‘Anti-Zionism’ is what happens when Jews ignore what it means to be Jewish.

The “anti-Zionist” narrative endures because it has not been deconstructed at its linguistic roots, and that process must begin within the Jewish community itself.

You cannot occupy your indigenous homeland. (photo: Nikolas Gannon/Unsplash)

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This is a guest essay by Hava Mendelle, who writes the newsletter, “Decolonization of the Jewish Mind.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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We all know by now that “anti-Zionism” is emerging as the modern-day front line in the global battle of narratives about Israel.

It is a battle saturated with ideology and information excess, where every claim to truth competes for the moral high ground and language has become the medium through which this power is exercised.

This “anti” narrative is winning precisely because truth itself has become relative in a postmodern, deconstructionist age, and no coherent idea has yet emerged to counter it. In this climate, “anti-Zionism” has become the fashionable morality and Israel the ultimate immoral.

In order to deconstruct “anti-Zionism,” one must start by looking at its greatest success among a small yet influential section of the Jewish Diaspora, who have become its most zealous adherents. These “anti-Zionist Jews” are celebrated in both Right-wing and Left-wing circles as the ethical conscience of the world, but for the majority of the Jewish community they represent a fringe ideology.

At the core of their “anti-Zionist” belief lies a denial of Jewish peoplehood and the conviction that Jews constitute only a religion and not a nation. This is the ultimate expression of a long colonial process spanning millennia in which Jews were transformed from a nation into a religious-cultural group that could be controlled by empire, effectively erasing peoplehood.

Paradoxically, “anti-Zionist Jews” are not engaged in an act of resistance but in the reproduction of the very framework of subjugation that imperialist thought imposed and that modern Western moralism still sustains.

This outcome is where the kernel of “anti-Zionism” can be deconstructed and defeated. Labeling the “anti-Zionist” movement as hateful, racist, or antisemitic is to name the prejudice without dismantling its intellectual framework. The “anti-Zionist” narrative endures because it has not been deconstructed at its linguistic roots, and that process must begin within the Jewish community itself.

The success of “anti-Zionism” among Diaspora Jews cannot be separated from the longer historical process by which empires learned to neutralize nations through redefinition and inherited vocabularies, effectively determining how a people understand itself. For centuries, imperial powers such as the Babylonian, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic empires sought to subjugate the Jewish People and to redefine them, replacing the language of peoplehood and sovereignty with that of faith and worship. Whether by deliberate policy or gradual adaptation, language both mirrored and reinforced this imperial hierarchy, shaping how the Jewish People could describe themselves within it. The word Jew, for example, bears the marks of conquest and translation over the ages.

The Hebrew Yehudi, meaning “Judahite” or “of Judah,” once signified both genealogical lineage and geography, uniting the people of the region through descent and shared territory. It was inseparable from the older biblical term am (עַם), used throughout the Hebrew Bible from as early as the 10th century BCE to describe Israel as a people bound by covenant, language, and land.

Moreover, am predates Greek and Roman concepts of “nation” and expresses the totality of collective existence long before the Hellenistic world divided identity into separate categories of religion and polity. In fact, there is no word for “religion” in the biblical Hebrew of the ancient Israelites; the later term dat (דָּת) was borrowed from Persian and Aramaic influences where it meant law or royal decree. Its entry into Hebrew scriptures during Persian rule reflected the influence of imperial bureaucracy in a type of linguistic and cultural osmosis that reclassified peoples into manageable spheres.

This historical reconfiguration was written into the Septuagint, the earliest Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures produced between the 3rd and 1st centuries BCE. Yehudi became the Greek Ioudaios, a term that could mean both Judean and Jew, and that gradually acquired cultural and theological meaning as Judea’s political autonomy was replaced by imperial rule.

Historians have noted that, by the 2nd century BCE, a decisive shift in vocabulary occurred: Judean identity moved from ethnos (nation) to ethno-religion (faith-community). As a consequence, rabbinic Judaism during this period re-spiritualized the Jewish nation under the pressures of empire, preserving identity through ritual, text, and study.

While this adaptation was both a theological innovation and a means of survival, it occurred within a world that penalized nationhood. As scholars Christine Hayes and Seth Schwartz have shown, post-Temple Jewish continuity depended on adaptation within imperial frameworks, and that transformation would shape Jewish self-understanding for millennia. From the Hebrew Yehudi to the Greek Ioudaios, the Latin Iudaeus and later into the Romance and Germanic tongues as giu, gyw, and finally Jew, each translation marked another stage in the negotiation between subjugation and survival.

This linguistic domination endures in the rhetoric of contemporary “anti-Zionist” movements. If Zionism is to be understood as the modern expression of Jewish peoplehood by the political, linguistic, and territorial reconstitution of an ancient people, then “anti-Zionism” is its denial. This is evident in a recent submission by Jews Against the Occupation ’48 to an Australian Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism. The group stated:

“We reject the idea that Jewish people are an ethnic group; Judaism is a diverse religion and culture … Zionism is a 19th-century political ideology influenced by European nationalism and Christian restorationism.”

“Anti-Zionism” depends on these binaries: nation versus religion. However, to adopt them is to remain captive within them. As historian Martin Goodman has observed, Ioudaios in antiquity held overlapping meanings, but what began as semantic fluidity became ideological rigidity under Christian and later European thought. When Jews describe themselves primarily as a religion, they are rehearsing the legacy of empire that sought to sever their continuity from the Land of Israel.

The modern Diaspora inherited this imperial lexicon. The emergence of the “German Jew,” the “Polish Jew,” or the “French Jew” was a linguistic artifact of emancipation, a new grammar of belonging that promised equality in exchange for redefinition. Jews who had once been servi camerae regis, meaning servants of the royal chamber, neither citizen nor alien, became nominal members of modern polities only when they renounced the notion of being a separate people.

As the priest and Deputy of the French National Assembly, Abbé Grégoire, declared during the French Revolution, “To the Jews as a nation, nothing; to the Jews as individuals, everything.” The same people could be labeled religion when toleration was fashionable and race when extermination required justification.

The persistence of “anti-Zionism” among Jews themselves reveals a moral inversion within, where the claim that Judaism is only a religion collapses under the weight of its own scripture: a tradition that for two thousand years has prayed for return to Zion and understood exile as transient, a wound never meant to become an alternative homeland.

This is evident in the Amidah, whose core prayers date back nearly 2,000 years and ritualized this rupture in the daily proclamation of return: “May our eyes behold Your return to Zion in compassion.” This central prayer in Judaism is recited three times a day facing Jerusalem. Moreover, the Hebrew word kisufim, meaning yearning or longing, recurs throughout Jewish sources, exemplifying the enduring desire to return to Zion.

The Psalms, the rabbinic Midrash, and medieval Hebrew poetry all reveal that longing for Zion was never a metaphor or abstraction, but a consistent cultural and spiritual reality embedded in Jewish text and practice. Even when expressed symbolically, Zion remained a place. When “anti-Zionist” Jewish groups such as Jews Against the Occupation ’48, Jewish Voice for Peace, or the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network ignore this liturgy and the millennia of continuity it represents, they are framing Jews as religious or cultural minorities, rather than a people entitled to sovereignty.

Many of these movements speak in the language of Tikkun Olam (literally “repairing the world”), but they forget that Shlom Bayit (“peace within the home”) long preceded it as a moral imperative. In Jewish thought, Shlom Bayit demands humility, restraint, and the suppression of ego in the pursuit of unity; the capacity to heal the world begins with the discipline of maintaining peace within one’s own house or community.

The late, great Rabbi Jonathan Sacks later echoed this, observing that a society which forgets how to sustain peace within its own walls cannot credibly preach peace to others. The significance here is that the “anti-Zionist Jewish” movement has forgotten this foundational duty. The growing disaffection of Diaspora Jews who have turned toward “anti-Zionism” is, in part, the consequence of neglecting this moral order. A community that loses its internal harmony forfeits its authority to repair the world. The challenge before us is not to counter “anti-Zionism” with another “anti,” but to offer a better idea: that decolonization in its truest form means the reclamation of our ancient language and peoplehood.

If colonization began through translation, decolonization must begin through reclamation. Translation turned a nation into an identity; thus, revival can return identity to peoplehood.

The Jewish People have already done this once. For centuries, Hebrew was confined to prayer, study, and fragments of daily life, until it was reborn as a modern language capable of expressing every facet of human experience in the modern State of Israel and beyond. As linguist Ghil’ad Zuckermann observed, the rebirth of Hebrew was a hybrid act of reclamation, a decolonization of the Jewish tongue itself. From the remnants of biblical vocabulary, from the syntax of exile, and the accents of Diaspora, the Jewish People built a living language as an act of national restoration. Reclaiming language is the purest form of decolonization.

To reclaim “Israeli” (historically Israelite) as a civilizational identity is to continue that work. Here, “Israeli” is not meant in the narrow political sense of citizenship, but in the older, civilizational sense of belonging to Am Yisrael: the people whose language, law, and memory arose from the same land. It is to name ourselves not as minorities within other nations, but as inheritors of an unbroken culture rooted in the land from which our language and law arose.

The modern State of Israel is an expression of an ancient nationhood. We need not return to the term Israelite; with a modern vocabulary we can reclaim “Israeli” as a civilizational, cultural, and ethnic marker to reject millennia of colonizer categories and reassert the oldest form of belonging we possess. The word Jewish carries centuries of imperial mediation; the word Israeli restores the link between language, land, and lineage.

Throughout history, Jews never ceased to know ourselves as Yehudim, the People of Judah. The continuity of that self-understanding is itself a form of resistance, proof that translation could distort our name but never erase our peoplehood. Reclaiming Israeli is a revival of our past in the next evolution of the same covenantal identity that has endured across languages and empires.

We are living through a battle of ideas in which words determine legitimacy. Having failed to offer a compelling vocabulary for secular or unaffiliated Jews who feel estranged from their heritage, we have left a vacuum that “anti-Zionism” fills with a counterfeit morality and the language of colonization itself.

To answer it, we must think in generations rather than news cycles. What story do we wish our children to inherit? A story of exile and colonization, or one of continuity and reclamation?

The choice begins with language. Every civilization begins by naming itself. The power to name is the power to exist.

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