Liberal Zionism Enters The Bargaining Stage of Grief
Ezra Klein and Jonathan Chait try to convince us (and themselves) a better Israel is possible. It's not.
In her 1969 book On Death and Dying, psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross introduced the five stages of grief experienced by terminal patients: denial, bargaining, anger, depression, and acceptance. Though Kübler-Ross’s work focused on humans grappling with the end of their lives, grief and the strategies for coping with it appear whenever there is loss. That loss can be physical, mental, or ideological, as is the case with liberal Zionists struggling to rationalize the slow death of their namesake ideology.
The demise of liberal Zionism was inevitable. Liberalism believes in democratic equality regardless of race, religion, or other protected traits. Alternatively, Zionism is the belief in a Jewish supremacist ethnostate, a direct violation of the liberal belief in legal equality. Liberal Zionism is an inherently contradictory ideology, no different than being an anti-racist segregationist or a MAGA socialist. Political projects can exist and thrive with contradictions, but only if the contradictions are acknowledged as temporary. If there is no plan to resolve the contradiction, or if it is ignored, the project will implode. Slavery was the prominent contradiction for 19th-century liberal democracies. The British Empire resolved this contradiction by prioritizing liberty over bondage and legislatively abolishing the slave trade in 1837. Because the United States refused to address the contradiction and kept kicking the can down the road, the lack of a resolution led to the bloody Civil War.
“In the [liberal Zionist] view, Jewish history shows that Jews need and are entitled to a nation-state of their own. But they also think that this state must be a liberal democracy, which means that there must be strict equality before the law independent of religion, ethnicity, or gender.” — Carlo Strenger
“Liberal Zionism is an ideology that provides cover for and advances the settler-colonial conquest of Palestine in the name of rationality, progress, equality, tolerance, democracy, and even anti-racism.” — Muhannad Ayyash
Much like the slave states that tried to hypocritically justify slavery by pointing to the Bill of Rights’ guarantees of liberty, liberal Zionists’ refusal to address their ideological paradox has led to its demise. As support for Israel craters in the United States, with the largest drop-offs among left-leaning and younger Americans, liberal Zionists see the writing on the wall. Their belief that Israel could exist as a liberal democracy for one ethnicity and a racial caste system for the rest is nearing death. So, they are grieving. Not just for the loss of liberal Zionism as an acceptable political belief in the United States, but also for the loss of their place as political thought leaders directing the national Democratic Party.
As support for Israel began dropping in 2023, liberal Zionists went through the anger and denial stages to cope with their loss of stature. Throughout the Biden presidency and into Trump’s second term, Matthew Yglesias aggressively defended Israel as waging a “just war” and denied that the Gaza genocide was a political liability for Democrats. (May, 2024: “Is Gaza hurting Biden in the eyes of the public because voters are pro-Palestinian? No.”) Liberals have always been sour that the pro-Palestine left opposes Israel. But the post-October 7th reaction went from annoyance to psychotic fury. In August of 2024, Jonathan Chait spewed his rage at anti-genocide protestors across the pages of New York Magazine, accusing them of wanting to genocide Jews.
“The [Palestine liberation] movement could not be any clearer on this point. Its members will not stop harassing and intimidating Jewish people. Nor will they adopt any standard of behavior. When they say they believe they are part of the Palestinian liberation movement, and that the movement is entitled to use any means necessary, that is exactly what they mean.
What Democrats and progressives need to decide is whether to treat these groups as noble idealists broadly on the right side of history or as the fanatic adherents of an illiberal and unjust program. In the Middle East, that program calls for endless war until the Jews have been expurgated from a soil on which they unnaturally reside. In the West, it means imposing social norms that make most Jews feel alien and unwelcome.
To advance justice for Palestinians and Jews does not require placating, forming alliances with, or ceding “leverage” to followers of this hateful program. The morally just response is to meet this ideology the way liberals meet other forms of hate: by calling it what it is.”
Even well-mannered Ezra Klein has previously struggled to contain his distaste for critics of Zionism. Not long after the start of the “Israel-Hamas War” (his framing), Klein made explicitly religious arguments for Israel’s ethno-nationalism, derisively saying:
“When people read [the Torah], it is an account of the Jewish people being expelled violently, repeatedly, from Jerusalem, which was not located at that time in New Jersey; it was there in the same place. There's a very ancient connection for the Jewish people to that land. When did the statute of limitations on Jewish expulsion run out?”
(Though Ezra Klein believes a 3,000-year-old religious history should determine modern Israeli politics, he’s also argued that Ta-Nehisi Coates’s incorporating the legacy of Jim Crow into modern politics is “too wide a historical scope.” Ezra Klein’s body of work shows that Zionism cannot be separated from its racist underpinnings, even if the Zionist believes they are fighting for social justice.)
While anger and denial still linger in the liberal Zionist psyche, the complete collapse of Americans’ sympathy for Israel has forced these prominent pundits into the bargaining stage of grief. As more and more Democratic politicians call to end funding for all Israeli weaponry, and the party opens up to anti-genocide voices such as Hasan Piker, liberal Zionists have filled the pages of America’s most prominent newspapers with their inner negotiations, attempting to convince their readers and themselves that Israel can still be a peaceful democracy — if only we ignore all evidence to the contrary. Each of these attempts to strike a bargain makes concessions to the anti-Zionist left. With Israel critics racking up wins in Democratic primaries, liberal Zionists are bargaining for a tactical retreat within the Democratic tent. Not because their morals compel them to stop Zionism’s century-long killing spree, but to ensure Israel maintains some relevance in the Democratic Party.
In a recent essay, Jonathan Chait implores his fellow liberal Zionists to make concessions to the “Hasan Piker extremist wing” of the Democratic Party. Otherwise, Chait warns, the establishment won’t be able to “hold on to the party.”
“A debate over American policy toward Israel is likely to divide the party in the next presidential-primary cycle even more clearly than Medicare for All divided it in 2020—even as many voters aren’t invested in the debate at all. The Democrats’ establishment opposes terrorism and backs a two-state solution; Piker and his allies want to cast that position as de facto support for the status quo, which is a single state controlled by Israel. If the establishment has any hope of holding on to the party, rather than surrendering it to the Piker wing, it will need to defy that characterization by recognizing that facts on the ground have changed. Political morals and public opinion are pushing in the same direction: ending American financial support for Israel.
The most essential task for liberal Zionists is to separate their ambitions from the stubborn realities of Israel’s government. Liberal Zionists can say that they oppose the status quo and favor two independent states, but as Israel’s willingness to trade land for peace recedes further into historical memory, those pleas sound detached from reality. The traditional Democratic posture is becoming outright impossible as long as the party continues to support sending billions of dollars to Israel every year.”
Conceding to pro-Palestine Democrats is a massive shift for Chait, who just two years ago demanded Democrats shun the anti-Zionist “hate movement.” His complete heel turn isn’t because Chait is concerned for Israel’s victims, but because he’s concerned for Israel — specifically, the flow of American weaponry it relies on. I’m sure this was a hard pill for Jonathan Chait to swallow. Which is why he’s being extremely honest with the like-minded The Atlantic readership by telling them that if the Democratic establishment continues supporting Israel uncritically, the progressive left will defeat them and transform the party into a fully anti-Zionist organization. To be fair to Jonathan Chait, he’s right. Democratic voters hate Israel almost as much as they hate Donald Trump. AIPAC-backed Senate candidate Haley Stevens was recently booed at the Michigan Democratic Convention. Staying the course is political suicide for Democratic Zionists.
Chait tries to make his message more palatable to his audience by offering them the easy way out: criticize Netanyahu. He is warning them that either liberal Zionists must retreat and concede the battle, or they risk losing the war.
“Liberal Zionists can win an intra-Democratic argument against anti-Zionist radicals, but they can’t win it while burdened with support for subsidizing settlements and a strategy of endless conflict. The most extreme anti-Zionist activists won’t be satisfied with anything short of committing the Democratic Party to Israel’s demise. But the most left-wing position in recent Democratic primaries—on Iraq in 2004, on health care in 2016—has rarely been adopted by the candidate who emerges as the party’s eventual nominee. The decisive bloc of Democrats includes those who are disgusted with Israel’s policies and ready to wash their hands of American support for its maximalist strategy, but wary of going full Piker. Either mainstream Democrats will give up any illusions they have about the ugly nature of Israel’s current government, or they will no longer occupy the mainstream of their party.”
To a rational observer, Jonathan Chait’s quick change from “pro-Palestine voices should be shunned” to “we must give in to their demands for our own survival” shows that his original ideology was extremely flawed. Someone with sensible control over their beliefs would stop and ask, “Two years ago, I said these people wanted to kill me. Now I’m saying we must admit they’re right. What else am I wrong about?” But in the liberal Zionist mind, which has psychologically invested in the worldview of Zionist founder Theodore Herzl that Israel is “a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism,” it is too difficult to admit they were fooled. It’s important to remember that liberal Zionists don’t consider their beliefs contradictory. Instead, they subscribed to Zionism’s racist belief that Arabs cannot accept pluralistic democracy, which justifies the suppression and expulsion of Palestinians and the Lebanese as a necessary step to spread Israel’s “liberal values.” Essentially, liberal Zionists think it's okay to have Jim Crow apartheid if the oppressor also hosts an annual gay pride parade.
Rather than resolve this contradiction plaguing his beleaguered mind, Jonathan Chait is watching liberal Zionism disappear before his eyes. Too late to stop it, all he can do is bargain with the Democratic Party, his fellow liberal Zionists, and most obviously, himself, to maintain a shred of credibility as liberal Zionism falls into the historical dustbin alongside segregation and colonialism.
A more polished episode of liberal-Zionist bargaining appears in Ezra Klein's recent work. Arguably the most prominent liberal Zionist in mainstream media, Klein deserves credit for criticizing Israel more than his peers. Still, that criticism always ends with him throwing up his hands and saying, “Nothing we can do!” instead of calling for international pressure to stop the slaughter he claims to oppose.
In a recent episode of his podcast, Ezra Klein discusses Israel’s colonization of Palestine with the editors of The One State Reality. The conversation centers on the West Bank, the arena in which liberal Zionists are most likely to criticize Israel because its apartheid policies are the least defensible. (When I reviewed Alan Dershowitz’s book for Jacobin last year, even he admits the West Bank segregation is indefensible.) Like Chait, Ezra Klein goes out of his way to argue that making concessions to the anti-Israel forces in the Democratic Party is a painful but necessary tactic to preserve long-term American support for Israel. Here’s him saying so in the episode prelude:
“I am not someone who wants to see the state of Israel cease to exist. But what Israel is choosing here — a one-state reality, which already is and will continue to be understood the world over as apartheid — endangers that state, too. The cost of Israel cannot morally be the permanent subjugation of millions of Palestinians.
In February, Gallup found, for the first time, that more Americans polled sympathized with the Palestinians than the Israelis. Among Democrats, among young Americans, it is not even close. Israel maintains support among older Americans, and it has benefited from the advanced age of the last two presidents, whose views of Israel were forged in another time, around another Israel. American politics has not yet fully grappled with what Israel has chosen to become. But it will — and soon.”
Throughout the conversation (which is worth listening to), Ezra Klein attempts to delicately walk what I previously called his “genocide tightrope.” On one side, Klein strongly criticizes Israeli settler terrorism and apartheid in the illegally occupied West Bank. On the other side, he tries to protect Israel by arguing that this violence is something new, a deviation from the “true” version of Israel. He also cynically suggests that the victims of Israeli violence bear some of the blame for their condition, saying the “wars” in Lebanon and Gaza are justified — they are not, and have been internationally condemned as illegal and immoral.
To give himself plausible deniability that he’s supporting radical religious militarism, Ezra Klein uses the framing of “Israeli Jews say” to advance the Zionist argument. It’s a cop-out that I’ve never heard Klein use for any other demographic, the media version of “i’M jUsT aSkInG qUeStIoNs BrO!” Here’s Klein using the “Israeli Jews say” framing to advance the argument that Gazans must be concentrated for Israeli “security.”
“When I speak to Israeli Jews about this, their view is that they did not have control of Gaza. They had withdrawn from Gaza, and after they withdrew, Gazans chose Hamas, a group dedicated to Israel’s destruction. And eventually the result was Oct. 7. And so to many Jewish Israelis, the lesson of the Gaza withdrawal is not that they had too much control but that they had too little — that they had offered too much autonomy and more than a thousand of their citizens paid a terrible price for that.”
Klein uses “Israeli Jews” again to argue that West Bank aggression is the result of the Palestinian refusal to accept earlier peace accords:
“I was doing a bunch of reporting before we had this conversation, and one of the things I found myself talking about with a number of Israelis was the collapse of faith among Israeli Jews in simply the idea of political deals. This was true with their views after the peace process: ‘We tried a peace process, and we got the second intifada.’ This was also true, to some degree, in what you’re saying about Hamas and Gaza. There was a sense that they were letting in more money and trying to stabilize [Gaza].”
And once again to suggest that Israel’s invasion of Lebanon is to keep Israelis “safe.”
“I’ve talked to Israeli Jews who live in the north, and they say: ‘Look, I can see Hezbollah members from my home. How am I supposed to allow my family to live there?’ During the Gaza war, there was rocket fire. You had the evacuation of the Israeli north. The people I spoke to felt completely failed by this.”
By claiming he’s speaking for “Israeli Jews” and not himself, Ezra Klein is arguing for his Zionist beliefs without compromising his liberal ones. He doesn’t want to say, “Israel might need to occupy Lebanon so that Israeli Jews feel safe,” because that directly violates liberal values. Instead, he pretends Israel is like any rational actor, then uses the framing of “Israeli Jews” to argue for the specific violations of democratic values. He further tries to protect Israel by claiming that the current Israeli government and military are somehow a bastardization of real Zionism.
“One of the things that we were looking at when we were preparing for this episode was the way the composition of the Israeli military, Israeli cabinet officials, but also Israeli military leadership, has changed. The Israeli military leadership used to be highly professionalized, often very centrist. There’s been a rolling purge, replacement, under Netanyahu, as he’s tried to put people who are more loyal to him into senior positions. In order to sustain itself, his coalition has had elements — like Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich — who in Israel had been seen as much more extreme.”
Of all the excuses liberal Zionists make for Israelis, the attempt to portray the Israeli government and its military as separate from the Israeli people is the most pathetic. Israel is an ethnic democracy. If you are Jewish, you have full democratic rights. Israeli Jews have repeatedly elected Likud and Benjamin Netanyahu. By passing race-based execution laws, massacring Palestinians, and cleansing Shia Muslims from Lebanon, the Netanyahu government is not acting against the wishes of the Israeli people — it is fulfilling them. Polling shows Israelis overwhelmingly support the IDF’s cleansing of Lebanon, as they did with the ethnic cleansing of Gaza at the height of the genocide. If the Israeli people were unhappy with the Netanyahu government, the Israeli Knesset could vote to dissolve itself and trigger elections. It has not, because Israelis support their national violence. It is also disingenuous of Ezra Klein to imply that a more “centrist” Israeli political coalition would be less imperialist. His conversation is about the West Bank and Lebanon. Leftist, centrist, and right-wing Israeli governments have occupied the West Bank since 1967. As for Lebanon, the pre-Netanyahu government shelled the civilians of Beirut back in 1982. With the October election looming, Netanyahu’s centrist opponents are attacking him for being too soft on Israel’s enemies. The opposition leader, Yair Lapid, condemned the ceasefire in Lebanon (which Israel immediately broke) and stated the only way to end the “war” is the “permanent removal of the threat to the northern settlements.” By which he means a permanent Israeli occupation of Lebanon. The far-right, hyper-militaristic government of Benjamin Netanyahu is not an affront to Israeli society, its citizens, or their values. It is a product of them.
What’s most striking about this episode is how clearly the contradictions of Ezra Klein’s politics are. Well, they’re clear to everyone but him. At one point, Klein explicitly details the reality of what Israel is, accusing it of “building illegal settlements at a record pace,” “protecting a terrifying rise in settler violence,” and “using the war in Iran as cover to invade Lebanon, displacing more than a million people.” And yet, in the very next sentence, he retreats into the Zionist safe space of saying Israel has to do something about Hamas and Hezbollah.
“I do not want to underplay what Israel is actually dealing with here. I have immense sympathy for Israel’s war against Hezbollah. They’re defending themselves in a way any state would. But this is collective punishment. Those million Lebanese are not all Hezbollah.
Israel’s security challenges are very real. Its horror, its fear, its trauma after Oct. 7 is very real. Its determination to make sure that never happens again is what any state and any people would do. Its right to reprisal against Hamas and Hezbollah is undeniable.”
Ezra Klein seems to honestly think Israel is invading Lebanon for any reason except to cleanse and occupy it. It is a truly revealing admission, considering he has previously suggested Democrats abandon trans rights and reproductive rights to win elections. It appears the Zionist belief that Israel is a perpetual victim that should always be given the benefit of the doubt is one of the only true values Klein holds.
The jumping back and forth between accusing Israel of war crimes and saying the context of those crimes is justified shows that Ezra Klein has yet to reach the acceptance stage of grief. He claims Israel is “defending itself” from Hezbollah. But Hezbollah was only created to defend Lebanon from Israel. He also says Israel has a “right to reprisal.” It does not. International law specifically rejects the right to reprisal by targeting civilians, which none can deny Israel has done over the last two and a half years. As for the claim Israel should defend itself from paramilitary resistance groups, in 2004, the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel has no right to claim “self-defense” in areas it illegally occupies. Despite his willingness to criticize specific actions of the Israeli state, Ezra Klein is unwilling and unable to accept the reality of what Israel is, of what it always has been. Not yet ready to accept the death of liberal Zionism, Ezra Klein bargains with himself by promoting blatant lies about Israel’s nature or its violations of international law. But he is also putting forth another offer to Israel’s critics, one that the anti-Zionist left should reject.
It is clear that Ezra Klein believes the path to peace is through Israeli goodwill. It is not. Palestinian rights are not contingent on whether the “Israeli Jews” Ezra Klein loves to center feel like giving it to them. Rights and safety are often inversely correlated. I would be “safer” if every person except me were put in prison. But my “safety” is of far lesser importance than the right of everyone else to be free. While Chait and Klein’s encouragement for concessions is aimed at their fellow liberal Zionists, they are attempting to reach an agreement with the anti-Zionist left that Palestinian rights must be agreed to by the Israelis, and their “security concerns” are valid. They are not. The truth is that the Israelis are not good-faith actors. They bombed seven countries in 2025. A new U.N. report shows Israel killed forty-seven women and girls every day during the Gaza genocide (which is still happening, despite Israel’s agreement to the “ceasefire”). Disturbing reports from Israel’s infamous Sde Teiman torture camp show IDF guards are using dogs to rape detainees. All of this on top of the valid charge of genocide, which the international community has a duty to prevent.
There is no deal to be struck with the Israelis or the media allies that defend them. The Palestinians want equal treatment. The Israelis want to deny it to them. That is the situation. Much like apartheid South Africa, the Jim Crow South, or Nazi Germany, the solution to genocidal Israel is for those of good conscience to use economic, cultural, and political leverage to impose a transition to democracy and dignity for all, regardless of whether the Israeli people want it. If Ezra Klein and Jonathan Chait had wanted a different outcome, they should have resolved the contradiction of liberal Zionism long ago. They chose ignorance, so this is the solution they’re getting.
There is no bargain to be made. So liberal Zionists should hurry up and get to acceptance. Your ideology was always wrong. Time to take it off life support.
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In Solidarity — Joe
"Liberal" zionism sounds a lot like "kinder-gentler" nazism. Oxymoronic.
Many years ago the godfather of far right Zionism Rabbi Meir Kahane in an interview with French journalists logically deconstructed liberal Zionist ideology. I never had any liking for Kahane but the man was right about the contradictions of liberal Zionism.