What Was Wrong with the Old Zionism?

Academic liberals tend to distrust nationalism and all its works, regarding them as rooted in atavistic and parochial sentiments and therefore as promoting a politics inimical to a humane universalism. Such liberals tend to be particularly distrustful of—if not downright hostile to—Zionism, the national movement of the Jews, and they often believe that this distrust is mandated by the version of liberalism to which they subscribe.

They have a point; but what they fail to grasp is that their belief says less about Zionism than about their brand of liberalism. Now, in order partly to correct that misapprehension, the Israeli political and legal theorist Chaim Gans has undertaken the worthy task of showing that liberalism and “the main goal of Zionism, namely, to establish an independent Jewish national home in the land of Israel” can be woven together to make a morally and politically compelling whole.

In his new book, A Political Theory for the Jewish People, Gans, a professor of law at Tel Aviv University, approaches his task by adroitly drawing on several bodies of scholarship and employing the rigorous reasoning of analytic philosophy. At the same time, he spices his argument with the ardent and unequivocal moral judgments of an engaged partisan. Along the way, he rejects both mainstream interpretations of Zionism and various versions of post-Zionism, advancing in their place a theory he calls “egalitarian Zionism.”