Ronen Shoval

Ronen Shoval (Hebrew: רונן שובל; born 1980 in Ramat Hasharon) is an Israeli doctor of political philosophy and author. He is head of the Argaman Institute and was dean of the Tikvah Fund. He was a visiting associate research scholar and lecturer in politics at Princeton University in the 2022–2023 academic year.

Shoval was born in 1980 in Ramat Hasharon. He studied at the Open Democratic School in Jaffa, and at the Rothberg High School in Ramat Hasharon. He served in the IDF, first in the Armored Corps, and later as an operations sergeant.

Shoval earned a B.A. in international relations and an M.A. in Jewish philosophy from the Hebrew University.

He earned a PhD in Jewish political thought from the Paris West University Nanterre La Défense where he graduated summa cum laude and was mentored by sociologist Shmuel Trigano.

Shoval participated in the "Young Leadership Program" of the Institute for Zionist Strategies. During the 2005 Disengagement, he and two other students founded Ta Katom (Orange Cell) which opposed the plan. He helped arrange thousands of students to protest, culminating in a 12-day hunger strike in front of the Supreme Court.

In 2006, after the Second Lebanon War, he co-founded Im Tirzu together with Erez Tadmor and served as its first chairman (2007–2013). The name means "if you will it" taken from Theodor Herzl's famous quote "if you will it, it is no dream" and focused on renewing "Zionist ideology to ensure the future of the Jewish nation and the State of Israel." It saw itself as dedicated to combating a "campaign of de-legitimization against the State of Israel and to [provide] responses to Post-Zionist and Anti-Zionist phenomena." Under Shoval, the group published a report in 2008 critiquing syllabuses used in various academic departments in Israel. In 2010 Im Tirtzu sent Ben-Gurion University of the Negev a letter demanding that the university stop what they saw as anti-Zionist bias in its Department of Politics and Government.

In 2010 Shoval published his first book, Im Tirtzu - A Manifesto for a Renewed Zionism in which he emphasized the difference between negative and positive Zionist consciousness and offered a solution to post-Zionism. It was published in English in 2013 as Herzl's Vision 2.0. Portions were included in the compilation The Zionist Ideas by Gil Troy.

Im Tirzu sued a Facebook group that compared them to fascists resulting in a lengthy court case. A Jerusalem district court ruled in 2013 that one of the Facebook posts accusing Im Tirzu of having Nazi-like racist ideology could be considered libelous but the Facebook page title stating "Im Tirzu is Fascist" did not constitute slander. The case was thrown out by the Israeli Supreme Court in 2015. Commenting on the final ruling, Shoval stated that the "Supreme Court saved the good name of the entire Zionist movement."