Opinion | The Word Was Already Dying When We Were Debating It

Nadine Epstein has written a careful, historically grounded and well-intentioned essay about the death of a word. I don’t disagree with her diagnosis; I disagree with her timeline.

The word “Zionism” was already in crisis when I was a teenager debating it in the mid-1970s inside Young Judaea, the Zionist youth movement I grew up in. But the crisis wasn’t about toxicity. It was about relevance. We weren’t asking whether the word was dangerous. We were asking whether it still meant anything at all.

That distinction matters. Toxicity can be cured by better usage, clearer argument, more careful speakers. Irrelevance is a different kind of death. And it was irrelevance, not weaponization, that was already hollowing out the word when my generation was coming of age.

The central argument in our youth movement debates was straightforward: If the purpose of Zionism was to establish a Jewish state, and the Jewish state now existed, then what exactly was a Zionist anymore? Many of us landed on a clear answer: You could only claim the identity if you were committed to aliyah. Otherwise, you were an Israel supporter, which in itself is a fine thing to be but not the same thing. The movement had been built on chalutziut, on pioneering, on the idea that personal transformation and physical relocation were inseparable from political conviction. If you removed that demand, what was left?

Irrelevance, not weaponization, was already hollowing out the word when my generation was coming of age.

I was among the hardliners on this question. In 1984, before leaving Columbia University for Israel, I published a short story in the HaMagshimim Journal, the literary journal of Young Judaea’s graduate movement, that imagined a dystopian future in which a young American Jewish leader, facing the social pressure of mainstreamed anti-Zionism, renounces Zionism before a major Jewish gathering, declaring it is time to “move on from false ideologies.”

I wrote that as a warning. Reading Epstein’s essay 42 years later, I feel the strange vertigo of having watched the warning come true.

The youth movement debates of the 1970s and early 1980s also contained a second, less resolved argument, one that I think Epstein’s essay misses entirely. Among those of us who were genuinely committed to aliyah, who were making the journey, there was a fierce argument about what modern Zionism should look like once you arrived. Was it still chalutziut: the kibbutz, the frontier, the physical cultivation of the land? (Kibbutz Ketura, in the Arava desert, was the touchstone for this view.) Or had pioneering evolved into something else: founding Israel’s first world-class institutions, building things that would make Israel a full participant in the cultural and intellectual life of the world?

One of my friends from that era, a fellow Young Judaean who, like me, made aliyah, first chose to study viticulture and enology, so that he could revolutionize the Israeli wine industry (which he did at the Golan Heights Winery) from an afterthought into something taken seriously on the world stage. Was that Zionism? I believe it was. The argument we were having in our early twenties, before we’d actually done any of it, was not about whether to go, but about what building a country actually demands. That argument was real, and it was serious, and it had nothing to do with bumper stickers or UN resolutions.

It is this argument, about content rather than nomenclature, that I miss most in the current discourse, including in Epstein’s otherwise thoughtful piece.

David Ben-Gurion, as Epstein notes, tried to retire the word himself in 1957. He lost that battle because too many organizations, like now, had too much invested in the label. The word survived, but hollowed out: increasingly decoupled from any behavioral demand, available for anyone to claim and therefore available for anyone to weaponize.

I understand why Epstein wants to finish what Ben-Gurion started. The case she makes, that the word now generates more heat than light, is empirically true. And her prescription, to speak in specifics rather than invoke the term, is sensible advice for a certain kind of conversation, in a certain kind of context.

But I want to offer a different perspective, from someone who has now lived in Israel for more than four decades.

I still identify as a Zionist. Not despite the word’s baggage, but because of what it costs to mean it. The core proposition of classical Zionism, that Jews can only be truly free and truly at home in their own sovereign homeland, resonates today more urgently than at any time since my youth. What I have watched unfold in the United States, Canada and Australia over the past several years, accelerating since October 7, is the thing I believed was theoretically inevitable when I left in 1984: the steady erosion of Jewish belonging in a society that once seemed to offer a permanent exception to Jewish history.

Epstein writes from the diaspora, where the word has become a liability. I write from Beer-Sheva, where the question the word Zionism was invented to answer—where are Jews safe? where are Jews home?—is not abstract.

I wouldn’t mourn the death of the word. Perhaps it deserves to die. But I would ask that before we bury it, we take seriously what gets buried with it: the demand that conviction be embodied, not merely declared; the argument about what it means to build something, not just to support it from a distance; and the recognition that the question Zionism was invented to answer has not, in fact, been resolved.

Epstein is right that we need language that moves us forward. I would only add: Forward toward what, exactly? That question is older than the current toxicity, and harder than any change of vocabulary will solve.

[This piece is a response to Nadine Epstein’s essay “The Word Zionism Is Dead.” For all responses, click here.]

Daniel Chamovitz is President of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Chair of the Committee of University Heads in Israel. He made aliyah in 1984. He writes the Substack newsletter Letters from the Negev.