Sam Harris is a thoughtful, provocative podcast host. Recognizing the Jihadist threat worldwide, he supports Israel enthusiastically. But he misreads what Zionism is – and should mean to the rest of the world. So, let’s duke it out substantively, respectfully.
About 28 minutes into a recent appearance on Haviv Rettig Gur’s compelling podcast, Ask Haviv Anything, Harris insisted:
“I think there’s one disaster here that amounts to a kind of own goal that we keep scoring on ourselves that we need not ever score again, which is the use of the term ‘Zionism.’”
Harris claimed that “Israel is the only country that has a name for an ideology that really is simply its account of why it has a right to exist.”
Zionism, he concluded, becomes “a permission slip that you keep putting in front of the world saying ‘this is what we call our belief that we have a right to exist.’”
That word is “never helpful.” It’s a “stumbling block” that sounds “dogmatic… like a form of racism” and “can be spun as some form of colonialism.”
Harris has defined Zionism too narrowly, while allowing antisemitic lies to obscure basic truths. Israel’s right to exist is foundational to Zionism, but limiting its horizons to that definition is suffocating.
Claiming Zionism only justifies Israel’s right to exist is like limiting Judaism just to belief in one God. Both phenomena are so much more multi-dimensional, no matter how reductive enemies and friends might be.
Even before 1948, Zionism entailed far more than establishing a Jewish state. The many different streams of Zionism I detailed in The Zionist Ideas – Political, Labor, Cultural, Religious, Revisionist, and Diaspora – illustrate the kaleidoscope of visions circulating then.
Zionists debated the Jewish state’s character, the New Jew’s trajectory, and the Jewish people’s fate in their homeland and abroad.
Since 1948, Zionists have defended the state, including its right to exist, when necessary, but also dream about what kind of state and what kind of people we will become – always.
Today, Identity Zionism transcends politics and partisanship, offering Jews everywhere touchstones in their homeland and springboards toward individual and communal meaning.
What Zionism really means
Meanwhile, holding Zionism responsible for the global attack on Israel’s existence blames the victim. Abandoning the term – or internalizing the Jihadists’ slurs alleging racism, colonialism, and oppression – gives our enemies victories they don’t deserve.
Harris is correct. “We’re all living in Israel; only some of us have realized it.” That’s why we must repudiate anti-Zionists’ libel fest.
Admittedly, some Zionists exacerbate the problem.
Left-wingers who only define Israel by any governmental missteps and right-wing extremists who squelch any self-criticism unintentionally feed misunderstandings of Zionism. Seeing Israel only through a partisan lens is blinding.
And the Jewish world’s defensiveness is enervating.
Last year, I was invited to address Jewish indigeneity at a conference. Rather than telegraphing insecurity, as if Israel’s existence needs justifying, I shifted slightly.
Taking Israel’s deep roots in our homeland as a given, I described how Zionist and Israeli culture flourished as Jews returned home and embraced their indigeneity.
Similarly, in my recent Essential Guide to Zionism, anti-Zionism, antisemitism, and Jew-hatred, published by JPPI, I didn’t act as Israel’s defense attorney.
I simply mapped out: “Ancient Signs of Jewish Life in Israel Archaeologists Have Uncovered.” The map detailed seven sites in modern Israel where Jews did Jewish two thousand years ago.
It’s shocking that, as America’s 250th anniversary approaches, Harris labeled Israel “the only country that has a name for an ideology that really is simply its account of why it has a right to exist.”
What about “Americanism?”
True, John Witherspoon coined the term in 1781 to describe a linguistic phenomenon. This signer of the Declaration of Independence tracked the twists Americans imposed on British English.
By the time Theodore Roosevelt celebrated “True Americanism” in 1894, the term had expanded deliciously, like Zionism. For some, “Americanism” did explain America’s right to exist.
Others defined “Americanizing” as acculturating. Still others meant America’s core ideals, especially “consent of the governed,” and everyone’s “inherent rights.” Americanism, TR wrote, “is a question of spirit, conviction, and purpose, not of creed or birthplace.”
In 1922, the British philosopher GK Chesterton wrote: “America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence.”
Chesterton popularized a colleague’s insight that “America is a nation with the soul of a church.”
I have long argued that, thanks to Zionism’s kinetic ideology, Israel, like America, is one of the few democracies in the world founded on an idea – “to be a free nation in our homeland,” and “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Canada’s formula, for example, is static: “peace, order, and good government.”
Zionism and Americanism make Israel and America dynamic, catalytic countries, yearning, churning, and ever-trying to better their nations by fulfilling their founding ideals – while improving the world too.
Building off Chesterton, Israel parallels America with a Jewish accent. Israel is “a nation with the soul of a shul” – forever squabbling while driven by tradition, values, rituals, ideas, and ideals.
So, no. Using the term “Zionism” isn’t scoring an “own goal” against us. Zionism is a verb, a process, a movement. It involves articulating our own goals individually and communally – in Israel and worldwide.
Zionism will keep us building the world’s only Jewish democracy, while strengthening the Jewish people, an old-new people who, thanks to Zionism, have been empowered, renewed, stretched, and inspired once again.
The writer is an American presidential historian and a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute in Jerusalem. Last year he published To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream and The Essential Guide to Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism and Jew-hatred, available on the JPPI website. Next month, he will publish The Essential Guide to the US-Israel Partnership, the 250th Edition.
