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Zionism



  • Israel's Founding Contradictions Haunt 75th Anniversary

    by Bernard Avishai

    A bargain of tolerance between secular bourgeois and religious supremacist wings of Israeli society is being renegotiated by the right wing. Are concessions to religious groups made by David Ben-Gurion at the founding the root of conflict?



  • The Demographic Shift Behind Israel's Ascendant Religious Zionists

    by Michael Brenner

    Demographics are pushing Orthodox religious nationalists, who are led by West Bank settlers, to political power that is forcing confrontations over both secularism and the occupation. This bloc is growing rapidly less friendly to compromise with secularists, Arabs, or LGBTQ Israelis.



  • Beinart: Antisemitic Zionism Isn't a Contradiction in Terms

    Conservative Zionists have reached accommodated American evangelicals' demands for a Christian-dominated America in exchange for support for a Jewish greater Israel. The media are reluctant to discuss this connection.



  • Israel's Ruling Coalition Turns Toward Theocracy

    by Bernard Avishai

    Netanyahu has engineered an alliance among three disparate strains of religious parties and secular Israelis favoring an aggressive nationalism and occupation policy. But the religious parties have broader goals of undermining secular society in Israel. 



  • Is Israel Criticism the Reason Harvard Refused "Godfather" of Human Rights

    by Michael Massing

    Kenneth Roth retired from Human Rights Watch after nearly three decades, and expected to move to a fellowship at the Kennedy School. Dean Douglas Elmendorf told him his fellowship was rejected because HRW exhibited "anti-Israel bias." Is the school insufficiently independent of the American foreign policy establishment and its donors? 



  • Israel's Religious Right Pushes for Restrictive Changes to Law of Return

    As Jews around the world are considering Israel as a refuge from antisemitism, that country's religious fundamentalist parties have the political leverage to decide that many fewer people are Jewish enough to qualify for immigration and citizenship. American Reform Jews are particularly affected.



  • The Women Who Secured the Balfour Declaration

    by Natalie Livingstone

    Women in the Rothschild family were instrumental in creating support among wealthy British Jews for Zionism, which they had previously rejected out of perceived self-interest and disdain for the Jewish masses.



  • Ken Burns's Holocaust History Has a Palestine Problem

    by Rafael Medoff and Monty Noam Penkower

    Although there was no sovereign government in Palestine between 1933 and 1945, British authorities there admitted a quarter million Jewish refugees. The filmmaker's focus on "sovereign" countries' record admitting refugees burnishes the Roosevelt administration's record.