Journalist Peter Beinart’s latest jeremiad purports to tell of the parting of the ways between liberalism and Zionism. It is a drum he has been beating for a while, and the New York Times is only too happy to be a boombox for the Beinart beat. He blames Zionism for the split, but he has it, in our view, backwards. If liberalism can no longer abide the political creed of Herzl and Jabotinsky, it is because liberalism has become illiberal.  

It is true, as Mr. Beinart writes, that “liberal America is becoming less ideologically hospitable” to supporters of Israel. Senator Schumer, say, was just denounced by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations for a speech wheeling on Prime Minister Netanyahu in the middle of a war. President Biden went out of his way to praise the speech, essentially abandoning his promise to support Israel against Hamas.     

Mr. Beinart declares that the “emerging rupture between American liberalism and American Zionism constitutes the greatest transformation in American Jewish politics in half a century.” The Biden administration’s abstention at the Security Council today underscores that this rupture is also a betrayal. Mr. Beinart laconically explains that it has become “harder to explain where Israeli Jews fit into” the left’s vision of “Palestinian liberation.”

Mr. Beinart, like the Bible’s Balaam, unwillingly spills some truths. He writes that some anti-Zionists “are taking it out on American Jews” and that the experiences of Zionists “on progressive campuses are coming to resemble the experiences of young Republicans.” He declares that for “American Jews who want to preserve their country’s unconditional support for Israel for another generation, there is only one reliable political partner”— the GOP.

The polemicist possesses a better understanding of liberalism’s deviancies than of Zionism’s virtues. He drily notes that “in pro-Palestine activist circles in the United States, coexistence has receded as a theme.” He also observes that the pro-Palestinian crowd is “generally hostile to a Jewish state within any borders.” He sees a future where American Jews, to be devoutly liberal, will choose to “jettison Zionism.” He does not mourn that future.

Mr. Beinart would, we reckon, don sackcloth and ashes at the prospect of such a future if he had a better understanding of the liberalism of Zionism, past and present. Herzl, its prophet, wrote in respect of the Jews that the world would “be liberated by our freedom, enriched by our wealth, magnified by our greatness.” He hoped that the dream of Zion would “redound mightily and beneficially to the good of all mankind.”

That liberalism — the real vintage —  was part of Zionism’s DNA from the  beginning. The dirt-under-the-fingernails collectivism  of the kibbutz puts the champagne socialism on college campuses to shame. It is so ingrained in the Zionist ethos that it suffused both Ben-Gurion’s statism and the free market sensibility of his arch-rival, Vladimir Jabotinsky. The builders of Zion, nearly all refugees from some manner of despotism, knew liberty’s worth.

Jabotinsky was among those who adopted, at the Third Zionist Congress, the Helsingfors Program, whose signatories affirmed that they were “prepared to take an oath binding ourselves and our descendants that we shall never do anything contrary to the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try to eject anyone.” His protégé, Menachem Begin, was of such liberal spirit that in 1948 he laid down arms rather than risk civil war.   

Zionism’s liberalism extends beyond its own camp. In “The Iron Wall,” Jabotinsky looks forward to the rise of a “moderate” Palestinian Arab faction with whom it will be possible to discuss “practical questions, such as a guarantee against Arab displacement, or equal rights for Arab citizens, or Arab national integrity.” His heirs — among them Prime Minister Netanyahu, whose father was Jabotinsky’s personal secretary — still await those moderates. 

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Correction: Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations is the title of the conference. It was given incorrectly in the bulldog.