Last night, I wrote my post for this morning and, as is often the case, when I woke up and thought about it, I decided it wasn’t quite right. Not that it didn’t say anything, but it really didn’t say anything the way I wanted to say it. So I am starting over.

I often hear the question asked in the Jewish circles I tend to travel in, usually rhetorically, “are you a Zionist?”. Sometimes it is asked during a speech, or a sermon, and the answer, given by the speaker, is always the same: “of course, I support Israel”. For a long time, I thought that, if that question was asked directly to me, my answer would be: “it depends how you define Zionist”. And, I guess that it still the correct answer, and the word “Zionist” can have many definitions, none of which are ever really spelled out.

As I have said in this blog several times, I think the term “Zionist” should be retired, and relegated to history. One reason is that there really are several possible definitions of the term, and when one claims to be a Zionist, you don’t really know what that means (other than “I support Israel”, whatever that means). And for many, mostly those who do not “support Israel”, the word “Zionist” has become pejorative. “You are a Zionist? Away with you.” Who needs it?

I had to spend a fair amount of time in my car yesterday, driving from home to Wheaton to Union Station to home, and I listened to podcast interviews with two prominent, Israeli-born, Jewish, anti-Zionist academics, Professor Omer Bartov of Brown University, and Professor Emeritus Yakov Rabkin of the University of Montreal. I don’t want to put words into their mouths, but I would say that, while neither of them want to see Israel wiped off the earth or its Jewish citizens harmed, their anti-Zionism goes beyond being against the Netanyahu government’s policies, and goes to the entire concept that led to the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948.

They separate the religious concept of a “return to Zion” (as proclaimed daily in Jewish liturgy) from the concept of political Zionism, as developed in the late 19th century in Europe. They remark that the earliest European Zionists were for the most part not religious at all, often socialist, and that their reconciliation of their own belief systems, and the concept of the Jews having a right to particular real estate given to them by a God that they didn’t really believe in, was always very problematic. They remark that the most religious of Jews have often never supported the concept of political Zionism, believing that the return to the Promised Land would have to await the coming of the Messiah.

They talk about the reaction of most Jews 130 years or so ago to the then new Zionist movement. It was antagonistic and oppositional, often publicly so. In fact, it wasn’t until the end of the World War II and the understanding of the breadth of the Holocaust that the concept of a Jewish homeland in Palestine became more widely accepted. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when Jews were pouring out of the Russian empire (with the approval of the tsars, of course), less than 1% chose Palestine as a destination.

They also talk about who were the allies of the Zionists when the majority of Jews wanted nothing to do with barren Palestine. They were often the antisemites, those who wanted to give the Jews a place to go so that they would voluntarily leave the places where they were living. Lord Balfour, I heard one of them say, pressed for what became known as the Balfour declaration because he wanted to curtail Jewish immigration into England, and that the only cabinet member in Britain who opposed the Balfour Declaration was Edwin Montagu, the only Jewish member of the cabinet, who was afraid of the effect it would have on the Jews of England. They cite Theodor Herzl’s statement that the antisemites are our best allies.

The upshot of all of this is that Zionism and Judaism, or Zionism and the Jewish people, are far from necessary partners. They also recognize, of course, that Zionism as a movement has been radically successful. It went from a fringe movement of Central European intellectuals to a mass movement which ended with the formation of the State of Israel, and the movement to Israel of Jews not only from Europe (mainly survivors of the Holocaust), but from countries in the greater Middle East and North Africa, where there had never been a Zionist movement at all.

But the concept of a state for the Jewish people was to create a state like all others. It was not to make the Jewish people special, but to make the Jewish people a people like all others. And once the State was declared and populated, the Zionist movement had accomplished its political goals, and Israel would have been better off if at that time, it had lost its particular Zionist identity.

But the Jews who came to Israel, these two academics say, were conditioned from their previous homelands to be treated specially (negatively special, of course, for the most part) and to be suspicious of everyone around them, and to resort to violence when necessary to protect themselves. This ethos, which one of them said emanated from the Jews leaving Russia who formed the base of early Israeli political leadership, was carried over to Israel and influenced Israel’s views of neighboring countries. Of course, there was more than a base in reality for the fear of their neighbors, who after all didn’t want the Jews there in the first place. But, for these academics, Israel, after its victory in 1948, could have taken a very different approach to its neighbors than it did, and this could have resulted in something much different from the situation we find ourselves in today.

I am not arguing in support of the overall positions of either Orlov or Rabkin, but I find their arguments very interesting and thought provoking.

And it coincides with my belief that it is time to retire the word “Zionism”.

Throughout history, religion and political control have gone hand in hand. It wasn’t until the end of the 18th century, and the French and American revolutions, that the concept of separating church and state became a reality, spurred by anti-monarchial movements led primarily by Freemasons. This was progress, and became something that we take for granted.

This church- state separation did not take place in most Muslim countries, and – in spite of the lofty ideals in Israel’s Declaration of Independence – in this sense Israel has become more like its Muslim neighbors than its European founders first imagined it would. We have two peoples claiming the same land, as we have had since the Balfour Declaration was issued. The conflict will continue until new leadership arises on both sides willing to drop religious claims to the land. Where are those 18th century Freemasons now that we really need them?