After my recent essay on Zohran Mamdani, I received an email from a reader in Rockland County, New York. For those unfamiliar with the area, Rockland County is home to one of the largest concentrations of Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews in the United States. Its neighboring village of Monsey has become a center of Jewish life for many Hasidic and Haredi communities.

The reader agreed with much of my Mamdani essay but suggested that the more interesting discussion wasn’t Mamdani himself. It was Zionism, or more specifically, the growing debate over Zionism and anti-Zionism.

His email arrived at an interesting moment because, truth be told, this is not an essay I particularly wanted to write. In fact, while researching it, I came across an argument by Sam Harris that almost convinced me not to write it at all.

Harris argues that perhaps the word “Zionism” has outlived its usefulness. No other country, he observes, possesses a special ideology devoted to explaining why it has a right to exist. France exists. Japan exists. Australia exists. Israel exists.

Why continue debating an “ism” that effectively serves as a permission slip for Jewish self-determination?

The observation stopped me in my tracks because, in a sense, this entire essay may be proving his point.

If Israel is approaching its eightieth birthday, why am I writing an essay explaining Zionism at all? Why am I once again defending a proposition that few other peoples are ever asked to defend?

For most of my adult life, Israel was not something that required defending. It was something we supported. We planted trees through the Jewish National Fund. We dropped coins into blue boxes. We prayed for the peace of Jerusalem. We celebrated Israel’s achievements in science, medicine, agriculture, technology, literature, and democracy.

Like many American Jews of my generation, I grew up viewing Israel not as a political abstraction but as a source of pride and connection. Its existence was not the subject of debate. Its future was. Its policies were. Its leaders were. But not its legitimacy. What never occurred to me was that, nearly eighty years after its founding, I would find myself pulled backward into a debate over whether the Jewish state should exist at all.

The answer, I suspect, is that while Harris may be right in principle, we do not yet live in that world. The debate continues. The legitimacy of Israel continues to be questioned. So I am reluctantly participating in a conversation I thought had been settled generations ago.

To be fair, Israel occupies a unique place in the modern imagination. Since its founding, it has fought multiple wars for its survival and continues to face adversaries that openly call for its destruction. It also remains at the center of an unresolved conflict that generates fierce debate over issues ranging from settlements and Palestinian statehood to accusations of........

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