ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the question of the author's personal engagement with liberal Zionism, at a moment of particular political stress, when many have expressed the fear that liberal Israel may be at irreversible risk.
The context of this chapter militates against asking the question at all, which is one reason for asking it. This chapter sits, literally, at the end of a volume on antizionism and antisemitism, and temporally, during a period of antizionist consolidation; antizionism being understood as an anti-Jewish intellectual framework that is widely accepted as legitimate. There has been a catastrophic decline in hope that a two-state solution will address the root causes of the conflict between Israel and its neighbours, and liberalism in general is hotly challenged, so that any re-founding of liberal Zionism may need to be part of a re-founding of liberalism itself.
This chapter argues that in spite of the pressures and the reasons not to, the yearning to re-examine one's positive project is a healthy one. It re-states the legitimacy of a Diaspora Zionism and its relationship to Jewish identity. And it re-excavates the reasons for liberal-ness and liberalism. It follows, then, that it re-articulates the ‘deplorableness’ of the current Israeli government. And yet it moves towards some conclusions that are both optimistic and worldly, idealistic and pragmatic, and open to facing with seriousness the ways in which the world may change.
