Everyone thinks they know what Zionism means. Shockingly few do.

To oppose Zionism is to say that everyone deserves sovereignty except the Jews. That is not edgy activism; it is antisemitism.

photo: Neal E. Johnson/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”

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

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For many people, Zionism is a boo word — hissed at rallies, plastered on placards, and tossed around as a synonym for colonialism, racism, or whatever the fashionable slur of the week happens to be. Ask them to define it, though, and their faces turn blank.

Here it is in terms even the dullest slogan-chanter can grasp: Zionism is the movement for the Jewish People’s national self-determination in their ancestral homeland. That is all. It is the same right that every other nation takes for granted. To oppose it is to say that everyone deserves sovereignty except the Jews. That is not edgy activism; it is antisemitism.

Jews are an ancient people — the year 5876 in the Jewish calendar has just begun — who were a people before they had their religion. The Hebrew Bible, whether one takes it as revelation or allegory, is a record of a people bound together by shared laws, language, land, and destiny. Archaeology confirms that a distinct Israelite civilization flourished in the hills of Judea and Samaria more than 3,500 years ago. Exile did not erase this peoplehood.

The Jews, of course, never left entirely. Even after the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, Jewish communities lived on in Tiberias, Safed, Hebron, and Jerusalem, where their presence has been continuous, though without sovereignty.

When travelers such as Benjamin of Tudela in the 12th century or Mark Twain in the 19th century visited the Holy Land, they recorded Jews living there as they had always done, even though the region was a neglected backwater under Ottoman rule from 1516 to 1917. The dream of return was not an abstraction; it was embodied in those who never left their indigenous soil.

Meanwhile, Jews scattered across Babylon, Spain, Yemen, and Poland prayed to return. They oriented synagogues toward Jerusalem. They ended every Passover with “Next year in Jerusalem.” The attachment was unbroken.

Zionism as a modern movement arose in the 19th century because history forced it. After centuries of pogroms, blood libels, and expulsions, Jews began to realize that no matter how many languages they learned or professions they excelled at, the outside world would never truly accept them.

The Enlightenment granted emancipation in parts of Europe, but it also unleashed new forms of antisemitism, now draped in pseudoscience and nationalism. The Dreyfus Affair¹ in France and the pogroms of Russia made it unmistakable. The Jews needed their country back.

The movement gathered pace beginning in the 1800s not only because of what was happening to Jews in Europe and the Middle East, but because it was the age of nationalist movements. The First World War weakened European empires and the Second World War finished them off. The 1930s saw nationalist movements emerge in places as far apart as Indonesia and Lithuania. Zionism was very much part of this. Today’s panoply of Arab states is also products of these independence movements.

It is amazing how often Zionism is treated as something unique and vastly different from other nationalist movements that emerged and were later realized as European empires fell. Many have argued that the word Zionism, as opposed to simply “the Jewish Independence Movement,” has not served Jews well.

Zionism is in no way colonialism. Colonialism is when a foreign power conquers land for its own enrichment, subjugating the locals. Zionism was decolonization: an indigenous people returning to its land, purchasing property legally from Ottoman landlords, draining swamps, reviving their language, and rebuilding villages on the ruins of their ancestors’ homes. It was Jewish insurgents who drove the British out of British Mandate Palestine.

This is extraordinarily well documented. The paperwork sits in archives in Jerusalem, London, and — for those conspiracy buffs who distrust these sources — the Ottoman archives in Ankara.

Zionism succeeded because it was rooted in the truth of Jewish indigeneity. It is not a myth conjured in 1948. It is etched into Jerusalem’s stones and stamped on Judean coins. It is embedded in Christian liturgy and Muslim scripture. It is history.

Despite this simplicity, vast numbers of otherwise literate and educated people insist that Zionism is something dark. This is because the idea of Jewish sovereignty is intolerable to those most comfortable with Jews as victims. A powerless Jew, dependent on others’ goodwill, fits neatly into the world’s moral imagination. A Jew commanding an army, securing borders, and building skyscrapers in Tel Aviv unsettles that imagination.

For Muslims, Jewish sovereignty gnaws at the unhealed wound of the Ottoman Caliphate’s defeat and collapse, which seemed to humiliate Islam itself. For Europeans, it is an uncomfortable rebuke to their history of persecution. Leftists find it an inconvenient contradiction to their binary of the “white oppressors” versus the “oppressed people of color.” They find it easier to distort Zionism into a cartoon villain than to face the fact that Jews, like every other people, have a right to self-determination in their homeland.

This is why regimes such as Iran refuse even to utter the word “Israel,” preferring to call it the dehumanizing “Zionist entity.” It is why many so-called “pro-Palestinians” describe any act they detest as “like the Zionists.” These are not slips of the tongue; they are deliberate attempts to deny Jewish nationhood. By reducing Israel to a faceless abstraction, they seek to strip it of legitimacy, as though it were an imposter state with no people behind it. It is linguistic warfare.

This pathology is not confined to Tehran or the Muslim world. It increasingly infects Europe, too. Most Western chancelleries still refuse to acknowledge Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, even as they post ambassadors and conduct business there daily. The refusal is a duplicitous diplomatic wink-and-nod that says: We will trade and sign treaties with you, but we will not recognize the most basic expression of your sovereignty.

These are forms of the impulse to deny Jewish self-determination at the most fundamental level. Quite why one would wish to associate with such a grubby idea is unclear, but I shall leave that question to the psychotherapists.

Here is another fact: Zionism is not synonymous with the policies of whatever Israeli government happens to be in office. Zionism is the principle that Jews have a right to sovereignty in their land. It could be a capitalist or communist state. It could anoint a king. Governing coalitions come and go. Parties rise and fall. Zionism endures.

Opposing a settlement policy, criticizing a prime minister, or debating the contours of peace is politics. Chanting that “Zionism is racism” or “Zionism is colonialism” is more than political comment; it is a denial of Jews’ right to exist as a people in their homeland. It is like telling Poles that Poland should not exist in Poland, or telling Indians that they should go back to being a British colony. It is that stupid.

The moral clarity of Zionism is that it restores to the Jewish People the agency that every other nation takes for granted. Without a state, Jews were perpetual targets — massacred in Ukraine, expelled from Spain, dhimmis (second-class citizens) in Muslims lands, exterminated in Hitler’s Europe. With a state, Jews can defend themselves. That is the difference.

Critics imagine that Zionism is inherently violent because it entails defending borders. This is idiotic. Every state has borders and an army to defend them.

For those who equate Zionism with Jewish expansionism, please book an appointment with an optometrist immediately and get out an atlas. Israel is a tiny speck amid vast Arab lands. Jews are a group that stubbornly refused to be consumed in the great Islamic colonial conquest.

I am unsure if people know just how ignorant they sound when they portray Israel as colonialist and expansionist. It is advertising to the entire world that they know nothing about history, religion, geography, or politics.

Far from being about expansion, Zionism is about existence. The Jewish state was recreated in 1948. Everything since then — hostile neighbors declaring war, defensive measures, peace treaties, and withdrawals — flows from efforts to destroy Israel’s existence. To pretend otherwise is to flaunt historical illiteracy.

Now, let us run through the most popular stupidities:

‘The Jews stole the land from Palestinians.’

False.

Jews bought much of the land from absentee landlords under Ottoman and British rule thereafter. Much of what was settled was desolate swamp or desert.

And when the United Nations proposed partition (two states for two peoples, the Jews and the Arabs) in 1947, Jews accepted it; Arabs rejected it, invaded Israel, and lost. Some 700,000 Arabs and 850,000 Jews were displaced in this war. Israel absorbed the refugee Jews, while Arab states abandoned the Palestinians and weaponized their misery against Israel. Muslim solidarity? Do not make me laugh.

‘Zionism equals colonialism.’

Again, false.

Colonists go to foreign lands; Jews were refugees returning to their homeland. Colonists exploit natives; Jews built a society that gave Arabs full citizenship, not to mention higher life expectancy, better education, and more economic opportunity than any Arab state has provided it citizens.

‘Zionism is racism.’

Yet again, false.

Zionism affirms Jewish nationhood. It does not deny anyone else’s. Israel has afforded full rights to its Arab Muslims and Christians, Druze, Bedouins, Circassians, and even Samaritans (real ones, not the Christian order). Compare that to most every Arab state where not only have Jews been exterminated or expelled, but where Arab citizens themselves lack rights and women face apartheid-like discrimination.

Israel is not perfect. Nor is the country you’re reading this from. Zionism, however, does not depend on perfection. It depends on its unassailable legitimacy; the Jews are indigenous to Israel, they have maintained an unbroken connection to it for millennia, and they have reconstituted their sovereignty there with the same right as any other people. They have built a successful state whose existence is now a fact.

For the dummies who are reading because they know it was written for them, here is the final word: Zionism means the Jewish People have the right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. To deny that right is antisemitism. The modern State of Israel’s existence is the realization of Zionism, and it is irreversible.

Criticism of Israeli policies is fair; denial of its legitimacy is not. The lies told about Zionism — colonialism, apartheid, racism — are propaganda to delegitimize Jewish sovereignty. Shame on anyone who participates in these malicious fictions. The linguistic games, slogans, and euphemisms are poorly camouflaged antisemitism.

Zionism is more than justice for the Jewish People; it is one of the few liberation movements that truly worked. Whereas so many post-colonial states remained poor, corrupt, chaotic, and autocratic, Israel turned Jews from victims into citizens and from supplicants into sovereigns.

Zionism means the Jews are home. Period.

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1. The Dreyfus Affair was a political scandal from 1894 to 1906 in which Jewish French army Captain Alfred Dreyfus was wrongly convicted of treason, revealing deep-seated antisemitism and dividing France over issues of justice, truth, and the role of the military in society.