During the endless and mostly failed negotiations to end the Gaza war, one idea has consistently emerged. Saudi Arabia, the richest Arab nation, would participate in rebuilding Gaza and officially recognize Israel. In return, Israel would publicly affirm the goal of a Palestinian state in most of the West Bank and Gaza. Making that deal would have fulfilled the dream of many Zionists: normalization, peace with all of Israel’s Arab neighbours, an end to generations of bloodshed. However, several Israeli ministers offered a different postwar vision. They suggested that Israel should rebuild the Jewish settlements in Gaza that Israel abandoned in 2005. According to one survey taken a year into the war, 38 percent of Israel’s Jewish population supported resettling Gaza. 

These contrasting postwar visions reflect a stubborn, more than century-old disputation at the heart of Zionist thought. The argument is over three questions: What is the purpose of a Jewish state? What kind of state should it be? And how do we achieve it? Two central Zionist personalities answered these questions in markedly different ways in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Theodor Herzl and Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, widely known as Rav Kook. They never debated each other—Herzl didn’t even know about Rav Kook—but their clashing ideas form one of the most important and enduring internal arguments both in Israel’s history and in current Israeli politics.  

In 1897, Austrian journalist Herzl wrote The Jewish State, his Zionist manifesto. He focused first on antisemitism, which he saw as a growing, intractable phenomenon. “The Jewish question exists,” he writes in the essay, “wherever Jews live in perceptible numbers. Where it does not exist, it is carried by Jews in the course of their migrations. We naturally move to those places where we are not persecuted, and there our presence produces persecution.” For Herzl, the great intellectual breakthrough in the essay was achieving a definitive understanding of antisemitism. He first admits that it is a “highly complex movement,” but after considering “trade jealousy, inherited prejudice, and religious intolerance,” he concludes with “It is a national question.” “We are a people,” he writes. “One people.” Therefore, “in countries where we have lived for centuries we are still cried down as strangers.”  

A Jewish state solves the problem. It would offer a place for Jews who wanted to fulfill their natural nationalist aspirations. And it would relieve the plight of Jews who remained in the Diaspora, because they “would be able to assimilate in peace.” Non-Jews would no longer question Jewish loyalties, because “their” Jews would have demonstrated fidelity by remaining in their host countries, even though they could have migrated to the Jewish homeland. For Herzl, this solved everything. In much of his writing he insists that his goal was not to combat or alleviate antisemitism, an endeavour he characterizes as “empty and futile.” The goal was to eliminate it entirely.  

For Herzl, the most important tool in creating a Jewish state—and therefore wiping out antisemitism—was international diplomacy. As a “national question,” he writes, it “can only be solved by making it a political world-question, to be discussed and controlled by the civilized nations of the world in council.” He believed that “the governments of all countries scourged by antisemitism will serve their own interests in assisting us to obtain the sovereignty we want.” He famously worked himself to death, negotiating with world leaders including Sultan Abdul Hamid and Kaiser Wilhelm, and created a movement of great political heft.  

He couldn’t, of course, ignore the need for settlements on the ground, but they were not the focus of his efforts. In The Jewish State, he even scorns the notion of Jewish agricultural settlements in Palestine. “We are a bourgeois people,” he writes, imagining, in his utopian novel Altneuland, Jewish urban centres populated by German-speaking Jews. The Jews, he felt sure, would build cities and settle the land after securing sovereignty, and therefore normalization, through negotiations and diplomacy. They would organize themselves into a “constitutional republic,” Herzl’s version of a liberal democracy. His indifference to actual settlement in Palestine was so great he considered alternatives to Palestine. In The Jewish State, he suggests Argentina as a possibility, and later considered Uganda. It didn’t matter where the Jewish state was located, as long as it achieved international legitimacy through negotiation. “We shall take what is given us,” he writes.  

Rav Kook’s goals and vision couldn’t be more starkly different. For Kook, the central problem wasn’t antisemitism but the pallid, weak Judaism of the Diaspora. “Apart from the nourishment it receives from the life-giving dew of the holiness of Eretz Yisrael,” he wrote roughly ten years after Herzl’s essay, “Jewry in the Diaspora has no real foundation and lives only by the power of a vision and by the memory of our glory.” Living outside Israel offers merely a kind of half-life. “Jews cannot be as devoted and true to our own ideas, sentiments, and imagination in the Diaspora as we can in Eretz Yisrael.” The land of Israel, for Kook, is not a path toward redemption; it is “the very Redemption,” where “all of the Divine commandments are realized in their perfect form.” Like Herzl, he senses a fatal weakness in the Diaspora but comes up with an altogether different diagnosis. For Herzl it’s antisemitism. For Rav Kook it’s exile, which is slowly poisoning Jewish spirituality.  

Unlike Herzl, Rav Kook doesn’t present a practical program, and there’s no mention of great powers or diplomatic efforts in his writings. But the loftiness of his language and his poetic fervour compel readers then and now with a single imperative: settle the land. For Rav Kook, that didn’t mean Tel Aviv or a secular kibbutz on the coastal strip. It meant biblical Israel—Jerusalem and the hill country of Judea and Samaria. In fact, the second Rav Kook—Rav Kook’s son—famously mourned in 1948 when Israel declared itself a state within the borders of the UN Partition Plan. By then the first Rav Kook had died, leaving it to his son to cry, “They divided my Land! Where is our Hevron—have we forgotten her? Where is our Shechem [Nablus]—have we forgotten her? Where is our Yericho—have we forgotten her?”  

After 1967, when Israel conquered these parts of biblical Israel, the movement Rav Kook created worked to settle Jews in those territories. Eventually, the younger Rav Kook and his followers engaged in Israeli politics, but they put direct action—building settlements—ahead of diplomacy and negotiations. They weren’t seeking legitimacy through great power politics. The legitimacy of their claims came from the Bible. Similarly, the first Rav Kook wrote nothing about what form of government Israel should take, but it’s impossible to imagine him supporting any regime that would separate Jews from biblical Israel. Of all Israel’s diverse political groups, Rav Kook’s followers are among the least attached to Herzl’s original vision of a constitutional democracy. 

Herzl and Rav Kook differ greatly in both their diagnoses of what ails the Jewish people and their programs for what needs to be done. For Herzl, the problem is antisemitism, and the solution is an internationally recognized Jewish state achieved through negotiations. For Rav Kook, the problem is exile, and the solution is for Jews to return to the Land of Israel. 

It’s easy to see how Herzl and Rav Kook represent significant strands in current Israeli politics. There have been and still are Herzlian negotiators seeking peace, security, and, most important, legitimacy through politics and diplomacy. Terrorism and failed negotiations have challenged and weakened this group, but the sensibility—the striving for international legitimacy and normalization—remains, particularly in Israel’s centrist parties and its high-tech global sector. And there are the settlers—first Rav Kook’s followers, then Gush Emunim, now the Religious Zionists—whose strongest Zionist aspiration is Jewish settlement in biblical Israel, mostly Judea and Samaria, but also, recently, Gaza.  

Interestingly, neither group has fully succeeded in their goals. The State of Israel has achieved great successes but has consistently failed to achieve peace with its closest neighbour and therefore failed to acquire what was most precious to Herzl—international legitimacy. And the settlers, despite huge investments and the strong support of many governments have only brought approximately 400,000 Jews to Judea and Samaria, less than 5 percent of Israel’s population, and less than half of the local Palestinian population. Herzl and Rav Kook remain as dreamers, but their greatest dreams have not been realized.  

Perhaps that’s because fulfilling the dream of one necessarily means abandoning the dream of the other. Israel can never be a constitutional democracy, or achieve full international legitimacy, if it won’t relinquish at least significant parts of biblical Israel. And it can’t remain inextricably tied to Judea and Samaria and still remain a liberal democracy committed to negotiations and diplomacy. Both Herzl and Rav Kook—great thinkers and indispensable Zionist leaders—live on in contemporary Israeli politics, but their visions clash. If an Israeli government decided on one, it would be giving up the other. Which is probably why the dominant feature of Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians and the Palestinian Territories for the past twenty or so years has been not to decide.  

Benjamin Netanyahu has been the prime minister for most of these years, but coalition politics has forced him to seduce both practical Herzl-like politicians and Rav Kook dreamers. Throughout his long career, Netanyahu has embraced the logic of a two-state compromise, withdrawn from much of Hebron, and developed partnerships with the Gulf states and simultaneously prioritized settlement expansion, brought the most undemocratic religious Zionists into his cabinet, and threatened to annex much of the West Bank. In other words, he has tacked toward Herzl and then toward Rav Kook, never committing to either approach. 

For a while, it worked. Israel’s economy prospered, and, apart from the occasional flare-up in Gaza, the country remained at peace. The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement worked hard to delegitimize Israel, and religious Zionists pushed for full annexation, but Israel seemed to thrive within the tension. But then came 2023, and then October 7. Much of the political earthquake over judicial reform was a continuation of the battle between Rav Kook and Herzl. The millions of Israeli protesters who flooded Israel’s streets and public squares were demanding a liberal democracy. Many of their opponents rejected liberal democracy because its system of constitutional judicial review prevented the state from discriminating against Palestinians in Judea and Samaria—that is, biblical Israel. The fight clearly wasn’t over technical issues of judicial power. It was the struggle over what kind of country Israel would be—a constitutional liberal democracy fully accepted in global institutions, or a populist, nationalist religious state, dedicated to Jewish sovereignty over all of biblical Israel. It was Rav Kook versus Herzl.  

This same ideological battle hovers over the questions of the “day after” the current Gaza war. Should Israel embrace the Saudis, work in partnership with the United States, follow the Western consensus, express at least a willingness to negotiate a Palestinian state? Or should Israel reject any political solution to the Palestinian issue, double down in the West Bank, occupy Gaza, and maybe even rebuild old Jewish settlements? It’s a stark choice, encapsulating two very different visions of Israeli sovereignty.  

I’m convinced that October 7 destroyed Israel’s policy (and Netanyahu’s specialty) of not deciding. Palestinians clearly will not stay quiet and peaceful while Israel refuses to commit. In any case, it’s hard to see how any society can balance two political dreams of such radical difference. Like most American Jews, and probably most Israeli Jews, I am rooting with all my heart for Herzl to defeat Rav Kook. This pains me to write. In my opinion, Rav Kook was a genius, a masterful mystic, an inspiring poet, a unique and beautiful writer and thinker. But he took no consideration of non-Jews living in biblical Israel, nor of non-Jews in general, and statecraft can’t survive on mythopoetic aspirations, no matter how beautiful. Israel’s best hope is to embrace its founding thinker, Theodor Herzl.  

For all their differences, Rav Kook and Herzl had one thing in common. Neither felt they were offering a dreamy utopian vision. They both believed that their programs for the Jewish people were eminently viable. Rav Kook had the example of the early secular Zionist pioneers. They proved that, with effort, Jews could re-inhabit their ancient home. Herzl insisted on the practicality of his plan. He rejected the criticism that he was seeking to transform human nature. He insisted that he was offering reasonable steps. He begins The Jewish State with a moving description of how “labor and enterprise” have transformed the world. He acknowledges that the work would be difficult, but not impossible. He is famously attributed as saying, “If you will it, it is no dream.”  

For Israel today, embracing Herzl and working toward international legitimacy and creating a Palestinian state seems almost utopian. Many experts (and many of my own friends and favourite Israeli thinkers) characterize it as a fantasy. But this is still the era of “labor and enterprise,” of working hard and transforming dreams into reality. The question today is, can Zionism still accomplish great but difficult tasks? The vision is there, along with the plan. But first we have to decide.