The massacre by Hamas on October 7 and subsequent war in Gaza has created the conditions for something surprising: a resurrection of the liberal Zionist political tradition.
Liberal Zionism is the insistence that there is no necessary contradiction between Israel’s dual identity as a Jewish and democratic state: that Israel can be a national home and refuge for the Jewish people while also embodying universal democratic principles of human rights and equality. Threading this needle, for liberal Zionists, means Israel must adopt a more liberal set of policies — most importantly, a two-state peace agreement with the Palestinians that allows both peoples to live with security and dignity.
Prior to October 7, liberal Zionism appeared defeated: broken by the failure of the 1990s peace process and subsequent collapse of the left-wing Israeli parties that stood for its ideals. And on its face, this moment seems like a poor time for a revival.
Israel’s conduct during the war has been nothing short of horrific: slaughtering entire families in Gaza, enabling mass settler violence in the West Bank, and cracking down on anti-war dissent at home. Israel’s most strident defenders see no problem with its actions, placing the blame for all civilian deaths on Hamas. The Jewish state’s harshest critics, by contrast, see these abuses as an expression of what Israel always was: a racist colonial enterprise that must be abolished “from the river to the sea.”
The world seems more neatly polarized than ever into pro- and anti-Israel camps. The term “liberal Zionist” is scarcely used even by those who believe in its ideals; it is more commonly deployed as a leftist slur against more Israel-sympathetic…
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