Thread by @Joe_Roberts01

Zionism is the liberation movement of the Jewish people, who lived under millennia of oppression and exile—a resoundingly progressive idea.

So how did we lose the support of many in the progressive left?

A not insignificant factor is a miscalculation on our part.

A 🧵

There have been external pressures demonizing Zionism since it’s inception.

Early Arab anti-Zionism, Nazi and Italian fascist anti-Zionism, Soviet anti-Zionism, and Islamist anti-Zionism all have used various arguments against the framework—with varying degrees of success.

Indeed, many of the arguments deployed by the Soviet Union have been internalized by the progressive left, as is evident by much of language developed by Soviet anti-Zionism still being used in both leftist academic and political circles, i.e. “Zionism is racism”

The concept of intersectionality, coined in 1989, was a shift that ended up bringing these ideas into the zeitgeist of progressive politics.

Intersectionality is the idea that various social and political identities result in unique combinations of discrimination and privilege.

In the theory, intersecting and overlapping social identities may be both empowering and oppressing.

There are plenty of critiques of intersectionality, I’m not going to address them here. The fact is that most progressive movements accept intersectionality as a core concept.

There are markedly different responses to intersectionality appearing in the 1990s and through to today.

The 🇵🇸 liberation movement, saw this as an opportunity. “My struggle is your struggle”. They effectively made the case, embedding themselves in social justice movements.

The institutional Jewish community largely ignored these politics early on, instead focusing on building relationships with power brokers and decision makers.

Later, as it became clear we were losing in this space, and with it support for Zionism in the progressive left, institutions and communal politics went from ignoring intersectionality to seeing it as hostile.

Our efforts to build coalitions based in it were too little to late.

I understand the urge to build relationships with power brokers, they are important and have been critical, especially as Jews are a tiny minority.

But these two strategies aren’t mutually exclusive. We could have been pursuing both.

By the time we realized the importance of this work, it was too little too late.

And we’re seeing the results of this miscalculation play out in real time in language about ‘decolonization’, ‘righteous resistance’, and Zionism as an oppressive ideology.

We even see the effects of this on Jewish young adults and students, with some choosing to join JVP and IfNotNow rather than the traditionally progressive Zionist organizations like Hashomer Hatzair and Habonim Dror who have suffered for it.

Is it too late for Zionism to be viewed as progressive? I don’t think so, but we are 30 years behind if we hope to reclaim this space. And if we do (and we should) then we need to get serious about funding this work and engaging in it in earnest.

And that means we our institutions and our leaders have to be serious about engaging in difficult conversations, and not only minority groups who already align with us because it is easy but with those who don’t. That’s where the ground will be made up.

It means we need proud progressive Zionist organizations that are focused on coalition building across these communities even if we don’t agree with all their politics, because to do otherwise is to cede this ground and recent events have shown that we simply cannot.

We can longer just ignore these politics because we perceive them as hostile, we need to focus on defining what intersectional progressive Zionism is and how it fits into the bigger picture. We cannot afford not to.