Benjamin Netanyahu condemned some of the judges in the illustrious Israel Prize jury as anti-Zionist extremists, and refused to authorize their participation in this year’s panel, though he later backed down following a national outcry.RONEN ZVULUN/Reuters
"The 2015 elections will go down in Israeli history as the most 'Zionist' in the annals of the state," veteran Israeli political columnist Akiva Eldar wrote this week.
It may seem a rather strange statement considering that Zionism was the rallying cry for a Jewish homeland more than a century ago and fell out of broad contemporary use after the state of Israel was established in 1948.
But Mr. Eldar is right. Not since 1975, when the UN General Assembly passed a resolution declaring that Zionism was a form of racism, has the subject been so hotly contested. The Z-word is on most people's lips in Israel these days, both those who are wrapping themselves in its banner, and those who denounce it.
The country's right wing utters it a lot, as a way of justifying the expansion of Israeli settlements into the "disputed" territory of the West Bank, home to 2.7 million Palestinians. Zionism, to these Israeli ultra-nationalists, means extending the boundaries of the Jewish state to all of Biblical Israel.
Zionism also is something the right accuses the left and the Arab Israeli community of opposing, and they mean it to sting. To be "anti-Zionist," they say, is to oppose the very existence of the state; even to seek to destroy it.
That is what they said last week of Hanin Zoabi, an Arab Member of Knesset from Nazareth in the predominantly Arab Galilee district of Israel, when the Central Elections Committee voted to disallow her from running in next month's parliamentary election.
Ms. Zoabi doesn't deny she's anti-Zionist. She argues that it is a discriminatory ideology, one that favours Jewish Israelis over Arab Israelis, who make up 20 per cent of the population. She argues that it is her right, as an Israeli, and her obligation as an Arab to express her views publicly.
Israel's Supreme Court agreed with her – by an 8:1 margin – in a verdict handed down Wednesday.
Right-wing political leaders denounced the verdict. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the Yisrael Beitenu party, said the ruling was "a mark of disgrace against Israeli democracy."
Of course, what's really prompted the resurgence of the Zionism debate is that an anti-Zionist party is poised to become the third largest bloc in the Israeli parliament.
Israelis elect their parliamentarians according to a proportional representation system, and the vote is always so dispersed that no one party can rule on its own; coalitions are the norm. In an effort to reduce the number of small parties in the Knesset, parliament voted recently to raise the threshold of votes needed for a party to win any seats.
Some thought this would reduce the number of Arab seats, since that community is always quite divided in its support for several parties. But the Arab parties succeeded in forming a combined Arab list, to which was added the joint Arab-Jewish Hadash party, historically a communist group.
According to recent polls, this list stands to win 12-15 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, putting it behind only the Likud party of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the joint Labour-Hatnua list led by Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni.
And so the name calling began.
Naftali Bennett, leader of the Jewish Home party, delivered a speech on Feb. 8 that described Arab Israelis as thieves. "Anyone who's gone travelling in the Negev in recent years knows that they can't leave their car … because it will be broken into and stolen," he said.
Others called Arab Israelis such as Ms. Zoabi "terrorists" and "traitors."
Even Mr. Netanyahu got into the act. He condemned some of the judges in the illustrious Israel Prize jury as anti-Zionist extremists, and refused to authorize their participation in this year's panel, though he later backed down following a national outcry.
So powerful has been the current of Zionism that the country's historic Labour Party felt compelled to change its name for the purpose of this election and to call itself and its Hatnua partner the Zionist Camp.
The very name of this bloc "conveys a message of cultural superiority of a close, superior group," said Amal Jamal, professor of political science at Tel Aviv University. What the political parties have learned, he says, is that "the more racist and vocal you are and the more you define the other side as a threat, the more votes you get."
It's worth noting that Mr. Herzog's father, Chaim Herzog, was Israel's ambassador to the United Nations when the Zionism-is-racism resolution was passed. He stood in the General Assembly that day and said the resolution "based on hatred, falsehood and arrogance, is devoid of any moral or legal value," before tearing it in half.
Avraham Burg's father, Yosef Burg, was a member of the very first Israeli Knesset, and one of the founders of the National Religious Party, a breakthrough movement in which Orthodox Jews embraced Zionism, something the ultra-Orthodox initially denounced as sacrilegious.
Today, the younger Mr. Burg, a former speaker of the Knesset and head of the Jewish Agency, has renounced the ideology that, he says, discriminates against Arab Israelis.
"Why do we need the Zionist definition?" Mr. Burg asked in a recent article, "unless we want to perpetuate the injustice and deprivation in the name of an ideology that has successfully achieved its goal and is past its expiration date."
Mr. Burg, once a leading member of the Labour Party, has recently joined Hadash, the joint Arab-Jewish leftist movement that has renounced Zionism.
"We are now at a critical juncture," Mr. Burg told reporters earlier this month. "In 20 years, the country will be in one of two places – either it will be a fundamentalist religious republic … or … we will see the establishment of an Israel-Palestine confederation with open borders."
Mr. Burg has opted for the latter, the road to which follows the anti-Zionism path.
He recalled that Chaim Weizmann, Israel's first president, said that history will judge the state of Israel by its attitude toward the Arab citizenry. It will not remember who shouted loudest "I am more Zionist."