JVL Introduction
We’ve carried many stories about the end of liberal Zionism in the past. But post-October 7th, there is an rapidly increasing polarisation among Jews in the United States, echoed throughout Jewish communities elsewhere. Quite simply, the liberal centre is fragmenting in ways it hasn’t before.
Mitchell Plitnick writing in Mondoweiss is clear that J Street, long presenting itself as the respectable face of the liberal Jewish world, is drifting to the right. It is “Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace” but strictly in that order. Since October 7th it has prioritised Israel’s Jewish ethnocracy and its military hegemony above all else.
It’s no longer, says Plitnick, a question of one state or two. Whatever the form, the path to any decent future has to be democratic:
It will be about whether Palestinians will have equal rights in every way—including the right of return and the right to ensure their own security, just like Israelis. And that means the question for American [and British and other] Jews will ultimately come down to whether we want to continue to insist on an ethnocratic formulation featuring a Jewish state, or whether we will help Israel to abandon the fiction that it can be an ethnocratic and democratic state at the same time. It cannot.
RK
We’ve carried many stories about the end of liberal Zionism in the past. But post-October 7th, there is an rapidly…
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