Zionism For Everyone (Except the Palestinians)
On Zionism's Hidden Question
Friends,
The war with Iran continues. Baruch Hashem, my family and I are safe, but it takes a toll. The sirens, the uncertainty, the constant awareness that the ground you stand on is not as stable as you need it to be—you learn to carry them, but they don't get lighter. That said, writing helps. It's how I make sense of things, and I am grateful to have the opportunity to do so even amidst the war.
Kol tuv,
Rabbi Zach Truboff
Zionism For Everyone (Except the Palestinians)
Alana Newhouse, editor-in-chief of Tablet, recently published an essay called “Zionism For Everyone.” The thesis is that Zionism is a “technology”—a model for national renewal available to any people willing to embrace it. Western nations have surrendered their sense of purpose, their willingness to take history into their own hands. Israel hasn’t. And as a result, the West envies Israel for its vitality, when it should be seeking to emulate it. Each nation should find its own version of what Israel has found: a future-oriented, distinctive national identity anchored in collective purpose.
There are many things one could say about this argument, and Noah Millman, writing on his Substack, says most of them well—that nationalism’s history has been catastrophically bloody, that Newhouse’s distinction between “good” and “bad” nationalism doesn’t hold up historically, that her examples undermine her thesis as often as they support it. But Millman does something far more important than cataloguing the essay’s weaknesses. He asks one question that the essay cannot survive: What would a Palestinian Zionism look like?
If Zionism is a technology that benefits the world and is available to everyone, then it should be available to the Palestinians—a people with a deep connection to a specific land, a living culture, a desire for self-determination, and a future they want to build on their own terms. If Zionism represents a profound, universalist project that demonstrates nationalism’s importance to humanity, then either you welcome Palestinian nationalism and potentially a Palestinian national project, or “for everyone” never meant everyone. It meant everyone except the one people for whom the question is perhaps most existentially urgent.
What makes Newhouse’s essay such a paradigmatic example of Zionist thinking is that the Palestinians do not appear. She does not consider their claims and reject them. She does not wrestle with the tension between Jewish and Palestinian national aspirations and arrive at a difficult conclusion. They are simply not there. Thousands of words about the universal promise of national self-determination, written after October 7th, after Gaza, after everything—and the one people whose existence poses the sharpest challenge to the argument never flicker into visibility. Not even as a problem to be set aside. It’s hard to see this as an oversight. An oversight can be corrected by pointing it out. What one sees here is something more fundamental: the structuring of perception itself so that certain realities never become visible in the first place.
Psychoanalysis calls this disavowal, and it is worth being precise about what this means, because it can be mistaken for lying, but it’s not that. A lie knows what it is hiding. Disavowal is different. Newhouse knows the Palestinians exist. She has written about them. She has edited articles about them. The knowledge is available to her, as it is available to any informed person. Disavowal means that one has the knowledge but proceeds as though one does not—not because the knowledge has been lost but because the operative framework within which one thinks and writes has no place for it to land. One knows, and yet one acts as if one does not know, and this is what makes disavowal so much harder to confront than a lie. A lie can be exposed. Disavowal already has the truth. It just refuses to speak it.
This disavowal did not begin with Newhouse. It is there at the founding of political Zionism itself. “A land without a people for a people without a land” was never an empirical description. Everyone knew it was not true. But within the framework that made Zionism coherent as a project, the presence of the Arabs did not have the status of a fact that required reckoning. It was something more like the weather. Whether the newspaper says rain or sunshine, one still has a job to do in the morning.
As early as 1905, Yitzchak Epstein saw this clearly. Writing in HaShiloach, he identified what he called “a hidden question”—the question of the Zionist movement’s attitude toward the Arabs.
Among the difficult questions linked to the idea of the rebirth of our people on its land, there is one question that outweighs all the others: the question of our attitude toward the Arabs. This question, upon whose correct solution hangs the revival of our national hope, has not been forgotten, but has been completely hidden from the Zionists
Note that Epstein goes out of his way to say the question had not been forgotten but rather was “completely hidden from the Zionists.” The distinction is everything. A forgotten question is one that slipped from memory. A hidden question is one that is present and yet not seen, because it is hidden not behind a wall but in plain sight.
Epstein understood that the Zionists “did not intentionally ignore” the Arabs. They simply “lacked the human and political sensitivity” to register their presence as something that made a claim on them. And he recognized what this meant about the movement as a whole:
That it was possible to avoid such a fundamental question, and that, after thirty years of settlement activity, it must be addressed as a new inquiry—this depressing fact is sufficient demonstration of the superficiality that dominates our movement and shows that we skim over the surface of things without entering into their content or core.
Epstein was describing disavowal before psychoanalysis had the word for it. The knowledge was there. It simply never became operative. But Epstein saw something else as well—what the disavowal would cost. He watched as Zionists purchased land from absentee Arab owners and evicted the local Arabs who had lived and worked on it for generations. The transactions were legal, and the evictions were legal. And none of that mattered, because people with a deep connection to their land do not forget the day they felt it was unfairly taken from them. He asks:
Will those evicted really hold their peace and calmly accept what was done to them? Will they not in the end rise up to take back with their fists what was taken from them by the power of gold? Will they not press their case against the foreigners who drove them from their land?
Epstein understood, already in 1905, that violence could be a consequence of the disavowal, not independent of it. The question may have been hidden, but its consequences would not be
That was 1905. Newhouse’s essay, written more than a century later, after October 7th, after Gaza, after everything, demonstrates that this founding disavowal has not been worked through. It has not even been interrupted.
What Newhouse’s essay also highlights is an irony that’s worth noting. The Israeli right, for all its faults, does not disavow the Palestinians. It names them. It names them as enemies, as demographic threats, as a population to be managed or transferred or defeated, but it names them. Smotrich and Ben Gvir do not write essays in which the Palestinians fail to appear. They appear constantly as the obstacle that must be overcome for the Jewish claim to the land to be fully realized. The right’s sin is not blindness. It is what it does with what it sees.
The Zionist mainstream, or at least those in it who still see liberalism and universalism as guiding principles, has built an entire world in which the question need not arise. This is what makes Newhouse’s essay so compelling. It is not a right-wing essay. It is not arguing for transfer or annexation. It is arguing for something that sounds enlightened—national renewal as a universal project. But the fact that this claim can be made at all—that one can write “Zionism for everyone” without hearing the silence where the Palestinians should be—is itself the measure of how deep the disavowal runs.
Zionism for everyone except the Palestinians. They are still Epstein’s hidden question. And we are still skimming over the surface.
In the aftermath of October 7 and the war that followed, Zionism faces a moment of rupture. The trauma of the attacks, the brutality of the war, and the reemergence of antisemitism have made sustained moral and political reflection increasingly difficult. Even under these conditions, the failure to reckon honestly with Jewish power now threatens Zionism from within.
Drawing on Jewish theology, Zionist history, and contemporary political thought, Zionism in Crisis brings together essays that challenge sweeping defenses of Israel’s actions and total condemnations of Zionism. At its core, it is a call for teshuvah — a call to question whether the path we are on is the right one, to name what has gone wrong, and to change course before it is too late.
You can order the book here:
If you know someone for whom this book might be appropriate — someone willing to wrestle honestly with what Zionism has become and what it must yet become — I’d be grateful if you’d share this with them.