...But for Palestinians, the notion that there’s a version of Zionism under which they can live in dignity is contradicted by history, because Zionism underpins the policies that drove their mass displacement from what became Israel in 1948 and has continued to displace them since. “When people think of Zionism now, they look at Gaza,” Saree Makdisi, a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), said. “This is what it means: that you want to have an ethnically exclusive state,” he said. “It’s ugly.”
“I am a Zionist,” the New York Times columnist Bret Stephens recently
wrote, “because I see Israel as an insurance policy for every Jewish family, including mine, which has endured persecution and exile in the past and understands that we may not be safe forever in our host countries.” But there have always been Jewish communities that rejected Zionism – from secular communists to strands of Orthodox Jewry. Today, anti-Zionist Jewish students are more visible and have played an outsized role in the protests against Israel’s Gaza war.
Israel’s enduring occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has also shifted the conversation on the left, which increasingly views Zionism itself as being essential to understanding the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the war on Gaza as a logical conclusion of Zionism. The failure of the peace process to produce an independent Palestinian state, alongside perpetually expanding Israeli settlements on Palestinian land, became proof for many observers that subsequent Israeli governments were never serious about those negotiations.
Israelis and
Palestinians, especially those younger than 35, are less likely to support two states. A majority of Middle East scholars, according to a
2023 poll, don’t think a Palestinian state is possible. The breakdown of a process toward a Palestinian state has also come as Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights groups have documented what they have found to be increasingly repressive apartheid policies in the occupied territories, which challenge the very notion that Israel is a democracy.
Though only a small portion of Jewish Americans see Zionism as “privileging Jewish rights over non-Jewish rights in Israel”, Palestinians, including citizens of Israel, live a very different reality. This has put liberal Zionists in America in a tenuous position. Under ever more extreme right-wing Israeli governments, the long-simmering tensions between a Jewish and a democratic state have come to a boiling point. “The painful truth is that the project to which liberal Zionists like myself have devoted ourselves for decades – a state for Palestinians separated from a state for Jews – has failed,” Peter Beinart
wrote in 2020. “It is time for liberal Zionists to abandon the goal of Jewish–Palestinian separation and embrace the goal of Jewish–Palestinian equality.”
But Palestinian scholars say the Zionism that the protest movement has put at the center is simply the state of Israel’s overt ideology, which asserts the dominance of Jews over the land. “Zionism as practiced is not an abstraction,” Makdisi said. “It happened in the land of Palestine. It happened at the expense – and it’s happening at the expense – of the Palestinian people.” At Harvard University’s protest encampment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, sophomore Violet Barron said that she defers to her Palestinian classmates and peers in thinking through these complex issues. “It took watching the scale of devastation in Gaza to understand what a staunch belief in Zionism can justify,” she said.