{"id":303011,"date":"2026-02-21T15:15:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-21T15:15:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/303011\/"},"modified":"2026-02-21T15:15:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-21T15:15:08","slug":"why-i-call-myself-a-zionist-in-modern-israel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/303011\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I call myself a Zionist in modern Israel"},"content":{"rendered":"

In many of my jobs I\u2019ve held over the years, I\u2019ve had the opportunity to interview executives, mostly not Jewish, overseas, on the phone or via Zoom. I would do my best not to indicate where I was based, other than the restrictions on my working hours that might not seem exactly nine-to-five, Eastern time.<\/p>\n

My being in Israel was not something I was embarrassed about; it just wasn\u2019t a topic I needed to insert into an interview about, say, the classified advertising business.<\/p>\n

From time to time, though, an interviewee would ask me where I lived, and I wouldn\u2019t hold back. \u201cIsrael,\u201d I\u2019d reply confidently. The inevitable next question, given that he or she could tell I didn\u2019t have a Hebrew accent, was what brought me to the Holy Land. My usual answer: \u201cZionism<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, though, I\u2019m not sure I\u2019d be comfortable answering like that. \u201cZionism\u201d has become a pejorative in many international circles.<\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t mean I\u2019m no longer a Zionist<\/a>. On the contrary, I believe deeply in the right of the Jewish state to exist. But it got me thinking about what\u2019s happened to the concept of Zionism<\/a> over the past few years and how that affects what I can and should say.<\/p>\n

\"ProtestProtest encampment at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. (credit: David Ryder\/Reuters)<\/p>\n

A recent survey by the Jewish Federations of North America<\/a> found that only one-third of American Jews said they identify as Zionist, even as nearly nine in 10 said they support Israel\u2019s right to exist.<\/p>\n

That confused dichotomy clearly stems from the misperception that being a Zionist means you must support whatever actions Israel\u2019s current government takes.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not the case at all. I, like most of my friends and peers, strongly oppose the policies of the Benjamin Netanyahu-led gang of thugs, crooks, incompetents, and racists. This government is beholden to its most extreme elements, and that\u2019s contributing to a poisoned discourse.<\/p>\n

Yet, at the same time, I support this country with all my heart. It has been my home for 31 years and has indelibly shaped my identity, even if my Hebrew-language skills never pulled their weight. There\u2019s that old saw that in the Diaspora you have to spend most of your time \u201cdoing\u201d Jewish \u2013 our Jewish life in California revolved around synagogue activities \u2013 while in Israel, it\u2019s all about \u201cbeing\u201d Jewish.<\/p>\n

In Israel, my wife, Jody, and I have been able to raise our family in an enveloping Jewish structure \u2013 calendar, school, language, culture. I value the way Israelis are always ready to help one another, even when they\u2019re yelling; the way we came together after Oct. 7 to fill in the gaps of an absent polity.<\/p>\n

‘You don\u2019t have to search for your Jewishness \u2013 it\u2019s all around you’<\/p>\n

You don\u2019t have to search for your Jewishness \u2013 it\u2019s all around you. Nor are we obsessed with the issues that animate Diaspora Jewish life. \u201cYou\u2019d really have to scour the Israeli Hebrew press to even find mention of the word \u2018genocide,\u2019\u201d wrote Shalem College\u2019s Daniel Gordis on his Substack, referring to one of the hot topics of American vs Israeli disquisition.<\/p>\n

This confusion about Zionism dovetails with the ad paid for by American businessman Robert Kraft that aired during the 2026 Super Bowl. In it, David, a Jewish teenager, is taunted by his peers, who place a \u201cDirty Jew\u201d yellow sticker on his backpack. He is ultimately \u201csaved\u201d by Bilal, a Black student, who places a blue Post-it Note (a reference to Kraft\u2019s Blue Square Alliance) over the yellow sticker.<\/p>\n

This depiction of the Jew as victim is wholly out of sync with the Zionism we Israelis feel. We may get rockets lobbed at us (all too frequently), but we see ourselves as strong, tough, possessed of agency.<\/p>\n

Liel Leibowitz, writing in Tablet magazine, proposed an alternative ad. In it, we\u2019re shown Hezbollah agents getting blown up by pagers, Israel Air Force planes over Tehran, news reports on the deaths of Hassan Nasrallah and Yahya Sinwar. A little on the nose? Absolutely. I wonder how it would have played among Super Bowl viewers.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have the honor of being hated by an axis of the perfidious, the despotic, the hypocritical, the cynical, the deranged and the incredibly stupid,\u201d said Bret Stephens, New York Times columnist and onetime editor of The Jerusalem Post, at this year\u2019s State of World Jewry talk in New York.<\/p>\n

Zionism \u201cwas never supposed to make Jews comfortable,\u201d noted Adam Scott Bellows, the CEO of the Israel Innovation Fund, in the Post. \u201cIt was supposed to make Jews durable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Joel Swanson, a scholar of modern Jewish history at Sarah Lawrence College, emphasized, in another Post article, that Zionism is not a static single-use symbol for believing Israel should exist. There are many types of Zionism: political Zionism, cultural Zionism, Religious Zionism, Revisionist Zionism.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo say \u2018Zionism\u2019 without adjectives is already to erase its internal diversity,\u201d Swanson wrote.<\/p>\n

He pointed to Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, a committed Zionist who immigrated to Palestine. But, Swanson added, \u201cHe also advocated for a binational state, shared by Jews and Arabs…. [Today] if you espouse Martin Buber\u2019s views… without an emphasis on maintaining a Jewish voting majority, you are labeled an anti-Zionist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, I find Swanson\u2019s thesis the most compelling: Zionism is multifaceted. I\u2019m living proof. When I first moved to Israel, I was firmly in the Religious-Zionist camp. Over time, I became more of a secular, cultural Zionist. But I always had a place to fit in.<\/p>\n

So, when I\u2019m asked these days why I live here, I will continue to answer, \u201cBecause I\u2019m a Zionist.\u201d I may have to explain a bit more; it\u2019s not a simple one-line response anymore. But I\u2019m not ready to give it up.<\/p>\n

The writer\u2019s book Totaled: The Billion-Dollar Crash of the Startup that Took on Big Auto, Big Oil and the World was published earlier this year as an audiobook. It is available on Amazon and other online booksellers in print, e-book, and Audible formats. brianblum.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In many of my jobs I\u2019ve held over the years, I\u2019ve had the opportunity to interview executives, mostly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":303012,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[16607,85,46,1619,43,48,22869],"class_list":{"0":"post-303011","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-israel","8":"tag-antizionism","9":"tag-il","10":"tag-israel","11":"tag-magazine","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-palestine","14":"tag-zionism"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=303011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303011\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/303012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=303011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=303011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=303011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}