Zionism

By Marcie Natan Hadassah National President In 2004, Belle Simon, who lived in New York at the time, needed a kidney transplant. A longtime membe...

We have had 64 years of building a homeland for the Jewish people, an heroic task that has at times succeeded beyond our wildest dreams, and of which we are immensely proud, and at times let us down in deep and painful ways. That is what it means to be in a loving relationship.

On Israel's 64th birthday, I've been thinking about how to share that love of Israel with my daughters, even while I know the Israel they will come to know may seem different than when I first went 40 years ago.

I am a Zionist because Israel is the most important project of the Jewish people in my lifetime, and I will do what I can to help make it work, no matter the odds. And what seems to me needed to make it work is a revival of Zionism's earlier aspirations.

Yes, I am a Zionist. Wholeheartedly. If at all, I am now more explicitly Zionist than I was in my younger years. I am sorry and troubled that it has become so hard for so many to describe themselves in these terms.

Zionists of the left must contend with two sorts of challenge. One challenge comes from without -- from those who deny the legitimacy of a sovereign Jewish homeland -- and one from within -- from those with positions that put Israel at grave risk both morally and physically.

Zionism is not an inert concept but a continuing dynamic challenge, in both definition and implementation. The connotation of the word Zionist is changing all the time.

Here is the Zionist movement's next goal: to take the lead in informing our People's self-expression in art and politics and business alike, so as to pioneer a path toward a more fulfilling collective life.

For the Love of Zion, call me whatever you will, it won't change what I am. Liberals like me, walking and talking like Zionists, are Zionists. That's a truth the "authorities" cannot duck.

Can the Jewish people survive without a Jewish and democratic state in the Land of Israel? For a while, perhaps. But creative Jewish survival needs a state to strengthen Jewish identity, foster Jewish unity and offer a meaningful Jewish response to the emptiness of modern life.

Israel's founders understood that Israel cannot treat its minorities the way that Jews were treated throughout history. A world view of how the Jews can realize their national aspirations in a socially just manner is as relevant today as it was then.

Hard though it may be, I think it is better to struggle constantly between particularism and universalism -- to struggle between the demands of actual, complex situations and circumstances and the horizons or principles that let us project better ones.

Zionism's plummet as a compelling idea -- beyond, that is, the political or religious right -- isn't merely the byproduct of insidious propaganda or of the bullying of leftwing academics. The term has stumbled into something worse than obsolescence.

Sometimes I feel that I am the last of a vanishing species of people who had deep convictions about taking responsibility for the destiny of the Jews and about mending themselves as part of a universal movement aimed at making the world a better place.

The Zionist movement succeeded in creating a homeland for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel more than 60 years ago. Its current challenge is to become a truly liberal democratic country of all its citizens and work toward peace with a homeland for the Palestinian people in Palestine.

Without the democratic, pluralistic model to which most Western Jews subscribe, Zionism is in danger of devolving into ethno-nationalism: the domination of one group by another.

Is liberal Zionism an oxymoron? These days, it's easy to think it is. Many people on the left have, reluctantly, accepted that right-wing extremists are today's true Zionists, and have, therefore, dropped away from Zionism, or have styled themselves "post-Zionists," or have come to regard Israel as irrevocably tainted by its Zionist identity. But: Liberal Zionism, authentic heir to classic pragmatic Zionism, though overshadowed by Israel's pro-settler right wing camp, is alive and -- as we set out here to demonstrate over the next few days -- kicking.

In the ongoing discussion about when criticism of Israel can be labeled as anti-Semitism, Nathan Sharansky said that it's anti-Semitism when Israel is demonized, when Israel is delegitimized and when a double-standard is used to assess Israeli behavior.

Last week, the Jewish community was publicly challenged to consider what views have a role to play in the discussion around our table and what views are beyond the pale.

One doesn't spend a quarter-century working in the American academy without coming across all manner of opinionated, irrational and overheated types. None more so than those whose out-of-class activism consists of lambasting the State of Israel.

I have argued against the one state solution time and again; both in the version of the greater Land of Israel propagated by Israel's right, and in the version advocated by many Palestinian intellectuals and activists and some Jewish intellectuals on the far left.

I have two rules about people's positive actions. The first is that they are always more important than their intentions, whatever they may be. The second is the rule articulated by Maimonides nearly 800 years ago: embrace truth regardless of its source.