Jonathan Greenblatt’s Argument For Zionism Is Very Shoddy

It might come from an understandable place, but it makes little sense

Back in 2021, I wrote a piece called “When Your Epistemic Bubble Pops.” In it, I explored a phenomenon in which a group develops a set of beliefs or arguments and, as a result of insular, groupish dynamics, becomes very convinced these beliefs and arguments are sound. But then, people outside the group encounter these beliefs and arguments and find them to be quite rickety. This can have consequences for the members of the group.

I thought of epistemic bubbles as I was listening to the interview Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League, gave to Lulu Garcia-Navarro of The New York Times. There’s a lot in there worth hearing and considering, but I want to focus on this segment:

Please define [Zionism and anti-Zionism].

So Zionism is, simply put, the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in their ancient homeland. That’s what it is. Zionism is essential to the Jewish tradition. The idea of Jews returning to Israel, we’ve been talking about it since Moses, literally. Political Zionism is newer, 125 years, but that notion of self-determination in the homeland doesn’t exclude Palestinians, doesn’t exclude any other group. It’s saying Jews have the right, this sort of liberation movement, to go back to where they’re from. Anti-Zionism is the belief that Jews do not have that right. It is an ideology which is committed to saying we will do what we can to prevent Jewish self-determination in their homeland. Anti-Zionism is an ideology of nihilism, Lulu, which would literally seek to not just delegitimize but eliminate the Jewish state. And that’s very problematic.

So you have equated anti-Zionism with antisemitism.

It is.

In preparation for this conversation, I talked to a lot of different people, and one of the things I heard is that anti-Zionism for them is a desire to have the rights of Palestinians equal to the rights of Jews in Israel and the Palestinian territories, which would ultimately mean that the country is not majority Jewish — the idea of the one-state solution. Is that definition of anti-Zionism antisemitic to you?

If you believe that only Jewish people don’t have the right to self-determination, that’s antisemitic because it’s holding out Jews to a double standard you don’t accord to other people. So if you believe my definition of Zionism — which is really not my definition, it’s widely accepted — it’s peculiar to me how anti-Zionism isn’t the opposite of that. How people choose to interpret it, to embellish it, dress it up as something other than what it is — but the reality is, if you believe how I laid out Zionism, then anti-Zionism is pretty simple.

None of this is new. Greenblatt is relating mainstream Zionist claims about our (Jewish people’s) attachment to Israel and our right to be there. Most American Jews grow up hearing a story roughly like this one. In our bubble(s), it has the ring of obvious truth to it.

But it just isn’t a good or rigorous argument by normal standards. And if the tide of public opinion continues to turn against Israel in light of the horrors unfolding in Gaza, the holes in it are only going to become more obvious. It’s strange to me, then, that someone like Greenblatt is remaining loyal to such a rusty, cobwebbed argument. (At some point I am going to write a long and disjointed piece about the Gaza war itself. I’m finding it difficult to figure out how to express myself in a remotely productive manner on that front.)

There are three questions worth exploring here, and after going through them I’ll briefly lay out what I view as a more modest, defensible conception of Israel’s (obvious) “right to exist.”

1) Do groups have “the right to self-determination” in the sense of having and controlling their own country or territory run in accordance with whatever the group thinks is best for the group?

2) More specifically, do groups have the right to return to places they once lived but had to flee from?

3) If you disagree with (1) and/or (2), are you exhibiting bigotry toward the group in question?

None of these seem like close calls. The answers are no, no, and no.

On (1), the question of who gets their own country or territory is a matter of deep historical complexity — it’s the stuff of luck and cruelty and heartbreak — and for the vast majority of ethnic and other groups who exist only in enclaves and/or as part of a thinly dispersed diaspora, no one is seriously arguing that they have a right to establish a new sovereign state that they can then run however they want, without regard to the current inhabitants of that lands’ preferences.

As in: We liberals sure like our land acknowledgments — I’m writing this from a library which has posted a note, as you enter, stating that it “resides on land historically owned and occupied by the Nauset, a distinct group of indigenous people partially subject to the chief of the larger Wampanoag tribe.” A sizable chunk of Americans think a horrible historical injustice was visited on the Native Americans, wish all the best to the surviving ones, and. . . well, recite land acknowledgments. But even here, the most sympathetic and historically relevant example imaginable in the U.S., no one actually believes Native Americans have a right to full “self-determination” in the sense Greenblatt means. Rather, the U.S. has established a system of “tribal sovereignty” that does grant the tribes some rights to (for example) collect taxes and have their own police. But the federal government is always looming, right there, if (for example) a federal crime is committed. There is no comparison between the degree of control Native Americans have over their affairs and their land and the degree of control Israelis have over theirs. More broadly, no one thinks the Hmong have a “right” to set up a Hmong state, the Uyghurs to set up theirs, and so on. Of course we all think it would be nice if, for example, the Chinese government didn’t brutally repress the Uyghurs, and if other groups weren’t similarly repressed. But the right Greenblatt is invoking — the right to self-determination in the form of a group’s own country — just isn’t a part of most people’s conceptions of, well, reality.

Israel exists as a state not because there is some universal right to “self-determination” that was recognized but rather because of a fairly stunning turn of events. As Greenblatt alluded to, that whole rather symbolic “next year in Jerusalem” thing turned into a full-blown ideology and movement — at first a fringe one — by the end of the nineteenth century. Eventually, in part because there was a population of Jews who were sufficiently sick of getting pogrommed in the East that even emigrating to a distant patch of coastal desert seemed superior to the status quo, a successful colonization project took hold. Then Hitler killed millions of Jews and created a large number of Jewish refugees, which obviously lent moral weight to the Zionist argument. The point wasn’t that every group deserves “self-determination”; the point was that Jews had suffered so immensely, in such a world-historic manner, that they did. The world had failed them and the least it could do was give them some land to build their own lives and their own defenses.

This is, of course, the shortest and most half-assed capsule history of Zionism imaginable, but my point is the reason the state of Israel exists is because of all sorts of historical contingencies. Some of it gets really random and specific. To take one random example: When it was important to advocate on the world stage or to negotiate with the foreign power occupying and administering Palestine between 1922 and 1947 — Britain — the Zionists but not the Arabs had the benefit of an educated, suit-wearing class of folks who spoke the language (sometimes literally) of the world’s power brokers. There are a lot of ways this could have all gone differently.