The Biggest Lie About Liberalism and Israel

There is no inherent contradiction between liberalism and Zionism, but there is an obvious contradiction between liberalism and the Palestinian movement. Why, then, do so many liberals support it?

photo: Johannes Schenk/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Ben Koan, who writes the newsletter, “The Thousand-Year View.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Many (most?) Western Jews have historically been on the liberal spectrum domestically, while supporting Israel abroad.

According to an increasingly popular narrative, sympathetically outlined by journalist and commentator Ezra Klein in the New York Times, this combination is ideologically inconsistent and morally untenable. Daniel May, a leftist Jewish publisher quoted by Klein, summarizes the supposed contradiction:

“American Jews tend to think that our success in the United States is a product of the fact that the country does not define belonging according to ethnicity or religion. And Israel is, of course, based on the idea of a state representing a particular ethnic religious group.”

The argument here is not that American Jews (and Western Jews at large) are hypocrites because they’re liberals who back the Right-wing Israeli party Likud, headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (Most don’t.) Rather, the argument is that Israel’s very existence is in tension with liberal principles.

To borrow Marxist language, the Netanyahu-led Right-wing government and the Israel-Hamas war have only “sharpened the contradictions” inherent in liberal Zionism. In this narrative, now that they’ve been forced to choose between liberalism and Zionism, many young Western Jews are choosing liberalism.

But the supposed incompatibility between liberalism and Zionism rests on selective definitions of both. Classical liberals appealed to the nation — as opposed to the divine right of kings — as the source of political legitimacy. They viewed the nation-state as the guarantor of liberal principles like individual rights, the rule of law, and representative government.

For example, the great liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote:

“Where the sentiment of nationality exists in any force, there is a prima facie¹ case for uniting all the members of the nationality under the same government, and a government to themselves apart. This is merely saying that the question of government ought to be decided by the governed.”

After World War I, this liberal principle of self-determination — as championed by then-U.S. President Woodrow Wilson — inspired the creation of new nation-states from the wreckage of multinational empires. Idealist though he was, Wilson did not propose a United States of Eastern Europe.² Instead, the victorious Allies sought (with mixed results) to align European borders with existing nationalities, as defined by ethnic, linguistic, historic, and religious ties.

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At its foundation, political Zionism was a nationalist movement in the spirit of classical liberalism.³ Theodor Herzl’s imagined Jewish commonwealth guaranteed universal suffrage, equal rights for its Arab citizens, and separation of religion and state. (“While we respect our rabbis, we will keep them to their synagogues, just as the army will be kept to its barracks.”)

Even the now-maligned Ze’ev Jabotinsky, leader of the Right-wing Revisionists and forefather of Likud, was a cosmopolitan liberal who championed coexistence with Arabs and official secularism.

Jabotinsky is often remembered for demanding a Jewish state encompassing the original borders of British Palestine (i.e., including present-day Jordan). However, he said in 1937 that there is “no question of ousting the Arabs. On the contrary, the idea is that Palestine on both sides of the Jordan could hold the Arabs, their progeny, and many millions of Jews.” Unlike most of his contemporaries, Jabotinsky anticipated a Holocaust-like disaster, and sought land to facilitate the mass evacuation of European Jews.

Like any nationalist movement, Zionism also included more radical strains, including once-influential socialists on the Left and even a small self-declared fascist faction on the Right. But the State of Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence enshrined the classical liberal (or prophetic) ideals of the Zionist mainstream. Per its founders, the new state “will be based on freedom, justice, and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel” and “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race, or sex.”

The Declaration also refers to “the natural right of the Jewish People to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State.” Here is where modern liberal (i.e., progressive) discomfort sets in.

When Ezra Klein quotes David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, as saying, “Only a state with at least 80 percent Jews is a viable and stable state,” the New York Times reader is supposed to shudder. Nationalism (especially concern over a nation’s demographic makeup) is now coded as conservative.

But John Stuart Mill, like most classical liberals, would agree with Ben-Gurion’s basic premise. Mill wrote, “Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities” because “the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist.”

For Mill, nationality “may have been generated by various causes,” including shared descent, language, religion, geography, and history. Thus, while “Switzerland has a strong sentiment of nationality, though the cantons are of different races, different languages, and different religions,” the general rule is that “national feeling is proportionally weakened by the failure of any of the causes which contribute to it.” Accordingly, functional nations that are as diverse as Switzerland are rare.

The fracturing of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, two Wilsonian attempts to combine multiple nations into single states, supports Mill’s case. In Israel’s own neighborhood, so does Lebanon, which descended into civil war in the 1970s after it lost its Christian majority.

In the particular case of Israel, concerns about demography cannot be divorced from two basic facts. First, Zionism was founded in reaction to the plight of Jews as a persecuted minority. Given the historical record, it’s no surprise that Jews would fear being a minority in a state established to escape that fate.

Second, Israel has been historically attacked and threatened by Arabs who seek its destruction. Therefore, were Israel to become majority Arab, it’s reasonable to fear that the result would rival the collapse of Yugoslavia in bloodshed.

As it stands, Israel is only 71-percent Jewish, and its minorities (mostly Arab) are full Israeli citizens. By contrast, the Jewish minorities of Arab states were expelled or forced to flee and, outside of Israel, minority Middle Eastern Christians have suffered a precipitous demographic decline, often driven by Muslim persecution.

Israel could certainly do more to foster non-Jewish civic nationalism, such as making Arabic an official language again and addressing unrecognized Bedouin villages. Still, Israeli Arabs have more individual rights in Israel than they do in most Arab countries.

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The obvious rejoinder is that stateless Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have been denied the liberal right to self-determination. But that’s not for lack of trying. Previous attempts at a two-state solution have failed primarily because of what historian Benny Morris calls “the essential rejectionism of the Palestinian national movement.”

In other words, Palestinian rejectionists deny any Jewish right to self-determination in the Holy Land and insist on the “right of return,” which would be the demographic destruction of Israel for reasons recognizable by John Stuart Mill.

This Palestinian rejectionism, the genocidal implications of which were demonstrated on October 7th, has also fueled the growth of Israeli rejectionism. To put it mildly, prominent members of the current Israeli government don’t speak the classical liberal language of Herzl or Jabotinsky.

But, at the same time, a little perspective is in order. Israeli Far-Right parties received 11 percent of the vote in the 2022 Israeli election. They are disproportionately influential because of the Netanyahu coalition’s parliamentary majority (64 of the available 120 seats). Conversely, Hamas won the 2006 Gaza election with 44 percent of the vote. There haven’t been any Palestinian elections since.

Ezra Klein summarizes the supposed contrast between liberalism and Zionism as follows: “For Jews of the diaspora, multiethnic democracy — in which the rights and security of political minorities are protected — is the bedrock on which our safety is built. For Jews of Israel, a Jewish majority is the bedrock upon which their state is built.”

But if the slogan “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free!” were ever realized, the result wouldn’t be a Western-style democracy. The preamble to the 2017 Hamas Charter states that “Palestine is the land of the Arab Palestinian people” and its “status has been elevated by Islam.”

The first article of the Palestinian Authority’s 2003 Constitution affirms that “Palestine is part of the larger Arab world, and the Palestinian people are part of the Arab nation,” while the fourth article proclaims Islam its official religion. An independent Palestine would, to use the buzzword Klein employs, be a Muslim Arab “ethnostate.”

Why, then, no leftist handwringing over the inherent contradiction between liberalism and Palestinian nationalism?

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Liberal democracy is perfectly compatible with a core ethnoreligious identity, as is illiberalism. According to Freedom House, the freest country in the world is Finland, which is 90-percent ethnically Finnish and has a cross in its flag. On the other hand, the Gaza Strip is an authoritarian theocracy with a nearly 100-percent Muslim Arab population.

Ezra Klein is correct that insofar as Israel adopts illiberal policies, it alienates liberal Western Jews. But it’s “anti-Zionism,” not Zionism, that is a fundamentally illiberal ideology. By definition, “anti-Zionism” denies an existing nation the right to self-determination.

Prior to the establishment of the State of Israel, that denial could be a matter of theoretical debate. But over 75 years later, it necessarily implies disenfranchisement and likely mass murder. By contrast, Zionism is not predicated on the denial of another people’s right to self-determination. Zionists accepted the partition of the Holy Land into Arab and Jewish states as proposed by the British in 1937 and the UN in 1947.

And while mainstream Zionist politics have mostly been liberal in a broad sense (i.e., ranging from social democratic to conservative), “anti-Zionism” has largely been driven by Communists, Islamists, authoritarian pan-Arabists, and Far-Left radicals who view all of Western civilization as a “settler-colonial project.”

There is no inherent contradiction between liberalism and Zionism. Instead, there is a contradiction between liberalism and Kahanism⁴ on the one hand, and illiberal leftism and Zionism on the other.

Klein’s narrative is flawed because it equates Kahanism, which rejects the classical liberal principles embedded in the State of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, with Zionism itself. It also ignores the illiberalism that dominates the Palestinian movement and much of the Far-Left.

Klein says that “the power” of New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s anti-Zionism is that “it is thoroughly, even banally, liberal.” He omits that Mamdani co-founded a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, a group that endorsed the October 7th massacre and once posted that the goal of divestment from Israel is “the total collapse of the university structure and the American empire itself.”

Nor does Klein mention Mamdani’s shoutout to the “Holy Land Five,” who were convicted of aiding Hamas. It would be easier to accept anti-Zionists as “banally liberal” if they weren’t constantly praising, excusing, or refusing to condemn a jihadist death cult.

If Kahanism comes to wholly define Zionism, then many Western Jews will abandon Israel. And, equally, if radical illiberalism comes to wholly define the Left, then many Western Jews will abandon so-called “liberalism.”

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1. Based on the first impression; accepted as correct until proved otherwise

2. Though interestingly, a plan to federalize the Austro-Hungarian Empire into a “United States of Greater Austria” was proposed before the war. But even this model envisioned dividing the empire mostly along ethnic lines.

3. Zionism differed from other nationalisms because the nationality in question was geographically dispersed. Even so, the Jewish situation was not wholly unique. Armenians, too, were once a minority in their country. And Armenia, like Israel, has a “right of return” for its diaspora. Notably though, there is no Left-wing movement calling for the elimination of Armenia.

4. A religious Zionist ideology based on the views of Rabbi Meir Kahane