Zionist
I have called what Israel is doing in Gaza a genocide. I wept for Yitzhak Rabin. Israel’s rabbis would tell me I am not a Jew; my own coalition tells me I am a Zionist. Purity tests will always lose.
by Lawrence Winnerman, Blue Amp Media COO
Editor’s Note: This article was previously published at lwinner.substack.com. It is republished here in its entirety with no edits. A comment has been added for clarity by Cliff Schecter at the end.
It is the night of November 4, 1995, and I am twenty-five years old, alone in my attic apartment in Seattle. It is cold and raining, the way it is always cold and raining there, and I am half watching a small television when the news breaks that Yitzhak Rabin has been assassinated. I go down onto my knees on the floor, my hands over my eyes, and I weep. My housemate, a Christmas-and-Easter Christian, finds me there and cannot understand the size of what has just come apart in me. I did not have the words to explain it to him then. I am not certain I have them now.
Rabin had been shot twice, from behind, leaving a peace rally in a Tel Aviv square that would later carry his name. The man who shot him was not an Arab. He was not Hamas. He was a twenty-five-year-old Israeli law student named Yigal Amir, a religious nationalist who believed that any Jew who would trade land for peace was a traitor to the Jews. He killed the prime minister to save Israel from the prime minister. He was twenty-five years old. So was I.
In Rabin’s jacket pocket, when they undressed him, was a single sheet of paper. On it were the words to Shir LaShalom—the Song for Peace—which he had sung, off-key and unashamed, an hour before he died. The page was soaked through with his blood.
I have carried that image for thirty years. I did not understand, at twenty-five, everything it would come to mean.
I am still not sure I understand it now.
Let me tell you where I stand, so that what I say next cannot be waved away.
I am an American Jew. My relationship with my religion is complicated, and my relationship with the state of Israel is more complicated still. I have written, in public and under my own name, that what the Netanyahu government has done in Gaza is worthy of the word genocide. **
I have gone further than that. I have written that it is worthy of the word my own people reserve for the thing that was done to us—a Holocaust***—and that I do not reach for that word carelessly, and that I reached for it on purpose.
I believe Benjamin Netanyahu and the men around him have committed war crimes for which they should answer at The Hague. I believe the settlement project in the West Bank is not a security policy but an engineering project, built parcel by parcel to make a contiguous Palestinian state geographically impossible—to kill the two-state solution by making the map unworkable, so that no one ever has to be the one to say no to it out loud.
And I believe Israel has a right to exist. I believe that Palestine has a right to exist. I believe two states is the only honest end to this—the only arrangement that lets two peoples who are not going anywhere both live. I have held all of these things at once, in the same body, without feeling the contradiction, my entire adult life. I wept for Rabin because he was, for one impossible moment, the man who might have delivered every part of it.
I did not come to that belief solely on my own. I was raised on it. In Hebrew school, in temple, the men who taught me were explicit about what the land taken in 1967—the Six-Day War—was for. It was not a prize. It was collateral. It was to be traded back for peace, every contested acre of it, the moment there was a partner to trade with. That was the mission as it was handed to me: land for peace, peace for land. So when I hear a Jew rage against trading land for peace as though it were betrayal, I do not hear principle. I hear someone who never understood the assignment—the geopolitics of the moment, the whole reason for holding the ground in the first place.
I am telling you this for a reason. By the standard of nearly any room in America, I am about as far from an apologist for the Israeli government as a Jew can be and still be recognizably a Jew. And there is a growing part of my own political coalition—the American left, the place I have lived my whole life—for whom none of it is enough. For whom it does not count. For whom I remain, because I will not say that Israel should not exist, a Zionist. And they do not mean it as a description.
And here the knot pulls tighter, in a way the people shouting the word at me could never guess. Because the state whose right to exist I will not renounce does not entirely claim me either.
My mother converted to Judaism in a Reform temple, while she was pregnant with me, precisely so that I would be born a Jew—because Judaism is matrilineal, and she wanted the line to run clean to her children. My father was born a Jew. And still: to the Orthodox rabbinate that controls who counts as a Jew inside Israel, a Reform conversion is no conversion at all. My mother did the one thing that was supposed to make me unquestionably Jewish, and they questioned it anyway.
By their ruling, I am no Jew.
Think about this from my point of view. In Nazi-occupied Europe I would have been made to wear the yellow star—Jewish enough for that—and, because I am also a gay man, the pink triangle stitched beside it. Jewish enough for the cattle car. Jewish enough for the gas. The fanatics who ran the camps would not have paused over my mother’s paperwork for a single second. But the state that calls itself the homeland and the birthright of every Jew would hand that same paperwork back across the counter and tell me I do not qualify. Jewish enough for Auschwitz. Not Jewish enough for Jerusalem.
And the gay man they would have pinned with that pink triangle is no safer now in the precincts of the people who would unperson me. I am no safer in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish enclave than I would be among fundamentalist Muslims, or among dominionist Christians. Put me in a room with the Jewish theocrat, the Islamist, and the Christian who wants his god written into our laws, and the one thing all three would agree on is me. Given the statute each of them dreams of, all three would see me dead. My quarrel has never been with a people. It has been, my entire life, with the certainty that there is exactly one correct way to be a human being, and that everyone standing outside it can be discarded.
That certainty has a name in this essay. It is purity. And I have spent fifty-six years being handed back at one counter or another: too Jewish for the town that raised me, not Jewish enough for the rabbis, too gay for the faithful of three religions, too Zionist for the left, too sick over Gaza for the right. So when I tell you what purity does to a coalition, I am not working from theory.
I am the man it keeps trying to leave at the door.
Watch what this word is doing: Zionist. In its plain meaning, it names a person who believes the Jewish people are entitled to self-determination in a state of their own. You can argue with that belief—people of good faith have argued with it for a century. But in the mouths I am describing, it has stopped being an argument and become a verdict. It has become a way of saying Jew without having to say Jew: a word you can shout at someone, spray on a wall, attach to a name on a list, and still insist you were only talking about politics. The shortened form, Zio, did not bubble up from the activist left. It came down from the neo-Nazi right, from the message boards of the 1970s and ’80s, and it has migrated—into chants, into group chats, into the rooms where my own side now decides who is allowed to march.
Here is what almost no one shouting it knows: I never called myself a Zionist. Not once, not in fifty-six years. I have never liked the word.
The word, in the beginning, meant only that the Jewish people should have a country—and it always held shades, a whole spectrum of them, from the zealot who wants every inch from the river to the sea to the dreamer who wants the smallest safe harbor and nothing more. Mine was always the gentlest end of that spectrum: an Israel that lives beside a strong and sovereign Palestine, two peoples in two states, harmony bought with compromise. That is the only Zionism I have ever held. If I am made to wear the word now, it is not because I have drifted toward it. It is because I will not abandon positions that are so plainly just, and that have served me so faithfully my whole life, simply because a new generation of the certain has decided the word is a brand to burn people with.
The Middle East is not a slogan. It is millennia of layered claim and counterclaim, grief stacked on grief, nuance the length of recorded history. I will not be collapsed into a single flat thing—villain or saint, Zionist or traitor—by people whose certainty is so total that they have decided everyone outside it must be wrong. That is not analysis. It is the opposite of analysis. It is the refusal to think.
And to anyone who comes at me with Israel should not exist, the land should be given back—I have one question, and I want it answered honestly: show me the deed in your hand.
Show me the paper returning the ground your own house stands on to the Lenape, the Ute, the Tlingit, the Cherokee, the Navajo, the Shoshone. Show me that you have signed your home back to the people it was taken from. Until you can, spare me the sanctimony of a justice you demand of one nation on earth and of no other—least of all yourself.
Criticism of Israel is not antisemitism. I have made that criticism, in language as harsh as any you will read. The conflation of the two—the reflex that treats every Palestinian flag as a threat to Jews—has been used for years to shield a real atrocity from the judgment it has earned, and I despise that reflex, and I have said so. I can see the line precisely because I have spent my life standing on both sides of it.
Which is exactly how I know when it has been crossed. When a child comes home and asks her mother whether Zionist is a bad word, because of the way she has heard it spat—that is the line.
When the price of admission to a progressive space is that a Jew first renounce the national existence of half the Jews on earth, and no other group is asked to renounce anything—that is the line.
When “globalize the intifada” is defended as a slogan of liberation by people who will not sit still long enough to hear what it lands like in the body of a Jew who remembers what the intifadas were—that is the line.
On May 21, 2025, a young couple left a reception at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington. Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim worked for the Israeli embassy; the evening they had just attended was about humanitarian aid, about building bridges between young Jews and young diplomats. A man named Elias Rodriguez walked up and shot them both dead on the sidewalk. As security took hold of him he raised a keffiyeh and said, “I did it for Gaza.” He chanted, “Free, free Palestine.”
Eleven days later, on June 1, in Boulder, Colorado, a man with Molotov cocktails and a makeshift flamethrower attacked a small weekly walk held for the hostages still held in Gaza. Among the people he set on fire was Karen Diamond, eighty-two years old, who died of her injuries. Among the people he set on fire was Barbara Steinmetz, also in her eighties, who had survived the first Holocaust as a child in Europe and had come, in the last chapter of her life, to be burned in Colorado for walking in memory of hostages.
In 2025, physical assaults against Jews in this country reached the highest level recorded since 1979.
And in the very days I am describing—while Yaron and Sarah lay on a Washington sidewalk, while an eighty-two-year-old woman burned in Boulder—hundreds of Palestinians were being killed in Gaza, part of a toll the Gaza Health Ministry by the first week of June 2025 had put past 54,000. I have already told you what I call that. Benjamin Netanyahu is a monster. The campaign he has run is a horror without a clean edge anywhere on it, a deliberate machine of starvation and rubble, and the dead of Gaza outnumber the murdered Jews I have just named by orders of magnitude that ought to stop the breath of any honest person.
But hear me carefully, because this is the hinge of everything I believe: you do not weigh these dead against one another.
You do not net them out as if fish on a scale.
The murder of fifty-four thousand human beings out of hatred does not cancel the murder of two out of hatred, and the murder of two does not shrink to nothing beside fifty-four thousand. Hatred is not an account where the large balance forgives the small one. A child shot for being Palestinian and a couple shot for being Jewish are killed by the same thing wearing different uniforms—and the moment I begin ranking them, deciding whose corpse has earned my grief and whose has not, I have joined the thing that killed them both, and so have you.
I will not do that, and how dare anyone think they have the right to insist we do it?
Tikkun olam. Repair the broken world. Not the convenient half of it. Not the half that flatters my politics. The teaching pairs, in the version I love best, with kintsugi—the shattered bowl mended with gold, the wound made into the most beautiful and honest part of the whole. But there is no kintsugi that gilds only the cracks on your own side of the bowl. A bowl only mended on one half holds no water—it is still broken.
The command was never to mend the wound on the side I belong to and step over the wound on the other. It was to pick up every shard. The world that is broken is the whole world, and I do not get to choose which of its fractures is sacred.
Israel and Palestine. Palestine and Israel. The two are inseparable. A border or a line, cleanly drawn might do it, but only ever as a golden seam in kintsugi, or a leaded one in stained glass. Drawing that line with blood will only ever kill both.
Here is the part I cannot make my peace with. It was not the murders alone. Murderers exist; the lone violent man is the oldest story there is. It was the silence that pooled in certain corners afterward—and the thing worse than silence, the pause, the “but,” the reflex to ask what the dead had done, which embassy they had worked for, what the walk had really been about. I watched parts of my own coalition, people I have marched beside, perform the small and terrible arithmetic of deciding how much a murdered Jew was owed. And I understood, in my body, that the line I had spent a lifetime policing from the inside was being erased from the inside.
None of this is happening in a vacuum, and the largest force in the room is not antisemitism. It is Gaza. It is what the cameras showed us for two years. The American left did not turn against the Israeli government because it was seduced by a slogan. It turned because tens of thousands of Palestinians are dead, because children starved on a livestream, because a government that claimed to act in the name of all Jews did things no decent person could watch and stay neutral.
The base moved because the base was right to move. I moved with it.
And the numbers tell the story of a party whose floor has shifted beneath its own leadership. In March 2026, the Pew Research Center found that eighty percent of Democrats held an unfavorable view of Israel—up from fifty-three percent in 2022. An NBC News poll in May put the share of Democrats who sympathize more with the Palestinians than with Israelis at sixty-seven percent; the figure for Israelis was seventeen percent. Among Democrats under fifty, it is not close. This is not a fringe. This is the party.
The party’s machinery has not moved with it. Its leadership, its donor structure, its committee chairs, the gravitational mass of AIPAC money in primary after primary—those still belong to an older settlement, one in which support for Israel was the unexamined default of American politics. So you have a base that has traveled an enormous distance and an apparatus that has barely shifted its weight, and between them a widening gap, and into that gap rushes everything at once: the genuine moral reckoning, and the purity test riding in on top of it, indistinguishable at speed.
That is the danger. Not the reckoning—the reckoning is overdue. The danger is what happens when a movement that is morally right about an atrocity welds that righteousness to a test that treats Jewish peoplehood itself as the thing to be confessed and renounced. The weld is the problem. At a rally it is impossible to pull the two apart, and most people at the rally are not trying to.
Let me clear some ground, because I will not be mistaken for what I am not. I have no interest in defending AIPAC. AIPAC is a bad organization. It has spent fortunes to enforce one foreign country’s line in our primaries, and there is real evidence it has been captured by Republican Jews who use it less to defend Israel than to bludgeon the left—laundering a partisan project as a communal one. When the left says AIPAC’s money is a poison in our politics, the left is right. I have said so. I am saying it now. Strike the lobby; I will hand you the hammer.
And do not stop at AIPAC. Every dollar of corporate money, every dollar of dark money, every untraceable fortune that buys a voice louder than a citizen’s is a poison in this country, and I want all of it gone. Overturn Citizens United. Drain the super PACs—left and right, Israeli and Saudi and homegrown alike. Get the money out of our politics and hand the country back to the people who actually live in it. And I despise foreign influence in our elections with a particular heat, which is why I will say the thing that is supposed to be complicated and is not: I may be a Zionist by fiat of shifting ground, but I am not an Israeli. I have never set foot in Israel. I am not especially moved to go. America is my country—the only one I have. Its soil and its water are my bones and my blood. My loyalty is not divided, and I will not have it questioned by people who mistake my refusal to wish a nation out of existence for an allegiance I have never given it.
I have known this about myself since I was twelve. In 1982, three young Israeli men came to my Hebrew school to recruit my class into the Israeli army—a free trip, co-ed service, a cheap gold-colored menorah for anyone who signed on the spot. The whole room lined up. I was the only child in that auditorium who would not put my name down. An administrator telephoned my mother that night to report the lapse, and she informed him, with considerable heat, exactly what she thought of grown men trying to enlist her twelve-year-old in another country’s army. I was gay, and Jewish, and frightened of a great many things at that age. But I already knew the one thing the recruiters could not sell me: my country was this one, and none other.
So nothing in this essay is a brief for the donor class. The problem is not that the left criticizes AIPAC, or Netanyahu, or the war—I do all three, in the harshest terms available to me. The problem is the slippage: the way a fair fight against a corrupt lobby keeps sliding, almost without anyone deciding it should, into a different fight entirely—over whether Jews as such are welcome in the room.
You can watch it slide. In New York, the first act of the new mayor was to revoke the city’s recognition of a definition of antisemitism, because that definition named some anti-Zionist rhetoric as crossing into Jew-hatred. A congressional candidate, handed the simplest sentence on earth, will not say that “globalize the intifada” is not a thing he wants globalized. None of this is AIPAC. None of it touches a dollar of anyone’s money. It is something else wearing the clothes of a just cause, and most of the people carrying it could not show you the seam where the one becomes the other.
That is precisely what makes it dangerous. Not malice. Drift.
Here is where it goes.
In 2026, the primaries become a civil war fought with other people’s money—AIPAC’s millions on one side, the small-dollar insurgent wave on the other, each race a referendum on a single foreign country. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed runs for the Senate on ending the $3.8 billion in annual military aid to Israel and calls the war a genocide, and he is not the protest candidate at the edge of the stage; he is a frontrunner. Multiply that by every contested seat. The party will spend the midterms litigating Israel against itself.
And then comes 2028, when it can no longer be deferred, because someone has to be nominated for president—and that someone will have to stand in front of a base that has moved as far as the numbers say it has, and a general electorate that has not, and a community of Jewish Democrats being told, this very year, by voices in both parties, that they are now politically homeless. No one can hold all three at once. The needle the nominee is asked to thread may simply no longer exist.
We have the rehearsal on tape. In 2024, the “uncommitted” movement gathered more than 700,000 primary votes in protest of the administration’s Gaza policy, sent delegates to the convention, asked for a single speaker, were refused, and declined to endorse. And the ticket lost. Both wings of the party took from that defeat the lesson that flattered them. The left said: you lost because you would not listen to us on Gaza. The center said: you lost because the left frightened the middle. Both are partly true—which is the cruelest possible outcome, because it means the fight cannot be settled by evidence. Each faction now carries a story in which the other faction is the reason we lose. That is not a disagreement. That is the architecture of a party preparing, once again, to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Let me say the strongest version of the other side, because I believe most of it.
They are right that the party’s leadership was morally cowardly on Gaza for far too long, hiding behind “Israel’s right to defend itself” while the defending curdled into something the word cannot hold. They are right that the donor structure has corrupted our primaries, and that no one should be at ease with a foreign-policy litmus test enforced by a super PAC. They are right that “criticism of Israel is antisemitism” has been one of the great bad-faith shields of my lifetime. I concede all of it. I have argued all of it.
So understand that what I am about to say is not a defense of Israel’s government, which I want to see in a courtroom, nor of the lobby, which I want out of our primaries. It is a warning about what purity does to the people who hold a coalition together.
A movement that is right about the world can still be wrong about its own members. And the first members it loses, when it confuses moral clarity with moral arithmetic—when it decides that to be let in you must first renounce—are the bridge-builders. The ones who can carry the message to the middle precisely because they are not pure.
The Jew who has called it genocide and still believes in two states is not your enemy. He is the most persuasive messenger you will ever have for the thing you say you actually want, which is for the killing to stop and for both peoples to live.
And you are spending him.
You are reading him out of the room over the single word he will not renounce, and you are calling it principle.
Yigal Amir thought he was saving his people.
That is the thing about purists: they always do.
He looked at a Jew who would trade land for peace and saw a traitor, and he was certain enough in his certainty to put two bullets into the one man who might have delivered the very thing that thirty more years of blood have been spent failing to reach. He wanted purity more than he wanted peace. So he got neither.
And neither did anyone else.
I am not saying the activist who calls me a Zionist is going to shoot anyone. A slur is not a bullet, and I will not pretend it is. I am saying it is the same gesture—the one I have felt my whole life, from every direction. The rabbi who rules that I am not a Jew. The theocrat of any faith who would see me dead for who I love. Amir, who shot the peacemaker to keep the blood pure. And the comrade who reads me out of the movement over a word I will not renounce.
They are not equal in their violence. But they are identical at the root: the refusal of the bridge, the conviction that the impure ally is more dangerous than the open enemy—that the person who agrees with you about ninety percent is worse than the one who agrees about nothing, because the ninety-percent person complicates the story.
Every purity movement in history has begun by devouring its own moderates, has called it justice, and has lost.
If the Democratic Party cannot make room for a Jew who has named the genocide, and wept for Rabin, and still will not say that half his people have no right to a home—if there is no chair in that coalition for that man—then it is not assembling a majority.
It is performing a purification ritual that will not end well.
And purifications do not win elections in a country of 340 million people. They lose them. They have always lost them.
There was a song in Rabin’s pocket. It was about how you cannot bring the dead back to life, so you had better make peace with the living. It was stained with his blood because a man who wanted purity put it there.
I have been reading that page my whole life.
I am not going to stop singing because the side that is ostensibly my own has decided I don’t know the words.
**Cliff’s Note: I don’t use this term b/c of a long history of blood libel that Jews commit *genocide* by drinking the blood of Christian babies. I call Netanyahu a war criminal and mass murderer who should be in The Hague, and will continue to do so.
***Cliff’s Note II: I 100% disagree with Lawrence’s use of this word, which should be reserved for only the most egregious crimes—with victims in the millions. But he absolutely has the right to express what he believes.
Cliff’s Note: Folks, Cliff here, and I want to tell you why this one is running on Blue Amp.
Lawrence Winnerman is a friend, a colleague, and one of the sharpest writers I know—and what he’s done here, laying his whole conflicted Jewish heart on the table and then using it to tell the left a hard truth about itself, is exactly the kind of thing almost nobody else has the guts to publish.
So we published it.
Now, am I going to pretend I agree with every word? I’m not, and Lawrence would be the first to call me a coward if I did. I don’t use the words “genocide” or “Holocaust” for what’s happening in Gaza. Those words carry a specific weight for me, and I land somewhere different than he does (see my notes above.)
But that’s the whole of my disagreement. On damn near everything else in this piece—the purity tests, the way the left keeps eating its own, the AIPAC bullshit, the cowardice of party leadership, and the warning that we are about to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory yet again—he is dead right, and you need to read every word.
This is why Blue Amp Media exists.
Not to make you comfortable—to put brave, complicated, important writing in front of you and trust you to wrestle with it like an adult.
And we can only keep doing it if you’ve got our back.
So have it. Become a $250 Fascism Fighter Founders-tier member, or grab an annual membership at 40% off—just $36 instead of sixty. That deal runs through the July 4th weekend and ends Sunday the 5th, so don’t sleep on it.
When you join, you’re not just funding the fight—you get the new arsenal: essays like this one going behind the member paywall, members-only Lives, an upgraded members-only chat, and a whole new layer of deluxe content stacked on top of everything we already make.
Read the piece. Argue with it. Then come fight alongside us.
— Cliff
Thank you so much for your essay. I admit, I am one of those on the left who had begun to despise the Jewish people for what they are doing in Gaza and Lebanon. I have never harbored those feelings for the Jewish people (or any other people) before and I feel uncomfortable about it. I am a retired Christian clergyman, and I have always tried to see the good in others regardless of their background. Reading the daily atrocities committed by the IDF on innocent people and the lack of a strong pushback in Israel just made me angrier. I forgot that there are Jewish individuals like yourself who feel as I do about the situation in Gaza and elsewhere. What you feel makes sense to me. Your essay clarified a lot of my unasked questions. You gave back to me a part of me that I was beginning to lose. For that, I thank you.
Lawrence, Cliff...thank you both for the courage to write and to publish this. I am not Jewish. I could not possibly fathom the pain that you experience for never being "enough" by some standard of purity. But I am a compassionate person who cries when I see the trauma that those in pursuit of purity inflict on people who are committed to what is best for all of us. So much is so wrong with our country today...we need to focus on ending this horrible regime. We must stop eating our own--the ones who are there to join in the effort. Peace to you both.