Local Opinion: You can — and should — be both a progressive and a Zionist

Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib shocked the world when she recently argued that progressives who support the world’s only Jewish state are not progressives at all.

Tlaib said, “you cannot claim to hold progressive values yet back Israel’s apartheid government, and we will continue to push back and not accept that you are progressive ….” What a shocking claim to make to the legion of supporters of Israel, both Jewish and non-Jewish, who embrace and champion the progressive agenda and have achieved some of its most significant accomplishments.

As someone who is a progressive and unapologetically Jewish and a Zionist, I feel it’s imperative to push back on the rhetoric and show she does not speak on behalf of our party or values.

According to Pew, in 2021, over 70% of American Jews lean toward the Democratic Party, and half describe their political views as liberal. Progressivism is aligned with Jewish values, which celebrate Tikkun Olam, the concept of man’s role in repairing or bettering the world. At the same time, Gallup found that 95% of American Jews support Israel, and Pew indicated that “eight-in-ten U.S. Jews say caring about Israel is an essential or important part of what being Jewish means to them.”

This is easily understood. Alyza Lewin of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law has written: “(The) determination to return to Zion is the glue that has kept Jews connected for millennia. For centuries Jews have not only prayed facing Jerusalem, they have prayed to return to Jerusalem.”

Support for Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel is integral to the Jewish faith. Lewin further writes: “demanding that a Jew abandon any part of his or her Jewish identity is antisemitic … one does not have to be a Zionist to agree that harassing a Jew for expressing the Zionist part of his or her Jewish identity is antisemitic.”

Accordingly, those like Tlaib, who would deny Jews their right to identify and practice our faith as our ancestors have for thousands of years, exhibit and inculcate antisemitism by acting to exclude Jews.

Yet it must be understood that Tlaib and her ilk are more than talk. As early as 2017, the Chicago Dyke March became famous for expelling a group of marchers who brought a Pride Flag with a Star of David.

That same year, anti-Israel radical Linda Sarsour proclaimed that Zionism and feminism are incompatible, which would probably have elicited a chuckle from Israel’s great female prime minister Golda Meir.

Last month, two Jewish women were harassed and kicked out of a sexual-assault survivors’ support group at the State University of New York (SUNY) New Paltz for their Zionist identity. Just this fall, nine affinity groups at the University of California at Berkeley’s school of law have begun the academic year by amending their bylaws to provide that they will never invite any speakers that support Israel or Zionism — a standard Berkeley Law’s Dean Erwin Chemerinsky noted would ban both himself and 90% of his Jewish students.

Is it really plausible that expelling Jews is the progressive choice? Most of Israel’s founding generation of leaders, including its first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, were of the Left. Governments of Israel’s Labor Party pursued the 1990’s Palestinian peace process, but their electoral fortunes declined when their peace overtures were answered with the bombs and bullets of Yasser Arafat’s intifada.

However, Israel’s current prime minister, Yair Lapid, comes from the new Yesh Atid, a secular party with a center-left agenda. Importantly, the same day that Tlaib was calling for the exclusion of Jews, Lapid called for a two-state solution and an independent Palestinian state in his first address to the United Nations General Assembly. Israel, the Middle East’s only multiparty and multiconfessional democracy, hosts a thriving LGBT culture and the biggest Pride events on the Asian continent. Why then would progressives opt for the position of Hamas, the theocratic terror group whose founding charter calls for the obliteration of the State of Israel?

In fact, Tlaib is not redefining the values of progressivism; she is redefining the word “progressive” away from its values. This is exactly what Donald Trump has done to American conservatives by advancing the idea that you can’t be a conservative unless you support Donald Trump.

The truth is more like the opposite; the same is true of Tlaib’s outrageous claim — can you truly be a progressive if you deny the Jews, one of the world’s oldest indigenous peoples and the sufferers of the worst genocide of the 20th Century, the right to favor sovereignty in their homeland?

In fact, what Tlaib is trying to do is create more and more spaces in which the overwhelming majority of Jews are not welcome. This is an ongoing hate crime in which too many progressives have become complicit. We must consistently highlight the racism and bigotry inherent in trying to push Jews and Zionists out of shared and progressive spaces, and the human harm that has been caused by re-othering Jews with this virtual yellow Star of David.