Progressive Judaism, Zionism and the State of Israel
pub: The Movement for Progressive Judaism, 2026
Maurice Naftalin
It’s telling that of all the urgent issues that press on the Movement for Progressive Judaism (MPJ), the one chosen as the subject of its first major publication should be the relationship with Israel and Zionism. Equally telling is the form of the book: 40 essays, three-quarters of them written by Movement rabbis and the rest by prominent lay people, exploring different aspects of the relationship from a variety of political and ethical positions. The claim of the book is that this diversity of perspectives is a defining strength of Progressive Judaism.
Various responses to this are possible: certainly, in a movement containing widely divergent viewpoints, it would be foolish to try to pretend to a unified opinion. But some dialogue, even of a limited kind covering partial topics and selected authors, would have made for a more readable experience than these 40 unconnected and uncoordinated reflections.
More fundamental, however, is the basic question: how diverse, really, are these expressions of the movement’s opinions? The framing assumption of the book—and of the Movement—is set out at the start: in the Preface, Trevor and Simon Chinn write that “The State of Israel belongs to the entire Jewish people, as does the task of completing the Zionist project.” And in case this leaves any doubt, the joint CEOs spoke at the launch meeting of the three objectives of the book, as outlined in the Introduction: to explain the diversity of Jewish thought to the wider community, to explain Zionism more religiously and morally to Zionists, and to explain Zionism to non- and anti-Zionists within the Movement. The much-praised diversity of opinion, then, has its limits; it must remain confined within a clear Zionist boundary. One essay alone in the entire collection poses a direct challenge to the assumption that our whole task is to explain Zionism better.
This is not always a problem: some authors have chosen different, less explicitly political aspects of the topic, and the results are among the most interesting essays in the book. For a non-exhaustive list:
- Robyn Ashworth-Steen thinks that confronting the multiple violences of the Exodus narrative would enable us to lament fully the harm we both inflict and suffer through “the never-ending cycle of oppression and revenge”.
- Elli Sarah draws lessons from the histories of Judah Magnes and Martin Buber in their advocacy of a bi-nationalist form for the new Jewish state.
- Sybil Sheridan makes a very interesting argument for the influence of American Christian fundamentalist thinking on extreme religious Zionism in Israel.
- Hannah Weisfeld clearly traces the developing divisions within Progressive communities.
- Andrea Zanardo writes about assumptions of ‘Ashkenormativity’, the assumption that Ashkenazi Jewishness is the norm, and other histories and practices are optional ‘add-ons’.
But these are the exceptions. The great majority of essays in this book have one major theme in common: the devastating disappointment that is the Zionist dream gone sour. There is a wide range of perspectives on this theme, ranging from Gershon Silins, who thinks that “the real solution would be for the Arab world finally to accept that there will always be a Jewish state in the Middle East” to Réne Pfertzel, for whom “the presence of the Palestinian Other is … a moral demand that shapes the very meaning of Jewish sovereignty”. But their unifying assumption is that the present character of the Israeli state is a temporary aberration, one that we must resist and strive to change, but never recognise as a persistent feature. One of the clearest descriptions of this state of mind comes from Arieh Miller: “The Israel of my Zionism … sanctifies the rights of all its residents, guarantees the safety of its own citizens, protects the safety of its neighbours and upholds the rights of everyone within its borders.”
This imagined “Israel of my Zionism” is an image infinitely precious to almost everyone writing in this volume. Reading these essays, I couldn’t help thinking of Walter Lippmann’s aphorism: “We are all captives of the picture in our head—our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists”. Perhaps he had been brought up in Habonim! Putting it more incisively, Herbert Spencer defined tragedy as “the murder of a beautiful theory by a gang of brutal facts”. The actual existing Israel is indisputably in the process of murdering the beautiful theory of the Jewish democratic state. But the murder can never actually happen; the knife perpetually inches towards the heart of the dream but can never be seen to actually penetrate it, even as the Israeli right triumphantly claim to have killed the idea of a Palestinian state for ever. In researching this review, I found an essay by Jonathan Freedland, a prominent and articulate liberal Zionist, which concludes with these words: “For if there is no prospect of two states, then liberal Zionists will have to do something they resist with all their might. They will have to decide which of their political identities matters more, whether they are first a liberal or first a Zionist. And that is a choice they don’t want to make.” The essay is entitled “Liberal Zionism after Gaza”. The kicker? – the article is dated July 2014! And many much earlier examples could easily be found.
This cognitive dissonance is everywhere in the book. Some of the book authors state it clearly; Jonathan Romain, in a perceptive essay, notes that “the slogan [of a Palestinian state] is still paraded … but simply because there is nothing else with which to replace it.” But he does not himself renounce it. Even more explicitly Irit Shillor describes herself without irony as “a great believer in the two-state solution … although I have to admit it no longer seems feasible”.
Of all the essays in the book, only one grasps the nettle. Joseph Finlay uses the evolution of the prayer Oseh Shalom to examine the changing balance between particularism and universalism in Progressive Jewish prayer. He concludes “the fate of the Jewish People is now utterly intertwined with that of the Palestinian people. If we cannot stand in solidarity with Palestinians in their moment of need, nobody will take Progressive Judaism’s claims to ethical monotheism seriously ever again. … my view is that the movement should not identify as Zionist.” The representation of this viewpoint in the book by one single essay out of 40 may indeed reflect the views of the clergy and the leadership of Progressive Judaism, but is it representative of the diverse views of the membership? That seems doubtful, but it is hard to be sure without a serious consultation exercise which does not seem to be planned even at this moment, when the movement’s policy on Israel is being formulated.
Finally, speaking on a personal note, the emotion that I missed the most from the book was anger. Anger is there, of course (anger that I share): at the attacks of October 7th, at the rising tide of antisemitism, at the consequences for diaspora Jews of the actions of the Israeli state. We do hear a lot about the anguish of the authors over what the Palestinians are suffering, and I don’t doubt the authenticity of this. But for three years there has been a sustained campaign of collective punishment against the Gazan people. The Strip, home to two million people, has been entirely destroyed; tens of thousands are dead, most of them women, children, and the elderly; more than forty thousand children wounded, many with amputations and other life-changing injuries; thousands of the dead still lie unburied under the rubble; the entire surviving population of Gaza is displaced into a tent city with only the basic means of survival. And the killing has not stopped. Where is the anger at these enormous crimes? In her essay, Rebecca Birk edges a little closer to a proportionate reaction, at second hand, when she reports that the eminent Jewish historian Ismar Schorsch has talked of Hillul HaShem, the desecration of God’s name, in the West Bank and Gaza, and has drawn the parallel of the religious institutions who remained silent in the time of the Nazis. There are many ordinary members of MPJ who long to hear such an expression of outrage from any of our leaders, or even to have their own voices heard outside of the confines of small groups.
The last thought should be given to Howard Cooper, who wonders whether we are at a Sabbatean moment in Jewish history—a schism so deep that it takes the Jewish world a century to recover. Indeed there are signs of this: increasingly, younger Jews are refusing to accept the dream of an idealised Israel if the price of that dream is to weaken rejection of the crimes of the real Israel. The same question also threatens, everywhere in the world, to tear existing Jewish communities apart. Amongst the many serious and thought-provoking essays in this book, none confront this question head-on. Is it possible that, in a few years, we will look back at this book and wonder: how could we have missed the biggest question of all those that face us?