Liberal Zionism is dying. Will foregoing the Jewish state save it?
JVL Introduction
Omri Boehm’s new book Haifa Republic argues that liberal Zionism is moribund in a world where the two-state solution is now pure nostalgia.
It can only be saved by reconstruction and revisioning. And that in turn involves a return to Zionism’s roots before statism had taken deep root – to the idea of some kind of bintionalism.
The ideas discussed in this review of Boehm’s book by Shaul Magid are not new but they involve a fascinating rediscovery and representation of past events, debates, contributions.
Boehm writes, “Arab-Jewish politics is the only model for a democratic future in Israel — and the only model that propels a country beyond the two-state solution.”
And, as author and reviewer stress, “such an alternative is in fact buried deep in the attic of liberal Zionism”.
Is it possible? Not, asserts Magid, without facing up to Religious Zionism, which is missing from Boehm’s analysis, and devising a way of severing religious messianism from the political sphere…
This article was originally published by +972 Magazine on Tue 10 Aug 2021. Read the original here.
Liberal Zionism is dying. Will foregoing the Jewish state save it?
A new book calls for Zionism to be re-envisioned as a binational project in order to shed Jewish historical trauma and salvage democratic values.
Loading article text…
I visited Israel in the late 1970s or early 1980s, just now I am not sure about the exact date. In Haifa an old Hungarian Jewish woman resident told me that “Jews and Arabs lived in harmony in Haifa until outside powers started to interfere and cause problems.” This woman emigrated from Hungary to Palestine before the Holocaust, she had many decades of Haifa experience.