A JUST ZIONISM: ON THE MORALITY OF THE JEWISH STATE
by Chaim Gans
Oxford University Press, 178 pp., $27.95
This is not a happy time for Zionists on the left, who have been in the Israeli political wilderness for years and have no champions on the horizon who seem capable of restoring them to power. But if their electoral prospects remain dim, they are still renewing their intellectual resources. Some of the best of them are on display in A Just Zionism: On the Morality of the Jewish State. In this insufficiently noticed book, now republished in paperback, Chaim Gans, a political philosopher and law professor at Tel Aviv University, has rethought and refashioned the liberal argument in favor of Zionism. He has done so, moreover, in ways that can be instructive to all of Israel's supporters, even those who may not always see eye to eye with him. In a book of fewer than one hundred and fifty pages he has presented a finely honed "philosophical analysis of the justice of contemporary Zionism as realized by the state of Israel, including Israel's territorial and demographic aspirations and the way it conceives of itself as a Jewish state." In the mine-strewn context of current wrangling over the rights and wrongs of Zionism, Chaim Gans' contribution stands out as a systematic analysis of unprecedented profundity. It merits the most serious intellectual and political attention.
Gans' defense of Zionism rests on two main arguments. One is the moral justification of ethno-nationalism in terms of a liberal worldview. The other is the justification of the Jewish people's specific need for, and entitlement to, self-determination in the particular territory known to Jews as the Land of Israel. While justifying and endorsing Zionism . . .
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