Zionism: Yes, No, It’s Complicated
A sermon by Rabbi Paul Kipnes on Zionism: yes, no, or it’s complicated?
I was eighteen, just out of high school, living in Jerusalem with twenty-five high school grads in a brand new gap-year program the Reform Movement had started. We studied Judaism and Israel, the Holocaust and antisemitism. Poetry and song. Hebrew in ulpan. And in between we traveled, yamah vakedmah, v'tzafonah vanegbah, west and east, north and south, rediscovering an ancient land. At the end I came away a full year of college credit, starting at Trinity College in Hartford Connecticut the next fall as a sophomore. What I really got was a love affair.
I remember traveling to Nahal Perazim, in the Negev desert. We climbed down into a cavern of white chalk walls and walked underground, and when we reemerged, the whole world was dusty white.
We were energized, speaking animatedly about the beauty. Our guide told us this was where our people's caravans walked and traded and lived. And I remember thinking: Jerusalem is our holy city, the Galilee is where the Talmud grew up, but this, this open nothingness, this is my place. Quiet and cacophonous. Not enough water, and so so many stories. In this place of becoming, I found myself.
It’s also where I found love… with Israel.
I've been back to Israel a n average of every other year since then. And the love persists. But somewhere along the way, the love changed. It started with a place: chalk and dust, silence and noise. It transformed into a love affair with the people.
Many of you know that Michelle and I have two nieces and a nephew-by-marriage in Israel, and their three young children. They're ours, the way our own kids are. Each of them is bonded to that land. Each of them served in the army.
I was thinking of them this week as we commemorated the third anniversary of October 7. What a horrific day. I can recite the headlines. Twelve hundred murdered. Three thousand wounded. Sexual violence used as a tool of terror. 251 dragged as hostages into the hell beneath Gaza. It happened in places my family had stood, places where my nieces and nephews had served. They weren’t down there but October 7th happened to them too.
I sat with them a month after October 7th, in late November 2023, supporting, listening, uncle-counseling them. None of them had PTSD. Nor do they now. That’s a luxury for those who passed through a trauma. What so many Israelis have is “current traumatic stress,” because well, October 7 is over, but it isn't over.
And I've watched them and their fellow citizens change. Moving from the moderate left to the moderate right, and past it. Because Israelis, and the world before them, offered Palestinians a state of their own, not once, not twice, but four to five times, something few nations ever extend to their sworn enemies, and what came back was this: Rockets. Terror. October 7th. And an international movement bent on dismantling the only Jewish state.
I can argue with where they've landed. I can't argue with how they got there.
And then last week, a flydubai flight left Dubai for Tel Aviv. A hundred seventy-four people aboard, a hundred sixty-six of them Israelis, many children. Two hours in, the co-pilot stabbed the captain, and the plane dropped fifteen thousand feet in 30 seconds. Someone told the Jerusalem Post that passengers near the cockpit ran toward it. A plumber pulled the co-pilot out of the pilot's seat. A dentist treated the wounded captain. And a reserve pilot landed the plane. Everyone lived.
Israeli officials - and now UAE officials - call it a terror attack, and say the co-pilot has told investigators he planned to crash it into Ben Gurion airport, 9/11 style. He wanted to kill. And those passengers ran toward the danger.
I thought about this when I started drafting this sermon. Because part of why we need a Jewish homeland is to have a place where, when we are in danger, there are people to help protect us, to run toward it. To land the plane.
So straight talk: Zionism. Yes, no, or it's complicated?
Let me start with what Zionism is. Zionism is the belief that the Jewish people have the right to self-determination in our ancestral homeland. Zionism is not racism. It’s the right to a home in our ancient homeland. Like every other people. That's all. The arguments come after, and they always have.
Ancestral. What I mean by that is that we Jews are from there. Our Torah tells that story, but it isn't only Torah. An archeological find, an Egyptian stone from around 1200 BCE (3200 years ago), the Merneptah Stele, lists Israel among the peoples of Canaan. An inscription found at Tel Dan, from the ninth century BCE (2900 years ago), mentions the House of David, the Israelite King. And in Rome, the Arch of Titus shows Roman soldiers in 70 CE carrying the menorah out of the Temple - the Jewish Temple - from Jerusalem.
And by the way, although the Romans scattered us, we didn't all leave. There have been Jews in that land in every century since: in Jerusalem, Tiberias, Tzfat, Hevron. Sometimes just a few families. Other times huge communities. But there. Everywhere else we went, we prayed toward Jerusalem three times daily, and we ended every Passover Seder repeating the ancient hope: Bashana Habaah Birushalayim, Next Year in Jerusalem.
So when someone calls us colonizers, I ask: Which empire sent us? A colonizer has a mother country to go back to. Where's ours? The Jews who came to Israel from Yemen, from Iraq, from Morocco, from Poland and from Russia, weren't heading somewhere new. Many were running. All of them were running home.
And we know the Palestinian people are rooted there too, deeply, and we should not be erasing them. Two peoples at home in one small place is the whole problem. It's why this sermon has a second “justice-for-all” half.
So that's where we're from. Here's why we still need a home there.
Theodore Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism, was a journalist in Paris in 1894 covering the trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army falsely convicted of treason. The story goes that he heard the crowd shouting for Jewish death. In France. The country that had emancipated its Jews. (Historians argue about how much that one moment changed him. I like the story anyway because it teaches us that the goodwill of others is not a plan that will sustain us.
I’ve spoken before about scholar Dara Horn’s important book called People Love Dead Jews. Hang on to that title.
The world is wonderful with dead Jews. They build museums, hold vigils, rebuild synagogues as museums because Jews no longer live there, and put Anne Frank in the curriculum.
But living Jews with needs and opinions and a stake in our own survival, that's harder for them. Zionism is a commitment to the living. To the notion that Jews must keep Jews alive.
Maybe you heard about what happened on the first night of Hanukkah last year, at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, when two gunmen opened fire on a menorah lighting. Fifteen dead. A rabbi. An 87-year-old Holocaust survivor. Children. The terrorists weren't after soldiers. They weren't after Israeli ministers. They came to shoot up Jews on a beach during a Jewish holiday.
And maybe you heard about what happened to Scott Wiener, the California state senator running for Congress. Jewish, gay, a champion of trans rights. He's said Israel's conduct in Gaza amounts to genocide. I don’t agree with him but listen to what happened next. In June, he was on his way to a Pride Shabbat service when antizionist protesters chased him out of San Francisco's Trans March. He told CNN they made references to his "Israeli handlers." He'd given that crowd what it asked for, and it didn't matter.
As Long Island Rabbi Daniel Nahum argued in a Yom Kippur sermon: antizionism has become its own form of hatred of Jews. I think he's right about that. Bondi and Wiener are among the evidence.
And yes, some of us believe that if we give up the only piece of Jewish real estate in the Middle East, they'll love us again. Or that if we disappear, we'll finally be true to our values. I understand where that comes from. It comes from a good place.
It's also what the Bund believed. The Bund was a Jewish socialist movement in Eastern Europe that said: stay where you live, and fight for your rights there. But it didn't save them. The movement was destroyed, and most of its members were murdered.
So Straight Talk: Zionism: why not “No”?
Because “No” asks us to believe something we’ve watched fail.
Because “No” says Jews can be safe as a religion and nothing more, guests in other people's countries on our best behavior. Bondi says otherwise. So does Scott Wiener. So does the Bund.
And because “No”, in practice, rarely stops at "change the government of Israel." It says there should be no Israel. Then what happens to the seven and a half million Jews who live there, who were born there, who've buried their parents there? For me, that's where the argument ends.
So Straight Talk: Zionism: why “Yes”?
“Yes”, because a people hunted and scattered for two thousand years gets a place of its own where it can defend itself.
“Yes”, because when danger threatens us and the cry goes up, we need people around us to run toward it.
And “yes”, because we're from there.
But “yes” by itself isn't the Zionism I love.
So Straight Talk: Zionism: Here’s where it’s complicated.
Israel is only 78 years old. A human creation, amazing, inspiring, holy. A human creation, filled with flaws, some of them sad, some dangerous and unjust. And those flaws have to be faced. Like in America right now. Like in most of the world.
My Zionism holds that I can love Israel and its people, and still be disappointed, frustrated, angry. I can love Israel, and dislike or detest its government or its leaders.
Now I want to talk about the Israeli prime minister, and I want to be careful, because it would be easy to blame everything on one man. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu isn't the cause of the hatred against Israel. Because that hatred was here long before him. One major cause is that Israel is a Jewish state, in a region surrounded by roughly 50 Muslim-majority countries, and there are people who can't stand the idea of an empowered Jewish people able to protect itself.
But a leader's job is to stand watch, and on October 7th he didn't. And afterward he skipped what Israel has done after every terrible moment, which is to appoint an independent, non-political body to find out what went wrong. And he tainted Israel’s moral code by bringing racists - Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich - into the government and empowering them. And he tied Israel's fate to one American party, which wore away the bipartisan support Israel could claim for generations before.
And in the West Bank, some extremist settlers are attacking Palestinians. Burning homes, destroying fields, and too often the government is doing nothing to protect or stop this. Many of them are driven by a dream of a Greater Israel, keeping all the land, the West Bank included.
That is an anathema to the Zionism I embrace and to our Jewish values. When a government won't stop its own citizens from harming the people under its control, that government has to change. Not the country.
The extremist settlers and Gaza have something in common. Both are about what Israel does with its power, and Israel must be called out when that power is misused. But here is where I part ways with the harshest critics. They fold the ministers, the extremist settlers, and Gaza into a single word.
On October 8, before a single Israeli soldier had gone into Gaza, there were people calling Israel genocidal. Some of these same people later denied the sexual violence not matter the evidence, or said any act of resistance is fair.
I don't believe the word genocide fits. Here's why. The legal definition requires an “intent to destroy a people”, and I don't see that. Again and again during this war, Israel instructed Gazans to evacuate by leaflet and phone and text. In 2024, when polio came back to Gaza, Israel paused the fighting, region by region, three days at a time, and vaccinated 640,000 children. Warnings and pauses aren't what “intent to destroy a people” looks like.
Aid went in, and Hamas stole a lot of it. And Israel also cut off imports for a stretch in 2025, and we can’t pretend it didn't.
And just three weeks after October 7, a Hamas leader said on television, that they'd do it again, and again and again, and when asked if that meant Israel's annihilation, said, "Yes, of course."
That is horrific.
But let’s not let the argument over that word excuse our silence about the suffering.
We can argue about the numbers of dead. How many were fighters - I’ve heard 25,000, further evidence that it’s a war. We can compare Gaza to other wars and to actual genocides. We can blame Hamas for spending billions on tunnels to protect its fighters instead of building schools and homes and hospitals to protect its people.
Still, as Jews, our hearts must always break at the death and destruction.
It takes strength to feel the pain of others, even when some of the action might be justified for self-preservation. Israel has had to choose, again and again, between being loved and being protected.
But we must never write off a whole people. We must never stop believing in peace. The anthem of the Jewish state is HaTikvah, The Hope. Od lo avda tikvateinu: our hope is not yet lost. We built a country that sings about hope. We might as well act like it.
So how do you stay in a relationship that’s this complicated?
Rabbi Melissa Buyer-Witman in Port Washington, New York, delivered a Yom Kippur sermon on what she calls Covenantal Zionism.
She asked us to think about the people we're bound to and can't just walk away from: the spouse, the parent who pushes our buttons, the child whose choices we don't understand. Judaism has a word for that relationship: Brit. Covenant. Brit asks us to stay when leaving would be easier.
Rabbi Buyer-Witman cited a survey: sixty percent of Gen Z and half of Millennials, many of whom are also walking away from Israel, have gone "no contact" with someone close to them. Sometimes that's necessary. More and more it's just what many people do when something gets hard.
Being in relationship with Israel is hard. But it’s necessary, and it challenges our ideals.
Still, we are a people whose forebearer Abraham argued with God at Sodom. Abraham didn't walk away. He stayed in the covenant and argued. That's what I'm asking of us.
In 1927, the French Jewish writer Edmond Fleg wrote his poem, "Why I Am a Jew." In it he stated that he's a Jew “because the faith of Israel demands no abdication of my mind.” I have written my own version, still unfinished, about why I embrace Zionism, even in a time when some use it as a slur.
I am a Zionist
By Rabbi Paul Kipnes
I am a Zionist because my devotion to Israel demands no abdication of my values.
I am a Zionist because wherever a Jew suffers, the Zionist seeks to give solace and make safe.
I am a Zionist because whenever a cry of despair is heard, the Zionist acts.
I am a Zionist because Zionism calls Israel to place the humanity of all people above selfishness, racism and ego, above any one ideology, above Israel itself. And Zionism calls us, in the same breath, to protect our people Israel.
I am a Zionist because Zionism calls Israel to place peace above any dream of more land, which is a misunderstanding of what the Divine intended.
I am a Zionist because I can love Israel and be ashamed of what some do in its name.
I am a Zionist because I can grieve for the innocent on every side and still insist that a Jewish state has the right to defend itself.
I am a Zionist because Israel isn't finished. We keep transforming it.
I am a Zionist because I'm in this covenantal relationship with Israel, the land and the people, and I'm not walking away.
Friends,
whether you like the term Zionist or not, be in covenantal relationship with Israel. It’s your ancestral home. It’s our Jewish home.
Don’t walk away. Engage. Now.
Let’s continue the conversation with each other.
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