Secular Zionism legitimizes the usurpation of Palestine by biblical Zionism.

Dr. Nader Andraos, Professor of Sociology at Harvard University, published an analytical article in the electronic magazine "Al-Furat" in its March 28, 2025 issue, titled "Secular Criticism of the Book of Exodus: The Confrontation between Edward Said and Michael Walzer." The article focuses on Professor Edward Said's criticisms of the methodology and theses of the American Jewish thinker Michael Walzer, one of the most important theorists of "just war" and the main exponent of the "liberal Zionist" school. Dr. Nader diverges in his approaches between Walzer's methodology and Edward's methodology, after revealing the most important political and intellectual visions of Michael Walzer regarding his position on the Zionist entity.

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that all currents of Zionist movements, from liberal, socialist, right-wing, biblical, and racist Zionism, have, with the intensification of the Palestinian and Arab struggle against the entity, diminished the distinction between them, to the point that they have become almost all a single Zionist current, with no clear boundaries between them. This article begins with a concise summary of Dr. Nader's approaches in his article—with my own adaptation—which brings to the surface the essence of the "liberal/secular Zionist" theses that legitimize and justify the usurpation of Palestine. These theses serve the right-wing and populist Zionist movement.

Dr. Nader begins by defining what is meant by liberal Zionism: "The intellectual and political trend that defends the legitimacy of the Zionist project based on concepts stemming from the liberal heritage, such as rights, citizenship, and religious freedom, and considers the two-state solution a just solution to the Palestinian issue." Dr. Nader analyzes the crisis faced by the thinkers of this movement, which is represented by "a fundamental contradiction between insisting on adhering to human rights and their universality, while simultaneously presenting liberal arguments for adhering to the Zionist project and the State of "Israel"."

Walzer published his book, Exodus and Revolution, in which he employed "the Jewish religious tradition to present a secular reading of the story of the Israelites' exodus from Egypt, as a model for every liberation movement." By basing liberal Zionism on religious heritage, Walzer sought to make it a competitor to another Zionism he considered harmful to the Zionist project: right-wing Zionism, which relied on the same heritage. After writing this book, Edward Said published a critical review of Walzer's book, in which he demonstrated the failure of Walzer's attempt to reverse his intention: "Instead of secularizing religion, he sanctified it by relying on an interpretive reading devoid of history." The subject of his book, Exodus and Revolution, is to answer the question: What is the role of religious traditions in shaping history? Walzer began exploring this question in his doctoral dissertation, published in 1965, entitled "The Revolution of Saints," a sociological and historical study of the role of certain trends in the Christian Reformation movement that led to the birth of Protestantism in shaping the modern world morally and politically. Walzer then authored his massive three-volume book, The Jewish Political Tradition, published between 2000 and 2018, which re-reads and reconstructs political philosophy in the Talmud. Dr. A rare example of Walzer's background is that he (Michael Walzer was never a Marxist or a pacifist. While criticizing the Vietnam War, Walzer makes clear in Just and Unjust Wars that he is not against wars in principle. The book was an attempt to clarify his moral position, combining an updated version of the medieval just war theory with various "historical explanations" from the Peloponnesian Wars, an ancient Greek war between Athens and Sparta, to the Vietnam War and the 1967 War. Walzer admits that his motivation for writing the book was to try to explain why he opposed the Vietnam War on the one hand, and supported Israel in the 1967 War on the other. Walzer began to see the Book of Exodus and the Prophet Moses everywhere he turned. The American Founding Fathers referred to the Book of Exodus, as did Oliver Cromwell, the author of the Glorious Revolution against the British monarchy, abolitionists, liberation theologians, and finally the civil rights movement. Walzer concluded that the Book of Exodus must be the basic model that contains the key to all revolutionary movements.) Walzer sought to distinguish between two types of Zionism: "Exodus Zionism" and "Messianic Zionism." Exodus Zionism focuses on the memory of the Israelites' flight from Egypt, their forty-year wandering in the desert, and their arrival at the Promised Land. Messianic Zionism, on the other hand, focuses on the future return of the Messiah and the resurrection that precedes His return. Walzer explains the difference between the two Zionisms: Exodus Zionism prioritizes human political autonomy and the ability to shape their own history. It tells the story of a human struggle against oppression and the journey through it to political maturity. Messianic Zionism, by contrast, is less "tragic" in its expression. It dreams of a sudden doomsday, not slow learning in the desert. "Exodus Zionism is moderate, rational, translatable, and accessible to revolutionaries and secular appropriation. Messianic Zionism belongs to the right-wing, from whom Walzer goes to great lengths to distance himself." The book aims to present a position that allows liberal Zionism to compete with right-wing Zionism on the same religious and textual level. However, this justification between the Zionism of the Book of Exodus and the Zionism of resurrection-based salvation is inaccurate. The story of the Exodus of the Israelites is itself apocalyptic. It includes the conquest of the "Canaanite" land and commands from the Jewish god, Yahweh, to slaughter its inhabitants. Michael Walzer says, "The Canaanites were explicitly excluded from the concern of the moral world. The commandments of Deuteronomy command that they should be expelled or killed, all of them—men, women, and children—and their idols should be destroyed." Here the article alerts us that this is what we would call genocide by today’s standards. However, Walzer quotes medieval Talmudic rabbis, including Maimonides of Andalusia, who invalidated this commandment. According to commentators, “the commandment applied only to a specific group of people mentioned in the text, who no longer exist or are currently unrecognizable.” This important issue was the subject of Edward Said’s response to Walzer in his book “Reading Canaanite,” published in 1986. It was the main point of confrontation between Edward Said and Michael Walzer. Said published an article entitled “Zionism from the Point of View of Its Victims.” In it, he argued that Zionism had no choice but to cling to the myth that the land of Palestine was a land without a people, or that even if it had a population, they were either “not of moral concern to the world,” or “nonexistent and no longer recognizable.” Edward Said found in Michael Walzer’s book, in which he ignored The very existence of the Palestinians confirms this analysis. Therefore, he began to refute his theses, which he promoted as secular liberalism: (Walzer's sole preoccupation was with right-wing Zionism, which relies on the Torah's commandment to kill all women and children to justify its actions. However, he was not concerned with the current reality in occupied Palestine. Rather, Walzer ignored the actual history that complicates his argument. For example, he says: "This commandment has no practical implications. The Jews returning to the land will not encounter the Hittites or the Amorites," but he does not name the Jews who will encounter them.) Edward Said describes Michael Walzer's interpretive tactic as "implication by postponement." By this, he means that Walzer promises to "discuss the problems posed by what he says later, but does not do so and continues to postpone them until they are forgotten and their impact is neutralized." The result, according to Edward, is "a false progressive label on deeply conservative ideas. He even offered a free gift to "loyal Zionism" and its dreams of the Day of Judgment." Edward Said criticizes the approach of this "liberal" Zionist, who champions the Zionist entity as part of the national liberation movement. He points out that the era of decolonization was supposed to have ended by the 1970s and 1980s, both intellectually and politically, with the exception of Nicaragua and South Africa. (The Western Left supported the Zionist entity before 1967 because it was a "socialist" experiment, especially when the alliance with the United States was not essential to its security. However, after 1967, this image of the entity became less credible due to the increased influence of the army, the entrenchment of the 1967 occupation, and the growing dependence on support from an external superpower, America—all traditional hallmarks of settler colonialism.) On the other hand, the New Left presented itself as opposed to the Vietnam War and the Cold War. How, then, can support for the Zionist entity be maintained in light of moral inconsistency? This dilemma defined the analytical model followed by Michael Walzer, as described by Edward Said. Walzer's goal was to convince his generation of the New Left that supporting the Zionist entity was not a renunciation of their progressive commitments. Edward Said therefore describes this element of Michael Walzer's argument as "rhetorical, with theoretical implications. There is a contradiction in Walzer's work between his claim to adhere to a universal argument, valid for every place, culture, and time, and his parallel commitment to the identity politics he discusses in his book *Spheres of Justice*, where he argues that "there is no single formula for equality since societies have their own standards of justice." In other words, Walzer prioritizes ethnic, religious, and national identities as the most important framing of the problem. Here, Walzer cites the position of the French novelist Albert Camus, focusing specifically on Camus's relationship with his French-Algerian origins and the Pieds-Noirs community during the Algerian War of Independence. Albert Camus criticized the excessive violence used by the Algerian National Liberation Front in its resistance to French colonialism and sympathized with those of his own identity—the French occupation—even though he represented the anti-colonial position in French intellectual circles. Walzer concludes from this example that the critic—meaning himself—“must speak only to those of his own identity—that is, the usurping Zionists—in order to address their conscience, and that identity, loyalty, and belonging take priority over abstract moral principles.” Thus, Michael Walzer’s aims are revealed when he emphasizes the importance of criticism, reflection, and commitment to universal ideals such as just war, while at the same time emphasizing the need for community and belonging. His goal is to “repackage the ethno-religious aspect of the Zionist project within frameworks that appear, on the surface, progressive and secular. This results in a closed moral universe in which the boundaries of the local community are accepted without question, and ethno-religious forms of identity and authority take priority.” Dr. It is rare that Edward Said rejects the notion of attachment to a particular identity as a sufficient measure of any critical act, even though he accepts the importance of this attachment, replacing it with what he considers another essential element: the extent to which the critic exposes himself to exclusion from his community. This seems to be the problem with the author of Exodus and Revolution. (Walzer exposes himself to no risk in any of his arguments. They satisfy both his "secular," or political, and "religious" commitments, because he has not risked either.) Edward Said has shown how "Israeli" citizenship, in particular, is defended by Walzer on ethnic and religious grounds, meaning that it cannot be a state "for all its citizens." That is, Edward insisted on highlighting the contradiction between ethnic and civic identity. The liberal Zionist Michael Walzer, while "secularizing" the Book of Exodus from the biblical narrative as a political wisdom that can be adopted and replicated by all liberation movements, as Zionism did in Palestine, has considered "secular history to be an infinite extension of the biblical narrative." Dr. Nader concludes his deconstructive article by saying, "The purpose of invoking the confrontation between Edward Said and Michael Walzer today is to expose the ways in which liberal Zionism relies on ethnic-religious myths and simultaneously denies them. Liberal Zionism's most dangerous illusion is that it believes it can control the consequences of its desires. Once myths and desires are invoked, control becomes difficult. Ultimately, any attempt to pit good ethnic-religious desires against evil ethnic-religious desires is doomed to collapse and fail. This is because the basis for this distinction is always left to those willing to risk realizing their myths. When the myths are realized, liberal intellectuals can keep their consciences clear because they are able to project their desires onto others and then claim that they are victims of the tragedy of history repeating itself." And that they "had good intentions..."

Methodology of Muhammad Abed al-Jabri and Samir Amin:

The transformations that the Zionist movement has undergone since its inception have demonstrated that its various forms of "communist" and "socialist" Zionism were encouraged and theorized by the Soviet Union, the socialist bloc, and the international communist parties affiliated with the Soviet center, including the Arab communist parties. This secular Zionism, which, in the early stages of the establishment of this entity, was able to play an influential role among the Zionist workers in Palestine. It was the one that promoted the idea of the “two-state solution,” which originally emerged from Soviet Moscow. It was not adopted by all UN resolutions related to the usurpation of Palestine, and was later adopted by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and rejected by most Palestinian and Arab leftist organizations not subject to the Soviet center. This “labor” and “socialist” Zionism, in light of the intensity of the Palestinian-Zionist conflict, soon saw its distinction from the rest of the currents of the liberal Zionist movement, the brutal neoliberalism, the religious Torah, and the populist racism diminish, and they all almost agreed on the major goals of the Zionist ideology based—according to the vision of the thinker Muhammad Abed al-Jabri, and with my modification—on the religious Torah “doctrine,” the racist Jewish “tribe,” and the “spoils” they seized from the wealth and lands of Palestine, as mentioned by “Yahweh” when he promised them a kingdom containing honey and milk and whatever their souls desired, and what the Zionist movement promised them, with all its diversity. Later, in a land without a people, for a people without a land!

The fusion and intermingling of all the currents of global Zionism into a single melting pot, into an entity of the “peripheries” of capitalism—according to the vision of the economic thinker Samir Amin, and with my own modification—is an essential feature of the “globalized” phase of post-imperialist fascist capitalism, in which the capitalist “center” countries, such as the United States, Britain, and France, have been able to erase the vast distinction between their right-wing parties—the American Republican Party and the British Conservative Party—and the liberal, labor, and even socialist parties—the American Democratic Party, the British Labor Party, and the French Socialist Party—so that all their positions and programs reflect the new goals of current fascist capitalism.

Thus, the disappearance of the distinction between the currents of the Zionist movement paralleled the disappearance of the distinction between the labor/socialist parties and the right-wing and populist parties in Europe and the United States. Just as the Zionist entity itself, as one of the parties within the capitalist camp, became a parasitic capitalist entity dependent on the main capitalist center, it transformed, like the capitalist centers, from "imperialist" capitalism to "fascist" capitalism.

............

Said published an article entitled "Zionism from the Point of View of Its Victims," in which he argued that Zionism had no choice but to cling to the myth that Palestine was a land without a people, or that even if it had a population, they were either "not of moral concern to the world," or "nonexistent and no longer recognizable."