The Progressive Zionist Has Become an Endangered Species

I am a progressive Zionist — someone who believes Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish homeland and Palestinians have a right to self-determination, and who refuses to conflate the Jewish state with any single politician. This used to be a large, confident tribe in American life. Today it has become a politically endangered species, and that is dangerous — not only for American Jews, but for the bipartisan consensus that has underwritten Israel’s security for generations.

The origin story of my relationship with Israel was shaped by standing on the South Lawn of the White House as a young staffer in 1993 watching my boss Bill Clinton broker the Oslo Accords between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat. After signing the accord, Rabin defiantly declared: “Enough of blood and tears! Enough!”

Unlike my teenage daughters, I grew up knowing Israel as a peacemaker, not a warmonger.

My first trip to Israel on Nov. 5 ,1995 wasn’t a Birthright trip or a family vacation. It was a mission: I was urgently flown to Jerusalem on a military transport plane as part of a mostly Jewish White House advance team because Prime Minister Rabin had just been assassinated and would be buried within 24 hours, according to Jewish tradition.

My first trip to Israel was to bury one of the great Israeli peacemakers.

The following spring I returned to Israel with President Clinton to campaign for the pro-peace candidate against a young, articulate hardliner named Benjamin Netanyahu to succeed Rabin as prime minister.

I often think about those three flashpoints in history. In an alternate universe, Rabin lives. In another, Netanyahu loses. But in this one, entire generations have come to experience Netanyahu as the de facto king of Israel. That fusion is not just a branding problem; it is a political and moral paradox for Jews who want to defend Israel’s legitimacy while opposing the ideology of permanent conflict.

When I worked for Bill Clinton, the Democratic Party was a natural home for traditionally liberal American Jews. Clinton staunchly supported Israel and spent his final weeks in office unsuccessfully pushing both sides toward a two-state deal. Peace requires partnership, and many chapters of the peace process, including Clinton’s final push for peace, have been stymied by the obstinance of Palestinian leadership. But as Netanyahu has retained power across decades and fended off corruption probes by aligning with far-right extremists, entire generations of American voters only know an Israel run by Netanyahu that’s transformed a two-state solution from a political project into a fairy tale.  This dynamic has only emboldened enemies of Israel and inflamed antisemitism.

I grew up in Greenwich Village and Venice Beach in the ’70s and ’80s believing antisemitism was a punchline in a Woody Allen film. If anything, as someone who believed more in string theory than the Torah, I experienced peer pressure to be more Jewish, not less.

During the pandemic school closures in Los Angeles, that assumption collapsed.

I watched powerful progressive institutions — especially the teachers union — supporting BDS-style measures like boycotting Israel years before the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre. It was hardly reassuring to Jewish students like my daughters, isolating at home, to know that their own teachers didn’t think our people should have a homeland.

At the same time, when I began organizing with Jewish parents to reopen all schools for all kids after a lost year for our children, we were targeted and attacked as Jewish parents by the teachers union, and treated as suspect outsiders in our own communities. That was the first time I felt the political ground shifting beneath progressive Zionists in America.

Like many secular Jews, Oct. 7 was my bar mitzvah. It was the day I transitioned from being Jew-ISH to JEWISH. I grew up with a healthy dose of privilege. But in the days and years following Oct. 7, like many Jews, I’ve felt a lot less privileged.

Antisemitism is not a problem confined to the left. Trump and the right continue to embrace devout antisemites and normalize antisemitic tropes. To state the obvious, Nazism is a right-wing movement.

Jews are being squeezed from both sides, which makes it even more urgent that the center space — the place where we can support Israel, support democracy, oppose antisemitism and oppose permanent war — does not collapse. The path forward for the Jewish Diaspora and Israel’s long-term security requires rebuilding a home for progressive Zionists in American life.

That means progressive institutions must treat antisemitism like any other prejudice and stop using “Zionist” as an epithet. It means Reform Jewish leaders must model how to love Israel while challenging its government. It means schools must scrub antisemitism from their ethnic studies curricula. And it means pro-Israel politics in America must decouple support for Israel’s security from unconditional support for any single leader — especially one whose governing coalition requires permanent war.

If we cannot rebuild that vital center, American Jews risk going it alone in a world with antisemitism metastasizing on the left and right. And Israel risks losing durable bipartisan American support that’s been the bedrock of its security for generations.

Ben Austin is an experienced political activist and thought leader in LA.