I think I’m leaving Zionism, or Zionism is leaving me.

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”

Coming to Zionism

I was 21 years old the first time I went to Israel.

Like many American Jews, my first experience was through Taglit Birthright, a Jewish organization that offered a 10-day, all-expenses-paid tour of the country. For young Jews, especially the secular kind (as I was), the Birthright trip is often a moving and dramatic experience. You are greeted and spoken to like a long lost family member returning home; you are told, accurately, that the land you are on was ruled by your ancestors thousands of years ago. You are surrounded in public, for the first time, by other Jews — no longer a minority (as you would be throughout the Middle East) or subject to nonstop Christmas advertising and immature punchlines about your nose (like you might be in the United States).  

It is equal parts exhilarating and identity forming. And, like most of the people on the trip, I was moved to tears at several moments, or thought for the first time that G-d might be real, or wanted to join the Israeli army and protect this nation of my people. I wasn’t naive about the context; I was a burgeoning journalist, a skeptic of faith and organized religion, and I understood that this trip was a propaganda tour. But I couldn’t deny the feelings it stirred in me — my sense that this place felt like home, that I had centuries of connection to it, that it was a safe haven for my people in the wake of the greatest attempt to destroy us in world history (and, as we Jews are often reminded, there have been many).

And so I fell in love. It was hard not to. On top of awakening in me a dormant spiritualism, a sense of being home, and an innate desire to be a part of something bigger than yourself, it offered simpler joys: the incredible geography, the ancient and heartstopping beauty of Jerusalem, Israeli girls, beaches, delicious food, and the deep sense you were at the center of the spiritual universe.

I didn’t just fall in love, either; I pledged to come back. And when I graduated from college, I did just that. I moved to East Jerusalem for six months, living in an all-boys yeshiva, studying Hebrew and Torah, and immersing myself in my faith. 

I also traveled to Egypt in the wake of the Arab Spring. I went to the Golan Heights. I played pick-up basketball with Arab and Muslim friends. I volunteered at Ultimate Peace, a program that brings Palestinians and Israelis together through ultimate Frisbee. I explored the edges of Israeli society where tensions between Israelis and Palestinians run the hottest. I went to Hebron and saw the West Bank; I slept at the border of southern Lebanon; I crossed into Egypt in Rafah; I stood across from the Gaza strip and felt the friction that permeates so much of society there. It was, and still is, the most intellectually stimulating period of my life.

That exposure burst the bubble my Birthright trip had created and allowed me to see Israel much like I saw my own country — full of blemishes and contradictions and, in some cases, abject horrors. The more people I spoke to, the more complicated my feelings; the more I read and experienced, the less I felt like I knew. But somehow my love and connection to Israel only grew. 

By the time I left that second trip, I was two things I wasn’t when I arrived: an observant Jew and a committed Zionist. I had always been Jewish, at least in the cultural sense of observing holidays and feeling connected to other Jewish people. But in yeshiva, I actually became a religious Jew. I got the meaning behind my traditions, the source material to my world understanding, the opportunity to stress test my beliefs and my doubts. I found the answers I sought compelling. I brought this new connection home, found a rabbi, and started studying the Torah and attending synagogue weekly.

I felt, and still feel as I write this, an undeniably strong pride for Israel that is hard to shake. The story of Zionism is one of a culture and connection to land reclaimed — and revived. For Jews to go from the early 20th century pogroms of Europe and the Holocaust to having their own sovereign state surrounding the Holy City in just a few decades still feels, to me, like a kind of miracle within the larger 5,000 year history of Jerusalem. 

I’m not here to revisit the entire history of the Israeli–Arab or Jewish–Islamic conflicts, just to describe my personal story of coming to Zionism. Israel was formed by Zionists and the global community with plenty of good intentions, and the context of its formation must include the centuries of Jews being persecuted across Europe and the Middle East that preceded it: the Holocaust, the changing boundaries of the world (with so many new nations and lines being drawn), the rise and fall of Arab rule in the region (which itself included unimaginable violence and displacement), the inevitability of war at the time to settle such boundaries, and the perseverance of a small but mighty people who happened to be mine. 

However, the modern global context also includes Israel’s actions since its formation: the pain of the Palestinian people, the Nakba, the war crimes, the assassinations, Israel’s backing of Hamas, the blockades, the broken promises. To me, being a Zionist is to know that Israel is far from perfect, but to believe that criticizing the obvious flaws of Israel’s government is worth it to push the country towards something better — towards the value of its ideals and the vision of a Jewish state.

Accepting Israel’s faults but believing in its promise is largely the position I held on the morning of October 7, 2023. If you read my writing in the days that followed, you’ll see me grappling with my love of Israel, my identity as a Zionist, my identity as a Jew, and the reality that the life Palestinians were living could not be peacefully maintained. I knew Israel bore some responsibility for the conditions that led up to October 7 and I feared things were about to get a whole lot worse. 

What I did not expect — and what in some ways left me heartbroken or in denial — is that the next 20 months would leave me questioning the project of Israel as a whole, questioning my Zionism, feeling isolated from my fellow Jews (along with any other straightforwardly “pro-Palestine” or “anti-Israel” team). I suppose, really, what I didn’t expect was to feel so utterly alone — so politically homeless on this issue, and so disillusioned and full of pessimism about the future.

Legitimate defense, ethnic cleansing, or genocide?

I’d like you to imagine for a moment that today is October 8, 2023, and I make the following prediction: In May of 2025, approaching two years into the war sparked by Hamas’s brutal terrorist attack and hostage taking, 100,000 Gazans would be dead; most of Gaza would be flattened; Hamas would still be in power; a quarter of the Israeli hostages would be dead; two dozen would still be in captivity; Iran, Hezbollah, and the Houthis would be firing rockets into Israel; Trump would be president and proposing “relocating” millions of Gazans out of the strip; Netanyahu would still be prime minister and aligned on Trump’s vision; Israel would be accused of genocide by multiple human rights organizations; and the Israeli military would be preparing to re-occupy Gaza indefinitely. 

Would anyone have argued that was a success? Or that Israel was “winning” the war? 

The answer is obviously no. If I had posited this on October 8, most people would have thought I was being hyperbolic about the worst possible outcome. In fact, I issued a warning just a few days after Hamas’s attack, which was met with resounding condemnation from many of my fellow Zionists saying that I was overreacting, framing Israel unfairly, and committing a kind of “blood libel” against Jews. Here’s what I wrote:

[Israel’s] desire for violence is not unlike Hamas’s — it’s just as much about blood for blood as any legitimate security measure. Israel will “have every right to respond with force." Toppling Hamas — a group, by the way, Israel erred in supporting — will now be the objective, and civilian death will be seen as necessary collateral damage. But Israel will also do a bunch of things they don't have a right to. They will flatten apartment buildings and kill civilians and children and many in the global community will probably cheer them on while they do it. They have already stopped the flow of water, electricity, and food to two million people, and killed dozens of civilians in their retaliatory bombings. We should never accept this, never lose sight that this horror is being inflicted on human beings. As the group B’Tselem said, “There is no justification for such crimes, whether they are committed as part of a struggle for freedom from oppression or cited as part of a war against terror.” I mourn for the innocents of Palestine just as I do for the innocents in Israel. As of late, many, many more have died on their side than Israel's. And many more Palestinians are likely to die in this spate of violence, too.

I think, almost in its entirety, this prediction has come true — if anything, it was understated. The only part of it that hasn’t come true is that the international community has not cheered Israel’s actions; instead, after the first few months of war, Israel has faced condemnation across the globe, probably because its actions have been more horrific than many of us imagined. Many respectable observers — not just activists or pundits or members of the UN with a track record of anti-Israel bias, but lifelong experts on war crimes in their field — have described what Israel has done in the last 20 months since as a “genocide” or “genocidal acts.” 

Throughout the war, Tangle readers have insisted that I call Israel’s actions a genocide, while others have pressed me to defend Israel from accusations of committing a genocide. Others still have more generally asked where I land. I first tried to tackle this question in early 2024, and I’ll start how I did then: by defining the terms. 

Many people debating this issue seem to believe genocide means “killing every single member of an ethnic or religious group intentionally;” others think it means “killing a great deal of civilians.” Neither is the definition of genocide. In the current UN Convention on Genocide (which Israel is a party to), genocide is defined as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Those acts can be:

1. Killing members of the group
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

On the basic facts, Israel is quite obviously guilty of #1 and #2; it has killed Palestinians and caused them serious bodily or mental harm. Israel is also almost certainly doing #3, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. The state has repeatedly cut off aid, food, and water from entering the strip, and it has accepted — if you believe Israel’s stated numbers on the combatants it has killed and widely accepted low-end estimates on the death toll — that roughly two-thirds of the people it has killed are civilian non-combatants. They also appear to be considering #5, which is forcibly transferring children of the group to another group, depending on how you define that. Israel is, after all, openly moving forward with an operation to displace all two million Palestinians in Gaza to a “humanitarian zone” and then returning to flatten the entire Gaza strip.

Israel has justified this by saying that Hamas is hiding in civilian areas and will not agree to the exact terms of a ceasefire deal Israel desires, even though Israel repeatedly violated the most recent ceasefire that it accepted, which is also the most promising ceasefire deal it has had.

The question, then, is intent: whether Israel is committing these acts with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, Palestinians as a people. If you want to define Gaza as a territory or nation, you could also ask if Israel’s intent is to destroy, in whole or in part, the national group that is Gazans. And the question of Israel’s intent is sticky. 

First, what do we mean by “Israel” here? Based on the people I know intimately, I do not think most Israelis want to see Palestinians in Gaza “destroyed.” And plenty of polls support that viewpoint. For instance: a recent Channel 12 poll found that 54% of Israelis believe the decision to expand its war in Gaza is politically motivated. Just 25% agree with the prioritization to destroy Hamas over getting the hostages home. 78% oppose the government’s refusal to launch a state commission inquiry to understand the failures that led to October 7.

But the Israeli government is a different matter. Israeli citizens did vote for their political leaders, but they are not in control of what is happening in Gaza; those decisions are made by members of the Knesset, military leaders, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And if Israel as a country wants a regime change, the will of the people will likely have to wait until 2026 to be expressed.

Of course, most governments or militaries committing acts of genocide do not state their intent plainly, which makes the charges difficult. But in this case, unfortunately, plenty of government officials have made plain language statements of intent to pick from:

In the weeks that followed October 7, calls from Knesset members and military leaders to bomb Gaza without distinction, flatten Gaza, “Nakba the enemy,” force hundreds of thousands to flee Gaza, “erase Gaza,” force hunger and thirst upon the Gazan population, and exact a "territorial price” to return Gaza to Jews were common. I ignored or excused these comments then because I understood the psyche of the Israeli mind at that time — because I felt it, too. Not the blind rage to kill indiscriminately, but the fear, the heartbreak, and the lust for some kind of price to be paid. I did not expect Israel to actually get here — where this emotion has turned to motivated action, even almost two years after that horrible day.

Unfortunately, as Israel has continued its violent actions, its statements of genocidal intent have persisted. And they have not been limited to the most extreme, fringe, or unimportant members of Israeli politics. In March of this year, Defense Minister Israel Katz said the following:

“Residents of Gaza, this is your final warning. The first Sinwar destroyed Gaza, and the second Sinwar will bring upon it total ruin. The Israeli Air Force’s attack against Hamas terrorists was only the first step. What follows will be far harsher, and you will bear the full cost… Evacuation of the population from combat zones will soon resume. If all Israeli hostages are not released and Hamas is not kicked out of Gaza, Israel will act with force you have not known before. Take the advice of the U.S. President: return the hostages and kick out Hamas, and new options will open up for you — including relocation to other parts of the world for those who choose. The alternative is destruction and total devastation.”

In other words, Katz is telling all Palestinians that their options are: 1) Overthrow Hamas and release all the hostages, 2) Be relocated to other parts of the world, or 3) Stay and be killed by the Israeli army. This statement is about as explicit a declaration of genocidal intent as you’re going to find. 

And it gets worse.

Just last week, Prime Minister Netanyahu gave his first press conference in five months. This alone is stunning; the disgraced leader, who oversaw the worst security failure in Israel's history only months after domestic protests against his attempts to consolidate his own power, has not just remained in power but has refused to answer to the people. During the press conference, Netanyahu made a genuinely startling statement. From The Times of Israel: 

While “ready to end the war,” Netanyahu said he would only agree to do so “under clear conditions that will ensure the safety of Israel: All the hostages come home, Hamas lays down its arms, steps down from power, its leadership is exiled from the Strip… Gaza is totally disarmed; and we carry out the Trump plan. A plan that is so correct and so revolutionary.”

To be clear, that is Netanyahu saying that his new condition for ending the war is the “revolutionary” Trump plan — that is, forcibly removing all Palestinians from Gaza, and putting the entire strip under Israeli control. 

This isn’t an invention of my imagination, nor is the proposal new. In late October 2023, a leaked Israeli intelligence document suggested Israel was considering how it could relocate Gaza’s population to tent cities in Egypt after the war, and then establish permanent Palestinian communities there. I dismissed the plan at the time as a product of the government’s fringes, but it’s now undeniably in the mainstream.

So, the actions fit the definition, and the government’s intent is hard to dismiss. However, there are some reasonable arguments against the genocide label. First, Israel is responding to a very real threat in Hamas, and it continues to take on rocket fire from surrounding nations. Second, older reports of a “famine” in Gaza have been vastly overstated. Third, 72% of the people killed in Gaza as of March 2025 were “combat-aged men,” which is defined as 13–55. Fourth, and perhaps most commonly stated, Israel is capable, if it desired, of killing far more civilians than it has. 

Personally, I don’t find these arguments all that compelling. Yes, Israel is under constant threat, but that doesn’t mean it has to collectively punish the entirety of the Gazan population (which, incidentally, is a war crime). Maybe past reports have been overstated, and maybe there isn’t an all-out famine in Gaza, but hunger and desperation seem pretty ubiquitous. Even if it's true that 72% of the deaths in Gaza are “combat-aged men,” that does not mean they were combatants; recall the data includes 13- to 18-year-old boys, and nearly half of Gaza’s population is under 18. And although Israel does have the capacity to totally eliminate Gaza, that doesn’t mean it isn’t trying to eliminate or force out the Palestinians. 

Consider this: What if you were in charge of Israel, and your desire was to ethnically cleanse Gaza while avoiding all-out international condemnation? How would you fight the war? Would you, perhaps, give pre-warnings of strikes and evacuation orders, then relocate them again and again to places that you still end up bombing or invading? Would you use the excuse of Hamas hiding in civilian buildings over and over again to justify strikes that killed non-combatants? Would you kill journalists and claim they were secret Hamas militants? Would you restrict access to information? Would you intentionally break ceasefire deals before they could usher in an end to the conflict, only to subsequently propose removing the entire population of Gaza?

It is a chilling line of questioning, made all the more chilling by all of Israel’s other condemnable acts:

Aid workers executed (and their deaths covered up), nine children of doctors in Gaza killed in a single strike, months of aid refused, Gazans systemically used as human shields (an accusation often leveled at Hamas), a refrain repeated that there are no innocents in Gaza, civilians arbitrarily killed, and antiwar protestors fascistically cracked down on. When a 15-year-old Palestinian boy said he was raped in Israeli custody, Israel raided the nonprofit that first collected his testimony. When Israeli soldiers were accused of abusing Palestinian detainees, far-right protesters stormed the base where they were held in protest — against the accusations. Many Israeli officials decried that incident, but others defended the right to torture Palestinians in custody. 

I very acutely remember the image of a dead baby that circulated just two months after my own son was born, wearing an outfit not unlike the ones I dress him in every day. That obvious and poignant human tragedy was apparently fine with people like Moshe Feiglin, a former member of the Israeli Knesset who publicly called for the killing of Palestinian children because “in 15 years” they “will rape your daughters and slaughter your sons.”

In December, for the first time, Amnesty International declared Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. That same month, Human Rights Watch also issued a new report detailing emerging evidence of acts of genocide that included depriving the Gazan population of water. On the last day of 2024, the United Nations Human Rights Office issued a critical report about Israel’s destruction of hospitals in Gaza, which went largely ignored. In 2023, Vox interviewed several experts on genocide who were hesitant to describe Israel’s actions that way. In 2024, they revisited them, and each had moved more firmly into that camp. 

Perhaps you are totally unconvinced by any of the arguments above. I understand that — I was on the complete opposite side of this issue in January of 2024. But this is where I am after honestly reckoning with 20 months of what Israel has done. This is where I am after taking in the reality of what Netanyahu and Trump are proposing for Gaza. This is where I am after looking at the images and reading the stories.

At the very least, it’s impossible to refute that Benjamin Netanyahu, with the backing of the Israeli government, is now proposing an ethnic cleansing of Gaza.  

The Oxford dictionary definition of ethnic cleansing is “the mass expulsion or killing of members of one ethnic or religious group in an area by those of another.” Trump’s plan, which Netanyahu is now committed to, is moving all two million Palestinians out of the Gaza strip. He is doing this openly. Even in December 2024, former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon accused Netanyahu of ethnic cleansing. The evidence today is even more clear cut.

To be clear: This operation, which has already begun, is now unconditional. It does not matter if Hamas surrenders tomorrow, or if the Gazan people somehow manage to overthrow them. If you are a Gazan who did not want this war and did not want to live under Hamas rule and spent the last 20 months doing exactly as Israel said, you are not exempt. You will be killed or forced out. 

So, plainly, I think we are witnessing something between an ethnic cleansing and a genocide — and the country I have supported is conducting those actions. My fellow Zionists who do not grapple with this are deluding themselves, and allowing the cause to die of moral failure. Or, alternatively, if this is the Zionism they subscribe to, I want no part of it.

What else could Israel have done?

Having written about this conflict for so long, I’ve become familiar with several common responses from readers. I think the most common one, by far, is the following criticism: “Okay, well what should Israel do, then? Nobody criticizing them or accusing them of genocide ever offers an alternative path forward.”

On some level, I find this question valuable and important. After all, in November of 2023, I was the guy who wrote a piece titled “Israel has no good options.” But not having any good options is not the same as having no options, nor is it the same as choosing the worst one. 

Here are a few options for what Israel could have chosen. This isn’t to endorse one or the other, or to rank them in any way, but is just to illustrate why the suggestion that Israel had no better options than its current course is absurd. 

1. Israel could have not responded. Many in Israeli and American society believe this option to be extreme and pollyannaish, but there is actually plenty of historical precedent for it. Most famously, after the 2008 “26/11” Mumbai attacks, when terrorists killed 174 people and wounded over 300, India decided not to bring hundreds of millions of people to war (and potentially nuclear devastation) and instead refused to carry out a military response. Rather than begin the exchange of bombs, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh won the diplomatic war. His reward was international praise, unity against extremism in Pakistan, and increased pressure both internationally and domestically within Pakistan for the country to do more to root out its extremist elements. While India was initially criticized as being “soft on terrorism,” its decision actually resulted in major gains in its diplomatic standing, years of relative peace and stability, and eventually a more sophisticated ability to avoid similar attacks.
2. Israel could have negotiated for the release of the hostages without a military campaign. It could have offered Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the hostages in Gaza, and then used the international condemnation of Hamas’s attack as momentum to launch a full-scale diplomatic push to remove Hamas from power. It could have done this in collaboration with its Arab partners in the region, some of whom appeared more open to strengthening ties to Israel in the days after the attack. On net, Israel could have recognized that one of Hamas’s key goals was to blow up strengthening ties between Israel and other Arab states, and they could have ensured the opposite result. 
3. Many Israeli security experts and former officials advocated for unilateral steps to improve conditions in Gaza and the West Bank in response to October 7, easing blockades and supporting economic development, and then empowering moderates in Gaza. This could have coincided with international pressure to coordinate sanctions on Hamas backers (like Iran and Qatar) to try to force the group out of power, or enlist an international peacekeeping force to take control of Gaza.
4. Israel could have conducted a more limited and targeted military response that was brief, impactful and focused on Hamas’s infrastructure, which could have led to a ceasefire and hostage negotiations. This was, in many ways, the original and stated plan — but in retrospect Israel never sent any strong signals it was the plan it was going to follow through on.
5. Israel also had various other potential options, including, but not limited to: mobilizing Arab states to act collectively with Hamas to force a solution; conducting cyber warfare and economic disruption rather than kinetic warfare; empowering alternative Palestinian leadership like the Palestinian Authority or local civil society groups; fully withdrawing from Gaza border interaction, hardening the border, and adopting a containment strategy like North Korea has on its border with South Korea. Perhaps most obviously, Israel could have first removed Benjamin Netanyahu from office and then allowed a different leader to chart the path forward.

These are just a few options. Many of them I think are worthwhile, and I find others risky or flawed. Most, to me, would have been better than the path Israel chose, given the results that path has yielded. 

I am not moving to the “other team”

Last week, an anti-Israel extremist named Elias Rodriguez shot two Jewish Israeli embassy workers in the back, killing them. The Bronx “Anti-War” Coalition, which leads pro-Palestine rallies in New York City, called this “the highest expression of anti-Zionism.” 28 pro-Palestine and Marxist groups have signed onto a campaign for Rodriguez’s release. Perhaps this is what “globalizing the intifada” means.

What Israel is doing is so profoundly horrible to me that it has effectively undone a decade of my beliefs in less than 20 months, but stories like this one are a reminder of the ocean between me and the other anti-Zionist activists that exist in this country.  

In other words: Israel’s actions do not make the other side inherently good or just. One litmus test I have for governing coalitions is how they treat their own people; Israel might be unleashing death and destruction in Gaza, but it doesn’t drag dissidents into the street and publicly execute them. It doesn’t hide its top military commanders underneath hospitals, forcing enemies to choose between killing civilians and combatants together or not being able to strike. On this issue, Gazans on the ground are far more attached to reality than anti-Israel activists on college campuses or in major American cities; they understand peace cannot exist under Hamas, and they can state this plainly while too many American leftists cheer Hamas on. It is worth saying, again and again, that most of the Gazan population was not yet born or were too young to remember the last election in the strip, and that the majority of them opposed Hamas’s idiotic and destructive choice to break the peace on October 7. 

At the same time, it is true that the general Gazan population is rife with anti-Jew and anti-Israel hatred. On the one hand this is easy to understand: These two peoples are at war, and many Gazans know Israel only as the nation that bombs its neighborhoods or blockades its borders. But there has been extensive reporting on the way educational materials and classroom environments are teaching Gazan children to hate Jews while glorifying violence against Israel. In other words: An entire generation of children is being radicalized by educators and adults at the same time Israel is giving them plenty of reason to be full of hate. This reality must be addressed before there is any chance at long-term peace. 

It’s also true that Hamas executed a terrorist attack targeting the most Palestinian-friendly Israelis on the planet — men, women, and children who volunteered in the Gaza strip and advocated for more freedom and prosperity for Gazan residents. Further, Hamas has openly stated its intent to continue to commit more attacks like October 7 if it does not get what it wants. Hamas is in power because it refuses to hold elections and murders or tortures its opposition. Hamas views armed resistance and martyrdom (that is, dying for the cause) as central tenets of its governing philosophy — and it does not plan to stop until an Islamic Palestinian state occupies the entirety of modern-day Israel (in a politically clever move, Hamas updated its 2017 charter to accept 1967 borders, but it describes this as a temporary solution that does not imply a recognition of Israel). 

Even if you think that mainstream Israeli society is corrupt and evil, you must acknowledge the challenges Hamas’s uncompromising philosophy creates for Israel. It mortifies me to read the accounts of Palestinian activists, or the blogs of Palestinian writers, or the words of some Arab leaders in the region who often ignore or downplay this reality.

Finally, many of Israel’s most ardent critics are not good-faith actors. They obsess over Israel, and this conflict, in a way that makes me deeply uncomfortable. While anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, many antisemites have been welcomed to the anti-Zionist coalition. Some clearly joined the fray out of a desire for social media clout and social justice points and have since moved on to other interests, after months of definitive and ignorant online proclamations about something they never truly intended to understand fully. They are notably silent on the atrocities in Syria or the genocides in Sudan or Myanmar or Ethiopia.

And, in my experience, many of the most ardent supporters of the Palestinian cause have not actually exposed themselves to the most compelling Zionist thinkers. They watch TikToks, Instagram Reels and YouTube videos about the current conflict, but do little in the way of, say, consuming seminal Zionist literature. To say it differently: They demand acquiescence to the Palestinian cause without meaningfully engaging the other side. 

So I’m not taking up the “Free Palestine” movement and you won’t find me chanting “From the River to the Sea” in the streets. The truth is, I still hold space for the complexity of this conflict. 

Why I’m leaving Zionism (or Zionism is leaving me)

Generally speaking, Zionism is defined as a nationalist and political movement for the establishment and maintenance of a Jewish state. I have long considered myself a Zionist because I believe in the project of a sovereign Jewish nation — a state existing on our historical homelands. In some ways it is a simple thing, really: Even a reformed Jewish upbringing like mine provided a constant stream of reminders of what our people have been through. A broken dam of generational trauma. 

For example, the cantor I learned under for my bar mitzvah escaped the Holocaust only because he could sing, and the rest of his family was murdered by the Nazis. I first heard that story from the man himself when I was 12. My grandparents fled Europe when they saw the writing on the wall, but the discrimination didn’t end in the States — my mom was banned from her junior high dances (“no blacks or Jews allowed”). Every holiday, every year, opened with the classic Jewish trope: They tried to kill us, they failed, let’s eat. 

When that is the story of your people, the story of a permanent and unimpeachable home becomes pretty attractive. There are Muslim states, Christian states, and Buddhist states. Why can’t Jews have one tiny strip of land in the Middle East where we have historical ties?

Downstream from this definition, though, is the reality that Israel is a kind of ethnostate — one defined by prioritizing the population of a particular ethnicity, in this case, Jews. Obviously, Israel has many non-Jewish citizens, but Zionism seems to necessitate keeping Israel as a state primarily populated by and run by Jews. It’s not the exact same, but this is not entirely unlike the desire Hamas has for the land of Israel. Zionists subscribe to a kind of Jewish nationalism, initially secular but increasingly religious, that anticipates a more pluralistic society but puts guardrails in place to ensure a Jewish majority. Hamas subscribes to a kind of Palestinian nationalism fused with Islamic fundamentalism, and envisions a state defined by Arab and Islamic identity with little room for non-Arabs or non-Muslims. It is, in effect, a more extreme version of Zionism — but for Palestinian Muslims. 

Like any political ideology, Zionism is constantly evolving. While Zionism has always drawn on the ancient Jewish connection to Jerusalem, in its early days it was an almost entirely secular movement born of Jewish nationalism. Today, religious Zionism seems far more influential in modern Israeli society and the Zionist movement broadly. 

I’ve observed how this change has pushed modern Zionism into more extreme positions, motivating settlers in the West Bank to steal land from Palestinians or leading war-planning members of the Knesset to accept the total destruction of two million people in Gaza. Just as polling in Gaza reflects strong anti-Israel and anti-Jew hatred, polling in Israel reflects the reverse: One recent survey found 82% of Israeli Jews support the forced deportation of residents of the Gaza strip, and 47% of all Israelis think the IDF should kill all the inhabitants of the cities it conquers. I struggle to think of a starker illustration of the failure (and radicalization) of Zionism and Israeli society writ large. 

As this evolution has taken place, and especially as it has accelerated over the last two years, I’ve found myself more and more isolated among fellow Zionists. When I wrote my piece “The Zionist case for a ceasefire,” the most common criticism I encountered from other Zionists was not about my argument for a ceasefire — it was to reject me as a Zionist at all. Believing, as I did, that the violence in Gaza had reached unacceptable levels, or that all Gazans were not guilty by association, or that destroying Hamas came at too high a humanitarian cost was not viewed by many of my Zionist readers as an acceptable position to hold. It was disqualifying.

As the war has gone on, I’ve realized that maybe they are right. Maybe, in 2025, being a Zionist means that Israel must respond to the events of October 7 with a total and complete siege of Gaza. Maybe being a Zionist is no longer conducive with believing the Gaza strip is full of innocent lives worth saving. Maybe being a Zionist so limits the decision tree Israel has in the war that it mutates that ethnic cleansing into a reasonable approach — the only possible approach — to concluding the war against Hamas. Maybe the Zionist movement no longer has space for giants of the movement like Judah Magnes, who advocated for a binational state in historic Palestine and a system where Jews and Arabs shared power and lived as equals. 

This evolution has invited an obvious and important question: If the current situation — the ethnic cleansing in Gaza, Israel at war on all fronts, Israeli society completely and utterly divided — is the product of Zionism, then perhaps this political ideology is failing? I say that not in an attempt to take away agency from Hamas or Arab states and save my condemnation only for Israel, but just to say that the way Zionism is interacting with the current conditions is clearly not yielding ideal results.

And if that is the case — if Zionism has produced these results and no longer has space for people like me — maybe this isn’t a movement or political ideology I want to subscribe to. Maybe the movement has left me, or maybe it's time I leave the movement. 

There is, obviously, no future in which the Israeli people simply surrender their sovereign state — not to Hamas, Iran, or any coalition of the surrounding Arab states. Nor should they have to. It’s clear to me that Israel has no legitimate, peace-seeking partner leading Gaza, and that the continued radicalization of your average Zionist is thrusting it further into violence and war. Genuinely building a more pluralistic society in Israel where Jews, Muslims, Palestinians, Arabs, and Israelis can live with equality in equal measure is going to mean abandoning or drastically reforming the modern iteration of Zionism we have today. It will mean a Jewish homeland that is not a Jewish ethnostate. It will mean a vision of Zionism more in line with many of its earliest secular proponents, rather than its modern-day religious adherents. It is work that will require generations of compromise, generational healing, and the deradicalization of extremists in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank.  

Grappling with all of this is no small thing. I’ve had to remind myself, repeatedly, that my identity as a Jew is separate from my identity as a Zionist. I’m constantly telling myself that leaving Zionism, or disavowing its current form, does not mean I can no longer attend synagogue, or find community with Jews, or travel to Israel. It does not mean I am no longer allowed to speak on this issue or participate in shaping the future of Zionism. I am not going to lose my identity, my community, or my culture by recognizing that a political movement I subscribe to is failing and corrupted. But this distinction is difficult: Both antisemites and Jews often insist that Judaism and Zionism are interlocked in inexorable ways, and despite my resistance to that idea it’s a hard feeling to shake when the rubber meets the road.

What I know to be true now is that my vision for a Jewish homeland doesn’t look a lot like the one that exists in Israel today. My vision is not a society at the whim of religious extremists. It is not a government that diminishes the value of non-Jewish life. It is not a place with so little imagination it cannot envision a future where Palestinians and Israelis live together, as equals, in peace.

In the end, my desires for what I want Zionism to be are distinct from what Zionism is. And that reality is now so obvious and so clear that I’ve begun to suspect my harshest critics are right. I may just not be a Zionist at all. 

A final note.

Thanks for reading. Obviously, this is a challenging topic for me to write about — and difficult for many of you to read about. I’m sure plenty Tangle readers will have strong reactions to this piece, so I wanted to end with two notes:

1. In the Tangle spirit, I am currently soliciting a counterargument to the views expressed in this piece. That is, I’m talking to a few Zionist writers I respect about penning a response or coming on the podcast to discuss this piece.
2. When commenting, please do your best to keep your thoughts respectful and fair. I ask that you do this when they are directed at me, but also at other members of the Tangle community. And, as always, please don’t unsubscribe if you disagree — just write in and make your case.