The liberal Zionist dilemma

There is a particular kind of essay that appears every few years, usually after some fresh convulsion in Jerusalem or Gaza, asking whether “liberal Zionism” can still hold together as a coherent political project. The question is not new. It has haunted the Israeli left since at least 1967, and arguably since 1948. But it keeps getting asked because the tension it names has never actually been resolved, only managed, postponed or papered over by whichever crisis happened to be dominating the news cycle at the time. Strip away the polemics on both sides, and the structural problem is fairly simple to state. Zionism, as a historical movement, was a 19th-century national-liberation project: the claim that Jews constituted a nation entitled to self-determination on a specific piece of territory. Liberalism, as a political tradition, is committed to individual rights, pluralism, and, in its more universalist versions, a certain skepticism toward ethnic or religious particularism as the organizing principle of a state. Liberal Zionism is the attempt to hold both of these commitments simultaneously: a state that is both a Jewish national home and a liberal democracy extending equal rights to all who live under its authority, including the roughly five million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza who have no vote in the government that controls their lives, and the two million Arab citizens of Israel proper who do vote but have long complained of structural inequality. The case that it’s viable Defenders of the project, and there are serious ones, argue that the tension is real but not fatal, because Israel within the Green Line has functioned, however imperfectly, as a liberal democracy with an independent judiciary, a free press, competitive elections and legal protections for minorities that, whatever their gaps in practice, exceed those found almost anywhere else in the region. On this view, the occupation is a political choice rather than a structural inevitability of Zionism itself, and a two-state settlement, or some other form of separation, would resolve the contradiction by returning Israel to something like its pre-1967 boundaries, where the demographic and democratic arithmetic works out far more comfortably. The unfinished business of 1948, in other words, is a bug, not a feature, and can in principle be fixed by political will and a peace agreement. The case that it isn’t Critics, from both a Palestinian nationalist direction and a growing post-liberal current within Israeli and diaspora Jewish thought, argue that this framing understates how deep the contradiction runs. Nearly six decades of occupation, they note, is not a temporary deviation. It is now the median condition of the state’s existence since 1967, administered by a permanent bureaucratic and military apparatus, sustained across governments of every ideological stripe and increasingly entrenched by a settler population approaching half a million in the West Bank alone. A political arrangement that has persisted this long, on this view, has effectively become the system rather than an aberration from it. Add to this the events of 1948 themselves, the displacement of roughly 700,000 Palestinians, a foundational fact that any honest reckoning with the state’s origins has to sit with and the argument is that liberal Zionism has always required a certain selective attention: a discipline of looking at the Green Line and not much past it. There is also a demographic argument that sits underneath both positions and rarely gets said out loud in polite company: between the river and the sea, Jews and Palestinians are now roughly at parity in numbers. A state that governs that entire territory while extending full and equal citizenship only to one of the two groups is, by most standard definitions, not a liberal democracy over the whole territory it controls, whatever it may be within the 1967 lines. Liberal Zionists have generally answered this by insisting on separation, two states or some other partition, precisely because they recognize that permanent, unequal rule over millions of people is incompatible with liberal commitments. The trouble is that the political conditions for separation have arguably gotten further away, not closer, over the three decades since Oslo, as settlement expansion has proceeded under governments of the right and center-left alike, and as the Palestinian national movement has fractured between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. Where this leaves the debate None of this settles the empirical question of what Israeli or Palestinian publics actually want, which is itself contested and shifting, particularly after October 7 and the war in Gaza hardened positions on both sides. What can be said with more confidence is that “liberal Zionism” functions less as a settled ideology than as a bet: a bet that the political conditions for genuine separation, or some other rights-respecting arrangement, can still be created before the facts on the ground make that bet permanently unpayable. Whether that bet is still live, or whether it quietly lost some years ago and its adherents simply haven’t noticed, is precisely the argument now underway. And empirical trends (settlement growth, the weakening of the two-state consensus in both societies, the aftermath of the Gaza war) will keep forcing it back onto the table, however uncomfortable that is for people who would rather not choose between their nationalism and their liberalism. This article was originally published on Leon Hadar’s Global Zeitgeist and is republished with kind permission. Become a subscriber here.