Next week, delegates from around the world will gather in Jerusalem for the 39th Zionist Congress.
This Congress takes place in the shadow of the massive destruction and loss of life from the war in Gaza, which has galvanized much of the world to view Zionism as a pariah ideology. For many, the face of Zionism is Benjamin Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich, and Itamar Ben-Gvir. They are very influential Zionist leaders who have shaped – and are shaping – Zionism and Israel in consequential ways.
Those Israeli leaders embody “fear Zionism,” the belief that the Jewish people need a homeland where they have the fullest power of self-agency.
However, they do not speak for all Zionists. “Fulfillment Zionism” stands in sharp contrast to fear Zionism. It proposes an ideal Jewish state. These two outlooks are as old as modern Zionism. Herzl’s two seminal works are The Jewish State and The Old-New Land.
The Jewish State, a pamphlet published in 1896, is the basis of fear Zionism. It was written as a response to the growing wave of anti-Jewish thinking and violence that gained steam as the 19th century headed toward the dark events of the 20th century.
The Old-New Land, a novel published in 1902, spelled out fulfillment Zionism, imagining what that Jewish state should look like. In between the publication of these two seminal works, the First Zionist Congress was held in 1897.
Zionist historian Shlomo Avineri points out:
“The Jewish commonwealth of [The] Old-New Land is based on universal suffrage, which in Herzl’s day did not exist in any Western democracy, save New Zealand… Reshid Bey, an Arab engineer from Haifa, is one of the new country’s leaders and a central figure in the novel.
“In fact, the issue of equal rights for the non-Jewish population is central to the novel’s plot… what Herzl advocated was that the Old-New Land should be both Jewish and democratic – a Jewish nation-state, but one that would preserve equal rights for its non-Jewish population, not half-heartedly, but as a major tenet of its political and moral credo.”
IN THE post-war period, Israel will have to decide if it is ready to embrace that broad vision of Zionism or if it will continue the path of Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, and Smotrich, locked in Herzl’s The Jewish State version of Zionism, including the increasingly non-democratic elements, to the exclusion of the diverse Jewish and Arab voices within Israeli society, as well as Bibi’s recent call to make Israel “super-Sparta.”
Herzl understood Zionism, the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, as a response to two motivations. One, the conclusion in the wake of antisemitism – a cancer that is either benign or malignant but always unfortunately and too-often tragically there – is that the Jewish people need a homeland where they have the fullest power of self-agency. That was Herzl’s motivation for establishing the modern Zionist movement, what can be called fear Zionism.
This conclusion on the need for Zionism is based upon a reality that cannot be dismissed, as the barbaric Hamas deeds of October 7 scream at us. Disturbingly, the growing ferocity hurled at Jews and Israel this past year and the ever-disproportionate focus and criticism of Israel over the years compared to so many other violent and deadly infractions around the world only make the case for a Jewish state based on fear Zionism.
The lopsided focus on Israel only confirms for many a serious and worrisome bias against the Jewish state, making it easy to dismiss criticism of Israel, even when there is a strong, valid critique; as in any war, both sides will need to answer for their actions. That being said, fear Zionism in more ways than one can be limited in its scope and prevents a society from fulfilling its broader needs and ideals.
Herzl understood that constraint. When he wrote The Old-New Land, he turned to the original Zionism. Fulfillment Zionism was created by the rabbis in the sixth century BCE during the Babylonian Exile, with its calls to “return them to their homes” (Hosea 11:11). That call was reiterated in the second century CE in response to the Roman destruction of the Second Israelite Commonwealth.
At its core was a call “to lead us back in joy to our land and to plant us within our borders.” Those words were not written in 1902 but more than 2,000 years earlier, woven into Jewish liturgy.
JEWISH NATIONALISM, along with a very strong connection to the land, was integrated within the religion over the centuries of exile and dispersion. Presenting itself as a religion throughout these displacements, Judaism always carried the seed of its national identity, manifested in its prayers and holidays.
My great-uncle told me that when they heard in their small shtetl of Ternifika, near Uman, Ukraine, the news of the issuance of the Balfour Declaration in 1917, there was joyous dancing in the streets. They did not dance as would-be colonists but as Jews who had waited 2,000 years, often in utter fear, terror, and a sense of abandonment, for the opportunity to return and rebuild a nation in its homeland.
That desire to return to the Land of Israel was originally motivated not by antisemitism but rather by the opportunity to reestablish an independent and free Jewish nation – “to be a free people in our land,” as sung in the Israeli national anthem – based on the challenge to create a society rooted in what Buber called “Hebrew Humanism.”
Israel is more than a tool to survive
Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan put it another way: “Paradoxical as it may seem, if a nation wishes to survive, it must not make survival itself its supreme objective but rather aim at the achievement of the highest intellectual, esthetic, and social good that alone makes national survival important to its individual members.”
Woven within that orientation is reaching an accommodation with the Palestinian people. As Ahad Ha’am, from the school of fulfillment Zionism, wrote in 1920: “However, this historical right of the Jewish people does not cancel the right of the other residents of the land... This land is also their national home…This situation, therefore, makes the Land of Israel a place shared by different peoples, each of whom is trying to build their national home there.”
In his invaluable book Palestine 1936, on the subsequent events of that seminal year, Oren Kessler reminds us of another time: If a Jewish child and an Arab child were born near each other in the same quarter of Jerusalem, the same midwife would nurse both children, creating “foster brothers,” with expected bonds between their families.
This conflict likely will not end with the victory of one over the other but rather only once the mutual understanding that the redemption of one side can only happen with the redemption of the other as well. That is the basis of fulfillment Zionism.
The writer, a rabbi, is associated with Hatikvah – The Progressive Slate.