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What is liberal Zionism, and what does it matter? In US political life this category has evolved, since the Middle East war of June 1967, from an assumed identity (between liberal, center-left politics and Zionism) to an embattled claim (that American progressives who believe in peace and antiracism ought to be Zionists as well). Americans have debated liberal Zionism with great intensity since the 2010 publication of an essay by the writer Peter Beinart, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment.” By this he meant the “failure” of that “establishment” to uphold liberal values – moral universalism, civic equality, opposition to ethnocentrism, and restraints on militarism – while also maintaining its familiar, fervently pro-Israel stance.1
Participants in this debate in the USA have deployed a specifically North American meaning of liberalism, one that descends from the New Deal and Great Society eras of US political and cultural history. Different understandings of liberal politics and ideology have prevailed elsewhere. In Israel, liberal Zionism has been, historically, a minority tendency describing a preference for free-market economic policy – rather different from the state-regulatory stance typically clustered in “modern” US liberalism with the socially inclusive commitments noted above. In some places and times, particularly those shadowed by state tyrannies, liberalism has simply betokened basic commitments to political and intellectual freedom. Here I focus on the ordinary political meanings of liberalism in the middle and late twentieth-century USA and the acceleration of controversy around efforts to maintain the established American linkage of liberalism in this sense with Zionism. Some polemics against Zionism have argued that liberal ideology, with its accent on universalism, is incompatible with nationalism of any brand. Such claims form part of the discursive field I interpret, as do liberal nationalist counterclaims. I see the crises negotiated by liberal Zionists in post-1967 America issuing from the intersection of an intrinsic ideological tension between liberalism and Zionism – not an ineluctable conflict – with historically specific events, including wars in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, the movement against white supremacy in the United States, the broader rise of a global left, and the conservative backlash against the left, a backlash that damaged the political center left along with socialist or radical movements.2
Today, arguments for...