In this essay I will deconstruct revisionist Zionism, exploring my personal narrative of moving from the Zionism that I grew up with in the New York Jewish community of the 1960s and 1970s to the more inclusive views I hold now. I will then examine Hannah Arendt's prophetic warnings from her 1945 article “Zionism Reconsidered” and compare them to Rosemary and Herman Ruether's analysis in their 1989 book The Wrath of Jonah: The Crisis of Religious Nationalism in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. In my analysis of my biography and these writers I discovered that liberal Zionism is actually a form of revisionist Zionism.

My personal narrative is one of a major tension between an intellectual acceptance of the validity of the Palestinian voice and an emotional block against truly hearing that voice, because of fears raised by the Holocaust. Before I began researching and writing this essay, I had considered myself to be a liberal Zionist who wanted peace in Israel and Palestine and a two-state solution. I did not realize how much I would unravel as I confronted Zionist narratives. Like a tree being shaken in a thunderstorm, I felt my very roots being displaced as I learned that my perspective contributed to subjugating the voice of the other, the voice of the Palestinians. What I have learned from Arendt and the Ruethers is that my childhood Zionist narrative was a false universalism that contributed to making the Palestinians a superfluous population that could be uprooted and displaced.