“But Zionism!” Isn’t an Argument Anymore

On what Ezra Klein misses about what Israel has become

Ezra Klein had a now infamous column recently in the New York Times about why there’s no liberal Joe Rogan, and quietly made a more consequential case: that antizionism has gone mainstream not because of bigotry but because of Israel’s conduct. Hasan Piker, Klein says, isn’t a Jew-hater. He’s an antizionist. And antizionism, in this telling, is now a reasonable response to a state that has apparently made itself unreasonable.

There have been many good rebuttals to Klein from people like Haviv Rettig Gur and Brendan O’Neill so far. I want to do something different: take Klein’s framing seriously, grant him every generous premise, and show that the argument still doesn’t land. The debate about whether antizionism is antisemitism maybe made sense 78 years ago. It makes no sense now. The reason has little to do with bigotry and everything to do with what Israel has become.

The argument that used to make sense

Once upon a time, Zionism was a theory. It was a proposition, developed in European cafés and Russian yeshivas, that the Jewish people should have a state. There were brilliant Jews who thought so and brilliant Jews who did not. The Bund (a secular Jewish socialist movement from Eastern Europe) thought Jews should remain Diaspora socialists. Early Reform thinkers thought Jews were a religion, not a nation. Orthodox anti-Zionists thought the return to Zion should be left to the Messiah. You could argue about Zionism the way you could argue about any political theory.

In that world, it was possible to be an intellectually honest antizionist. You could say, “I don’t think a Jewish state is the right answer to the Jewish question,” and mean it. You were engaging with a proposition that had not yet been lived. Many prominent Jews in Europe and America felt the same way.

That world ended in 1948.

Zionism is not a theory anymore. It is a country called Israel.

It is over seven million Jews who live there. It is a language spoken by children in schoolyards. It is a passport, an army, a grandparents’ generation already buried in the ground. You cannot be antizionist toward a country the way you were toward an idea. The category error is too big.

What are you actually asking them to do?

Here is the question that’s basically never answered: Take an Israeli seventeen-year-old in Haifa. She did not pick Zionism. She was born in 2009. Her grandfather came from Baghdad in 1951, because Iraq was expelling its Jews 10 years after the Farhud tried to murder them. She speaks Hebrew because her mother spoke Hebrew to her. She has an Israeli passport because that is the country her birth certificate was issued in.

What exactly does the antizionist want her to do?

“I’m not asking her to do anything. I’m just opposed to the state she lives in.” That isn’t an answer. Every country is made of people. To be opposed to the existence of her state is to be opposed to the arrangement that is her life. Does the antizionist want her to emigrate? To renounce her citizenship and live as a non-citizen in a Palestinian-majority state? To stop speaking Hebrew to her children? Every specific version of the answer is either monstrous or incoherent. “From the river to the sea” is a slogan only because no one has to spell out what it means for the actual Jewish human beings living between the river and the sea.

The sophisticated antizionist will say he is making a political argument about the character of the state. A binational arrangement. Consider what that actually means. Seven million Hebrew-speaking Jews give up majority status, give up the political sovereignty their grandparents built, give up the only country on Earth where Jewish life has demographic and military weight, and trust that a binational entity including Hamas voters and West Bank militants will treat them fairly. They are to return, voluntarily, to the Diaspora condition they left, with its known downside of periodic mass murder, the desire for which is enshrined in founding documents.

This is where the distinction between antizionism and antisemitism becomes, in practice, an academic curiosity. Bari Weiss wrote in How to Fight Anti-Semitism that it’s one thing to consider whether to have children before you get pregnant, but it’s another thing entirely to consider parenthood after your kid is born. Maybe the distinction between antizionism and antisemitism matters in a Jewish Studies seminar. For the Israeli seventeen-year-old in Haifa however, it’s meaningless. What the antizionists are demanding of her is that she dissolve the basic conditions of her existence. Whether your motive is classical Jew-hatred or high-minded political theory is immaterial to the demand itself.

It is also not racism, at least not in the Nazi sense. Nazi racial antisemitism offered Jews no escape: you are what you are biologically, and no renunciation could save you. Antizionism does offer an escape: Renounce your people’s sovereignty, disavow Zionism, adopt the vocabulary of your accusers, and you will be welcomed. This is the sophisticated antizionist’s position. In that structural sense, antizionism resembles not racial antisemitism but the old Christian antisemitism, which promised to receive Jews warmly if only they would convert.

That is why the honest word for it is not racism. A movement that seeks to erase a national and ethnic identity through propaganda, persecution, and sometimes violence is not a legitimate political position. It is a hate group. That broad political circles in the West now grant this hate group intellectual respectability is a problem of its own, and not different in kind from the fact that racial doctrines once enjoyed wide acceptance, or that Christian Jew-hatred was once the bedrock assumption of educated European life. Popularity has never been evidence of legitimacy.

What Israelis are

Israelis don’t owe anyone an argument for their existence. They don’t need to win the debate about whether Zionism was the right idea in 1897. They don’t need to persuade Ezra Klein or Hasan Piker or the student encampments that their country’s creation in 1948 was just. The debate is over, not because one side won, but because the thing itself came into being. They are a people. They speak a language. They live on a piece of land and have mortgages. That is what peoples do. The Greeks do it. The Poles do it. The Québécois do it. The arguments about whether they should are, at this point, a leisure activity for people who live elsewhere.

The core goal of Zionism, the one all its strands shared, was to make the Jewish people a nation like other nations: speaking its own language, exercising sovereignty in its own homeland. Different Zionisms added different ingredients. Some are incomplete. Some never will be. But the core was achieved. To be a Hebrew-speaking Jew in the Land of Israel is now as unremarkable as being a Frenchman in France. Zionism as an ideology has produced something that no longer needs ideology: a national, ethnic, and cultural identity with a life of its own.

For a long time, Jews have been expected to justify their existence to every new generation of critics, in every new language, using the vocabulary the critics themselves handed us. Zionism and the Israeli project, at its deepest level, is the project of not having to. Of simply being. Of the dignity of waking up somewhere, ordering a latte (“cafe-hafuch”) and croissant in Hebrew (OK, the Hebrew for croissant is croissant, a French word, but still), and speaking a language and raising a family and going to work. Antizionism is a demand that Jews return to the mode of being in which they have to justify all of that. Israelis, for the most part, are not interested. And they shouldn’t be.