Liberal Zionism is dying. Will foregoing the Jewish state save it?

Palestinian citizens of Israel and activists protest against the ‘Jewish Nation-State Law’ in Tel Aviv, Aug. 11, 2018. (Tomer Neuberg/Flash90)

Haifa Republic: A Democratic Future for Israel,” by Omri Boehm, New York Review Books, 2021.

In 1974, a small group of American Jewish leftists who considered themselves Zionists, named Breira, called for a two-state solution as a path to resolving to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The idea of a Palestinian state standing alongside a Jewish state was not unprecedented; nearly three decades earlier, it had been endorsed by the UN General Assembly through the 1947 Partition Plan. But at the time of Breira’s emergence, this position was viewed as so radical that, by 1976, the group was effectively crushed by the American Jewish establishment.

Shortly afterward, in 1978, the organization Peace Now was formed in Israel, offering liberal Zionists an ostensible movement toward a two-state solution. Like Breira, Peace Now was also considered out of the Israeli mainstream in its early years, and most liberal Zionists did not sign on. But by the 1980s, the two-state solution slowly made its way into the belly of the liberal Zionist base. By the end of that decade, it became its dogma, and by the 2000s, its raison d’etre.

Today, it is not provocative to say that the liberal Zionism espoused by groups like Breira and Peace Now is in a deep crisis. Not only has reality seemingly left the ideology behind, but the ideology itself has not really offered any new ideas in 30 years. The two-state solution is effectively dead, yet to abandon it is to cut out the very core of liberal Zionist identity — much like Chabad coming to terms with the fact that their beloved rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, is not the messiah. And so, the dogma continues because it must, because that is how dogma functions; it is impervious to “facts on the ground.”

More …