Israel in modern Jewish identity: an internal debate

Contemporary Jewry is burdened by a fierce debate about Zionism and Israel. A sizeable sector of Jewish academics, where leftists and self-declared liberals are strongly represented, criticises the Jewish state to the point of casting doubts regarding its very existence. Although their argumentation is frequently similar to the utterances of non-Jewish antisemites, what moves these Jewish Israel-critics is not so much Jews and Judaism but rather the Zionist idea. Such anti-Israel Jews are influenced by modern ideological trends and pressures that affect also, strangely enough, certain Israeli Jewish intellectuals. These developments happen on the background of an increasing pattern of Jew-hatred in non-Jewish society, a transformation of past antisemitism now expressed as anti-Israelism.