Exile is one with utter dependence - in material things, in politics and culture, in ethics and intellect, and they must be dependent who are an alien minority, who have no Homeland and are separated from their origins, from the soil and labor, from economic creativity. So we must become the captains of our fortunes, we must become independent - not only in politics and economy but in spirit, feeling and will.

The rejection of Jewish life in the Diaspora—shlilat ha-golah—is a central assumption in all currents of Zionist ideology. … In its most extreme formulation, the idea of shlilat ha-golah implies that the condition of exile will ultimately destroy the Jewish people, first of all in the moral and spiritual sense, and afterward in the physical sense as well, whether by discrimination and persecution, or by total assimilation.

You can’t sit in Manhattan and be a Zionist just because you like oranges, falafel and come here once a year to argue in Jerusalem about ‘Where is Zionism going?’ There is only one answer: Zionism is going on here. Zionism as I see it exists only in its practical form. And as a person who likes shoes isn’t a shoemaker, so a Jew who likes Israel isn’t a Zionist.

Ironically, in the debates about the “negation of the Diaspora,” both sides, Zionist and anti-Zionist, have shared a premise: “exile” as a defining category of Jewish existence was over. In the first part of the 20th century, the inferiority, indeed the perils, of Diaspora life were hotly debated by Zionists, Diasporists, and anti-Zionists. They fought vehemently in the American press about Zionism and the future of Jews and Judaism... They argued about the value of Diaspora—but they all agreed that with America and Israel, exile was essentially over.

Thus the debates around the negation of the Diaspora were between two Jewish alternatives living in what each, for different reasons, determined was a “post-exilic” era. Zionists and Diasporists both rejected, in some fashion, the notion that “exile” remained an operative category of Jewish existence. The Zionists mostly believed exile had ended and thus immigration to the land was necessary. Diasporists believed “exile” had ended, and now Jews in the Diaspora could live in a safe state of “dispersion,” golah, and not galut, exile...

The Diasporists envision the end of exile as the end of oppression in the Diaspora, a fact that may include the existence of a sovereign Jewish state, while Zionists envision the end of exile as the end of the Diaspora, leaving only the Jewish state.

I have complete and unbridled faith in both the Jewish People the world over and in the State of Israel. There can be no faith in either without the other, because each needs and depends on the other. Both stem from the same source in antiquity, and inherent in both is a common vision of redemption.