Deep Dive On Zionism
We who oppose Zionism can be more nuanced about how we approach it. Not every Zionist is tantamount to a Klansman, as some believe.
Welcome to this special edition of Cutting Through. This edition presents a deeper dive into its subject than usual and brings more history into the discussion of very current events.
If you find this newsletter useful, please share it and encourage others to subscribe. I deeply appreciate all of you who do. This work is only possible with your support, so if you have the means and motivation to become a paid subscriber, it will help me continue to produce this material. In June, I will be debuting videos, both personal commentary and interviews with prominent figures in policy and academia, and more. So, supporters, your patience and generosity will be paying off.
To become a free or paid subscriber, just click this button.
You can also support this site with a one-time donation, rather than—or in addition to—a subscription, through my CashApp account by clicking this button.
To share this newsletter with your friends, just click this button.
For several months, I have been considering a piece on how the word “Zionism,” or “Zionist” has come to be used as a harsh pejorative in mainstream, progressive media and spaces. But recently, I was pushed into finally getting something out here.
There is a meme making the rounds on Facebook, which reads “Zionism is to Judaism as the KKK is to Christianity.” As with most memes, the shorthand it uses leads to a comical caricature of its own point and, in this case, veers it into questionable, and inaccurate, territory.
Unlike the Ku Klux Klan, there is a tangible range in Zionist ideology, such that many Zionists believe, quite sincerely, that they can be Zionist and still promote equality, even in Israel. Klansmen, by definition, represent a racism that is always extreme, even if some few of them might not go quite as far as murder.
Zionism pulls its support from liberal as well as reactionary quarters. Anti-Zionists argue, correctly, that Zionism, when brought into power that creates policy, must inevitably be discriminatory and when the oppressed react, the discrimination increases.
In that regard, anti-Zionists have been proven correct, and it has gotten progressively worse, not better, as Israel has faced fewer threats over the decades. Yet it remains true that there are Zionists who hold liberal values and believe that these can be brought to bear to bring a more just state.
I believe those people are naïve and mistaken. But I also think people who hold that belief can still be good people, even if they are misguided in my eyes and the eyes of others. I feel they ought not be lumped in with those driving the genocide in Gaza. Indeed, the onslaught on Gaza provides an important measure, as there are those who professed liberalism, but after that horrific day turned as vicious and bloodthirsty as their right-wing counterparts. Yet others did not and continue to believe that there can be a Jewish state that is also a state of all its citizens.
I find that notion impossibly self-contradictory. But in this space, I am not going to argue that case. Rather, I want to break down the idea of a “Zionist” because while the entire ideology might be worthy of opposition, not all its adherents are malign actors, or at least they don’t all intend to be. So, let’s pull this terminology apart and bring it into a light through which we can understand it.
Defining Zionism
Let’s start with the terminology as I will use it in this piece. Zionism, as a general concept, is a broad term which means a national movement of the Jewish people. Not, as is often stated the national movement of the Jewish people as there have been and still are others, though none have gained significant traction. But there are other ways than Zionism to conceive of Jews as a whole people, or even, if you must, as a nation than through the colonization of Palestine.
Zionism is currently identified with Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza. Most people using the term now, especially those who rarely or never used it before, are using it in that sense. But anti-Zionism is certainly nothing new and it is also varied in its expressions.
I find the current usage of “Zionist” problematic, despite my harsh condemnation of Israel, its apartheid nature, and its genocidal actions. I am enormously critical of and opposed to Zionism, as I am of all nationalisms, especially those that become synonymous with state power, a combination that inevitably leads to oppression.
Zionism, in all its many forms, is a modern, nationalist movement. Like all nationalist movements, it projects itself back into the history of the people it nationalizes, but it is a modern construct, a product of post-Haskalah Judaism and of the modern era. Indeed, it was born around the same time and of the same thinking as the toxic European nationalism that led to so much calamity for that continent and the world, including late-stage colonialism as well as fascism.
When Jews through the centuries and around the world sang “Next year in Jerusalem” at the seder table, they were not expressing a nationalist or a territorial sentiment. Rather, Jerusalem was the center of Zion/Tzion, an idea of messianic redemption. Yes, it was focused on the very real city of Jerusalem, but it was not about land and walls, but about the rebuilding of the Holy Temple in an era when the Messiah (Moshiach) had come, and Jewish exile was to end. That redemption was believed to come from God, not through human agency. While there was no prohibition on Jews living in Palestine/Eretz Yisrael, the mere fact of being there did not make either the Jews who lived there or the Jewish people as a whole “redeemed” and it did not end the exile that is central to the Jewish religion as it evolved through the Talmud in both the Eastern and Western worlds.
Zionism retcons that experience, turning it into an expression of yearning for a Jewish state. That may well be what growing numbers of Jews around the world meant during the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and on through the years, but it’s not what was meant by the phrase “Next year in Jerusalem” for most of Jewish history. The yearning for Jerusalem was the yearning for the end of galut, the end of an exile which, Jewish tradition holds, was decreed by God, and would eventually be ended by God in the messianic era.
Zionism in its early days did not concern itself much with this question. It was an entirely secular movement and remained almost entirely secular until well after the creation of the State of Israel. Only after 1967 did religious Zionism become a major force in the Zionist movement, and only after that time did the inherent fascism that, as I will explain, was part of the roots of Zionism, begin to mix with religious fervor to form the dangerous trends that have swept Israel over the past four decades.
Indeed, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, gave the small sector of religious Zionism more power in the state structure than its size would have merited largely because he wanted the validation of Jewish authority around the world and among as many Jews as possible, and because he didn’t anticipate how much that sector of Zionism would eventually grow.
It is important to understand that almost everything we think of today as “Zionism” is the strain known as Political Zionism. That is the strain that envisioned a state and featured many of Zionism’s best-known figures, such as Theodor Herzl, Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weizmann, Golda Meir, and others.
Within Political Zionism, the major camps were Labor Zionism, which dominated the movement in the pre-state Yishuv and for the first three decades of the state, and the Revisionists, which evolved into what is considered right-wing Zionism today, prominently represented by the Herut party and, later, the Likud Coalition.
The historian Avi Shlaim, in his seminal work, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World, argues persuasively that the Revisionists’ more aggressive view, which was based in the beliefs of its founder, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, some of which were drawn from openly fascist ideologies with which Jabotinsky sympathized, had dominated Labor Zionism for years even before the creation of Israel. This is important to bear in mind when we consider how far to the right Israel has shifted in recent years, even before October 7, 2023.
There have been other forms of Zionism. The most well-known of these alternatives was called Cultural Zionism. It traces its history to some of the most egalitarian figures in Zionist history such as Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginsberg), Judah Magnes, Gershom Scholem, and Martin Buber. These figures represented a form of Zionism that either did not agree that a “Jewish state” needed to emerge or, if a state format was necessary, that it should be a bi-national one, where Jews and Palestinians were equal in every sense.
I find this complexity important. In my view, there was a great deal to respect in the wisdom of Ahad Ha’am, and in the Brit Shalom (Covenant of Peace) movement, that was led by such figures as Buber, Scholem, and Arthur Ruppin (Magnes helped conceive it, but was never an actual member of the movement). That movement sought to create a cultural center for Jews in Palestine, and to work and live with the Palestinians in partnership in an independent state. It had no need to encourage mass immigration of Jews to, much less colonization of Palestine.
But as much as I admire the ideas and work of Brit Shalom, it would be disingenuous to suggest that they were ever anything more than a small minority among the Jewish settlers in the Yishuv, and they had virtually no traction in the European and American Jewish communities, unlike the Political Zionists.
Still, we would all do well to think more of Brit Shalom and Ahad Ha’am when thinking of how to move beyond the apartheid state and the culture of genocide and oppression that Israel now embodies. And we should understand that some self-described Zionists today adhere more to Buber’s and Magnes’ philosophies than to Herzl’s, Ben-Gurion’s, or Jabotinsky’s. That doesn’t mean that their Zionism might not be problematic, but it certainly is different from the venomous and hateful anti-Palestinian sentiment that motivates so many mainstream Zionists, in or outside of Israel.
Anti-Zionists understand that it is simply impossible to maintain an ethnic majority without resorting to some very ugly tactics. Population trends ebb and flow according to the lives of the people. A mandated majority must, of necessity, resort to repressive measures, including ethnic cleansing, at some point. This is why we express concern in Western countries when white nationalists and other racists fret over white people becoming a minority. The only way to avoid it if the trend naturally moves in that direction is violence of the most horrific kind.
But there are Israelis who believe in equality, and it is quite possible that, without the violence that occupation and dispossession bring not only to the victims but also to the occupier, many more would see the merits in a state of all its citizens, rather than an ethnocracy. It would, to be sure, take a great deal of time. Not only have Israeli Jews and Jewish Zionists experienced conflict for their entire lives—even if they have been on the far more militarily powerful side—but Jewish history has instilled a warranted fear of antisemitism, which has been cynically magnified by a zealously nationalistic Zionism.
Yet a relatively functional democracy in Israel and Palestine is far from a pipe dream. States change radically all the time, whether it is through the collapse of a great power like the Soviet Union or the inexorable march of history like the end of Apartheid South Africa. But the states continue to exist, as do their problems and politics.
There is no utopia, and it is self-defeating in the extreme to decide that whatever post-apartheid future there might be is going to be some heretofore unimagined egalitarian society. But there is also no reason that it should become the genocidal apocalypse most Zionists (due, in significant part, to anti-Arab, Islamophobic, and anti-Palestinian prejudice) believe it must be.
In any case, to wrap up this section, we do well to keep in mind that not only are there Israeli Jews who are not Zionists, but not all Zionists are the same. I know people who identify as Zionist and have literally risked life and limb to protect Palestinians from settlers and from the government and army. There are Zionists who fervently believe that their Zionism can exist without in any way diminishing the lives of Palestinians, and that point is important to them—important enough for them to fight for it, sometimes at great personal cost. I disagree with that belief, but that doesn’t mean it is insincere on the part of those who hold it.
Don’t assume that every Israeli Jewish high school graduate who refuses to serve in the occupying army or every Jewish Israeli who stands side by side with Palestinians in the face of rubber bullets and tear gas is anti- Zionist. More than a few of the activists who take great personal risks to try to end the occupation and change Israel’s broader policies toward the Palestinians do so out of a desire to build a new and better Israel. Many of those people work in organizations like Breaking the Silence, B’Tselem, Gisha, and others. And, if one argues that such beliefs are just a milder form of racism, that may be, but the difference between a NIMBY liberal and Klansman matters. One can be reasoned with, one cannot.
Life isn’t that simple, nor is the definition of Zionist.
Zionism as identity
Distinguishing between Zionism and Judaism has become a crucial focal point for Palestine solidarity activism. That is correct and necessary. But as often happens in political discourse, especially in the age of social media, it tends to break down to simplistic elements.
I reject even the mildest form of Zionism because I reject nationalism in general. Whether that is Jewish nationalism, American nationalism, Palestinian nationalism, Chinese nationalism, or any other nationalism, I reject it and believe, no matter the origin of the nationalism, it must ultimately become harmful because it must, by definition, raise the interests of some people over others based on arbitrary characteristics.
Nationalism usually starts as a defense mechanism of some sort, and while that can sometimes be a useful and valuable tool for liberation of the oppressed, nationalism inevitably becomes oppressive when it is mixed with state power. That’s what happened with Political Zionism, both in Israel and among its supporters around the world.
Zionism was born and established a firm foothold in both Jewish and Christian communities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in large, but not exclusive, part as a response to the great wave of pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe at that time (Christian Zionism was birthed from different roots, including the rise of Dispensationalist mythos and strong antisemitism that wanted to see European Jews “return” to Palestine).
It did not arise as a response to Nazism or the Holocaust, by which time it was a well-established, if still distinctly minority movement among Jews. After the Holocaust, when, for obvious reasons, support among Jews and non-Jews grew for the establishment of a Jewish state, but even then, most survivors of the Nazi genocide were not inclined to emigrate to Palestine and those who did often did so because of pressure and a lack of options (see Tom Segev’s The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust).
But persecution was not the only factor in early Zionist thought. Many early Zionist thinkers were at least as concerned about assimilation as they were about antisemitism (for some interesting discussion of this, see The Post-Zionism Debates: Knowledge and Power In Israeli Culture by Laurence J. Silberstein). This was the immediate post-Haskalah period and the entire concept of a Jew who was not what we would think of today as Orthodox was just as new. What did it mean to be a Jew if you were not religious? Would Jews simply be absorbed into the prevailing European societies, intermarry, and disappear? This was a concern and helped lead to the development of Jewish nationalism.
In any case, long before 1948, Zionist leaders from Herzl and Weizmann to Ben-Gurion and Josef Weitz recognized that they would have to find a way to significantly reduce the number of Arabs in Palestine if there was ever to be a Jewish state. This was always a part of Political Zionism, and this is an inescapable and crucial point.
Theodor Herzl, in his diary, famously wrote that, “We shall try to spirit the penniless (Palestinian Arab) population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries while denying it any employment in our country…The removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”
There are many citations where Ben-Gurion talked of “transfer” of the Arab population, by which he meant a much more forceful expulsion than Herzl had envisioned. Like Herzl, Ben-Gurion, Weizmann, and many other early Labor Zionist leaders did not see the Arabs as equals and did not understand that they had a strong bond to the land of Palestine and a strong Palestinian, as opposed to broadly Arab, ethnicity. Ben-Gurion was of the belief that, among the expelled Arabs, “the old will die, and the young will forget.” He was right about the first part.
Some parts of the old Mapam party vocally opposed such harsh action against the Arab population, opposing expulsion, home demolition, and settlements in the new state of Israel being established on Arab land. But Mapam tended to fold under the weight of political and physical realities. This will remind some of how, today, more liberal Zionists are perceived, with justification, to wilt when the moment gets too heated. In general, as the late scholar Ze’ev Sternhell established in his excellent book, The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State, all the branches of Labor Zionism subordinated their socialist and egalitarian ideals whenever they came into conflict with nationalist concerns.
One contemporary example of this is the new leader of the Labor Party, Yair Golan, who is looked at as the hope for reviving the Israeli Zionist left. Golan caused a huge stir when, in a 2016 speech on Holocaust Remembrance Day, he took aim at the growing fascist movement in Israel, saying, "If there is one thing that is scary in remembering the Holocaust, it is noticing horrific processes which developed in Europe – particularly in Germany – 70, 80, and 90 years ago, and finding remnants of that here (in Israel) among us in the year 2016.”
Yet in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israeli civilians, Golan told Ynet, “First of all, we must close all the crossings in Gaza. I think in a situation like this, we cannot allow humanitarian aid. We must say to them: ‘Listen, until our hostages are released, we will starve you to death. This is completely legitimate.” Golan advocated collective punishment and the widespread killing of innocents, which was, itself a “horrific process” used in Germany 85 or so years ago. He has never retracted this statement.
Yet Golan’s words are reminiscent to me of a great many friends and colleagues (some of whom are no longer friends or colleagues) in the wake of October 7. Here, I do not refer to people whom I have known to be racist in their views of Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular. Rather, I refer to people who hold liberal sensibilities and who I thought would have known better and had at least some scruples about the wholesale slaughter of tens of thousands of innocents whose only crime was living in the Gaza Strip, yet have either remained silent, supported, or at least offered apologia for Israel’s genocidal action in Gaza.
How do we explain this? For me, this is where a more nuanced approach to Zionism as an ideology comes in.
Few ideologies can do what Zionism does: attract adherents from some of the most racist, hateful sectors of our society while simultaneously bringing in people from much more liberal corners. I have experienced this, with considerable sadness.
Having been raised in an extremist Zionist environment, I am the only member of my blood family, to my knowledge, that is not part of the purely genocidal strain of Zionism. They, like many others I grew up around, are people who never saw Palestinians as human, so it was easy, after the brutal and criminal actions of Hamas on October 7, for them to go full-blown annihilationist. Most of them were already there.
But I have seen others echo Golan’s words, some of them uncritically accepting the word of men in the Israeli government who, before October 7, they were fully aware were thoroughly dishonest.
Yet within that latter group, there are others, who are more troubled by Israel’s behavior, even if they reluctantly support it. Yes, they see the horrors of October 7 as far greater than the horrors of the 237 days since. But they also see the monstrosity of those eight months of slaughter and the futility of trying to wipe out resistance to colonization and dispossession, even if they refuse to see Israel as a colonial project.
I do not expect nor desire any Palestinian or Palestinian solidarity activist to accept a view of Jewish entitlement to colonize Palestine and dispossess the people who have been living there for centuries and generations, whether genocidal in nature or not. But I do think we in the West need to have a broader conversation that includes, in an open manner, Zionists who legitimately see Palestinians as deserving of their full and equal rights. Yes, even that standard is fraught, and it incumbent on those Zionists to acknowledge that the Palestinian demand for the Right of Return cannot be simply off the table, for one example. But the distinction between various views among Zionists still matters.
It is not easy for people to redefine an identity that has been imprinted upon them since their youngest days. And for many Jews, Zionism is their Judaism, or at least an indispensable part of it. From personal experience, I can attest that changing that identification is a process that can take many years, even decades, and every step requires confronting difficult, uncomfortable truths.
It’s not a bad idea to keep in mind that many of the solidarity activists around you—particularly, though not exclusively, the Jewish ones—made that journey. Palestine solidarity activists have for years—at demonstrations, community events, campus encampments, everywhere—shown incredible creativity in creating warm and welcoming spaces for those who want to stand with them or learn.
I am not urging people to open those spaces to those who would disrupt or who seek to come in to debate or argue at inappropriate times and places. All I am saying here—whilst rambling for a long time about history and ideology—is that not every Zionist is a Klansman. Many Zionists are openly racist, genocidal, and hateful people. Sadly, these days, we have found that many who we might not have thought fall into that category actually do. We can see it in the obvious ways, in anyone who supports Israel’s Gaza genocide or is ignoring the growing threat to the Palestinians of the West Bank. We can see it in the thugs who are attacking Palestine solidarity encampments on campuses across the country, side by side with their white nationalist allies. We can see it in the white nationalist members of Congress using Jews to attack higher education.
But that’s not all Zionists and engaging with those who oppose the genocide even though they still support some form of Jewish state can bear fruit, today and for the future. That seems important to me. It seems to me that driving a deeper wedge between those people and the ones who are supporting genocide is productive, while alienating people who might be enticed to question their Zionist beliefs is counterproductive.
I urge you to read the resignation letter from Lily Greenberg-Call, the first Jewish Biden appointee to quit over Biden’s support for the Gaza genocide. Greenberg-Call once led her campus AIPAC chapter, and even in her letter, she does not say anything that implies she would identify as anti-Zionist. Yet her action made a real impact. Let’s encourage more of that.
There is every reason to criticize Zionism. Just let’s try to do it in a manner that leaves room for those who don’t want to sell their humanity for the sake of Israel.
News Roundup
U.S. Non-Profit Supporting Palestinian Refugees Faces Baseless Lawsuit Aimed at Defunding UNRWA
Center for Constitutional Rights, May29, 2024
Israel won’t end war for deal to free all hostages, PM’s aide said to tell families
The Times of Israel, May 30, 2024
Arab Americans In Key States Poll: Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia
Arab American Institute, May 30, 2024
Don’t Believe the Conspiracies About the Gaza Death Toll
By Adam Gaffney, The Nation, May 30, 2024
Jon Stewart calls rejection of UK candidate for liking one of his sketches ‘dumbest thing since Boris Johnson’
By Joe Sommerlad, The Independent, May 30, 2024
Burning the Indigenous Population up in their Tents is an old Colonial Technique of Genocide
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment, May 28, 2024
Surveillance and interference: Israel’s covert war on the ICC exposed
By Yuval Abraham and Meron Rapoport, +972 Magazine
My Latest Articles
Deluge: Gaza and Israel from Crisis to Cataclysm
Edited by Jamie Stern-Werner, this book features numerous essays by prominent scholars and thinkers on Palestine. I am proud to say I was invited to be among this esteemed collection of writers, which includes Mouin Rabbani, Nathan Brown, Avi Shalim, Khaled Hroub, Sara Roy, Ahmed Alnaouq, and many more. Order a copy by clicking the link above, which will take you to a site where you can purchase from an independent bookseller.
Biden and Congress are destroying International Law for Israel
The current American threats to sanction the ICC could spell the death of International Law. Whatever little hope people had for a just international system will disappear.
As always, follow me on:
Twitter @MJPlitnick
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/MitchellPlitnick
Bluesky @mjplitnick.bsky.social
Threads @mjplitnick
Mastodon @MitchellPlitnick@journa.host
for my latest hot takes, comments, and news updates.