Is Zionism Working?

Judge a movement the fairest way there is — by its own stated goals. Zionism set out to make the Jew safe, accepted, unified, and remade apart from Torah. Three-quarters of a century on, weighed against those four promises, the results tell a humbling story, because the project was raised on a foundation the Torah warned would not hold.

Zionism began, in the late nineteenth century, as a secular national movement. Theodor Herzl and those who followed him believed that the Jews' long agony among the nations would end only when they had what every other people had: a sovereign state, a flag, an army, a normal place in the family of nations. The movement's aims were political and national, not religious — and that is not a slur but simply its own self-description.

It is now well over seventy-five years since the State was founded, and that is long enough to ask a fair question — the question one would ask of any movement, judged not by the intentions of its founders but by the results it actually produced. Did it achieve what it set out to achieve? The honest way to answer is to take the movement's own four great goals, one at a time, and hold each against the reality of today.

I. Goal One: A Safe Haven for the Jew

The founding promise, sharpened to anguish by the Holocaust, was safety: a place where, after centuries of pogroms, the Jew would at last be secure.

Judge it honestly. The State of Israel possesses one of the most formidable militaries on earth — and remains a place where Jews live under sustained threat: rockets, terror, recurring wars, and relentless international campaigns of delegitimization. On the seventh of October 2023, the world saw, in the most agonizing way imaginable, the limit of the promise: terrorists breached the border and murdered roughly twelve hundred Jews — men, women, children, the elderly — in a single day. But the hard truth it laid bare cannot be unseen: that military strength, however great, cannot by itself guarantee a Jew's safety. This is not a Charedi talking point; it is what a strong army learned in a single morning.

And here the Torah's claim, far from being naive, turns out to be the realistic one. "If Hashem does not guard the city, the watchman keeps watch in vain" (Tehillim 127:1). Safety, the Torah teaches throughout the tochachah of Devarim (28), is a blessing that flows from Hashem — not a product manufacturable by borders and firepower. The Charedi conviction is not that armies are worthless, but that they are instruments, never guarantors: "Torah, while one engages in it and while one does not, protects and saves" (Sotah 21a), and it was on exactly this that the Chazon Ish stood before Ben-Gurion, telling him that it is in the merit of the Torah being learned that the nation lives and is shielded. The promise of self-made security has proven, tragically, to be no promise at all. Real protection has only ever had one Source.

II. Goal Two: To Normalize the Jew Among the Nations

The second promise was acceptance: with a state of his own, the Jew would finally be normal — a nation among nations, no longer the eternal outsider.

By this measure the outcome is almost the reverse of the intention. Israel is today among the most vilified states on the planet — the target of more condemnatory resolutions at the United Nations than any other nation on earth. Far from dissolving, the world's old hostility has merely changed its dress: the antisemitism that once attached to the Jew as a person now attaches to the Jewish state, "anti-Zionism" serving as its respectable costume on campuses and in media that would never tolerate the older bigotry openly. The Jew sought to stop being singled out, and finds himself singled out still. The Torah, which is not surprised by this, framed it long ago. "Their laws are different from those of every other people" (Esther 3:8) — Jewish distinctiveness is not a defect to be cured by statehood but a fact of Jewish existence. Israel was called to be "a kingdom of priests and a holy nation" (Shemos 19:6) — a people set apart by design, not blended in by aspiration. The longing to be like everyone else was never going to be granted, because it asks the Jew to be something the Torah says he is not. The attempt to outrun that distinctiveness has only run straight back into it.

III. Goal Three: To Replace Torah Identity With National Identity

The third goal was the most ambitious of all: to forge a "New Jew" — secular, Hebrew-speaking, rooted in land and labor and statehood rather than in Torah and mitzvos — and so to redefine Jewishness itself.

Here the results are genuinely two-sided, and honesty requires saying both. On the one hand, the project to build a Jewish identity emptied of Torah did, for large parts of the population, succeed in emptying it — producing generations with little knowledge of their own heritage, and one of the most secularized Jewish societies in history, with all that follows from it. On the other hand — and this is among the great ironies of the age — the very land the founders meant to secularize now hosts the largest and most vibrant Torah world in all of Jewish history. The "New Jew" was supposed to replace the old one; instead, the old one has flourished beside him, in numbers the pre-war Torah world could scarcely have dreamed of. What this proves is precisely the Charedi claim: that a Jewish identity drained of Torah does not hold, because "it is your life and the length of your days" (Devarim 30:20). Remove the Torah, and what remains is not a new kind of Jew but a fading one; restore it, and Jewish life surges back. The experiment, run now for a century, has quietly returned its verdict.

IV. Goal Four: To Unite the Jewish People

The fourth promise was unity: under one flag, Jews of every origin — religious and secular, Ashkenazi and Sephardi, survivor and refugee — would at last become one.

Instead, the State has become a theater of some of the deepest divisions in the Jewish world: religious against secular, Ashkenazi against Sephardi, right against left, Zionist against Charedi, election after bitter election. This is not said with satisfaction — the divisions are painful, and they wound real people — but it must be said, because it bears directly on the question. Shared citizenship turned out not to be the same thing as unity. The Torah locates true achdus elsewhere: "when two sit together and words of Torah pass between them, the Shechinah rests among them" (Avos 3:2). Unity, in the Torah's understanding, is not the accident of a shared passport; it is the fruit of a shared truth. A people bound only by nationality, with no common spiritual center, will fracture along every other line — which is exactly what has happened. "Jewish unity" without Torah is a slogan in search of a soul.

V. A House Built Without Its Foundation

Step back from the four goals and a single pattern emerges. Zionism asked nationalism, statehood, and military power to do the work that, in the Torah's account, only Hashem and His Torah can do — to make the Jew safe, accepted, whole, and one. And so the same posuk that opened our discussion closes it: "Unless Hashem builds the house, its builders labor in vain" (Tehillim 127:1). The builders labored heroically; no one disputes their toil or their sincerity. But a house raised without its true foundation, however imposing it looks, will show its cracks in time — and the cracks, after seventy-five years, are not hard to find.

This is also why the Torah world was wary from the start of a redemption pursued by human force, "ascending as a wall" and pressing the end before its time, against the shalosh shevuos of Chazal (Kesubos 111a; treated in our dedicated article). Not because it doubted Jewish strength or courage, but because it knew the deliverance of the Jewish people was never a problem of insufficient power. It was always a matter of returning to the One who alone delivers.

VI. So — Is It Working?

Set against its own grand promises — to make the Jew safe, accepted, spiritually whole, and united — the verdict is humbling, because those four things were never within the reach of the tools it chose.

None of this is said in triumph over our fellow Jews, and certainly not in coldness toward them — they are our brothers, and their longing for a secure and dignified Jewish life is one we share with our whole hearts. It is said, rather, as the oldest and most stubborn Jewish claim there is: that the security, the dignity, the wholeness, and the unity that Zionism sought by way of nationhood were always to be found by another road entirely — the road of Torah, mitzvos, teshuvah, and the patient awaiting of a redemption built by Hashem's hand and not our own. That is the one project, in four thousand years, that has never once failed the Jewish people — and it is the one still open to every Jew, of every camp, today.

May we merit to build on the only foundation that holds, and to see the true and complete redemption of Klal Yisrael — bimheirah b'yameinu, amen.

Sources

The foundation — Hashem, not might

• Tehillim 127:1 — "Unless Hashem builds the house, its builders labor in vain… if Hashem does not guard the city, the watchman keeps watch in vain" — the anchor of the entire discussion
• Devarim 28 — the tochachah, in which safety and blessing flow from Hashem
• Sotah 21a — "Torah… protects and saves"; and the documented meeting of the Chazon Ish with Ben-Gurion, in which he affirmed that the nation lives and is protected in the merit of Torah (this theme is rested on these sources rather than on the unverifiable quotation attributed to Rav Chaim of Brisk in the working draft)

Distinctiveness, not normalization

• Shemos 19:6 — "a kingdom of priests and a holy nation"; Esther 3:8 — "their laws are different from those of every other people"; Shabbos 89a — the teaching that at Sinai, sinah (the nations' hostility) descended into the world — Jewish distinctiveness as a fact of Jewish existence rather than a defect statehood could cure

Identity — Torah as life

• Devarim 30:20 — "for it is your life and the length of your days" — the claim, borne out by the flourishing of the Torah world in Eretz Yisrael, that a Jewish identity emptied of Torah does not endure

Unity through Torah

• Avos 3:2 — "when two sit together and words of Torah pass between them, the Shechinah rests among them" — true unity as the fruit of shared truth, not shared citizenship

The deeper caution

• Kesubos 111a — the shalosh shevuos, the Three Oaths against forcing the end and ascending as a wall — treated at length in our dedicated article

The structural relationship to other articles in this series

• "The Charedi View of the Founding of the State" and "The Jewish State Is Not the Jewish Dream" — the deeper account of the Charedi reservation
• "What Is the Torah View on Nationalism?" — peoplehood through Torah versus secular nationhood
• "Why Don't Charedim View the State as Reishit Tzmichat Geulateinu?" — the redemption question
• "The Three Oaths" — the caution against a redemption forced by human hands