We must reclaim the ethical vision at the heart of Zionism

Before Zionism becomes some sort of “hate crime” in the court of hostile public opinion, the world would do well to remember that the equation of Zionism with racism and colonialism is logically and evidentially weak.

If only for the sake of those Jews whose support for Israel can threaten their social and professional credibility, the historical illiteracies that feed anti-Zionism need to be challenged. For, however things have turned out, Zionism’s original ethical impetus shows that it’s far from a project that is essentially morally wrong.

Even the briefest review of modern Jewish Zionist thought rebuts the charge that Zionism is “Nazism” - a charge now routinely used by antisemites wanting to turn their own racism into a virtue. More positively, knowledge of Zionism’s founding ethical values helps Jews to reclaim ownership of a vision that can still shape their hopes and dreams for Israel’s future.

It cannot be said too often that, at least from a Jewish perspective, Zionism cannot be reduced to a variant of European colonialism. While Theodor Herzl may have sought the sponsorship of European colonial powers for a Jewish state, he and other early 20th-century Zionist thinkers regarded the return of the Jewish people to their ancestral home as part of a universal emancipation of the oppressed from the tyrannies of empire.

Labour Zionists like A. D. Gordon espoused a Zionism whose purpose was the very opposite of exploiting Arab labour. Instead, Zionism was to return urban Jews to nature, promising their revitalisation through physical labour on the land. Jews in Palestine were there to create an ideal society – to plant and build their own future — with their own two hands.

Asher Ginsberg, a late 19th- and early 20th-century cultural Zionist better known as Ahad Ha’am, similarly argued that the purpose of Jewish settlement in Palestine was not merely to escape antisemitism but to inaugurate a Jewish national revival. He disagreed with Herzl’s view that most, if not all, Jews should return to Palestine.

What Jews needed was not a sovereign state but a sovereign culture whose rebirth would psycho-spiritually regenerate Jewish life in both Palestine and the diaspora. Whether secular or religious in orientation, Zionism would be ethical because Judaism is ethical. Jewish settlement would have to be compatible with justice for its Arab neighbours.

Ahad Ha’am’s cultural Zionism informed the small but influential Brit Shalom group’s dream of Jews and Arabs living together in a single binational state. Lasting from 1926-1933, Brit Shalom, literally, Covenant of Peace, was a circle of European Jewish intellectuals who had emigrated to Palestine.

Brit Shalom’s membership did not always speak in one voice, but shared Martin Buber’s conviction that Jews could not fulfil their biblical commission to be a holy nation — Zionism would not establish Zion — without fairly and respectfully sharing the land with the Palestinian Arabs.

Buber, perhaps the best-known of the circle, argued that political equality for the two autonomous peoples would provide a “living example” of what Zionism can contribute to world justice.

Palestine would be a light to the nations, he said, not so much because it was Jewish but because it would be a beacon of hope for peaceful relations between nations. Jerusalem was to be the throne of history’s servant, not its tyrant.

Zionism would turn the commandment to love our neighbours into a political commitment

Of course, Zionists have always argued about Zionism. Not all Jews of the period shared Brit Shalom’s spiritual politics. Many ignored or dismissed the growth of Arab national consciousness in Palestine; others, especially after the Hebron massacre in 1929, regarded conflict with the Arabs as inevitable.

And as the 20th century went on its catastrophic way, realism necessarily prevailed over idealism. After the Grand Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, had declared an Arab ideological alliance with Nazism; after the mass expulsion of Jews from Arab lands; after nearly 80 years of war; two intifadas, and the October 7 massacres, it now seems obvious to most Jews that a binational state had been something of a pipe dream.

Nonetheless, the visionary elements in 20th-century Zionist thought indicate that, whatever contemporary Israel’s political shortcomings, its founding ideas were, broadly speaking, ethically sound.

In fact, by 1945, when the object of Zionism had shifted from settlement in Palestine to the imminent realisation of a Jewish state, Jewish intellectuals from Gershom Scholem and Martin Buber, through to Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, and Primo Levi shared acute concerns about the ethical costs of creating and defending it.

On the one hand, the level of violence needed for the state to protect its borders might prove so at odds with Jewish values that its Jews would effectively cease to be Jews. On the other hand, without the defensive power of the state, the Jewish people might not survive at all. The choice was stark and remains so to this day. Do we forfeit our ethics or our life?

Writing in the 1980s, Levinas concluded that while the political and ethical priorities of a Jewish state might sometimes be at odds, they could be reconciled in the unique character of Israel as a Jewish state.

For only in Israel, a whole country standing under the commandment to love our neighbour – including Palestinian neighbours who are not our self-declared enemies – could Jewish ethics finally be put on a practical political footing. God, for Levinas, is the commandment to love.

Far from a betrayal of Jewish ethicality, Zionism would turn the commandment to love our neighbours into a political commitment to provide them with a national sanctuary.

In short, Israel’s task of protecting both the security of Jews and the humanism of their tradition was always going to be difficult, but perhaps not impossible: political sovereignty would give Jews the collective moral autonomy to choose the good. A Jewish sovereign state would permit Jews to fully live, every day, the social law of biblical and rabbinic Judaism.

Dispersion’s political impotence had been bad for the Jewish soul. As we read in the liturgy for Yom Kippur, in exile, Israel is “fearful of even a rustling leaf”.

Rav Abraham Isaac Kook, who became the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of mandatory Palestine in 1921, taught that the Jewish light to the nations could not shine when Jews were in exile, living as strangers at the mercy of others. Living in fear, he said, we have only “nebulous and ghostlike ideas”; in dispersion, the tradition functions more as a studied text than an active commandment.

Throughout the 20th century, Zionism offered Jews the ethical and political opportunity to be of service to a suffering world. Especially after the Holocaust, the return of Jews to their sunlit land was seen as the re-emergence of a world-redemptive radiant light from its hiding places in the cellars and pits of the diaspora.

To raise the Israeli flag was to make the star of David once more a shield for the defenceless and the persecuted. That is why, for Levinas, the establishment of the Jewish state was a moment that belonged to “the moral goal of history”. Israel anticipated a world without mass murder.

And so it was for Primo Levi. Like other modern Jewish thinkers, Levi’s support for Israel was far from unconditional. But in May 1967, when Egypt declared that the Arab aim in the coming war was to “drive the Jews into the sea”, Levi addressed the Jewish community of Turin with the reminder that Israel, a small country “originating in persecution and massacre”, must be a guarantee to all who suffer that |there will be no more persecutions, no more massacres”.

No other country, Levi noted, is asked “to cease to exist”. But, as always in modern Jewish thought, his is a Zionism that moves from the particular to the universal. Israel, he said, “must live”, not just for its own sake, but because “humanity will be one, or it will not be”.

To once more exclude the Jews and the Jewish state from the unity and common welfare of humanity would be a demolition of the human essence itself.

I have a treasured copy of David Ben-Gurion’s 1966 book, The Jews in their Land. This edited book — at once historical and visionary — has been owned by three generations of my family: it was a gift given to my father by his parents, and in 1972 he passed it on to me. One day, I will give it to my daughter.

So too, le dor v’dor, from one generation to the next, we need to take possession of the Zionist ideal or it will perish at the hands of those who never knew it.

This article is based on Professor Raphael’s seminar last month for the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism