This is Zion

the United States is a place of prosperity and safety for Jews, and we should throw our doors open to more

I pitched the idea for this piece far and wide for several months and could find no one willing to publish it; only one of the editors was willing to come out and say that they couldn’t publish it because I’m not Jewish. I don’t usually artificially ask people to advertise my work, but I’d love for this to get a bigger audience, so please share if you’re inclined.

I am among the many who regularly lament that European anti-Semitism and German genocide led to the endless tragedy that unfolds in Palestine, year after grinding year. None of the Palestinians huddled among rubble in Gaza ever pushed helpless Jews into ovens. I lament also that the British Empire, stuffed with genteel Jew hatred, enabled the modern state of Israel, thanks not to some principled adherence to human rights (lol) but because they felt a Jewish state would help ensure their access to Middle Eastern oil. (They were also motivated, I’m sure, by the hope that British Jews would go warehouse themselves somewhere far away from Britain.) And I lament that the meddling of great powers led to the Nakba, and to 1967, and to the modern stasis which destroys the moral legitimacy of Israel and which subjects the Palestinian people to permanent dispossession and ceaseless slaughter. Meanwhile, the UK and Germany and well-heeled Europe in general go puttering on along, rich and safe.

I am, as you know, opposed to Jewish nationalism, for a fairly direct and basic reason - I am opposed to nationalism generally and religious and ethnic nationalism specifically. Beyond that objection in the abstract, modern Zionism has obviously been disastrous for Palestinian Arabs, many of whom have made their home in that space for generations. But I also think that there’s a very pragmatic sense in which the modern Jewish nationalist project makes no sense: there is already a home for the Jews, one in which Jewish people are safe, rich, educated, and healthy. And that home is the United States of America. I’m not speaking metaphorically when I say that America is better at being Israel than Israel is at being Israel. I want everybody to be groovy internationalists like me, because the nation-state is a modern fiction and because nationalism has been implicated in almost all of the great crimes against humanity in history. But if you drop all of that and just fixate on what’s pragmatically best for actually-existing Jewish people, Zionism still looks like a shitty deal. And there’s a better, safer place for the Jews that requires no moral compromise.

Defenders of the modern Israeli state are in this constant argumentative bind: they must ceaselessly insist that Israel is teetering on the brink of destruction, in order to keep American money and weapons and diplomatic muscle flowing, while at the same time claiming that Israel is the only place where Jews can be safe. These are, obviously, directly contradictory sentiments. If it takes the constant patronage of the most powerful nation on earth to keep Israel from destruction, and even then the country is subject to assaults like that of October 7th, in what sense could Israel possibly be considered a safe place for Jews? Well, you could point out that by most basic statistics that catalog violent threats, Israelis are safer than citizens of most countries in the world. (If you ask an Israeli whether their country is safer than Chad or Colombia or Pakistan, they’ll get offended that you asked.) Unfortunately, you are then merely pulled back into the other side of the paradox - if it’s true that Israelis are remarkably physically safe, in context with much of the rest of the world, how can we justify the seemingly perpetual outlay of vast amounts of American ordnance and treasure on Israel’s behalf?

Well, some tell me, Israel is a safe home for Jews, but only because of American largesse. This contradicts constant assertions about the unprecedented effectiveness of the IDF, but set that aside for now - if that’s true, then the modern state of Israel is surely doomed, as no patron, even the United States, remains the hegemon forever. No matter how you bobble this particular ball, if it’s true that a distant patron withdrawing its unprecedentedly generous support would cast the existence of Israel into immediate doubt, well, it kind of gives the game away. If Israel can’t survive the end of American economic, military, and diplomatic support (for political or practical reasons, it makes no difference), then Israel has an expiration date, simply by dint of the inevitable cycles of history. America is in slow but certain decline relative to the rest of the world, both great powers and the distributed violent potential of ordinary states. The largesse that Israel has relied on will not last forever. So, if you’re a Jew who wants to build a lineage that will in time see generations living in peace and prosperity, how could you (for example) follow those settler lunatics into the West Bank, knowing that the day the United States turns its back on Israel is the day Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran and all manner of other actors would come to take your land? All moral and political and historical disputes aside, it is the Zionists themselves who say that Israel is mortally threatened by its neighbors. So what do you do when American power declines, as it inevitably will?

I have argued that the only hope for a secure Israel in a post-American-hegemony world is to become the secular multiethnic democracy that the demographics of the territory it controls insist it should be. And I genuinely believe that that’s the case - the argument for a secular and multiethnic Israel is one of self-interest for Israeli Jews as well as an ethical argument. (A shared Israel-Palestine would also be the greatest beacon for the viability of multiculturalism and peace that has ever existed in history, a living symbol of human progress.) But people get very unhappy about that idea, and there’s a certain class of moderates who have taken to ridiculing the concept of the one-state solution. What they seem not to understand is, first, that the insistence that a shared state cannot succeed is not just a rejection of the possibility of peace and equality in Palestine but a declaration that the very project of liberal democracy itself has failed. Second, I think they’re whistling past the graveyard; if the state between the river and the sea does not eventually integrate its Arab and Muslim populations fully into civic and political life, as equals, then it faces almost certain destruction when no longer protected by a uniquely peerless superpower. Again, the Zionist case undermines itself: if it is indeed true that Israel’s neighbors bear implacable hatred against the idea of a small Jewish state in a sea of Muslim countries, then it’s foolish to think that such a state can survive the end of the American century. But if that state instead dropped its anachronistic attachment to ethnonationalism and state religion, perhaps that hatred would not prove so implacable. There is more than one way to consider the safety of Israel.

But, OK. You’re skeptical that a multiethnic and secular state in Palestine would prove safe for the Jews. Then I ask you to consider the glaring example of a better, safer place for the Jewish people: the United States of America. The simple reality is that whether we call Israel safe for Jews or not, it is demonstrably, indisputably the case that the United States is safer. And in fact in statistic after statistic, in so many different aspects of human flourishing, few identifiable groups in the world are doing as well as Jews in America. This is a land of safety and success for the Jewish people, as it should be! Why fight for that contested scrap of land, when that fight has both resulted in many Jewish deaths and in the continuing oppression and killing of a beleaguered minority? Why not come here, and deepen the tradition of Jewish excellence that is written into the basic fabric of the history of the United States?

American Jews have income and employment figures that are remarkable by any definition. (Pew’s extreme reluctance to simply acknowledge that American Jews are on average a very wealthy ethnic group says something about the requirements of modern identity discourse, but never mind.) American Jews are also incredibly well-educated compared to the norm. As that Pew research demonstrates, fully three quarters of American Jewish adults have college degrees, compared to less than 38% of American adults in general. Israeli Jews are well-educated, but not like American Jews. The average American Jew goes through 15 years of formal education as defined by Pew; the average Israeli Jew, 12. (Note that these figures in general are dragged down by the ultra-Orthodox populations in both countries, whose men typically are restricted to religious education that does not factor into such figures and whose women rarely attend college at all.) Watch Oppenheimer sometime; while it’s true that the Manhattan Project recruited people of all types from all over the world, that effort simply cannot be conceived of without the efforts of American Jews - despite the fact that our most elite academic institutions engaged in a more-or-less explicit campaign to exclude Jewish applicants, such as through the adoption of “holistic” admissions criteria that gave them greater leeway to manipulate their incoming student bodies. Jewish American academic excellence and consequential financial success has been so pronounced for so long that we have decades of research aimed at explaining it and seeing if it can be replicated in other groups.

And all of this success has knock-on consequences. Being a high-earner and highly-educated are both strongly associated with being less likely to be the victim of a crime. (Endogeneity and confound questions are not summatively meaningful here.) What about hate crimes? Though it angers both liberals and conservatives alike, for different reasons, I continue to point out that hate crimes are in fact quite rare. Here Axios breathlessly reports, for example, that Houston was the site of 85 hate crimes in 2023; that’s 85 too many, of course, but Houston has a population of 2.288 million people, meaning that fewer than .004% of residents were the victim of such a crime. (And if it’s the Houston metro area rather than just the city proper, it’s much lower than that; Axios’s link does not contain the relevant information.) Hate crimes are of course especially pernicious and we have good reason to be especially vigilant against them, but recent years have seen a lot of breathless hype about supposedly skyrocketing hate crime rates with precious little proof of an actual, practical problem. The fixation on hate crimes is so pervasive that I find it difficult to research statistics on the rate of crimes committed against American Jews in general, but by inference from larger demographic figures, that rate is likely quite low and vastly lower than the risk for (to pick a salient example) African Americans. And if you’re wondering, Jews appear to commit crimes at very low rates too. Consequently, the population of incarcerated Jews in the United States is tiny.

Though there are some relatively rare genetic disorders that afflict Ashkenazic Jews at far higher rates, in general American Jews are a healthy population. Health statistics are one of the few areas where Israeli Jews can claim general advantages over American, but this is complicated by the fact that like most advanced nations Israel has universal health care, while the United States does not. (That’s a massive embarrassment for our country, for the record!) Still, every indication is that America’s Jews are quite healthy compared to international and domestic averages, and the result is a community of long-lived people. Research suggests that America’s Jews have long life expectancy and in particular produce an unusual number of very long-lived people; this study found that Reform and Conservative Jews born between 1850 and 1910 had an average life expectancy of almost 81 years. American life expectancy in general, right now in the 2020s, is less than 78 years! Not surprisingly for a wealthy, healthy, educated, long-lived population, American Jews report high levels of life satisfaction.

Compared with U.S. adults overall, Jewish adults are somewhat more satisfied with their communities (90% vs. 81%) and the way things are going in their lives (85% vs. 79%).

Upwards of eight-in-ten Jewish adults also say their family life (90%) and physical health (85%) are at least good, if not excellent. And three-quarters say the same about their social life.

Broad demographic figures come with a lot of complications and eliminate nuance, of course, but in general the statistical case is that life is good for most American Jews. This is especially true at elite levels. Jewish people have vastly outsized representation in academia, government, finance, entertainment, and sundry other industries in the United States. My mind was blown when I learned that there’s about as many Mormons in the world as there are Jews, as this was so contrary to my lived experience. (As far as I’m aware the number of Mormons I’ve known in my life is in the single digits.) But then, the major contexts of my life have been academia, left politics, and media, all of which have disproportionate Jewish populations. It’s generally the case that Jewish professionals have much more representation in prominent fields like politics, medicine, and law than you’d expect from their overall numbers. Of course anti-Semitism exists in the United States. Things aren’t perfect here. But by essentially any metric that you can gather, American Jews as a class are flourishing. And the worst numbers we see in that population come from the ultra-Orthodox, a self-selected group that engages in a style of life that’s unusually likely to result in a lack of education, poverty, and shorter lives relative to comparable peers. (Rejecting modernity has consequences, bad ones.) If you hold Zion to be not a geographic location but a concept of Jewish safety and success, you could hardly ask for a fuller realization of that ideal than what you find in the Jewish experience in the United States.

But, of course, the (angry) reply will be that the practical question of Jewish safety and Jewish flourishing is not the point. The point is that Israel is the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people, the basic story of the Torah notwithstanding, and that Jews are thus bound by some cosmic design to occupy that stretch of land, no matter how much greater danger that creates for the Jews who live there or how great the moral crimes committed by the Israeli government, which has been subjugating the Palestinian people for over 75 years and is now engaged in an assault that is as horrific as it is directionless. The Jewish people need the Jewish homeland because they are Jewish and because it is their homeland. Well, people of all kinds absolutely hate it when I make this comparison, but its basic sense compels me to make it again: that’s just blood and soil nationalism. It casts Jews as the volk; this West Bank settler’s dream of a Greater Israel is simply an Israeli Lebensraum. “Our people are who they are because of our genetic lineage and our land is ours by virtue of a quasi-mystical connection we have to it” has been the basic logic of fascism and genocide going way, way back.

And it’s particularly perverse for Jews to embrace that logic, or so it seems to me. No people in the history of the world have suffered more deeply due to the depravations of nationalism than the Jews. It’s no wonder that the history of internationalism is filled with Jewish movements like Bundism; who else has known the depravations of nationalism as well as the Jews? Who has paid a higher price for that ideology? I have been called anti-Semitic for this comparison several times in my life, but I don’t give a shit. The Jewish people were pushed to the very edge of extinction thanks to “blood and soil” thinking and it breaks my heart to see so many Jews who have embraced it in a misguided effort to secure their people’s future.

The dogged insistence that Israel is the only guarantor of Jewish safety simply cannot bear objective scrutiny. America is home to 85% as many Jews as Israel, and those Jews are safer, richer, more educated, and more free from violence than those in the “homeland.” And I say let the rest come. I am, as you know, a big fan of immigration of any type; I think immigrants make America strong and could help us face our looming demographic disaster. But I understand that mass legal immigration is not in the cards, politically. A special carveout for Jews, though? I absolutely think that could be a bipartisan effort, today, in 2024. Most estimates suggest that there aren’t even 15 million Jews in the entire world. If we were to throw our doors open to all of them, or even just to the ~7.5 million who now reside in Israel, we could absorb them into this country just fine. America is a broad and welcoming place when we let it be, a geographically vast and incredibly rich country that grows in wealth and stature along with its population. Sure, the demographic averages in quality of life for American Jews would probably trend down a bit if we let in millions more, but they would still enjoy a remarkable set of advantages compared to almost anyone else in the world. And if letting Israeli Jews relocate to a huge and rich and advanced part of the world that actually wants them results in the end of the unconscionable treatment of the Palestinian people, it sure looks like a win-win for everybody. (Would I want the Palestinians to also be able to come here and live in peace and prosperity? Yes. Can that ever happen politically? No.)

If I could go back, that’s what would have happened after World War II. We just mount a massive effort to invite the diaspora to this country. We could have achieved that simply with integration into regular American life, as has happened with so many Jews. But if there was demand for something like a state, we could have carved some space out of our vast and underpopulated West and made it a home for Jews, operating similarly to an American Indian reservation. But that did not come to pass. We can always open the doors, though.

For my entire adult life, I have debated with American Zionist Jews who passionately defend Israel’s government and Israel as a concept, who wax poetic about Aliyah, who insist on the necessity of a muscular Jewish state which explicitly codifies itself as a country for and by Jews, who say to be Jewish is to yearn for a return to Zion - but who have zero interest in living in Israel. I could make fun of them, I guess, but I wouldn’t ever do so. For so many American Jews, whether committed Zionists or the ever-growing number of the permanently conflicted, Israel is just an idea, not a place; it’s where they put their thoughts and feelings about being Jewish, the repository for their unhappiness over the various forms of disrespect they’ve no doubt endured in their lives for being Jewish. Those feelings are understandable, but the Zionism they result in is destructive. For Jews and Palestinians alike.

More to the point, all else being equal, you’d take the tradeoff of living in America as a Jew, right? From the veil of ignorance, you’d take it. If you came here to the United States and had to bear the brunt of a few bigoted jokes and some crass stereotypes, but would be joining a people who enjoy material conditions superior to almost any identifiable class of people in the world, wouldn’t you accept that trade? And if you were truly afraid of another Holocaust, would you not put money on the United States as the place where that’s least likely to happen? That’s no little thing, this country’s commitment to “never again.” Surely that is something you can rely on, in the most practical sense. The United States is experiencing its inevitable decline as a hegemon. But nobody’s invading and starting another Shoah, here. We’ve got the bomb.

This, here, is Zion. America is Israel. New York City is Jerusalem. The specter of anti-Semitism is always with us, but it’s hard to name a single ethnic or religious group that has flourished anywhere more than Jews have flourished here. Is the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River really so precious, so intimately connected to Jewish people by some mystical force, that it’s worth fighting and dying there, in an effort that has destroyed Zionism’s moral reputation and left piles of children’s bodies in its wake? I guess I can’t answer that question for anyone else, and I am not a Jew. But when you read some of the handwringing about growing antipathy towards Zionism among young American Jews, I have to say… what did you expect? Why would they want to go and fight over a patch of desert that means nothing to them? And why is it so hard for so many people to look at American Jewish success and allow themselves to simply celebrate it, rather than search for evidence that the truth is actually darker? This is what victory looks like, for a refugee people. The American Jewish experience is a shining light of remarkable success for an oppressed minority, secured through immigration and assimilation. And not only do I not think it’s anti-Semitic to recognize that success, I think it’s anti-Semitic if you don’t.

Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, said “We wish to give the Jews a Homeland. Not by dragging them ruthlessly out of their sustaining soil, but rather by removing them carefully, roots and all, to a better terrain.” If that could be accomplished voluntarily, by showing worldwide Jewry that there is already a home where they can be prosperous and safe, without the moral stain of occupation? Then for maybe the first time in my life, he and I agree.