As Israel marks its 76th anniversary this week under the shadow of the Oct. 7 massacre and the Israel-Gaza war, the country’s underlying Zionist ideology is being called into question.
Various groups distort and weaponize the term “Zionism,” depicting it as a malignant form of tribalism or even racism.
To understand current developments in Israel, as well as the country’s tumultuous history, it is necessary to clarify what Zionism has really meant over its 150 years of existence.
Born in the late 19th century, modern Zionism is a national movement similar to the ones that arose during the same period among Greeks, Poles and many other peoples.
The key idea of Zionism is that Jews constitute a nation, and as such they have not just individual human rights but also a national right to self-determination.
Nothing in this Zionist idea implies that Jews are superior to others, whether they are Greeks or Poles — or Palestinians.
Nor does the idea that Jews constitute a nation necessarily deny the existence of a Palestinian nation with a right to self-determination, or the human rights of individual Palestinians. The equation of Zionism with racism — an allegation that persists long after a 1991 United Nations’ resolution revoked a previous resolution to that effect
— is therefore not only false, but is itself tainted with racism.
Proscribing Zionism implies that Jews can have no legitimate national aspirations, unlike all other peoples.
When one of the leaders of the recent protests at Columbia University claimed that “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” he was, in effect, arguing that Jews who harbor national aspirations should be systematically killed.
When other protesters chanted slogans such as “We don’t want no Zionists here,” perhaps they thought they were expressing hostility toward racism, but they were in fact calling for the harassment and expulsion of any Jews who possess national sentiments.
Of course, some Zionists
— like adherents of all other national movements
— can be racists or
bigots.
Relations between nations are often fraught with tensions, hatreds and even atrocities, particularly when they have conflicting territorial demands.
Almost every national movement in history has included hard-liners making maximalist demands and moderates willing to compromise. Zionism is no exception.
We cannot do justice here to the many strains that existed within Zionism over the past 150 years, and to the impact that events such as the Holocaust and the various Arab-Israeli wars had on Zionism.
What is clear is that over the generations many Zionists did deny the right to Palestinian nationhood, and laid claim to the entire land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, as well as to additional territories east of the Jordan, in the Sinai Peninsula and elsewhere.
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But other Zionists held much more sensible views, and were willing to settle for far less.
David Ben-Gurion and the majority of Zionists embraced in 1947 the U.N. partition plan that mandated the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside a Jewish state.
It was Palestinian rejection of this plan that led to the eruption of the first Arab-Israeli War (1948-1949).
Between 1949 and 1967, Israel’s policy was to achieve peace and normalization with the Arab world based on the 1949 borders, largely renouncing claims to additional territories such as the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
During the Oslo Peace Process of the 1990s and in the following decades, the “two-state solution”
— which recognizes the Palestinian nation and its right to self-determination
— enjoyed widespread support among Israelis.
It is still seen by many Zionists as the best way forward, though over the past decade, support dropped from almost two-thirds of Israelis to one-third, according to Gallup polling.
None of this will impress people who argue that Jews have no rights whatsoever in the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
That, however, is a curious argument, given that Jews have had a continuous presence in that land, and a deep cultural and spiritual connection to it, for about 3,000 years.
Even if we were to reject all such historical claims, and even if we look back on the Zionist project in the early 20th century as entirely unjustified, the fact remains that as of 2024, there are more than 7 million Jews living between the Mediterranean and Jordan.
What should they do? Most of them were born in Israel and are not welcome anywhere else in the world.
They now clearly constitute a nation.
Denying the existence of these 7 million people or of their national aspirations will lead to further conflicts, with nuclear potential. A peaceful solution can be secured only by recognizing that as things stand in 2024, both Jews and Palestinians deserve to live with dignity and security in their country of birth.
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Yuval Noah Harari is the author of “Sapiens,” “Homo Deus” and “Unstoppable Us” and a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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