About a month ago, I attended the first meeting of an interfaith dialogue group in Washington, DC.  The group, comprised of several Jewish and Muslim members, is committed to exploring the similarities between our respective peoples amid the backdrop of the Middle East crisis.  Naturally, we kicked off our first meeting by breaking the ice, and overtly establishing that we are all open-minded, human-rights loving individuals.  As is always expected in a setting of "mixed company," everyone made sure to couch his ideas in equivocal language - no one went too far towards admitting that he might naturally identify with one side of the conflict or the other.

After an hour or so of breaking the ice, one brave soul came out and admitted that she is in fact a Zionist - or in other words, a supporter of the Jewish State of Israel.  This statement of truth abruptly punctured the formality, and led one of the Muslim members of the group to inquire about the definition of Zionism.  This is where the trouble set in.  As the few Zionists in the room (including myself) attempted to explain our proclaimed ideology, we came to the uneasy conclusion that participation in an interfaith dialogue group was somehow contrary to our own definition of Zionism.  Specifically, our definition of Zionism conjured up images of right-wing nationalism and individualist struggles; nowhere did interfaith compromise appear.  The pivotal question then became, could we even call ourselves Zionists?  The answer to this question requires a brief contextualization of Zionism itself, and an investigation as to where the ideology is (or should be) going.

Like any ideology, Zionism must be understood in its historical context.  An antecedent form of Zionism can technically be traced back to 70 C.E. (A.D.), when Jews were expelled from their biblical homeland under the Roman regime of Titus.  For almost two thousand years, the Jewish people survived as a scattered Diaspora, spread across a multitude of adoptive empires in the Eastern Hemisphere.  Unsurprisingly, this diasporic way of life led to a diasporal consciousness: imbedded in the Jewish psyche was a desire to return to the biblical homeland, as impossible as this goal often seemed.

The latent desire of return finally found its expression amid the socialist rumblings of late Nineteenth Century Europe.  Under the instruction of Theodore Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, Eastern European Jews began to organize themselves around the cause of returning to the Jewish homeland. This trend towards emigration continued right up through the wake of the Holocaust in 1945, when many displaced Jews found themselves returning to Israel not out of ideological conviction, but out of necessity.  To this day, for a Jew to move to Israel is considered a great honor.  The term used for moving to Israel, Aliyah, literally means to step up.

From its very inception, modern Zionism was founded on notions of struggle and conflict.  The land upon which the Eastern European emigrants arrived had been laid to waste under the Ottoman Empire.  The project of turning a desolate desert green was therefore one that required tremendous sacrifice for the newly arrived emigrants.  Expatriate housewives and businessmen of Berlin, Budapest, and Riga, were handed shovels upon arrival, and immediately began plowing the fields under the hot Mediterranean sun.  Alongside these inherent struggles to cultivate the land, existed the all-too-familiar tensions with the Arab neighbors.  From the moment that Zionism took root on Israeli soil, the bloody struggle for survival became part of Israel's national psyche.  It is no surprise then that Zionism is often cited as a hard-line ideology.  As a result of this fact, Jewish Nationalism and Jewish-Arab Coexistence have seemed to become conflicting ideologies, not two sides of the same Zionist coin.

As history has shown us, this traditional way of defining Zionism has not led to improved security and well-being of the Jewish state.  While it is true that Israel has continued to grow, despite her often-espoused obituaries courtesy of neighboring religious and political leaders, a fourth generation of Israeli solider now finds himself engaging in a biannual war for survival.  Furthermore, as Israel's recent two wars have soberly indicated, neither domestic tranquility nor international support are won through clashes with Arab neighbors.  On the contrary, the militant groups that Israel seeks to extinguish only gain more international legitimacy with each death that is reported on the international news.

Observing the failings of our past, it is time to adopt a New Zionist mentality.  It is time for Israel's leaders to understand that support for the Jewish state and coexistence are not mutually exclusive.  Instead, they are necessary components of the same Zionism dream - for Jews to live in peace and prosperity in the land of their ancestors.  Jewish leaders can no longer afford to pretend that Zionism precludes cooperation with Israel's Arab neighbors.  The New Zionist leader must recognize that the end of Hamas and Hezbollah will not come through further military posturing.  Instead, it will come through brokering a compromise that will give prosperity and statehood to the Palestinian people.  Only when the Palestinians are offered the carrot of prosperity will they no longer feel the need for Hamas, their true captor.

While I hope to see a New Zionist leadership taking hold of Israeli politics, the right-wing Likud party took the lead in the most recent parliamentary election.  Benjamin Netanyahu, a man of distinguished career and service, represents the old Zionist ideology that any show of compromise is a sign of Israel's weakness.  My hope is that Netanyahu, like those in my discussion group, will find the space to reconcile his passion for the Jewish state, alongside the need to compromise with our Palestinian neighbors.  I am quite convinced that there is nothing un-Zionist about this.