If you grew up Reform or Conservative in America, you were taught that caring about Israel is part of being Jewish. Not a political position — a component of the identity. Which means that when you question it, you’re not disagreeing with a policy. You’re leaving the family.
So let me show you what your own movement put in writing.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ciwOjs9USj-lU5TqtBCNhIAFWZjOHvEQ/view?usp=sharing
Pittsburgh, 1885:
The Pittsburgh Platform was the official doctrine of American Reform Judaism for over fifty years. It states that Jews are “no longer a nation, but a religious community,” and therefore “expect neither a return to Palestine... nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.”
That is not a fringe pamphlet. That is the founding statement of the largest Jewish religious movement in American history, and it held until the Columbus Platform of 1937 began to shift the position. In 1942, Reform rabbis who objected to that shift founded the American Council for Judaism specifically to oppose the creation of a Jewish state. Reform rabbis. In America. Organizing against it.
The man from San Francisco:
Judah Magnes was born in San Francisco in 1877. An American Reform rabbi, educated in American universities, formed by American ideas about pluralism and democracy. He led a major congregation in New York. In 1912 he moved to Palestine, and he helped found the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and led it for years.
And he spent his life arguing against a Jewish state.
Not because he opposed Jews living there — he moved there and built its university. He argued for one country, shared: Jews and Arabs, equal, two languages, two school systems, one democracy, neither side ruling the other. In 1946 he put that case to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, in public, under his own name.
He lost. He was shouted down. He died in 1948.
And then he was erased from the history they taught me in school in Haifa. I had never heard his name until I found a dollar paperback of his writing on the bottom shelf of a used bookstore in the Mission District, in my thirties, in the city where he was born.
He was not alone, and the company is not minor:
Brit Shalom, founded in the 1920s, argued the same case. Its people were Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem — the two most influential Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century, the men whose books sit on your shelf and were assigned to you in college. Hugo Bergmann, the first rector of the Hebrew University. In 1942 Magnes and Buber founded Ihud to continue the argument, and among its members was Henrietta Szold.
The founder of Hadassah.
These were not marginal cranks. This was a significant part of the intellectual leadership of the Jewish world, and it held that a state built on Jewish political supremacy over an Arab majority was both wrong and unsurvivable.
Now the part I’m obliged to say, because it’s true:
They lost for a reason, and the reason was not that they were outargued.
Six million Jews were murdered. The St. Louis was turned away. At Évian in 1938, thirty-two countries met to discuss Jewish refugees and almost every one of them declined to take more. The world demonstrated, at length and in detail, that it would not take Jews in. After that, Magnes’s position didn’t look wrong so much as suicidal, and anyone who tells you the American Jewish shift to Zionism was mere opportunism is not being honest with you.
My own parents left Europe for Haifa in 1936. Everyone they left behind was murdered. The movement I argue against is the reason I exist.
So I’m not going to stand here and tell you the 1885 position was obviously correct and that the Jews who abandoned it were fools or cowards. They had the best reason anyone has ever had.
But here is what I will tell you:
The argument didn’t end. It was buried.
There is a difference between losing a debate and being written out of the record. What happened to Magnes was the second thing. He is not a footnote in the curriculum, he is absent from it. Brit Shalom is not taught as the road not taken; it is not taught. A Jewish child in Haifa in 1960, or in Scarsdale in 1990, learned that there was one Jewish answer to this question, and that anyone outside it had stepped outside the Jewish people.
That is what makes the charge of betrayal work. It only works if you don’t know the argument existed.
Why this matters more than a history lesson:
Because of what happens at your own table.
When you say something careful and uneasy about what has been done these two years, and someone tells you that you’ve turned on your own people — you’re not actually being answered. You’re being told a piece of history that was edited.
You are not outside Judaism. You’re inside an argument that is older than the state of Israel, that was held by its own university’s founders, and that was never settled. It was closed.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ciwOjs9USj-lU5TqtBCNhIAFWZjOHvEQ/view?usp=sharing
Coby Friedman, this essay is much closer to the history of Zionism that I recognize than your video about the Haganah, Irgun, Lehi, and the supposed division of labor between respectable and terrorist Zionists.
But you have overlooked something fundamental in your own account. Judah Magnes, Martin Buber, Brit Shalom, and Ihud were not simply representatives of an anti-Zionist tradition. Their advocacy of binationalism was itself part of the history of Zionism. Buber, in particular, understood himself as a Zionist. He rejected the idea that Jewish national self-determination required exclusive Jewish sovereignty over the country.
That is quite different from the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform, which rejected the understanding of Jews as a nation altogether. You have brought together people whose disagreements with political Zionism arose from very different understandings of Jewish peoplehood, national aspirations, and the rights of Palestinian Arabs.
I agree that these traditions deserve far more attention than they have received. I also agree that Jewish opposition to particular forms of Zionism cannot reasonably be treated as betrayal of the Jewish people. But I am a Zionist, and have been all my life, whose understanding of Zionism recognizes Jewish national self-determination alongside Palestinian national self-determination and political equality.
In your video, you effectively dismissed liberal Zionists as people who provide moral cover for the violence of others. Here you describe the intellectual and political traditions that demonstrate why that characterization is historically inadequate.
You cannot simultaneously insist that the suppressed history of Jewish nationalism deserves to be recovered and then disregard the Zionist identities of people whose understanding of Jewish nationalism contradicts your own definition.
I would welcome a serious examination of how these different Zionisms developed, why some prevailed, why others failed, and what their adherents actually believed and did. That would also require recognizing that opposition to territorial domination and Palestinian dispossession has existed within Zionism itself, and was not necessarily a calculated means of facilitating either.
You are right that an argument was not settled merely because one side acquired political power. But neither can you settle the meaning of Zionism retrospectively by excluding the Zionists who disagreed with the people who acquired that power.