AN ETHNO-STATE IS INHERENTLY ILLIBERAL:
The liberal Zionist dilemma: A contradiction in search of a solution increasingly sharpened by war, settlements and demographic parity (Leon Hadar, September 19, 2026, Asia Times)
Strip away the polemics on both sides, and the structural problem is fairly simple to state. Zionism, as a historical movement, was a 19th-century national-liberation project: the claim that Jews constituted a nation entitled to self-determination on a specific piece of territory.Liberalism, as a political tradition, is committed to individual rights, pluralism, and, in its more universalist versions, a certain skepticism toward ethnic or religious particularism as the organizing principle of a state.
Liberal Zionism is the attempt to hold both of these commitments simultaneously: a state that is both a Jewish national home and a liberal democracy extending equal rights to all who live under its authority, including the roughly five million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza who have no vote in the government that controls their lives, and the two million Arab citizens of Israel proper who do vote but have long complained of structural inequality.