A Labor-party member of Israel’s Knesset gave an impassioned speech last week accusing the Israeli right of having “lost Zionism some time ago.” In fact, Liel Leibovitz argues, the speech by Stav Shaffir, widely circulated online, shows Labor as the party that has lost touch with the Zionist spirit:
As students of history know, Zionism is notoriously elusive. Conceived as a movement to create a national homeland for Jews, the ideology had always contained multitudes, accommodating those who believed that Jews should settle only in the Promised Land and those who were willing to settle for Uganda, those who saw Zionism as a cultural undertaking and those who understood it as a socioeconomic quest, those who sought answers in the heavens and those who planted trees in the ground. It could welcome the pragmatist [David] Ben-Gurion and the hardliner [Vladimir] Jabotinsky, the agnostic [Max] Nordau and the pious Rabbi [Tzvi Hirsh] Kalischer. It was, by design, extremely elastic.
As such, Labor’s attempt to redefine Zionism with its own narrow political agenda is an affront to the very thing that has kept the movement vibrant and successful. And it’s more than a small slight: look deep in the heart of Zionism, and you’ll find a spiritual core that Labor’s current pronouncements have all but extinguished.
Read more on Tablet: http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/188666/israels-new-zionist-camp