedland (obviously), David Hirsh, Daniel Finkelstein, Anshel Pfeffer and so on.
Flag-waving protesters in Tel Aviv (Flash 90)
Again, I can’t promise much optimism to be found here, but it is a very interesting pamphlet and, I think, an important one. But even as I read my far more learned fellow contributors’ contributions, I kept thinking: I have been through this before. Specifically, on November 9, 2016.
That morning, I walked into what was then my office where — who else? — Freedland had to take me aside somewhere because I was weeping my eyes out.
Yes, it was the morning after the 2016 US election and Donald Trump was definitely going to be my native country’s next president. The place I once thought I knew, the one I defended in arguments and the one that was such a major part of my identity, was now unrecognisable to me.
No doubt some will say that I should have experienced such a loss of faith before in what we can, I guess, call the American dream. Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib; even just learning about the Vietnam War or slavery, for God’s sake.
But for whatever reason, it was the election of Trump that really felt like a severing between me and America. I considered giving up my US citizenship.
But I didn’t. I couldn’t. America is too much a part of me, and I learned to distinguish in my mind between my dream of it, which I refuse to relinquish, and the political reality. That, I suspect, is what much of the diaspora will learn to do about Israel.
We can still believe in the dream, and defend it, argue for it, fight for it, even if the current reality is a source of such sadness.
