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Liberal Zionism: A Pillar of Israel's Settler Colonial Project

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Summary

Muhannad Ayyash’s Al-Shabaka policy brief argues that Liberal Zionism, despite the Israeli regime’s increasingly right-wing policies, still plays a dominant role in Zionist ideology because it provides the Zionist project with the veneer of enlightened, Western civilization and democratic, progressive politics, so that Israel is rarely described in mainstream Western circles as a settler-colonial state that practices Apartheid (Liberal Zionism: A Pillar of Israel’s Settler Colonial Project, lines 141-143). Emerging from Labor Zionism, liberal Zionism is, Ayyash argues, directly responsible for the 1948 Nakba, holds the 1948 conquest to have been righteous and justifiable while critiquing only the 1967 occupation, and supports a Two-state solution out of fear that a one-state reality would expose the impossibility of reconciling an ethnocratic Jewish state with true democracy (lines 145-151, 175-187). Its US case study is J Street, whose demilitarized-Palestinian-state and borders positions Ayyash reads as annexationist and as racializing Palestinians as violent (lines 215-225). The brief’s prescription is De-Zionization: reject liberal Zionism as a “partner in peace”, insist on Palestinian decolonial liberation for the whole of colonized Palestine and for Palestinians everywhere, and pursue five practices — countering ideology with reality, rejecting the weaponization of Antisemitism, centering Palestinian paradigms, emphasizing decolonial anti-racism, and dismantling Zionism (lines 151-155, 245-255).

What the file is

  • An Al-Shabaka policy brief (topic: Politics), published June 14, 2023, “16 min read”, downloaded from https://al-shabaka.org/briefs/liberal-zionism-a-pillar-of-israels-settler-colonial-project/ (access basis: NGO). The original is the HTML page; the text copy supplied with it (4,709 words, lines 1-412) is a plain-text rendering of that page, with no page markers, so locators are line numbers.
  • The text copy includes the site’s frame around the brief: navigation and featured items at lines 1-128 and 262-412, including items dated September 2026 that belong to the page as captured, not to the 2023 brief. The brief itself runs lines 129-257, followed by the author’s biography (lines 259-261).
  • Text quality: the brief’s prose is clean and complete in both copies. The Overview carries a footnote marker 1 after “practices apartheid” (line 163); in the original HTML that marker is an easy-footnote whose text is the French-translation note that also appears in the text copy at line 257, not a substantive note. Three pull-quotations in the text copy are followed by “Share on X” page controls (lines 173, 203, 221), which are not part of the sentences. The section heading “The Annexation Conundrum” (line 227) appears in the text copy without the heading styling of the other sections. The page offers a “Download PDF” / “View PDF” link (lines 269-271); no PDF was supplied.
  • The brief’s own title, author line and date are at lines 133-135; the original HTML metadata gives a publication timestamp of 2023-06-14, matching the displayed “Jun 14, 2023”.
  • The author biography as captured (lines 259-261) lists a 2025 book, Lordship and Liberation in Palestine-Israel: The Promise of Decolonial Sovereignties (Columbia University Press, 2025), which postdates the 2023 brief and belongs to the biography as captured, not to the brief.

Section by section

  • Executive Summary (lines 139-155): the thesis, the Labor Zionism genealogy, the two-state support grounded in fear of a one-state reality exposing the fallacy of an ethnocratic Jewish state claiming democracy, the “provides cover” formulation, and the prescription — rejection of liberal Zionism as a “partner in peace”, Palestinian decolonial liberation, de-Zionization for Israeli Jews, and intersectional coalitions beyond colonized Palestine using teach-ins, petitions and letter-writing campaigns.
  • Overview (lines 161-167): repeats the Executive Summary’s opening, then adds that right-wing Zionist ideologies and their global supporters, especially among Christian Zionists, must also be confronted, but that debunking liberal Zionism is critical as leaders and media call for a return to the two-state solution; “the idea that there is a liberal form of Zionism worth salvaging must be refuted” (line 167). The brief’s plan is stated: define liberal Zionism, expose its settler-colonial and apartheid foundations, give a US case study, and propose a framework for confronting it.
  • Understanding Liberal Zionism (lines 169-197): contemporary liberal Zionism emerges from Labor Zionism, appeared after 1948 in left-wing governments, NGOs, lobby groups, political parties and scholarly networks promoting Israel as a liberal Jewish state, and enjoyed ideological hegemony for many decades following 1948; Yehuda Kurtzer is quoted that liberalism was “baked into” the political Zionism that built the state (lines 171-175). Zionism is best defined through its victims, the Palestinians, and from that perspective liberal Zionism “can only be understood as settler-colonial, root and stem, as it is directly responsible for the 1948 Nakba” (line 173). Its four central beliefs are listed (lines 177-183; see Key passages), with the qualification that not all liberal Zionists hold each in the same language — some argue Palestinians left and were not expelled — while across variations the 1948 conquest is held to have been “righteous, legitimate, valid, and fully justifiable” (line 185). Palestinian decolonial critiques of 1948 are painted as antisemitic to marginalize and censor them, through “the new antisemitism” dating to at least the early 1970s, when Labor foreign minister Abba Eban began pushing the narrative that anti-Zionism is antisemitism (line 187). A 2023 Washington Post opinion piece by Paul Berman, Martin Peretz, Michael Walzer and Leon Wieseltier illustrates the tactical critique of 1967 that avoids 1948: Israel located among the “freedom-loving nations”, Netanyahu’s government said to threaten Israel’s standing, and continued full US military funding insisted on (lines 189-191). Ayyash reads their “double, but not contradictory, support” as resting on the recognition that what was taken by force in 1948 can only be held by force, and that rejecting annexationist policies saves the Jewish-majority state while blocking the Palestinian critique from mainstream discourse (line 191); support for the 2023 Israeli protests is concern for the liberal veneer, not opposition to settler colonialism, and “the Left and the Right are on the same page regarding the creation and “defense” of Israel as a state for a Jewish majority” (line 193). Liberal Zionism is part and parcel of Colonial modernity: modernity as a Western phenomenon cannot be separated from colonization and slavery, liberal Zionists accept Western civilization’s superiority as conventional wisdom, and Walzer’s most recent book — praising “liberal morality” as a Western Enlightenment product with no decolonial paradigm — is the case in point (lines 195-197).
  • Settler-Colonial and Apartheid Policies of Liberal Zionism (lines 199-211): all policies arising from the liberal Zionism framework are settler-colonial and apartheid; establishing the state in 1948 necessitated expulsion and dispossession, and Israel then promulgated apartheid laws to make the expulsion permanent and begin Judaizing colonized Palestine — the 1950 Law of Return, the 1950 Absentees’ Property Law and the 1952 Nationality Law, among many others (line 201). The Berman-Peretz-Walzer-Wieseltier language — “an ever-more aggressive” settlement campaign, “extremist Jewish vigilantism”, “ethno-nationalists”, a warning of movement toward Viktor Orban’s Hungary — recasts Israel as a victim of a global ethnonationalist wave (line 205). Against it, Ayyash holds that Israel entrenches a system placing the settler above the indigenous population spatially, politically, militarily, economically and legally, indigenizing the settler while displacing the Palestinian, and that apartheid is a step along the settler-colonial continuum of violence beginning with mass expulsion, eliminating indigenous sovereignty (line 207). The two-state / one-state passage from the Executive Summary is repeated in full (lines 209-211).
  • A Case Study in US Liberal Zionism (lines 213-225): J Street — self-described as “pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy”, working against “bigotry, inequality, and injustice”, holding that Israel shares democratic principles with the US and faces “dangerous enemies” with a right to defend itself — builds its opposition to the occupation on rendering “questioning Israel’s fundamental right to exist as a Jewish homeland” illegitimate, while acknowledging Palestinians “deserve full civil rights and an end to the systemic injustice of occupation” and supporting “the creation of an independent, de-militarized state of Palestine with defined borders” (lines 215-217). Its unexplained demilitarization requirement racializes Palestinian bodies as violent (line 219). Its borders language — Israel must “give up the vast majority of occupied territory on which a Palestinian state can be built in exchange for peace” — implicitly acknowledges an Israeli claim to the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, and its peace-plan idea allowing established Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem and large West Bank settlement blocs close to the Green Line to be incorporated into Israel is support for annexation, aligning with Israeli governments across the political spectrum (lines 223-225).
  • The Annexation Conundrum (lines 227-235): annexation must be limited, for J Street and similar organizations, out of fear that expansion would expose Israel’s settler-colonial foundations; the reality is present in liberal Zionist opposition to the Palestinian Right of Return and in concern that the visibility of Israel’s daily violence, through the digital revolution and Palestinian activism, may lead onlookers to question Israel’s very foundation (line 229). Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s call for the state to “wipe out” the West Bank town of Huwara is given as the new regime’s honest articulation of the aspiration behind eliminatory policies, dismantling the liberal veneer; liberal Zionist protests over Huwara used the language of “anti-occupation”, “extremist settlers” and “Jewish terror” while ignoring that “Israel proper” was established by the same structure of settler-colonial violence (lines 231-233). Liberal Zionism is at best a multicultural liberal politics that sees settler-colonial foundations as perhaps tragic but fundamentally sound; if progressive politics do not view the anti-racist project as necessarily decolonial, “then they are not progressive politics at all” (line 235).
  • De-Zionization is the Only Way Forward (lines 237-255): repeats the “provides cover” thesis, the rejection of liberal Zionism as a “partner in peace”, and the de-Zionization account — beginning with Israeli Jews recognising that Zionism never resolved the “Jewish Question” in Europe but internalized it and replicated the Western colonial project in Palestine, and ending where Israeli Jews would be “immigrants…welcome residents in a historic homeland” rather than “natives or settlers in historic Palestine”, with the state, nationalism and sovereignty reimagined away from Western colonial models (lines 239-243). Five practices for the coalitions follow: counter ideology with reality; reject the weaponization of antisemitism, including definitions that incorporate the question of Palestine “from the right, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), to the left, the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism”; center Palestinian paradigms; emphasize decolonial anti-racism against corporatized Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) initiatives; and dismantling Zionism, in which Jewish and Israeli communities must participate (lines 245-255).
  • French translation note (line 257) and author biography (lines 259-261): see What the file is.

Key passages

  • “It fulfills the specific and critical function of providing the Zionist project with the veneer of enlightened, Western civilization and democratic, progressive politics. As a result, the Israeli regime is rarely described in mainstream Western circles for what it is: a settler-colonial state that practices apartheid.” (lines 141-143)
  • “The triumphant Zionists understood what they were doing as building a liberal political movement. Liberalism was baked into the political Zionism that ultimately led to the building of the state.” (Yehuda Kurtzer, as quoted) (lines 145, 171)
  • “Liberal Zionism can only be understood as settler-colonial, root and stem, as it is directly responsible for the 1948 Nakba” (line 173)
  • The four central beliefs: “The establishment of the Israeli state is the only method of securing Jewish safety and resolving Jewish exile”; “Jews have inherent, biblical, and sovereign claims to the land of Palestine”; “The Zionist project is a heroic and miraculous endeavor that carried the torch of modernization and civilization to the so-called land of Israel”; and the 1948 “War of Independence” was necessary, its outcomes — “namely, the expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians from their lands and homes and the destruction of Palestine—were natural and ought to be accepted.” (lines 177-183)
  • “Since liberal Zionism cannot reconcile the Zionist dream of an ethnocratic Jewish state with true democracy, a one-state reality will expose this foundational fallacy.” (lines 149, 211)
  • “Fundamentally, liberal Zionism is an ideology that provides cover for and advances the settler-colonial conquest of Palestine in the name of rationality, progress, equality, tolerance, democracy, and even anti-racism.” (lines 151, 221, 239)
  • On apartheid: “a step along the settler-colonial continuum of violence that begins with the mass expulsion and displacement of indigenous people” (line 207)
  • On J Street’s borders position: Israel must “give up the vast majority of occupied territory on which a Palestinian state can be built in exchange for peace” (line 223)
  • On Huwara and the new regime: Smotrich called on the Israeli state to “wipe out” the West Bank town of Huwara (line 231)
  • “If progressive politics today do not view the anti-racist project as one that must necessarily be decolonial and committed to dismantling the structures of colonial modernity, then they are not progressive politics at all.” (line 235)
  • On de-Zionization’s end point: Israeli Jews would no longer be “natives or settlers in historic Palestine,” but rather “immigrants…welcome residents in a historic homeland.” (lines 153, 241)

Evidence the work relies on

  • The brief is a policy argument, not a research report; it cites by hyperlink rather than by footnote, and the text copy does not reproduce the link targets beyond the linked phrases. The one footnote marker in the text (line 163) carries only the French-translation note in the original HTML.
  • Yehuda Kurtzer, identified as a liberal Zionist, quoted on the early Zionists’ self-understanding as building a liberal political movement (lines 145, 171).
  • Paul Berman, Martin Peretz, Michael Walzer and Leon Wieseltier, a 2023 opinion piece in the Washington Post, quoted and paraphrased for the “freedom-loving nations” framing, the “double, but not contradictory, support” formulation, the “an ever-more aggressive” settlement language, “extremist Jewish vigilantism” and “ethno-nationalists”, and the insistence on continued and full US military funding (lines 189-191, 205).
  • Michael Walzer’s most recent book, as Ayyash presents it, praising “liberal morality” and “liberalism” as a “product of the Enlightenment and the triumph…of the emancipated individual—a Western figure”, needed to prevent becoming “monist, dogmatic, intolerant, and repressive” (line 197). The brief does not give the book’s title in the text copy.
  • J Street’s own website and policy positions, as Ayyash presents them: its self-description as “pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy”, its coalition and self-defence language, its demilitarized-state position, and its policy on borders including the incorporation of East Jerusalem neighborhoods and large settlement blocs (lines 215-225).
  • The 1950 Law of Return, the 1950 Absentees’ Property Law and the 1952 Nationality Law, named as the apartheid laws that made the 1948 expulsion permanent and began Judaizing colonized Palestine (line 201).
  • The figure of more than 750,000 Palestinians expelled in 1948, given within the fourth central belief as liberal Zionism presents the war’s outcomes (line 183).
  • Bezalel Smotrich’s call to “wipe out” Huwara, given as the new Israeli regime’s honest articulation of its eliminatory aspiration (line 231).
  • The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition and the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, named as the definitions of antisemitism, from right and left, that incorporate the question of Palestine and must be rejected (line 249).

Analysis

  • Method: a definitional and ideological critique. Ayyash defines liberal Zionism through the experiences of its victims, lists its four central beliefs, and tests two exhibits against them — the Berman-Peretz-Walzer-Wieseltier Washington Post piece for discourse, and J Street’s published positions for policy — before deriving a programme (de-Zionization and its five practices) from the definition.
  • Perspective: explicitly decolonial and Palestinian-centred; the brief announces its aim as refuting “the idea that there is a liberal form of Zionism worth salvaging” (line 167) and rejects liberal Zionism as a “partner in peace”.
  • Limits, as the work presents itself: the argument is carried by the two exhibits and by the stated beliefs of mainstream liberal Zionism, which the brief itself qualifies (“While liberal Zionism is not a monolith”, line 175; not all proponents hold each belief in the same language, line 185). Its historical claims — responsibility for the Nakba, the apartheid character of the 1950-1952 laws, Abba Eban’s early-1970s role in the “new antisemitism” — are asserted in the brief rather than documented there; the hyperlinked sources behind them are not reproduced in the text copy. The Executive Summary and the two-state / one-state passage are repeated in the body, so the brief’s sections overlap by design.

Muhannad Ayyash, Yehuda Kurtzer, Michael Walzer, Abba Eban, Benjamin Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich, J Street, Al-Shabaka, Huwara, Silwan, Nakba, Law of Return, Absentee Property Law, Citizenship Law (1952), Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism

Liberal Zionism, Labor Zionism, Zionism, Settler Colonialism, Apartheid, Colonial modernity, De-Zionization, Decolonisation, Two-state solution, One-state solution, Ethnocracy, Judaization, New Anti-Semitism, Antisemitism, Right of Return, Christian Zionism

How it relates to other sources

Open questions

  • The brief asserts that Abba Eban, as Labor foreign minister, began pushing the narrative that anti-Zionism is antisemitism in the early 1970s (line 187); no source for the dating is given in the text copy, and the wiki’s other sources on the “new antisemitism” begin with Sharansky’s 2004 formulation. The two accounts are held side by side on New Anti-Semitism.
  • Walzer’s “most recent book” is discussed without a title in the text copy (line 197); which book is meant is not established by the file.
  • The brief’s internal presentation of the fourth central belief gives the 1948 expulsion figure as “more than 750,000 Palestinians” (line 183); other ingested sources give differing totals for 1948 displacement, each held with its source on Nakba.

Coverage

lines 1-412 of 412, read in full

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