Zionism is not collapsing because its premise has been disproven. Israel exists, Hebrew lives again, and Jewish sovereignty has been restored in history, not in metaphor.
The failure we are witnessing now is not ideological defeat but ideological neglect. Zionism is not losing the argument; it is losing the muscle memory required for Jews to live as a people under pressure. That muscle memory once defined the movement’s seriousness and discipline. Today, it has atrophied through neglect rather than defeat.
This needs to be written now because we are living through the most dangerous lie Zionism has told itself since its founding: that survival can be outsourced and seriousness deferred. October 7 did not happen in a vacuum, nor did the global eruption of antisemitism that followed it. What we are witnessing is not a sudden wave of hatred but the collapse of a long-standing illusion of institutional sufficiency. That illusion told Jews that safety was permanent, their institutions were durable, and history had softened. History, as it always does, proved otherwise.
This is a Zionist State of the Union, delivered at the point where denial has become dereliction, reassurance has become complicity, comforting lies have replaced leadership, and the cost of avoidance has already been paid in Jewish lives. Zionism today is at precisely that moment.
The question is no longer whether Israel has the right to exist, a debate long settled in blood and fact. The question is whether Jews – especially outside Israel – are prepared to live as a people who understand power, danger, and responsibility. Silence at this moment is not neutrality: It is surrender by omission.
October 7 massacre exposed a civilizational failure
October 7 did not only exposed a security failure or an intelligence lapse. It exposed something far more uncomfortable and systemic: a civilizational failure. A global Jewish ecosystem mistook stability for permanence, symbolism for strength, and moral language for power. What shattered that morning was not only a border but an entire set of assumptions. Zionism, many believed, could be preserved through ceremonies, press releases, and nonprofit professionalism. That belief did not survive contact with reality.
Zionism was never meant to be a brand: It was meant to be an operating system for the Jewish people. It was designed to shape how Jews thought, organized, defended themselves, and transmitted responsibility across future generations. An operating system either runs or it crashes. What we are witnessing now is not sabotage from the outside but decay from within.
The system was never updated for a hostile environment. Early Zionism understood this instinctively. It did not begin with legitimacy but with preparation. Language came before recognition, defense before sympathy, and institutions before applause. The movement’s founders argued ferociously among themselves, but they agreed on one essential truth: Jews could not remain a people in history unless they learned to act like one. That conviction produced what Zionist thinkers called the “New Jew” – not a fantasy but a correction for centuries of enforced dependency.
The New Jew was rooted in land, language, labor, and responsibility. He or she was capable of self-defense and collective action. Most importantly, the New Jew did not require permission to exist. This ideal was never about abandoning ethics or compassion. It was about ending dependence on others for survival.
Sovereignty was understood as a prerequisite for moral agency. For much of the past thirty years, Zionist institutions – especially in the Diaspora – have drifted away from this foundational seriousness. Many have become legacy nonprofits optimized for donor comfort, media cycles, and symbolic advocacy rather than civic formation.
This is not an indictment of every individual or organization, many of whom act with courage and integrity. It is a critique of a dominant institutional culture that has struggled to adapt to a hostile environment. That failure of adaptation has had consequences.
These institutions learned how to fundraise, message, host conferences, and build museums. What they stopped doing at scale was producing Jews capable of withstanding hostility without collapsing into explanation mode. Optics replaced preparedness, and visibility substituted for resilience. When the world turned hostile, as it always does, there was nothing beneath the slogans. The infrastructure of seriousness had been quietly dismantled.
The problem is not that young Jews do not care. They care deeply and fear for the future in a way that older generations often cannot fathom. The problem is that we handed them a Zionism that no longer behaves like Zionism. We offered universal language stripped of particular obligation, advocacy divorced from consequence, and identity without discipline. We taught them how to speak about Israel fluently and defensively. We did not teach them how to be Jews in a world that does not want Jews to exist as a people.
This is the quiet truth most leaders will not say out loud: Zionism has been castrated. Outside Israel, it has been softened into a commemorative posture rather than a civic practice. “Never Again” became a phrase you light candles to, not a doctrine you organize around. Hebrew became decoration instead of infrastructure; self-defense became an emergency exception rather than a baseline expectation.
Sovereignty, meanwhile, became something Israelis had, so Diaspora Jews did not have to think seriously about power at all. That arrangement felt comfortable and even virtuous. It allowed distance without consequence and identification without responsibility. For a time, it insulated communities from hard choices. But eventually, it collapsed.
There is a civil war within Zionism right now, and it has nothing to do with Left or Right. It is a fight over what Jews are allowed to be: strong without apology or strong only with permission; particular without explanation or endlessly translating ourselves for others; armed without shame or morally neutered by fear of judgment.
This is where a familiar left-wing Jewish argument enters and collapses under scrutiny. We are told that Israel’s actions “increase antisemitism,” that Jewish power provokes hatred, and that restraint would lower the temperature.
But this argument misunderstands both antisemitism and Zionism. Antisemitism does not arise in response to Jewish behavior; it attaches itself to Jewish existence. Jews were murdered when they were powerless, dispersed, compliant, and invisible. Sovereignty did not invent antisemitism: It ended Jewish helplessness.
More tellingly, many of the Jewish voices advancing this claim are increasingly detached from Israel as a lived national project. They experience Jewishness primarily as a moral identity rather than a civic one. Their critique often reflects estrangement rather than intimacy. Ethics, when separated from responsibility, becomes abstraction.
Early Zionism rejected this detachment outright. The New Jew was meant to end the habit of theorizing about Jewish survival from a safe distance. Power and morality were never opposites in Zionist thought. Power was the condition that made morality sustainable. Without it, moral protest replaced moral responsibility.
This is why contemporary Zionism defaults to messaging rather than building. When confronted with violence, intimidation, and ideological warfare, the instinct is to explain harder, condemn louder, and fundraise more. Visibility becomes a substitute for security. Conferences replace training, and statements replace doctrine. Each cycle leaves the underlying weakness intact.
Zionism was never meant to be over-professionalized and under-ideologized. It succeeded because it built infrastructure – language, defense, labor, and parallel institutions – before it ever secured legitimacy. Today, too many organizations operate as if legitimacy is the goal and survival is assumed. That logic is backward. Survival always precedes legitimacy.
The result is a Diaspora Zionism fluent in moral performance but fragile under pressure. A generation trained to argue rather than build, to explain rather than prepare, to feel rather than act. We raised morally articulate guests rather than competent members of a people with enemies.
Here is the part that makes people uncomfortable: this fragility was avoidable. The warnings were there for years.
Rising antisemitism was documented, dismissed, and normalized. Too often, national institutions prioritized coalition politics over Jewish preparedness. Ideological comfort replaced strategic clarity, and donor reassurance displaced necessary adaptation.
October 7 did not create the crisis: It removed the insulation. What Zionism needs now is not another campaign. It requires a re-founding – not rhetorically but structurally. Better messaging, broader coalitions, or another emergency fundraising drive will not fix this. It will be fixed through Hebraization – the deliberate, unapologetic re-centering of Jewish life around Hebrew language, Jewish civic competence, and sovereign responsibility.
Hebraization restores seriousness where symbolism has failed. Hebraization is not nostalgia: It is infrastructure. It restores Hebrew as a living civic language because a people that cannot think in its own language cannot act freely in history. It normalizes Jewish self-defense as a baseline civic skill because security is the precondition for moral life. And it rebuilds Zionist leadership around seriousness rather than comfort.
Where existing institutions refuse to adapt, Hebraization demands the creation of parallel institutions without apology. This is not a rejection of Zionism’s achievements: It is a refusal to live off them. Zionism survives not by being explained but by being lived. This is not a call to abandon morality – it is a call to reclaim adulthood. A movement that cannot defend its children, transmit its language, or prepare for hostility is not morally elevated: It is unserious. And unserious movements do not survive long in history.
Zionism was never supposed to make Jews comfortable. It was supposed to make Jews durable. The question now is unforgiving and straightforward. Will Zionism remain a commemorative brand, something we fund, remember, and explain? Or will it return to being a disciplined movement that produces Hebrew-speaking, self-defending Jews capable of living as a people, not as guests, in the modern world?
History is an impartial observer. It offers no credit for intentions, only results – and it has little mercy for those who fall short.
The writer is the founder and CEO of The Israel Innovation Fund and the author of Never Again Is Not Enough: Why Hebraization Is the Only Way to Save the Diaspora.