Shaul Magid writes:

It has been two years since the mass murder on 7 October 2023, an event that shook world Jewry more than any event since the creation of the state of Israel.

For Jews it was shocking. For the state of Israel, it was deeply humiliating. The entire Zionist project was founded on the presumption that the Jewish state would prevent things like this from ever happening again.

A response was inevitable. But the response Israel pursued – the obliteration of Gaza, the killing and maiming of tens of thousands of civilians – was a choice. And this choice complicated how many American Jews processed the attack that set it in motion, and it now complicates the community’s commemoration of the day. How does one mourn and commemorate an atrocity against your people in the midst of an atrocity done to another people in your name?

The complexity of mourning lies in the fact that there is no consensus as to what any of this means. In fact, for the American Jewish community, the last two years have seen the collapse of a half-century-old consensus on Zionism itself.

The beginnings of a Zionist consensus among American Jewry extends as far back as a 1915 essay by the lawyer and then future supreme court justice Louis Brandeis titled “The Jewish Problem; How to Solve It”. But the consensus really takes hold after the six-day war in 1967. Before then, American Jewry housed a fragile but stable coexistence between groups that had a range of views about the necessity of a Jewish state – Zionists, non-Zionists and anti-Zionists.

That coexistence persisted through the 1950s and 60s, in remnants of Jewish socialism, in the non-Zionist American Jewish Committee, in the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism and other organizations. For Louis Finkelstein, the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Zionism was more spiritual than political, and he did not permit singing Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem, at JTS ordinations in the early 1960s. Nor were Zionism and pro-Israelism the centerpiece of Modern Orthodoxy until after the six-day war. Jewish identitarian alternatives coexisted.

But after Israel routed its neighbors in the six-day war in 1967, occupying territories including the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights and East Jerusalem, the American Jewish relationship to the country changed dramatically. Israel’s victory, along with longstanding fears of a “second Holocaust”, resulted in a growing belief in the country’s critical importance to the Jewish people, and a source of pride in its resilience. Rhetoric about the “miraculous” nature of the victory and the “liberation” of land gave the Zionist project a religious, even messianic, significance. In those heady years, much of the remaining ambivalence about Zionism disappeared. In the early 1970s, the Commentary magazine editor, Norman Podhoretz, memorably proclaimed: “We are all Zionists now.” [Continue reading…]