Jonathan Siegel suggested that a few of us write about the meaning of Zionism in the wake of the recent Israeli elections. There are few things I like talking about less than “what Zionism means to me.” But since you asked…

Zionism is an example of what the great British socialist and cultural historian Raymond Williams called a “keyword, ” a word that is either blessed or cursed with a multiplicity of shifting definitions, words that often find themselves on the historical barricades, passionately defended and equally passionately attacked. As Williams put it, keywords have “a history and complexity of meanings; conscious changes, or consciously different uses; of innovation, obsolescence, specialization, extension, overlap, transfer.”   Zionism is a keyword and trying to give it a neat definition is a fool’s errand. It is a zombie term, a term that has outlived its usefulness, but refuses to die. And “progressive Zionism” is even more obscure, its two parts becoming more oxymoronic every day. In response to Jonathan Siegel’s excellent post, I would only say that if Rabbi Eric Yoffie is a progressive Zionist, then the term has been emptied of all meaning. Reading the same Haaretz articles as Siegel, Yoffie comes across as a tepid, timid Zionist centrist, clinging to a third way that no longer exists, a plague on both your houses politics, Netanyahu bad, left-wing Zionism bad; BDS unmentionable and beyond the pale. It is the sort of politics that was decisively rejected in the recent election, a nostalgic “make Israel great again” politics for a pre-1977 and pre-Begin Israel. read more

My dear fellow white people in Pittsford, Brighton and across the U.S.,

As a white man, I understand the farther situations are from my personal responsibility, the easier it is to call things what they are — almost as if it’s a law of physics. I can spot racism and a racist a mile away; but inches away, my eyesight gets blurry.

So when I hear children in the Pittsford school district (and where does this not happen?) are being called the “N-word,” degraded and mocked for their black-ness, I can recognize that as racism. And when I hear white district authorities fail to call those behaviors specifically “racism” and “racist,” I also recognize that as white fragility and racism. read more

In the aftermath of the Israeli elections, American-based Progressive Zionists need to do some deep soul-searching about the viability of their enterprise. Within Israel the left—with whom Progressive Zionists are aligned–is as far, if not farther, from political power as ever, with no real chance of obtaining it in anything like the foreseeable future. Only an existential threat to the state caused by right-wing Zionist overreach seems likely to change that, and perhaps even then only for as long as it takes for the crisis to resolve itself. read more

I am a dual citizen of the Unites States and Israel and I exercise my rights to vote in both places. I arrived in Israel for the election nine days before the vote took place. Full disclosure: I have been a supporter of Meretz for many years, having been a member of a kibbutz and an activist in the peace movement. I am biased towards Meretz of course.

Here is some background information on the four election lists that are generally considered as being the Israeli left, although there is not full agreement on this. The groups/parties are: Meretz, Labor (Avoda), Hadash-Ta’al, and Balad-Ra’am. When I refer to Arabs in this article, I am speaking about Palestinians who are Israeli citizens and have the right to vote in Israeli elections. read more