When they’re not trying to justify or deny the latest Israeli war crime, we often hear liberal Zionists lamenting the state of Israeli politics today. They see these politics as a “betrayal of the values upon which Israel was founded” and frame them as an aberration from Israel’s supposedly core democratic and progressive values. They usually lay the blame on whatever Prime Minister is currently holding office. This was especially widespread during the Netanyahu years, and given Bennett’s track-record, we don’t see this changing any time soon.
If you were to ask these liberal Zionists when it all went wrong, their answer would be with the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip during the 1967 war [You can read more about this here]. According to the popular liberal Zionist narrative, occupying land in 1967 “corrupted” the Zionist project and Israeli society, and constituted a deviation from Israel’s founding principles:
“The tragedy is not that Israel has had no choice but precisely the opposite – by choosing to hold onto the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Israel radically altered its narrative arc. […] The story shifted from Israel the unapologetic David to being Israel the apologetic Goliath. From being a light unto other nations to hasbara in defense of the occupation.”
Liberal Zionists are not unique in this nostalgia for the past. Beneficiaries of imperialism are always looking back fondly on the “good old days”, which they imagine represented a better form of society. For instance, half of white Americans say that things were better in 1950 than they are today.
To put that into perspective, half of white Americans think that a society with segregation, where you needed to sit at the back of the bus if you weren’t white, where there were lynchings of Black people, was preferable to society today. And why not? They weren’t the ones facing any of this tyranny. They weren’t the ones being murdered in cold blood in the street.
A large portion of white Britons are also nostalgic for the days of the British empire, one of the most bloody and colonial empires in history. Half of those who voted “leave” during Brexit would prefer that Britain be an empire again. Once again, why wouldn’t they? They enjoyed the spoils of colonialism, and never needed to suffer its consequences. It wasn’t them being enslaved and butchered.
For the liberal Zionist, their nostalgia is not related to a perceived loss of power such as the examples above. It is about a perceived loss of morality and legitimacy. It is about Israel’s reputation, about them being unable to support Israel without feeling guilt or seeming reactionary. However, the most significant difference here is that the nostalgic “uncorrupted Israel” these liberal Zionists yearn for is fictitious. The Israel they imagine before 1967 has no basis in reality, and is a result of a national mythology cultivated by intense propaganda.
Ultimately, the common thread uniting all of this nostalgia is the complete erasure of its victims.
Just like any other colonizer, Israelis are impressively self-centered. Settler narcissism knows no bounds, as even as they lament the occupation of 1967, it is not out of concern for the Palestinians, who are the direct victims oppressed by this brutal military dictatorship. Instead, their focus is on themselves:
“The greatest damage has been internal. The settlement enterprise has become a divisive factor in Israeli society, sowing bitter rivalries among Jews not seen since the end of the Second Temple period, a story with its own tragic ending.”
Even when Israelis oppress, they are still the victims. As if this “settlement enterprise” happened in a vacuum, without any people being displaced, killed or oppressed. The real damage, it seems, is how it became a divisive factor for Israelis, because Palestinians have always been invisible collateral damage to the Zionist project. As a matter of fact, great efforts were implemented to erase Palestinians’ presence; entire forests, parks and nature reserves were created with the sole purpose of hiding the ruins of destroyed Palestinian villages. It appears that these efforts have been successful when it comes to the Israeli public, because the only way someone could possibly believe that pre-1967 Israel was on the “right side of history” is if you completely excise Palestinians from this history.
The willful ignorance needed to sustain this view is quite impressive, considering that Palestinians in the newly established Israeli state lived under martial law, needing permits to even leave their neighborhoods or villages. The living conditions in these communities were so abysmal that an Israeli politician at the time described them as “fenced concentration camps”.
We remind you that these were supposed to be the so-called “Arab Israelis” which were citizens of the state. They remained living under such conditions until 1966, basically a year before the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. As a matter of fact, the reason Israelis were able to so easily seize and administer the newly occupied areas was because they simply transferred the same structures and systems used on Palestinians living under Israeli control after 1948.
Furthermore, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians would not stop after the war; Palestinians in the Naqab, as well as those close to the ceasefire lines, would continue to face mass expulsions into the 1950s. This should solidly dispel the myth that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was an unplanned consequence of war, as it continued years afterwards [You can read more about this here]. Many massacres and mass killings took place during this period against Palestinians who were supposedly “equal citizens of Israel”. For instance, the Kufr Qassim massacre claimed 49 Palestinians, who were murdered in cold blood by Israel. To drive in how dehumanized and erased Palestinians are, the commander responsible for giving the order to open fire was fined 10 measly pennies. This is what the life of 49 Palestinians was worth. His accomplices were sentenced to very light jail time, but were all pardoned and set free within a year.
Given these facts, the idea that Israel somehow lost its way after 1967 is quite laughable. The tactics used to dehumanize and dominate Palestinians in 1967 occupied areas were pioneered and tested on Palestinians in 1948 occupied areas. Ethnically cleansing 800,000 Palestinians and destroying over 500 villages is not some small aberration to the noble Zionist project, but a necessary precondition for the existence of the Israeli state today.
As we always emphasize, the occupation of 1967 is a symptom, not the root cause of the question of Palestine [You can read more about this here]. Trying to understand the Palestinian revolution by starting at 1967 will produce a flawed, incomplete and selective understanding of the conditions on the ground today.
Despite their insistence to the opposite, Zionists are largely uninformed and selective about the history of their ideology and state. This is because for the most part, the information they get is from either Israeli or Zionist media and education sources. One need only look at some of the colossal myths still popular in Zionist circles today, to see how effective this brainwashing has been. The vast majority of these myths are lazy, and could be dispelled through a basic investigation of primary sources. When it comes to the story of the founding of Israel, Avi Shlaim argues that the disconnect between the Zionist narrative and reality is aided by the fact that:
“Most of the voluminous literature on the war was written not by professional historians but by participants, by politicians, soldiers, official historians and by a large host of sympathetic chroniclers, journalists, biographers and hagiographers.”
Therefore, most “historical” knowledge Israelis and Zionists have are from sources relegated to the realm of political claim-making rather than honestly reflecting actual events. Combine this with the silencing of Palestinians, willful ignorance and reactionary ethno-nationalist chauvinism and you have a recipe for an impenetrable bunker mentality. Liberal Zionists are not immune to this mentality, as we see their cognitive dissonance and contradictory politics all the time. They talk about the rights of refugees and asylum seekers in the West, and revert to blood and soil fascists the moment the right of return for Palestinians is mentioned, discarding their “progressive” charade and ranting about “demographic threats”.
Simply put, liberal Zionists live in denial. They are in denial about how Israel was founded, how Israelis came to have their homes, how Israel operates, and how it is sustained. They never ask themselves why Israel was supported by the biggest colonial powers at the time. They never ask why they are supported today by the largest imperialist hegemon in history. They make-believe that they are part of some liberation movement, while being sponsored by the forces squashing liberation movements all over the world.
It is easy for them to condemn the occupation, as far as they are concerned 80% of the territory is enough. Some even look down on the West Bank settlers as uncivilized, thinking that somehow the colonization of Palestine in 1948 was different than what the West Bank settlers are doing today, or that their homes were acquired in a different manner than the infamous Yacov in Sheikh Jarrah. They live in a bubble, claiming “this isn’t the Israel I believe in” whenever a new heinous war crime is committed by a state that could only exist due to heinous war crimes. This denialism is akin to Americans saying “this is un-American” whenever something terribly American happens.
Invoking a mythical idealized version of Israel that never existed serves mainly to assuage liberal Zionist guilt about supporting Israel today. Regardless of how loud they protest, Israel is increasingly being identified with reactionary and fascist movements all over the world. With every war crime committed, support for Israel becomes more of a taboo in progressive circles. Claiming that Israel has merely “lost its way” is a coping mechanism to keep pretending that this is a temporary state of affairs, that Israel at its core is good, and thus worthy of continuous support.
Naturally, this means that they must concede that Israel has some faults, but this criticism is reserved and shallow, focusing on individuals rather than systems, and definitely not interested in root causes. This saves them from having to admit that Israel as a whole has been a racist, colonial endeavor, or confront their own complicity in the destruction of Palestinian society. Fortunately, this tactic has been transparent and ineffective. As a result, there are personalities on the Zionist “left” whose sole purpose is to endlessly whine about how they aren’t welcome in progressive circles anymore, naturally accusing those circles of antisemitism rather than inspecting their own reactionary politics.
In reality, for Palestinians there has never existed a “good” Israel which was corrupted. It is an impossibility, and a complete contradiction of terms. Israel was built at the expense of the destruction and subjugation of Palestinian society. The only way liberal Zionists think Israel was on the “right track” in this period is because, like their right-wing counterparts, they don’t view Palestinians as equally human.
- Salaita, Steven. Israel’s dead soul. Temple University Press, 2011.
- Sayegh, Fayez Abdullah. Zionist colonialism in Palestine. Vol. 1. Beirut, Lebanon: Research Center, Palestine Liberation Organization, 1965.
- Honig-Parnass, Tikva. The False Prophets of Peace: Liberal Zionism and the Struggle for Palestine. Haymarket Books, 2011.