10 Signs You Might Be a Zionist
If you agree with many or most of the following statements, you might be a Zionist!
Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.
This is a guest essay written by Pat Johnson.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
The term “Zionist” has been dirtied up to depict all sorts of things it does not mean.
A Zionist is someone who believes the Jewish People have a right to national self-determination in their ancestral and modern homeland. That is it.
Zionism and Zionists come in every flavor. There are Left-wing and Right-wing varieties, Jewish and non-Jewish Zionists, tolerant and intolerant types, pacifist and militarist Zionists, and literally every permutation among these binaries.
That diversity is used by people of ill-will to cherry-pick the bad as exemplars and ignore any examples that might depict Jewish national self-determination in a good light. There is a word for that behavior. But anyways.
Since the word has been too often co-opted by people as a pejorative, let’s take a couple minutes to unpack what it means to be a Zionist. You might find — Horrors! — that you are a Zionist!
Read on and keep score! If you agree with many or most of the following statements, you might be a Zionist!
1) You believe in treating people fairly regardless of their innate identities.
Zionism believes the Jewish People have the right to national self-determination. If you have a problem with that, you should ask yourself why.
If you believe in self-determination for Palestinians, but not for the Jewish People (like, if you think “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” is a totally legitimate expression), you should especially ask yourself why you believe this and also why you imagine yourself a person who supports human equality.
2) You avoid double standards in human interactions.
Relatedly, if you support Palestinian national self-determination (or any other expression of national self-determination) but not the Jewish kind (Zionism), you are trading in double standards.
Zionism is, quite simply, the belief that the Jewish People deserve the rights accorded to other national peoples. If you disagree with that, you should be experiencing cognitive dissonance. (If you square this circle by asserting that Jews do not deserve sovereignty because you believe Jews are not a national people, continue reading.)
3) You let individuals and groups define their own identities.
If you think deadnaming or misgendering transgender people is cool, or if you think it is fair for someone to racially categorize, say, Barack Obama or Kamala Harris, rather than allowing themselves to define who they are, then anti-Zionism is probably your jam.
Some of the opposition to Zionism is based on the misperception that “Jewishness” is a religion. It is — but it is more than that. Judaism is a religion at the historic heart of Jewish identity, but Jews are a national people and more.
If you subscribe to an idea that Jews do not deserve national self-determination because they are “just” a religious grouping, you are not only displaying ignorance on a topic you probably should not be engaged in to begin with. You are defining the identities of other people in a way you probably would not do with any other group. There is a word for that. But anyways.
4) You support national self-determination for Jews and Palestinians.
Zionism has always been premised on the idea that Jews as a free people in their own land will coexist peacefully with their non-Jewish neighbors. I cannot believe I actually have to say this. Can you imagine Jews choosing incessant threats, war, conflict, and terrorism? Who more than the Jews would not want a little peace?!
The Palestinian movement, by contrast, overwhelmingly rejects coexistence if accepting coexistence means accepting Jewish national self-determination. Any question of this has been erased by the seemingly almost unanimous lining up of “pro-Palestinians” behind intolerant and annihilationist chants and other expressions denying the right of Israel (and often Israelis) to exist since October 7th, 2023.
The mask is off.
5) You believe in peaceful resolution of human disagreements, not war.
If you do not understand that Israel has offered Palestinian self-determination in exchange for peace, you should not be engaged in this discussion until you educate yourself.
Israelis have offered countless opportunities for peace, mutual coexistence, and Palestinian self-determination. Every single one has been dismissed as insufficient.
Why?
Because peace, mutual coexistence, and Palestinian self-determination are not the primary goals of the Palestinian movement. Ending Israel is the goal. If you are still not clear on this concept, you really should not be engaging. Or you should just listen to the chants of the “pro-Palestinian” demonstrators and read their social media posts.
6) You believe in equal treatment of minorities in a democracy.
There is no perfect multicultural democracy. Inequality exists everywhere. I am not sure why Israel, of all places, is expected to be perfect in ensuring complete heavenly harmony among peoples. (Actually, I am. See “double standards” above.)
However, Israel has legal equality for all peoples. By contrast, even the quasi-“moderate” Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has promised that an independent “Palestine” will be a Jew-free country. And to believe that anyone in a “free Palestine” would actually be free is to deny every scrap of evidence from the Palestinian experience with self-government.
7) You do not justify inhumanity in the name of ideology.
Palestinians, in much of the world’s imagination, are justified in everything they do. In the simplistic binary of “oppressed versus oppressor,” Palestinians can do no wrong and Israelis can do no right.
This is the excuse for the chant “By Any Means Necessary,” which justifies beheadings, live human immolations, rape as a tool of terrorism, kidnapping, and mass murder of families and other civilians as entirely reasonable means of reaching political ends.
If you refuse to let your ideology trump your humanity, you may be a Zionist.
8) You recognize the humanity of Palestinians.
Activists worldwide dehumanize Palestinians as helpless entities without agency, like some single cell organism capable only of responding to external stimuli. This is foundational to the Palestinian narrative, in which Palestinians (and, no less important, Israelis) are not viewed as human individuals capable of rational choices, but as avatars in a perverse simulation game.
Not surprisingly, many of the enraged chanting picketers for “Palestine” probably gained some of their conceptions of human interaction (and their own social skills) from playing “Second Life” and “The Sims” video games in their parents’ basement.
If you recognize Palestinians (and Israelis) as actual human beings rather than avatars in a geopolitical simulation, you may be a Zionist.
9) You understand the definition of indigeneity.
Another of the assumptions undergirding the Palestinian narrative is that Palestinians are the indigenous people in the region and Jews the “imperialist colonizers.” This requires a complete inversion of the definition of “indigeneity.” There is simply no way to refute the archeological and historical evidence of Jewish indigeneity in the land in question.
None of this should preclude the rights of Arabs, Muslims, or any other people to exist freely in this land. But let’s not redefine the definition of indigeneity to mean the people who came later were there first. That is just silly.
There is a lot of denialism going on in the world right now. Like on climate change, for example, or the idea that the COVID vaccine is a nefarious plot rather than a lifesaving shot. Denial of Jewish indigeneity in Israel is less like the denial of climate science or vaccine efficacy than denial of the law of gravity.
To assume Arabs, who migrated from Arabia, and Palestinian Muslims and Christians, who adhere to religions formed centuries after Jews built Jerusalem, are indigenous to Israel requires a complete refutation of irrefutable evidence.
(I always hesitate to make these cases, because all these people are there now and that is what should matter. But when activists treat history like fairy tales and fairy tales like history, we need to call a duck a duck.)
10) You oppose the use of child combatants and human shields.
Dead Palestinians are not just the cost of doing business for the Palestinian terrorists. They are the business.
Hamas and other entities maximize the number of dead so that credulous overseas activists count the dead and declare Palestinians the moral victors based on that grim scorekeeping. They maximize these numbers by situating military installations in civilian neighborhoods, schools, hospitals and mosques. They employ child combatants and, when these children are killed, overseas activists wail lamentations while the terrorists celebrate.
And this response by overseas activists assures the terrorists that their strategy is working exactly to plan.
If you endorse this strategy, even implicitly, rather than decrying it with your every fiber, you have no right to call yourself “pro-Palestinian.” You might even look up the definition of “humanitarian.” Because you are the reason Palestinians are dying.
There are other examples I could have used in this list. But these should be enough to situate you on a spectrum. If you scored five or higher, you might be a Zionist.
Please note: Results can differ. You might find examples of Zionists who do not reflect each of the above examples. Certain extremist Israelis, for example, do not seem to recognize the humanity of Palestinians, or believe in equality of all peoples.
But people of goodwill do not extrapolate examples of bad characteristics to represent an entire group. There is a word for that.
Also to be said: Because Jews are Multi-Racial, Zionism is Not Racist: Jews are not a single Race, because Judaism has welcomed millions of Converts from all of the Races of the World throughout history. Further, Zionism gives Jews special access to Israel as a place of Safety from murder because of our Religious Identity. It is the Anti-Semite who has called Jews a single race, and killed us in the past because Jews had no Nation to flee to to escape Genocide. Now we have Israel.
Yes, I am a Zionist (and a proud one!)