At its inception 150 years ago, Zionism, as a political movement, only enjoyed around 5% of the Jewish people’s support. Opposition to Zionism came from the Left and Right, religious and secular. Zionism inspired fear and hate among the world’s Jews, and most wished it would just die out.
Others took more extreme measures. Zionist speakers, especially the founder of the movement, Theodor Herzl, were banned from speaking and excommunicated from many Jewish communities.
However, the Zionist movement enjoyed remarkable success in its early stages. It held its annual congress with impressive independence, scored meetings with world leaders, and achieved its goal of creating a state in 50 years. But it took almost half a century for the Jewish people to support it. Zionism’s overwhelming support among today’s global Jewish community was a pipe dream 150 years ago.
The opposition to Zionism was varied, depending on where the objections stemmed from. Many secular Jews, assimilated into the societies of the European nations they called home, feared that Zionism would cause the gentiles around them to see these Jewish citizens as strangers with dual loyalty and not truly fellow citizens.
Religious Jews feared Zionism was advocating the foundation of a secular state as a substitute for Torah values and would encourage Jews to forgo their Torah observance. There were many additional objections expressed by other Jews.
With time, most objections to Zionism have been demonstrated to have been exaggerated or without justification to warrant concern. Zionism didn’t bring about a dangerous rise in antisemitism and while today’s Israeli government isn’t committed to Torah, it isn’t opposed or anti-Torah either. The modern State of Israel has combined Torah into many of its areas of governance.
Zionism isn’t inconsistent with the Torah; rather it enhances the Torah
AS A RABBI who teaches Zionism in Jerusalem, I am acutely sensitive to disingenuous attacks against Zionism that use the Torah to smear Zionism. I was appalled by fellow columnist and educator Naomi Klein’s recent diatribe against Zionism, “We need an exodus from Zionism” (The Guardian, April 24, 2024), in which she claims that Zionism is a false idol “that has betrayed every Jewish value.”
Jewish values originally stem from the Torah but have evolved through Rabbinic literature over the past three thousand years. Authentic Jewish values are ones that are consistent with the traditional values found in the Torah and rabbinic writings.
Tragically, due to the Jewish people’s 2,000-year exile, many Jewish thinkers have assimilated values that are inconsistent with traditional Jewish values into their writings and teachings and tried to incorporate those values into mainstream Judaism.
Many Jewish scholars have written about the consistency between traditional Jewish values and Zionism. They point to Zionism’s centralizing of the Land of Israel into Judaism and the hundreds of times Israel is mentioned in the Torah, along with the command found in the Torah to settle and live in the Land of Israel.
There have been many Jewish scholars who have taken the opposite approach in their writings and have claimed that Zionism is inconsistent with traditional Jewish values. I proudly teach that Zionism is a movement solidly based in traditional Torah values.
Many opponents of Zionism today – 150 years after the movement was founded and achieved its primary goal of establishing a Jewish state – claim that Zionism stands for despicable values it never espoused. In her column, Klein claimed Zionism perverted Jewish values of justice and emancipation from slavery and transformed them into advocacy for colonial land theft, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.
Klein is clear that she isn’t speaking politically. She says outright that she’s not addressing today’s Israeli government nor its leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but Zionism itself.
She distorted traditional Judaism in several ways. She claimed that the biblical image of Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel, is a metaphor for human liberation and that the Passover story included the dreams of liberation of the ancient Egyptians. She writes that it has betrayed the Jewish value of questioning and the love we have as a people for text and for education.
Klein omits (or never knew) about the Pascal offering and claims that Passover, now ruined by Zionism, was never in need of walls, a temple, or a rabbi. In fact, Passover needs all three.
These claims are so inconsistent with thousands of years of Jewish scholarship that they’re laughable. It’s difficult to determine if Klein is ignorant of traditional Judaism or purposefully distorts it to fit her political agenda.
She also twisted authentic Zionism and its values. She claimed that Zionism required the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and ancestral lands, it viewed Palestinian children not as human beings, that it has led many of our own people down a deeply immoral path, it equates Jewish freedom with cluster bombs that kill and maim Palestinian children, and “scholasticide,” destruction by means of education.
KLEIN’S DISTORTIONS are so obviously agenda-driven that they’re shameful. Eretz Yisrael is a real place, it was the seat of the Jewish state for close to 1,500 years, and today’s State of Israel is the rebirth of ancient Israel.
Zionism values questioning and is an inherently introspective movement. It has centered education as a priority in its movement and the nation-state it created. Zionism never instituted a mass expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from Israel; in fact, more than two million Arabs are equal citizens of Israel today. Israel prides itself on morality and treating non-Jews fairly and ethically.
Zionism is a movement that Jews the world over can be proud to call its own. It is a movement founded only 150 years ago but its foundation was laid thousands of years ago when God told the Jewish patriarch and matriarch Abraham and Sarah to leave their native lands and settle in Israel. Zionism has created an amazingly successful, almost miraculous State of Israel.
As Israel celebrates its 76th birthday, its people should boast of its achievements and pray for its continued success.
The writer, a Zionist educator at institutions around the world, recently published a new book, Zionism Today.