Zionism After Trump

The radical shift in policy charted by the Trump administration with regard to Israel-Palestine (the movement of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and the withdrawal of funds from UNRWA, the United Nations agency that provides support to Palestinian refugees) will likely prove to be a transformative crisis, not just for US-Mideast relations but for the global Zionist movement as a whole. Writing in the New York Times Michelle Goldberg has already asked if, in the wake of Trump's presidency, liberal Zionism is dead? By "liberal Zionism" she means the Labor Zionism of figures like David Ben Gurion and Yitzhak Rabin that had once been the mainstream of Israeli politics. Whether her most dire outcomes are realized or not, there seems little doubt that both the internal politics of Israel and its orientation toward the international community will be permanently changed by current developments.

Donald Trump sells his new policies as obvious course corrections never attempted by his predecessors because they lacked his bold vision and freedom from conventional restraint. He knows that his core voters will admire these moves as characteristic of his strength as a "disrupter" of politics-as-usual. Moreover, there will be very little downside for him politically because, like him, his supporters are not likely to pay attention to or care much about the long-term consequences of his actions.

Trump is operating from a conventional overestimation of U.S. power that is likely to make intuitive good sense to most of his core supporters. By "taking Jerusalem off the table" (that is, by backing the notion that occupied East Jerusalem will forever remain Israeli territory, despite the fact that the Israelis themselves have never gone as far as claiming to have "annexed" it) and by refusing funds to support Palestinian refugees, Trump claims to be forcing a peace resolution in the face of Palestinian intransigence, but none of these gambits will work to that end. Few countries will follow the U.S. in relocating embassy missions to Jerusalem, and Islamic nations or private donors are likely to make up the shortfall in funding for UNRWA.

Rather than creating a show of US strength, Trump has created a show of US bias. The US funded UNRWA, for example, not because the Palestinians were dependent upon US largess, but because doing so helped foster the appearance that the US could serve as an impartial broker between the Israelis, who on a per-capita basis receive many more dollars in aid from the US than any other nation, and the Palestinians, whose own aspirations for sovereignty wait upon a peace settlement with Israel. By asking why the US should give the Palestinians money "without getting anything in return," Donald Trump is effectively declaring that what the US "wants" is peace on Israel's terms. The same logical inference arises from Trump's claim to have "taken Jerusalem off the table".

Michelle Goldberg and others are no doubt correct in asserting that this shift in the dynamism of US-Israeli-Palestinian interaction undermines the forces, already weakened by years of stagnation, that might lead to a two-state solution. As Palestinians abandon the hopes of a two-state solution in the face of explicit US obstruction and as right-wing Israelis, emboldened by Trumpist encouragement, pursue policies of quasi-annexation, the goals and principles of liberal Zionism (the maintenance of a state that is both majority-Jewish and a liberal democracy) will become ever-progressively attenuated. Donald J. Trump may well have finally put a stake through the heart, not only of a two-state solution, but of the Zionist ideal of Herzl, Weizmann, and Ben Gurion.

Is there anything that can be done? Trump's diplomatic ineptitude is facilitated by the fact that few Americans, even among the Jewish community, understand the history and situation of Israel-Palestine any more than he does. Labor Zionist policies and goals are not given robust voice in American politics because (for reasons that I discussed in a previous post) all of the organizations that coordinate lobbying efforts on behalf of Israel (like AIPAC) are much more in sympathy with the ideology of Likud and parties even further to the right on the Israeli political spectrum.

If, in fact, Liberal Zionism is dying, it is in part because it lacks robust and institutionalized representation in the US, Israel's staunchest ally. One potential countermeasure to Trumpism might thus be a campaign of sustained outreach on the part of liberal Israeli political parties among Jews in the US. American Jews need to be better educated about the political differences between Israeli parties and leaders, and they need to be organized to impose political costs (or bestow political rewards) upon US leaders that obstruct or foster policies conducive to a two-state solution.

The imperative for this sort of coordination between American Jews and Israeli leaders is intensified by the possibility that, in fact, a two-state solution has been rendered untenable. If Israel-Palestine will eventually be united as a single commonwealth, demographics will not allow that new entity to be the majority-Jewish state that Theodor Herzl envisioned, but it can and  should still be a true democracy. Such an outcome can only be guaranteed, however, if  activism and leadership in both Israel and the US protects the rights, liberties, and security of all residents living on either side of the "Green Line." For such a process to be safeguarded, it is important that liberal Israeli leaders create channels of dialogue now that can garner the support necessary to mobilize public opinion in the US, whatever shape the Israeli-Palestinian peace process may take moving forward in the wake of the Trump presidency.