Who Gets to Define the Word Zionist?
The term has been wielded as a slur for decades, including by those who misuse or misconstrue it or use it as a synonym for Jew
Here’s an experiment: Open Twitter, put your cursor in the search window, and type some variation of “[horrible adjective]” plus “Zionist.” This includes but is not limited to “dirty Zionist,” “evil Zionist,” “satanic Zionist,” “disgusting Zionist,” “demon Zionists,” “Nazi Zionist.” You’re likely to get an endless scroll of responses. Sometimes the posters, in a seeming effort to avoid censors, obscure some of the letters, resulting in variations like “Z1onist,” or “Z*onist.” Or, they employ the white supremacist-approved prefix “Zio” (think, “Zio tears”). The specific politics of the person they’re directing their red-faced, frothing ire at doesn’t much matter. And for some, it’s often a synonym for Jew. Sometimes, a few comments down, and after a little prodding they revert to just using “Jews” or sometimes “joos.” Why are we allowing voices like these, both online and in the real world, to dictate the usage or definition of a term that has historically referred to a belief in the existence of a Jewish homeland–a term that is not specifically related to support for any particular Israeli administration or policy, including the handling of the current war in Gaza, and which can also refer to someone who believes in Palestinian self-determination? Also, how does this conversation relate to the broader historical conversation about why anti-Zionism so often veers into antisemitism?
Zionism emerged as a late 19th century Jewish nationalist movement that sought to establish a nation for the Jews in their ancestral homeland, where they’ve always maintained a presence. (Jews have constituted the largest religious group residing in Jerusalem for at least the last 180 years.) There were, throughout recent history, varied strains of Zionism, including political Zionism, socialist Zionism, religious Zionism and spiritual or cultural Zionism. These have been in conflict with each other, like in the case of cultural Zionism and mainstream Zionism before the nation’s founding in 1948, with the former advocating on behalf of a Jewish cultural hub in the region, but not specifically a Jewish nation-state. Or take messianic Zionism, which only emerged as a political force after the Six-Day War of 1967, after Israel captured the formerly Jordanian-controlled West Bank and Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip (along with the Sinai peninsula, since returned to Egypt after a 1979 peace treaty, and the formerly Syrian-controlled Golan Heights). The adherents of this brand of Zionism believe that the region, including the occupied West Bank, is ordained by God to the Jews. Theirs is a viewpoint in stark contrast to Israel’s long-standing secular majority, who, if they don’t want to give up the military occupation of the West Bank, cite security as among their top reasons. There is also the pro-peace camp, or liberal Zionists, most of whom are anti-occupation, settlement expansion, and seek a negotiated independent Palestinian state along some semblance of pre-1967 borders, with many also acknowledging Palestinian grievances and seeking to correct historical injustices. (Liberal Zionism likely represents a sizable portion of non-Orthodox American Jewry.) Many abhor Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and aggressively criticize Israel’s extremist ministers as well as established and proposed anti-Democratic policies, like Netanyahu’s judicial reform aimed at watering down the power of the country’s Supreme Court, which incited constant, large-scale protests over the course of many months. It’s of note that only the most right-wing bad-faith actors would deem their stance and actions antisemitic, contradicting the notion, or rather, inaccurate widespread claim, that “all criticism of Israel is deemed antisemitic.” Admittedly, liberal Zionism has been shrinking as a political force within Israel over the past decades and contracted even more so in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks, but there are signs the ideology is reemerging, even as the current Israeli government continues its crackdown on free speech.
The only throughline among these disparate strains (aside from the historical, but no longer relevant strain of cultural Zionism) is the belief that the state of Israel, as a homeland for the Jewish people, in some capacity, should continue to exist. Sort of like how liberal Democrats and far-right Republicans can have widely diverging visions for the United States while still referring to themselves as proud Americans without inherent contradiction. There is also the lesser-known “non-Zionism,” an identity that separates itself from Zionism, or active support for the continued existence of a Jewish state, but doesn’t advocate specifically for the state’s dismantling, either. The identity can describe both leftist Jews and Biblically-focused Orthodox ones, though an overlapping definition or ethos can be hard to pin down, same as it would be for, say, non-Democracy or non-Communism, since it’s seemingly a passive versus operative position.
And it’s true that prior to Israel’s founding, there were those Jews who had an alternate vision for Jewish safety. The Bund, a collective of Jewish socialists, who, in addition to organizing workers’ strikes and rallying against antisemitic pogroms, believed that Jewish cultural life, specifically secular Yiddish cultural life, could thrive and be strengthened within the diaspora in Europe, according to YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. They also viewed Zionism, in contrast, as an ideology that “represented the interests of bourgeois Jewry.” The movement inevitably collapsed after the Holocaust and Stalinist repression, and for some has become a cautionary tale about Jewish naïveté. There were, undoubtedly at the time, positive and negative aspects to Zionism worthy of discussion; the positives included a state that is actively invested in the protection of a historically persecuted population and that can serve as a refuge for Jews seeking to flee to safety from elsewhere, while the negatives pertained to colonial Britain’s involvement, the ethics of encouraged migration, and the presence of extremist Jewish insurgent groups using terrorist attacks to achieve certain ends, among other issues. These disagreements made sense before Israel’s founding in 1948 but have little practical application now.
Because the salient point is that the state of Israel does, currently, exist. And has existed for more than 75 years. Israel is home to nearly seven million Jewish citizens and two million Arab citizens (or Palestinian citizens, depending on how they self-identify). Many of its Jewish citizens are the descendents of refugees from Tsarist pogroms, post-Holocaust Europe and a huge swath of the Middle East and North Africa, from Morocco to Lebanon, with nearly one million arriving in the lead-up to and aftermath of the U.N. partition of 1947. Many were fleeing violent pogroms, including in places like Yemen, Syria, Libya, and Iraq; the combined Jewish population of all four countries went from nearly 300,000 to about 20. There are currently zero Jews left in Libya.
Which is why the inverse of Zionism — anti-Zionism — is such a controversial position to many Jews. When it’s not implicitly dismissive or even explicitly supportive of terrorist violence against Israelis, it can sound like academic theorizing masquerading as a relevant political identity, with no real pragmatic answer for how it will achieve its goals. Anti-Zionism posits that somehow, some way, the Jewish state can be undone and something — its adherents tend to disagree on what — will take its place. For more extreme elements, all that matters is the downfall of the “Zionist entity.” The word “entity” is a favorite, imparting a tiny nation-state with a kind of magical, all-encompassing, evil power. If the overwhelming popularity of certain Tweets is to be believed, this new country would also involve the ethnic cleansing of Jews. These particular adherents of the ideology are likely the most visible, the ones chanting the very unambiguous “We don’t want no two-state, we want all of ‘48,” or the “Settlers, settlers, go home; Palestine is ours alone.” Or the Arabic “From the river to the sea, Palestine is Arab,” as well as the head-scratching “Occupation is a crime, from New York to Palestine” chanted by immigrants to the United States and their descendants while marching on land they’re technically occupying. Certain college students, including those at a university in Birmingham, England, have called for “Zionists off our campus,” which, in the U.S, using the straightforward definition from earlier in the piece, wouldn’t just apply to an overwhelming majority of Jews, but non-Jews as well. They love to trot out the Neturei Karta, an extremist ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionist sect that has referred to the Holocaust as divine punishment and once attended an Iran-sponsored Holocaust revisionist convention, to show that they’re not against Jews, “actually.” The sect, which is vehemently anti-Israel for entirely Biblical reasons, is so extreme it’s been disavowed by fellow anti-Zionist Hasidic sects, including the Satmars.
Some anti-Zionists liken Israel’s potential downfall to apartheid South Africa, often neglecting to mention that apartheid’s fall came via a referendum vote from white South Africans and a vision for a shared future. (Not that the two countries are the same; even some of Israel’s ardent critics believe it’s inaccurate to apply the label of apartheid to greater Israel.) A cohort of Palestinian as well as Western anti-Zionists, including some anti-Zionist Jews, propose one binational democratic state — while marching side-by-side with the ideologues mentioned above — but again, neglect to point out how unpopular that solution is in the entirety of the region, in both Israel as well as Gaza and the West Bank, with Israelis and Palestinians recently hardening their respective stances. Forcing intractable sides into some imagined unity government (why would either agree to this, realistically speaking?) seems like it would result in even more bloodshed, while doing away with the raison d’ être for both movements. This position appears to ignore the long-term goal of Palestinian self-determination, outlined in Palestine’s 1988 Declaration of Independence. The document, which prompted many countries to officially recognize Palestine as a state, explicitly says that “The State of Palestine shall be for Palestinians, wherever they may be therein to develop their national and cultural identity and therein to enjoy full equality of rights.”
Many international anti-Zionist activists take their cues from groups like the BDS movement, which seeks to isolate Israel via boycotts and divestment and has a strict policy of “anti-normalization,” meaning bans on cooperation with those in Israel who seek to find a way towards peace, including Israel’s Palestinian citizens. The movement recently called on its members not to engage with Standing Together, a group comprised of Jewish and Palestinian Israeli citizens, on the grounds that they’re “serving Israeli propaganda” and “[continue] to parrot ‘liberal’ Zionist arguments of dialogue and unethical coexistence–one that is based on a master-slave relation rather than justice, reparations and full equality.” Standing Together defines itself as “a grassroots movement mobilizing Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel in pursuit of peace, equality, and social and climate justice.” Their ranks have been growing in recent weeks, while facing a wave of repression from Israeli authorities for their advocacy. (Some of their members support a single-state solution or a confederation, some two-states, but in general, they have shied away from offering a specific end-goal to co-existence and explicitly do not support the most incendiary anti-Zionist rhetoric.) They are also currently one of the major groups within Israel protesting on behalf of a ceasefire. BDS’s move against Standing Together prompted a strong rebuttal from the organization’s Palestinian members.
Recently, an anti-Israeli occupation-themed, decidedly anti-Zionist Palestinian restaurant in New York City, Ayat, with a menu section called “From the River to the Sea,” decided to host a Shabbat dinner for allies. They made the “error,” however, of allowing Brad Lander, New York City Comptroller, into their midst as well as a caterer (who, according to the restaurant, refused payment, mind you) who grew up in Israel and provided regional kosher-style food for the event. The caterer’s other specific sin was “appropriating Palestinian cuisine,” according to Instagram commenters, an ahistorical accusation denying the rich culinary heritage of Middle Eastern Mizrahi Jews. Brad Lander, meanwhile, reportedly has no issue with BDS supporters on his staff, opposes unconditional military aid to Israel, and attends Muslim and Palestinian solidarity events, including with controversial figures like Linda Sarsour, though he has described himself personally as a “progressive Zionist.” These folks’ seeming inclusion prompted a flurry of Instagram comments, no longer visible, directed at the restaurant, along the lines of “How dare you feed Zonists” in addition to angry calls for a boycott, resulting in the restaurant owner posting a clarification on his views. Only the strictest, most self-flagellating anti-Zionist rhetoric, which would inevitably downplay and excuse away the murder of fellow Jews, would allow a Jewish person to be labeled an ally in these circles.
While I can at least understand a consistent worldview that rejects the idea of any state having a specific ethnic identity, the anti-Zionists’ desire for a state’s unraveling seems uniquely focused on Israel. Despite the acrimony and bloody historical feud between Pakistan and India for instance, almost no one is proposing that the partition of 1947, which occurred after the end of the British Raj and resulted in 15 million displaced and up to two million dead, be undone. Or that the other nations established by colonial powers France and Britain in the first half of the 20th century, including Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria, all of whom have fought bloody civil wars with a combined hundreds of thousands of casualties, should be dissolved. There are ideologies like Communism that seek a rejiggering of the world order, but there is no other oft-talked about political identity whose goal is the dissolution of one specific state, which just happens to be home to half of the world’s Jews.
Even while making pronouncements like “We don’t hate Jews, we hate Zionists,” some of these online “anti-Zionist” posts quickly devolve into classic, trope-y antisemitism, making the distinction between “Zionists” and “Jews” entirely inconsequential, an altogether familiar historical framing, which these people may or may not know, or rather, care they are repeating. They parrot antisemitic tropes about Jewish control so redundant and uncreative (think: Protocols of the Elders of Zion), it’s both embarrassing and horrifying. These types love to tell both Israelis and Jews in the diaspora to “go back to Europe” or the especially vile “go back to Poland” — the place where close to 90 percent of Jews were systematically exterminated by the Nazis for being an “alien race,” less than 80 years ago. Jews aren’t allowed to claim indigeneity anywhere in the world, it seems. Sometimes, these antisemites get especially unhinged and crowd City Council meetings to shout about October 7 being totally justified or an Israeli psy op, depending on who’s speaking, or rant about the “evils” of the Talmud. (A not-insignificant number of those using anti-Zionism as a cover for flagrant antisemitism are white supremacists.)
An example from an Instagram comment with hundreds of likes: The poster said something along the lines of the “We don’t hate Jews” pronouncement above, and when pushed on the facts and presented with evidence that people do, in fact, hate Jews (the Holocaust is very recent history, after all), the poster responded by stating that Jews need to ask themselves why that is the case, why is it that they are so hated and have been kicked out of so many countries. (Insert SpongeBob meme.) Antisemitism is always the Jews’ fault, in their eyes, whether before the founding of the state of Israel or after.
A 1981 article by Dave Davies, then-leader in the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), on the Soviet anti-Zionism propaganda campaign of the late 1960s, 70s, and 80s from the party’s journal, Australian Left Review, speaks to this Jew/Zionist conflation, which, as evidenced by his writing, is in no way new. His words read as though they could’ve been written yesterday.
“The word “Zionism” itself has been used and misused in so many senses that it has almost lost any meaning. In many contexts it has become synonymous with Jews. For example, if the authorities in a particular country say that the troubles of the day are being stirred up by “Zionists” and there is an atmosphere of popular anti-Semitism, large sections of the population are going to translate that mentally into “It’s the bloody Jews again!”
Davies points to various writings by then-contemporary Soviet authors who engaged in: agitating on behalf of anti-Zionism; conflating Zionism and facism; favorably quoting brutal Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, who made a 1975 U.N. speech urging America to “get rid of its Zionists”; literally confusing the terms “Zionists” and “Jews” in their writing; lecturing on worldwide “Zionist control”; dismissing or downplaying historic Jewish suffering. Other forms of propaganda at the time, including political cartoons, compared Zionism to Nazism. He writes about his personal disappointment in meeting an educated Soviet sea captain, a fellow Communist, who repeated the blood libel that Jews baked matzah with the blood of gentiles and decried the perceived power of the “Silversteins” and “Goldbergs” of the world.
In fact, the country’s most celebrated bard, Vladimir Vysotsky — who reportedly had a Jewish father, but after his parents’ split was raised primarily by his mother — even wrote satirical songs about these prevalent antisemitic views, including how they figured into the USSR’s denial of Jewish emigration. (These types of songs were typical for Vysotsky, whose lyrics undermined the Soviet establishment in a clever, scathing way.) All this to say: while Davies was seemingly surprised and ashamed to see these views relayed by fellow Communists, most of the country’s Jewish residents had grown accustomed to the USSR’s antisemitic bigotry, and many understood it to be a foundational feature of the Soviet system itself.
After being one of the first countries to recognize Israel’s independence, likely owing to the country’s socialist origins, the USSR’s anti-Zionist turn was a study in realpolitik, leveraging historical homegrown antisemitism to pit itself against U.S. imperialism, which, to them, took the form of growing U.S.-Israel allyship.
It wasn’t just the Soviets. Australians, too, were guilty of misusing the word “Zionist” back in 1981, according to Davies.
“Indeed, there is perhaps no word in the political vocabulary that is uttered with such venom — something which seems strangely out of proportion even allowing for the policies and actions of the Israeli government. I cannot forget what happened when I was leaving a meeting on Vietnam some years ago in the company of a Jewish friend who had spoken in the rather heated debate in which no mention at all had been made of Israel or the Middle East. A person standing at the door snarled at my friend, “Zionist!”
Despite the rancor with which the word was often invoked even then, Davies points out that Zionist, defined as someone who “supported the continued existence of Israel” at the time of writing “covered all Communist Parties (including the CPA) and Social-Democratic Parties throughout the world.”
Things have definitely changed drastically in this regard since 1981, with leftists abandoning Zionism for the most part, and with anti-Zionism gradually becoming the default platform of the Democratic Socialists of America, resulting in resignations from long-time members.
Two years after Davies’s article, the USSR established the Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public, which used official government channels to promote the idea that as described by YIVO, “so-called International Zionism [sought] world hegemony, served American imperialism by fomenting anti-Soviet feeling abroad and spreading lies about the persistence of a ‘Jewish Question’ in the USSR.”
Similarly to their Soviet predecessors, some modern anti-Zionists use the legitimacy of respected institutions, including academia, to launder views about what they see as unique and seemingly wide-reaching Zionist control. They hyper-focus on Israel in order to tie it to nearly every perceived injustice around the globe. For example, the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, per their words, “approaches Zionism as a broad set of colonial and repressive work and solidarities, efforts to curate knowledge and identities, and to dismantle movements that resist it.” Here’s an example of their view of the far-reaching effects of Zionism:
“This study of Zionism includes, for instance, research on the role of Zionism in the development of US hate crimes policy and homonationalism, the linkages between Zionist and Hindutva politics, the ties between Zionist institutions, the Israeli state, and the evangelical Christian right, the Zionist surveillance technology deployed at the U.S.-Mexico border, the destruction of Indigenous agriculture in Guatemala, the centrality of Zionism in the opposition to and attempted cooptation of ethnic studies in the United States, and the fostering of post-9/11 interventionist human rights politics with regard to North Korea.”
It would take multiple pages to go through these accusations one by one, but for example, Zionism’s role in “opposition to and cooption of ethnic studies” (using their link here, not mine) relates to American Jewish voices opposing the inclusion of a non-critical view of the BDS movement in an early draft of California’s required ethnic studies public school program, as well as the program’s omission of the Jewish American experience as it relates to antisemitism. As a reminder, BDS is the movement that opposes any kind of compromise that would allow Israel to continue to exist as a Jewish state and bans engagement with pro-peace Palestinian voices. An academic quoted in the article linked by the institute implies that antisemitism — one of the world’s oldest and most insidious ethnic prejudices, including in the U.S. — doesn’t really have a place in ethnic studies lest the field turn into de-politicized “multiculturalism.” This explanation for the exclusion of Jewish Americans from the discipline, which focuses on Black, Indigenous, Latino, and Asian — which includes Arab — experiences in the U.S., is a common one among its adherents, because they see most American Jews, most of whom are Ashkenazi, as white. (Ashkenazi phenotypes vary widely and include those with brown skin, but as I’ve observed, Ashanzi Jews of a variety of shades can be othered, harassed, or discriminated against in the U.S. if they’re perceived to be specifically Jewish based on a certain set of physical attributes or a Jewish-sounding last name, a net that can ensnare non-Jews as well. In addition,visibly religious Jews aren’t conferred the protection of “whiteness,” as they’re the most vulnerable to antisemitic hate crimes.) Jews challenging the specifics of a curriculum based on established dogma and advocating collectively on their own behalf is seen as another example of a kind of virulent, tentacle-like “Zionist reach.” There really is no winning.
Or, take “Zionist surveillance technology.” They’re referring to the tech of an Israeli defense company used at the Mexico-U.S. border. In this framing, the technology itself has been imbued with an ideology. Does the tech employed by the larger defense and security company Leonardo, based in Italy, have Italian nationalist leanings or…? That company’s reach is also vast, with contracts around the world, including with Israel.
Much of this academic discourse surrounding Zionism takes the form of an oppressed/oppressor narrative, with Israelis and Jews being the latter and Palestinians the former. There is undoubtedly currently a military power differential between Israelis and Palestinians, though the history of Israel’s founding also includes surrounding Arab armies attacking the fledgling Jewish state, which defended itself with little international assistance, and colonial Britain severely curtailing Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine in 1939, just before the mass-scale slaughter of Jews in Europe began. The oppressed/oppressor conversation about Zionism rarely ends with allusions to specifically Israeli power, though. This is inherent in the way certain people wield the word “Zionist.” Instead, it often devolves into ideas about Jewish power. Agitators accuse us of controlling certain industries, like the media and banks; of having dual loyalties; of working as a cabal (on behalf of Israel and against Palestinians and other marginalized groups, or alternatively for non-whites and those same marginalized groups, depending on which edge of the political spectrum is doing the accusing). These are tired stereotypes, as I mentioned above, and they are dangerous. Antisemitism is so insidious precisely because it doesn’t fit into a simplistic narrative. It’s one of the reasons universalizing Holocaust education to mean “hating those different than you is bad” has done little to assuage antisemitism. Prejudice against Jews is downplayed or denied, or often inverted, because of our perceived power, allowing the prejudice to foster into something violent and even recently, all-too-often deadly.
Anti-Zionist non-Jews, meanwhile, like to point to the growing population of anti-Zionist Jews as proof-positive that their views are not antisemitic, that conflating Zionism and Judaism is dangerous, and that there are “good Jews” out there, willing to speak up for what’s “right.” I, for one, will not debate the Jewishness of fellow Jews. Anti-Zionist Jews are Jews. They are allowed to call themselves Jews. Just as members of the Bund, they’re allowed to believe what they want, but their ethnicity as Jews doesn’t absolve many of their views from being labeled antisemitic (i.e. if they justify the killing of all Israeli civilians by labeling them “settlers”) or ignorant by others. On Twitter, a few of the most visible proponents of enthusiastic Jewish ethnic cleansing in a proposed “Free Palestine” appear to be Jewish. Some also seem strangely uncomfortable with acknowledging Jewish or Israeli suffering, whether on October 7th or really ever, and center their anti-Zionism as the primary component of their Jewish identity. Many also like to proudly mention that they have no connection to Israel, belying a unique kind of privilege. These Western diaspora anti-Zionists Jews, many Ashkenazi, have likely never personally needed Israel in their own lives. Their ancestors were lucky to find relative safety in the U.S. and elsewhere; for hundreds of thousands of other Jews, Israel was their only option. While only ten percent of the world’s Ashkenzi Jews live in Israel, it’s home to 90 percent of the world’s Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, who hail from Spain, North Africa, and the Middle East. Also, nearly all of Beta Israel, also known as Ethiopian Jews, call Israel home.
So who gets to define and dictate the usage of Zionist? Is it, as Davies of the Australian Left Review wrote more than 40 years ago, a term so misused as to be rendered meaningless? Maybe, but at this point, since no real alternatives exist, perhaps it’s better to reclaim its definition, to wrestle it away from being the sole property of extremist pro-Israel right-wingers who unabashedly cheer on the carnage in Gaza, or angry antisemites who use it as a substitute for Jew. And in response to those who use it as a slur to accurately describe the desire for the continued existence of a Jewish state, in some capacity, at least we know where we stand. We’ll be looking for partners in peace elsewhere.
