Zionism still defines the Jewish nation today - opinion

Surrendering gives our enemies a victory they don’t deserve, underestimates Zionism’s ongoing, expansive, inspirational value, and repudiates our people’s – and her magazine’s – proud histories.

The weakest argument claims “the label Zionism has become outright dangerous. The use of the term by its very nature keeps the question of existence unnecessarily alive.” No. A conspiracy of hatred keeps questioning Israel’s existence and Zionism’s validity, not the word.

After 1948, Arab diplomats mocked Israel’s legitimacy by calling it “The Zionist entity,” treating the Z-word as a curse. Validating their campaign of sneers would embolden them. No linguistic makeover will satisfy them – they seek Israel’s destruction.

Fifty years ago, when the UN declared Zionism “racism,” America’s UN ambassador, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, anticipated the resulting torrent of toxins. “Whether Israel was responsible,” for particular world problems, he said, “Israel surely would be blamed… Israel would be regretted.”

Elie Wiesel, who understood the power of words and the cancer of hatred, wrote: “I have never been a Zionist, not in the formal sense of the word. I have never belonged to a political organization. But faced with the anti-Zionist attacks by those who corrupt language and poison memory, I have no choice but to consider myself a Zionist. To do otherwise would mean accepting the terms of reference used by Israel’s enemies. I wish our non-Jewish friends would do the same, and claim Zionism as a badge of honor.”

Six months earlier, in May 1975, Wiesel and Leonard Fein founded Moment. Seven years later, during Israel’s first, searing, Lebanon war, Fein wrote in Moment: “There are two kinds of Zionists in the world: most of us are both. We want to be normal, we want to be special: we want to be a light unto the nations, we want to be a nation like all the others… I vastly prefer a people that chooses to risk a collective nervous breakdown, as we do, by endorsing both visions… Muscle and conscience, body and soul…”

Zionism has always been a many-splendored movement. Then, as now, people who accepted its three pillars of peoplehood, homeland, and statehood, could be religious or secular, socialist or capitalist, liberal or conservative. Zionism flourished, as Judaism has, through the resulting debates. My book, The Zionist Ideas – updating Arthur Hertzberg’s 1959 anthology – celebrates that diversity.

I identified six basic schools of Zionist thought – Political Zionism, Labor Zionism, Religious Zionism, Revisionist Zionism, Cultural Zionism, and Diaspora Zionism. Tracing the conversation from pre-1948 pioneers, through the first 50 years’ builders, to today’s torch bearers, I found it easy to place most modern thinkers within ideological tributaries stretching back over a century.

Some passionate, pro-Israel Jews, didn’t fit in. The Canaanites of the 1940s fought to launch a state in their indigenous homeland, but repudiated Judaism and Diaspora Jews. That would make them pro-Israel today but not Zionist.

The writer A.B. Yehoshua’s definition beautifully illustrates why pro-Israelism isn’t enough, given the many Zionists living abroad while Israelis can be Druze, Bedouin, Arab, and Christian too. “A Zionist,” Yehoshua explained, “is a person who accepts the principle that the State of Israel doesn’t belong solely to its citizens, but to the entire Jewish people.”

Zionism welcomes ardent supporters worldwide who may not know Hebrew, while respecting but excluding patriotic Israelis who speak Hebrew fluently but aren’t committed to Zionism’s mission of restoring Jewish statehood.

Today, anti-Zionists reject Israeli flags on synagogue bimahs, as “political statements.” But the blue-and-white banner was the “Zionist” or “Jewish” flag, before ’48 – because Zionism expresses culture, heritage, values, identity; it’s not just supporting today’s Israeli government or Israeli actions. Abandoning “Zionism” would narrow, and overly-politicize, a far richer phenomenon.

We who advocate Identity Zionism, a values-based liberal-democratic Zionism finding inspiration and purpose from this great adventure in Jewish statehood, will never forsake our movement.

Identity Zionism taps into the Jewish sense of history and community while focusing on forever-improving Israel. That’s why Zionism remains the movement of Jewish national liberation, which first established a Jewish-democratic state in the Land of Israel, while rebuilding a new Jew – everywhere. Since 1948, Zionists have defended Israel and the Jewish people when necessary, but build, are rebuilt, and always dream.

This is not the time to retreat, especially under the gun. Instead, honoring Israel’s – and Moment’s – founders, many of us will keep shouting “I am a Zionist – loud and proud” as a badge of honor.